Building an affiliate marketing business is one of the best decisions you could make. However, getting started could be one of the most daunting tasks you ever do.
Being an affiliate comes with so many benefits that, well, sometimes seem incomprehensible if you haven’t had the chance to experience it firsthand.
If you are reading this, you probably know what an affiliate marketing moneysite is and how affiliate marketing works. What’s missing then is just GETTING. STARTED.
To start an affiliate marketing business, you may get overwhelmed thinking you have to learn a whole lot of things, build lots of skills and maybe even learn how to program. But that would only be too much. Being an affiliate marketer does require a lot of knowledge about your niche, the products and services you promote, and skills in marketing. However, you do not need any of these to get started.
Unlike jobs that require some form of formal education, you can start with affiliate marketing TODAY as you learn. With the step-by-step process outlined in this article, you can begin your journey without any knowledge. The key is that you learn as you grow. You will find that the more you learn and build your skills, the better your business does, and your earnings increase.
Steps To Starting an Affiliate Marketing Business
1. Niche Up! Choose a Niche to Build Your Business in
A niche is a focus area. Having a focus area is very important if you are an individual. In some instances, the best idea is a micro-niche. Starting with a very narrow focus affords you the ability to specialize your knowledge to the audience and the product offerings within the micro-niche. Choosing a niche could be as simple as going with what you are passionate about. But if your passion is a micro-niche without a lot of interest from people and the products or services are not very exciting, you may not be able to take off with your business. Even though passion counts, you need to validate your chosen niche for its profitability before jumping in.
Top Affiliate Niches
- Self-Improvement.
- Relationships and Online Dating
- Languages.
- Technology
- Personal finance
- Home improvement and Pets
- Health, Wellness, and Beauty
- Home Décor and DIY
- Baby Products and Services
- Music Instrument Tuition.
- SaaS
- Marketing and Business
- Web development and WordPress
2. Choose Your Products
The majority of people will create a blog or moneysite right after choosing a niche. But the best is to identify the products or services to promote. The idea here is that the products determine how you promote them. If you start with a blog but later realize it doesn’t match your products, then you might have already committed to a different promotion strategy. To choose your products, you need to know these two terms:
- Affiliate programs: affiliate programs are initiatives by brands to take advantage of the benefits of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers can sign on to affiliate programs on the website of the brand or through an affiliate network (that’s if the brand chooses to work with the network)
- Affiliate networks: An affiliate network is a cluster of many brand affiliate programs on one platform. On an affiliate network, marketers can register to have access to their preferred affiliate programs. Examples of affiliate networks include Rakuten, Digistore24, and Clickbank.
Top Affiliate Networks (Platforms) to Find Products for Affiliate Marketers
- Affiliate Future
- Digistore24
- AvantLink
- CJ Affiliate
- ClickBank
- FlexOffers
- LinkConnector
- RevenueWire
- ShareASale
The Most Important Thing In Choosing A Product Or Service
Product vs. Commission: When it comes to choosing the product to promote, you will struggle between going for products with more commission and products that are high quality with a strong brand.
There are so many products that lack the quality available for promotion, and sometimes beginners can make the mistake of going for such products. Promoting an inferior product will only cost you eventually when your audience realizes how bad a product you are promoting.
The best products for an affiliate marketer to promote are those with a good commission and are high quality. The brands should have some recognition making it quite an easy sell since the brand has a reputation. Unlike well-reputed brands, it may be difficult convincing your audience of the performance of a product when there is not a single piece of information about it online.
3. Choose Your Promotion channels
To create a website or not, that is the question! Needless to say, you do not need a website to run your affiliate marketing business. There are lots of affiliate marketers who are succeeding with only youtube as their main channel of promotion. Others do it through Facebook and Instagram. Before you decide, it’s best to take a look at your niche. You might even do a little research on the top-earning affiliate marketers in your niche.
Identify the products and services that they promote, how they promote, and which channels they use. Using them as a benchmark, you can determine the best ways to get started. However, a moneysite is always an asset you can count on regardless of whether you are promoting a service or a product. It doesn’t matter whether you are promoting digital products, tickets, subscriptions, etc, a website is always a good idea for an affiliate for reasons we discussed.
Top Channels For Affiliate Marketers
Moneysite/Website/Blog: A moneysite is an affiliate marketing website created with the main of driving traffic to a brand website and generating money for its owner. It could be a review website, a blog, etc.
PPC: Paid ads or Pay Per Click advertising is one of the major tactics used by affiliate marketers to drive traffic for high-ticket products and services. Google ads are quite prominent as well as Facebook ads.
Social Media: Social media is one of the simplest platforms to use as an affiliate. It’s free, easy to set up, and requires less work than others like SEO. However, it isn’t all rosy. You will have to build an audience and have a following to be able to get good results.
SEO: Search engine optimization is the organic visibility gained from search engines through carefully orchestrated strategies in content, technical and offsite factors. SEO can be considered a “Free” source of traffic. This is because the traffic gained is completely not paid for. However, the catch is that you may end up paying for content, and SEO experts to work on your strategy. If you do learn the skills involved, then it could be free entirely and you don’t have to pay anyone to get the work done.
How-To Videos: One of the platforms that affiliate marketers also thrive on is YouTube. It’s a content powerhouse and marketers can easily teach their audience how best to use their products and services. It’s an effective way to teach people how to use something and then show them how they can get a discount for their purchase. Although not all affiliate programs have deals, you can still get good results with this strategy. And YouTube is one of the best platforms. From beauty products like makeup to SaaS products like productivity software, YouTube can source quality traffic.
Email Marketing: Building an email list is a lifetime investment that every affiliate needs to think about. As a beginner, you may not be able to afford expensive software but options like Convertkit and Mailchimp are great for starters and you can always export your list to new software when you decide to move.
Webinars: Webinars are great for selling high ticket products and services that require demonstrations.
There are a lot more ways to promote your offerings as a marketer. These are just a few popular ones that you can start with easily.
4. Create Your Assets
After choosing your platform, the next is to create it. If video is what you found to be the most effective for your offerings, then creating a youtube channel might be your task here. If a blog or moneysite is what works best for you, then off you start. The key here is to waste no time. Create your accounts and start setting them up. Look at how others have set theirs up and quickly put together your minimum viable account and get started.
5. Get to Work
There are many strategies for Affiliate Marketing Success. And you may have read about several of those online already. But unless you choose to go with paid ads, you will have to invest in one thing.
Content has something to do with it!
Content and its quality are extremely important when it comes to depending on organic ways to promote products and services.
Best Strategies for Promoting Your Affiliate Offers
1. Promote Products Your Audience Needs
When choosing products as an affiliate marketer, you might be tempted to go with the big commission products and the benefits the products have for you as a marketer. However, that may not be the best way to choose products because ultimately, you may get products that pay well, but no one may be willing to buy them. And you may not get a commission out of any sale. Your audience should be central to your decision. When choosing products, look at your audience and research what products can help them. If you are into web development, you can find products and services that help developers do their work well such as themes and plugins.
2. Be Genuine and Honest
Affiliate marketing is great and all but occasionally, you find marketers promoting products they don’t believe in, they don’t use, and rely on just promoting products without a personal conviction. Ironically, your audience can sense when you are merely promoting without having a personal conviction about what they are promoting. Before you decide to promote a product or service, ask yourself if you will be willing to buy the product or service.
3. Select the Best Products in Your Niche
Promoting products that are quality and serve your audience best is much easier than trying to convince them to buy a product that isn’t worth it.
4. Build a Traffic Asset For Your Links
Working as an affiliate marketer without a source of directing traffic can be very hectic and frustrating. The worst may be that you end up spamming your friends and social media groups with links to buy products and services they do not need. A simple solution to this problem is to create your asset. By choosing a platform to promote your offers on, you are more likely to build an audience than if you don’t have any. You may choose to create a Facebook page, build a moneysite, start a youtube channel, or any of the many other ways of promoting your products.
5. Test Link Placements and Platforms
Finding a platform that will serve you well requires constantly optimizing your current platform. If you use social media, you might want to check how your posts perform so you have a good idea of when it is ideal to post a deal or an offer. If you have a moneysite, you can take things to the next level by performing tests including A/B tests to see which placements convert better.
6. Properly Track Your Links
Without tracking and analytics, you may merely be playing in the dark, which is a not-so-good position as a marketer. Affiliate marketing is purely driven by performance. You don’t get paid by the number of links you have circulated on your platforms and neither do you get paid when people merely see your link. You only get paid when certain actions are taken by visitors. This means you need to take a painstaking effort in tracking and analyzing your links and their performance. Through your findings, you can test and improve on your successes while working to reduce your failings. Without proper tracking, you may not be able to get the insights needed to get the best results.
Top Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success
Go Big on Content
The more visible your channel is, the better. And what better way to become visible than to create content? Whether you are using a youtube channel, running an Instagram page, or a moneysite, having quality content published regularly and frequently is critical. Through your content, users can discover you and end up using your link to make a purchase giving you the credit for commissions. Content may not be very relevant if you are selling certain products and services and if you are heavily using paid ads to get sales. The downside of organic promotion is that you may not be able to have a specific inflow of leads as compared to ads which can be simply optimized for a certain number of leads periodically.
Use Ads When necessary
Ads may not be an option when you are starting due to financing constraints. But when it becomes necessary, do not hesitate to use paid ads as they can help you streamline your lead generation process and create a systematic process for getting quality leads on a more predictable level. At best, you can scale your system to generate more leads when you feel it’s right to scale and increase your income.
Monitor Your Growth
Marketing and analytics move together in the digital world. Using strategies when you don’t monitor your growth will only mean you don’t have any objective feedback on what you are doing. A situation that is not necessary. There are lots of analytics tools available to affiliate marketers like Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, native social media analytics tools, tracking solutions like Bit.ly, and more. The platform you use will determine the best ways to track your growth and analyze the effectiveness of your strategies.
Have a Personal Passion for Products/Services
It is not a must to be passionate about the products you promote. But having a genuine interest in the niche and the products as well as the problems your audience face will have a positive impact on your work and the well you do it.
Focus on Your Niche
It’s not uncommon to start with one niche, the next thing is a product from a different and before it’s obvious, your channel is unfocused and at best confusing to the audience. In such situations, especially on social media, you may end up looking at the audience that followed you for the initial niche. Sticking with a niche doesn’t mean you are stuck with a few products. Rather, it affords you the specialization to learn and promote a few products. You easily become an expert and have all the answers people have. If you have the right answers, people will find you and use your recommendations.
Have A Work Ethic Befitting Your Niche
Most affiliates start solo, working from their home or personal space, accounting to no one. This might be a bit of a problem without some discipline to get the work done. If you run a moneysite, you will need fully-optimized content. If you are running a youtube channel, you may need more than one video a month to generate good income. All of this involves a work ethic that ensures that eventually, you can start generating good income even if you slow down on creating new content down the line.
Set Goals
You may not have a boss to shove some KPIs down your throat but having your own goals and KPIs is a great way to grow as an affiliate by measuring what you do and the results they bring. If you publish 3 content a week and you make $350, will you make twice that amount if you publish twice the content? Thinking in such lines will help you realize your full potential to live a life of freedom, one of the perks of being an affiliate marketer.
Conclusion
There are lots of opportunities available to you when you start affiliate marketing. It may be products, strategies, or better ways to make money. However, picking a niche, focusing on it, and constantly upgrading your knowledge and skills will be a much better ladder to lean on than drifting around from one thing to the next. Just like many things, it takes time and experience to earn “freedom money”.
