Successful Affiliate Marketing

Learning how to become a successful affiliate marketing entrepreneur and putting what you learned into action daily can be a financially life changing process.

Succeeding as an affiliate for any number of high converting products over time can produce a steady stream of income that can potentially outgrow the wages earned from a regular job, even multiplying the income as your skills, knowledge and success grows.

If you are working in a job and are looking for ways to supplement your income or even replace the job altogether by working from home as your own boss, this may be of interest to you. If you fear losing your job in the near future as it may not be as secure as it used to be, or perhaps you have already been given notice of termination, this information could help you retain an income and avoid living on your savings until another job comes up.

In this article, I will look at what affiliate marketing is and how you can make it work for you.

What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work?

You may have heard from someone about making money from the Internet and that it can be a lucrative way to create an income. If they weren't talking about doing an online job, such as data entry, freelance writing or doing some from of work for a company with an online presence, most likely they were talking about affiliate marketing.

It is basically a process of earning commission by promoting products produced by other people or companies. It is done by finding a product that you like or have an interest in, promoting it using the Internet as your platform and earning a percentage of the sale price for each sale that you generate.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing

Let's say you're completely new to this way of working and want to know how to become an affiliate marketer. What are the first steps you'll need to take?

Before you do anything, the very first thing you must do is get clear with yourself why you want to learn how to do this. You should also consider what you expect to get from going through the learning and practical process.

For example, you may be in a position where your current source of income is not as secure as you'd like it to be. For most people, that source of income is their job.

Or perhaps you are about to lose your job, or you have already lost it. Either way, your way of life in financial terms is certainly under threat and you definitely need options. Like NOW!

Becoming an affiliate marketer can be an attractive option because it means that you can work from home and, if successful, offset the lost (or about to be lost) income from your job either partially, completely or, if very successful, explode it right off the map!

Let's look at how you can start affiliate marketing from ground zero: That is with no prior knowledge or resources to begin with.

You will need some resources to get started, most or all of which you may already possess:

A bank account (where you can be paid)
A computing device (a home PC or laptop is preferable)
An Internet connection (wired or WiFi)
A dedicated space for working including a desk and chair

Notice I didn't mention money to spend in that list. That's because you can get started with literally zero capital if you need to, although it can help speed up the process if you have some funds at your disposal to spend.

Another useful item that will help you enormously (and one you probably already have) is a decent phone with a camera. You see why a little further along.

With your home workstation set up for you to work from, you'll need to set up a dedicated gmail address to receive any business related emails. This will cost you nothing, by the way.

Next, you will need to sign up to some affiliate networks where you'll find a huge number of companies and product vendors that work with affiliates to sell their products and services. The first stop for many new affiliates is a company called Clickbank.

Clickbank is one of the longest running and most highly used of the affiliate networks where you can earn anything from a few dollars to several hundred dollars per sale. They specialize in digital products (ebooks, courses, video training and info products) from a wide range of areas.

You can sign up for Clickbank by clicking this link (it will open in a new browser tab so you can return to this page easily without it closing on you). Go and do that now, then come straight back here to read the rest of this tutorial.

Once signed up with Clickbank, your next task is to decide what you want to promote. In this industry, people tend to specialize in focused areas that we call "niches," because it's easier to keep track of what your doing when you're not trying to work in a lot of different areas.

For example, a popular "niche" is the "Internet Marketing" niche where people promote products that are created to help affiliate marketers get started, grow and become hugely successful!

There are several large niches that are popular that include Health and Fitness; Diet and Weight Loss; Sports; Finance; Investing; Business and B2B; Software Development and Services; Gambling; Personal Development; Dating; Home Improvement, Repairs and Gardening; Parenting; Travel and many more to choose from.

It's helpful to choose a niche that you already have an interest in and knowledge of as you will be producing your own information articles and videos to help you promote the products and/or services you choose. It will also help you stay motivated when you work on a subject that you're interested in.

Choosing a product from the huge selection in Clickbank deserves an info article all to itself, as there is a lot to know about. To get started, you can navigate to the Clickbank Marketplace and scroll down the left-hand column of main subjects, then click the subject to get a more focused list of the sub-topics in that main category.

Clicking that sub-topic will bring up a list of all the products listed under it, each with a paragraph of pertinent information about the product. That information, including the sale price, the commission rate, gravity (the number of affiliates already making sales of the product) and several other valuable metrics can help you to choose a product to promote.

When you choose a product, click the "Promote" button to generate a pop-up that contains your affiliate link. This is the link that you will put in front of prospective buyers that will be tracked by Clickbank so they know it's your link that sent the buyer to the product and produced the sale.

Successful Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Once you have settled upon a niche and then chosen a product to start promoting, the real work begins. That work is promotion!

The aim is to get your affiliate link in front of as many interested people as possible to have a good chance that a percentage of them will click through to the offer and buy it so you get paid some commission. How you do that is another big article (or series of articles) on traffic creation and usage, but I'll give you the basics here now.

People go in search of and find things online in a number of ways. Some go direct to the search engines (primarily Google) and enter a search term, known to those of us in the business as a "keyword."

Google serves up it's list of indexed results, which are links to website pages or videos where the searcher can find the information that they're looking for. Youtube also has its own search engine where searchers can enter keywords to find relevant videos that they hope will provide them with the information they're searching for.

Other surfers will go via their preferred social media platform to search for information. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter etc, all have a means whereby you can search for keywords or hashtags to find information.

The big question on your mind right now is something like: "How can I get my affiliate link in front of these searchers using Google or Facebook etc?"

There are essentially two ways to do this. One is free, the other will cost you money.

Free Promotion

The free route, taken by most newcomers to affiliate marketing involves creating a website or blog and posting relevant articles about the product they want to promote, hoping that Google will index and then rank their web page high in its index, preferably on page 1. This can and does happen, however it can take some time for it to actually happen.

It is possible to hurry up the process by using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to literally optimize your web page to make Google believe it is the best fit for their index and the people using it. A well written article, for instance with sensible use of relevant keywords in the title and text can help with ranking, as can getting many other website owners to link back to your article, because they believe it is a good resource to share in their own site.

Unfortunately for you, so many people have abused SEO techniques over the years in an attempt to artificially achieve high ranking that Google has waged war on such techniques and if not done correctly will cause your web page to suffer in the search index rather than prosper! The same can happen in social media sites too, if their guidelines and terms of service are violated.

I will cover SEO in its own series of articles here in this site.

Free Video Promotion

In a similar way to ranking web pages for getting your affiliate link in front of prospective buys, you can create videos and post them on Youtube if you have the necessary skill, know-how and are brave enough to get yourself in front of the camera!

Not everyone can do this and it is especially difficult for people wanting to market to English speaking countries like the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand for instance, if their native language is not English. It is of course possible with good enough English as a second language, but it can be tougher to convince, say an American to trust you if your accent is not the same as theirs!

Even a marketer from the UK like me has a more difficult time marketing to Americans because my accent is different to theirs!

However, don't let that stop you from doing it anyway. You can still make sales via video no matter where in the world you are from to a person somewhere else in the world if they have a need for a thing and you have the information to help them decide to buy it!

Paid Promotion

A much faster way of getting your affiliate link in front of many eyes online is to go the paid route. That is by buying advertising space or text ads from the big traffic attractions like Google, Facebook, Instagram etc.

Buying ads is another skill that needs to be learned. It can become costly to just throw money at, say Facebook ads and expect great results when something isn't quite right with your ad. You could end up spending a lot of money and get no buyers.

Or conversely, when you learn to advertise the right way, you could end up with a lot of buyers for relatively small ad spend.

Traffic Secrets

Becoming a successful affiliate marketer boils down to knowing how to create a compelling review page for a product (to place your affiliate link in) and driving enough targeted (interested) traffic to that page to result in converting a percentage of those visitors into buyers.

There is no real big secret to getting that traffic when you have figured out how to advertise correctly or rank video and web pages high enough in search results to siphon off surfer to your own page. Once you are ranked for a keyword (or set of keywords) that has a decent number of searches each day, the traffic will find your page.

If you are too new at this to know how to rank a web page, or even to build a web page in the first place, you will need to know other ways to attract traffic to your affiliate link.

I will cover traffic methods in a separate article (coming soon) as well as expand on the information already shared in this article on improving your affiliate marketing know how and skill set.

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Posted on Wed September 9, 2020 in Make Money Online | 0 Comments