Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Affiliate marketing is a way of earning when an online retailer pays you a commission for traffic or sales generated from your referrals.

It is the process of earning a commission by promoting other peoples ( or company’s ) products. You will find a product and you like, promote it to others and earn a profit for each sale that you make.

How does Affiliate Marketing Work?

From digital marketing services, affiliates introduce the merchant’s brand to the people visiting their pages or blogs.

They can do so by either writing about the product or service introduced by the merchant or can feature banner ads,

For every person visiting the merchants site and making some real purchase, the affiliate gets some payment.

Though affiliate marketing doesn’t require you to have a website, most of the affiliates do prefer to have one of their own.

Here, they can talk about the affiliate products by giving detailed reviews about them, making comparisons with similar products and also recommending them to their visitors or blog readers.

For every affiliate product there’s a special link, which helps them in tracking if they get paid for every sale that went through them.

As soon as anyone clicks on the link, the merchant also knows from which affiliate the particular customer came from. And if that customer buys anything you get the commission.

So, the prime goal of affiliate marketing is to get more people to click on the affiliate links. The more the clicks and visits to the merchant pages, the more the chances of sales happening and thus earning a commission.

How To Start Affiliate Marketing

The majority of people are interested in making money with an internet-based “side hustle” to supplement their regular income or even starting an online business to replace their income entirely.

For them Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online as a standalone business or as an additional revenue stream to an existing business.

• Choose the Right Affiliate Network

The fit must be right between you and the merchant who is going to benefit from your promotional efforts, or it simply won’t work.

The easiest way to begin with affiliate marketing is to select an affiliate network. Many affiliate networks exist, some of which are tied to well-known companies like Amazon, Google and Apple, while others specialize in specific types of products and services.

• Research and Select the Right Affiliate Products

A good sound strategy is a must for new affiliate marketers. You should choose a niche that you can make money online with and has a lot of product vendors. This will give you a wide selection of products to offer your online community.

However, when you’re just getting started you should limit yourself to two or three products at a time. This will allow you to really become an expert on the products you are promoting which can be helpful when it comes to marketing those products.

As a new affiliate marketer, you are not obligated to purchase every product you want to promote. But it goes without saying that actually owning and using the products is huge for establishing credibility and trust. Intimate knowledge of the product can mean the difference between making the sale and having prospects move elsewhere.

• Utilize Social Media Marketing to Get More Traffic

Now-a-days, social media communication is helping over half of the world stay connected through our daily lives. It is the perfect way to promote your affiliate products to people on every continent. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest and other social media platforms are great vehicles for “word of mouth” or viral marketing.

All it takes in most cases is one click of the button to reach at least a few hundred engaged followers with a great product offer to entice them into becoming paying customers. If only one percent of your followers share your content to the same amount of people then your audience just tripled and with that happening, so has your potential to earn a commission.

On top of the fact that video has the best chance to go viral, It is a great way to introduce yourself and gain your communities trust. Trust is crucial when it comes to making an online sale. Video marketing, in particular, is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise via commentary, screenshots, and live reviews.

The key to successful affiliate marketing

You want to start affiliate marketing you’ve committed to building an affiliate business. Your success as an affiliate marketer is tied to how you answer these questions:

• Can you find products or services to promote that offer you a great commission rate?
• Can you find a niche market that is likely to buy what you are promoting?
• Are you able to build content and traffic around these products?

If the answer to each of these questions is a resounding yes, there is your affirmation. There is a good chance that you can be successful with affiliate marketing. But rather than jumping to conclusions immediately, take time to research whether others are out there making a sustainable affiliate income from products and content in that niche.

In a sense, competition is a good thing here… It’ll help you validate your idea and prove that it’s worth it to build a business around your chosen niche.

Pillars of Affiliate Marketing

To be successful, all parties involved in affiliate marketing have to connect and communicate actively. The vital part of this connection is the relationships formed between the advertiser, publisher, and the consumer.

Advertiser

An advertiser in affiliate marketing can be any company that sells products (cosmetics, kitchen appliances, electronics, cloth etc,) or services (software, cloud storage, video games etc)

There is also one more distinguishing characteristic that defines you as an advertiser. You have to be ready to pay other people to help you sell your products and promote your website.

Publisher

Publisher plays an important role in affiliate marketing as an individual that promotes an advertisers’ product or service. In exchange, the publisher earns a commission.

Usually, there is a contract that binds a publisher and advertiser. As part of this contract, the advertiser is the one that provides a publisher with text ads, links, and banners.

The publisher then uses it on their website to promote the advertisers’ products and services. The publisher is also known as an affiliate – the future you.

Consumer

Lastly, as the final involved party in affiliate marketing, we have the consumer.

The consumer is a person who sees the ad on a publishers’ website, takes action (clicks on it, submits info) which leads them to the advertisers’ website to complete an action. (make a purchase, subscribe to service) It is what marketers call a conversion.

Strategies for Becoming a Successful Affiliate Marketer

Successful affiliate marketing experts can make an income of more than five figures per month. When affiliates reach this elite level, they’re often referred to as “super affiliates.”

However, only 1 to 5 percent of marketers ever achieve this status. I can not guarantee that anyone who becomes an affiliate marketer will ever see five figure months or even get to 5 thousand dollar months. But, I do know that if you ever hope to even come close to having success as an affiliate marketer you will need to come up with a well strategized game plan and carry it out with fierce commitment and no fear.

These are some tips and strategies to help you develop that game plan.

• Decide on a business model

There are two primary business models that prospective affiliate marketers choose between. The first is a resource site, and the second is a review site.

Which model you choose will depend on your familiarity with the products or services you advertise.

• Target a niche

If you’re just starting out, a niche market is the obvious way to go. Look for a market that has a clearly defined need and willing audience. Then, find affiliate opportunities that dovetail with that niche market.

• Create an effective website

Once you have a great product you believe in and a target market, you’ll need to stock a site with quality content that will help drive traffic and affiliate sales.

Once you have your website set up, you’ll want to optimize it for conversions and sales.

• Build an audience through trust

The audience is the most important component of affiliate marketing. You could be producing the best content on Gods green earth, but it won’t make a dime if no one ever visits your site.

The most successful affiliate marketers build compelling content first, and affiliate revenue later. Chris Brogan has said: “when there’s an opportunity to bring something of value to your community and make some money for your efforts, then you’re looking at what I think of as a great opportunity.”

To build a successful affiliate program, it helps to care about the products you are selling, and to offer legitimate value beyond just a quick sale.

While you can build an affiliate business around any type of product, it helps if you actually use the product and endorse it personally.

• Make sure you understand disclosure

A couple of years ago, The FCC introduced new rules that covered the increasingly professionalizing world of bloggers. Now you must disclose when you have a financial interest in a product or service you feature on your blog.

This goes for sponsored post, but more importantly, affiliate links. (example: This page contains affiliate links, which means that if you buy something using one of the links below, I may earn a commission.)

• Find and work with affiliates

Affiliates will help to grow your business and help you tap into web traffic. There are many ways to meet and engage with affiliates, but the best way to access desirable affiliates is by building a reputation for yourself.

You can do this by developing a popular blog or otherwise earning a large online following, or by becoming a published author of a book or article.

There are other ways of meeting affiliates, of course, and each method will vary in its success and required effort.

• Seek knowledge and embrace change

If you are familiar with internet marketing at all, you know that what worked three months ago may not work today. Stay on top of the trends. Seek knowledge, and start by learning something new about affiliate marketing daily.

For example, remember those marketing tools called banner ads that used to drive sales at an astronomical rate a few years ago? A result of all those banners was banner blindness.

That means most online viewers will not click on banners even if they do relate to what they are looking for because they have been bombarded by them too many times.

Final thoughts

In the conclusion, we can say that, Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn a living. But, before you start trying to count your commission earnings, there are a lot of things that have to be done.

You need to find the best product or service you want to promote, identify your target audience’s needs, and build your website for affiliate marketing purposes.

If you have any questions about this topic or anything else you may want to talk about, feel free to contact me at Sammy@paperchaseprophet .com