Affiliate Marketing has become the best way to make money online. Here are some ways to becoming an affiliate marketer and a successful one at that.
Affiliate marketing is probably one of the most talked about ways of making money as a sales professional over the Internet from the comfort of your own home or just about anywhere for that matter, as long as you have a reliable open Internet connection. You’ve probably heard of various ways to ‘make money online’ before, with the likes of Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Surveys and Forex appearing in most recommendations. But the issue with most of these methods is they only really work for the more advanced customer. Today we wanted to shine the light on a method with proven success stories, and most importantly a system that can be used by anyone.
In simple terms, affiliate marketing is when you earn commissions for recommending products/services to readers (or people you know). This is done by joining affiliate programs, where you get unique links (tagged with your personal ID) that tracks whenever your links convert to a sale. That’s because the affiliate program works by setting a browser cookie when someone clicks on an affiliate link and tracks any purchases made at the destination before the cookie expires. After that, the affiliate program pays out a small commission. Thus, it’s possible to make a little money or even make a living off of affiliate marketing, but only if you can convince people to click on your links and buy your affiliate partner’s products. It’s a largely passive way to make money, which frees up your time to do other cool things, like travel and eat your weight in pie. It’s more than just dropping links into content, but we all have to start somewhere, right? If you’re a total beginner, here’s how you implement affiliate marketing into your blogeroo:
- Finding good products to promote
- Building websites
- Conducting market research
- Search engine optimization (getting your website ranking well in the search engines)
- Creative ways to promote your products
- Social networking and "web 2.0" strategies
- Email marketing
- Pay-per-click marketing
- Creating or sourcing content for your website or newsletter
- Getting motivated, staying motivated, and avoiding potential mishaps
- Earning money by displaying ads on your site (eg, Google AdSense)
... And there's quite a bit more.
How you do that is up to you – it can be via simple banner ads, or via informational and trustworthy websites. As an affiliate marketer, you have to not just send people to these websites, but convince them to purchase whatever is on offer at that website. It’s a hell of a lot of work. But when you wake up after a good nights sleep, check your stat programs and see you made $1,000 overnight…
Things Nobody Tells You About Affiliate Marketing
- Create the content that people are searching for: Think about Google Search/Pinterest. Google Search Console offers tools that could have a huge impact on your successIf one thing is certain. Google Keyword Planner remains one of the best in terms of usability and outcome. Google Trends is the ideal tool to explore any topic for your content and to discover what’s trending. It is also very good for identifying new niche markets you could dive into, as well as for understanding the seasonality trends of products you are already promoting. On Pinterest, you can find out which topics people are seeking out. It’s that Pinterest is not here to compete against Google. Pinterest’s search weaknesses are Google’s strengths, and likewise, what Google is bad at doing Pinterest is really, really good at. There are a lot of other social media platforms, but why is Pinterest worth your time. Pinterest is a search engine, which means that your reader is telling you exactly what they want and need. People come to Pinterest looking for new ideas to try, and the very best ideas come from businesses like yours.
Start building an email list: You can capture buyers details, as opposed to letting the visitor disappear once you’ve passed the prospect along to the merchant. If you build a list you build stronger relationships with your customers. Once you have these details, you can build up a buyer list that you can leverage to offer related goods and services at a later date. To target certain types of customers you want to promote business to, you need to adapt the content according to their wants and needs. People need to hear something good about a product a couple of times before they decide to buy it. One great way to explore this is through product reviews and comparison. When people sign up for a mailing list, they expect to read about information and issues they have. There are plenty of ways to attract customers to sign up on your email list. One great way is to build in a popup window to notify your customers to sign up to receive latest updates and promotion of your website. Another method is to entice their participation by dangling a contest or lucky draws. Unique content and reader appeal will generally result in higher search engine ratings too, which in turn should drive more traffic and conversions. Create captivating and interesting emails, not only to draw your current audience in but to make it irresistible for them not to forward to their family and friends as well. Great examples like hosting a refer-a-friend promotion, life hacks and tips and tricks, product comparisons in the current market. These are wonderful ways to attract new potential readers, luring them in and increasing your email list!
Get Your Website Designed: So you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing and wondering about your first website options. If you’re a total newbie, using a low-end beginner site is one way to learn the affiliate marketing game on the cheap. WordPress is still the most popular website-building platform, because it's so flexible. If you're looking for a simpler affiliate website builder than WordPress, there are great, easy-to-use, options out there. The top free website platform I recommend is: Wix, Ucraft, Shopify, Site123, Duda, Squarespace... Of course, the important thing, whatever platform you choose, is that you produce good content relevant to your users, work hard to promote your affiliate programs, and spend time making your page design speak to your users. You need to maximize your core competency, which is Internet sales and marketing, so you don't spend all day coding, thumbing through HTML books, or incurring the unbearable cost of web developers which are notorious for delays and holding their clients hostage.
Running a pay-per-click affiliate campaign (e.g. Google AdWords Pay Per Click): You want as much of this traffic as possible to click on links or ads on your site which, in turn, take them to another site, namely the party or parties you represent. Alternatively, depending on your revenue model, you may want to maximize the number of not only your visitors, but the percentage of these which ultimately purchase the goods or services of the merchant or service provider you represent. One way or another, clicks on your site, or purchases on your site or a third party site, result on commissions paid to you. Running a pay-per-click affiliate campaign probably won't generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for you right off the bat--but it is the easiest way to leverage the keyword research and PPC skills you've developed in building your own site. When you advertise a merchant’s product or service and being paid for each click, you are actually being paid for leads. When someone finds an ad interesting and visits the website, then publisher makes money. There are various best pay per click affiliate programs accessible via market
Put yourself in the position of the buyer: What would make you buy from a previously unknown web site? Typically it’s due to reasons such as convenience and scarcity. If your chosen merchant doesn’t meet the criteria, then pass and move onto another who does. If a merchant offers something a buyer can easily get elsewhere, then you’ll be exposed to a great deal of competition. Google Trends is a useful tool for predicting rising interest in keyword areas. Google Insights For Search allows you to drill down into the data, including by date, by region, by category and by source. Microsoft Ad Intelligence and Google Adwords provide seasonal trends.
Building An Audience: You can use PPC to get visitors to sign up to the site, join your forum, or subscribe to your RSS or e-mail newsletter. These visitors can attract more visitors, especially if you blend in viral marketing techniques i.e. make it easy for them to invite friends. Also remember that people often do not buy on the first visit, no matter how interested they are in the product or service. They may click through to the merchant – on your dime – then go off and do some price comparison, perhaps leaving their buying decision for a few days, forgot who they went to a few days earlier, and end up buying the product elsewhere. People often need to hear your name a number of times before they make a buying decision, especially on big ticket items.
Discover market trends: Things may slow down in July and August with vacations and may become sluggish again in December. If you can identify these online search trends at the query level you'll be able to:
- Create content that focuses on a specific search query that you know will be trending
- Transform the way you select your blog post topics.
- Analyze which products your company should sell.
- Find the best keywords & search terms for driving more traffic.
By simply recognizing a trend, the trader has noticed a bias that has shown itself in the marketplace. The alluring part of this is that if that bias continues, the trader might be able to jump on the trend, and let the market do the heavy lifting of moving the position into profitable territory. Traders are often best served by waiting for the up-trend to pull back before buying (or waiting for a down-trend to rip higher before selling), in an effort to enter the position as cheaply as possible. You can find all kinds of complicated indicators to tell you when there is a trend. Google Trends and Google Insights are tools that make it easy to find recent hot search trends across the web. Using search engine trends to generate blog topics is a solid SEO technique because you already know that users are searching that keyword, making the blog post more likely to drive higher amounts of traffic to your site. Social media is a powerful tool to keep track of industry influencers, their points of view and ensure you remain part of the conversation. Listen to your customers could provide valuable insight into possible changes in their behaviours and needs. Observation of your competitors can often give you a good picture of their market positioning and whether they are reacting to what could be seen as an emerging trend. By simply reviewing their website, customer reviews and social media channels it is possible to understand how you compare to your competitors. Start back at the beginning and try again.
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) / improving website experiences: The Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) process simply means: increasing the percentage of website visitors who convert into customers. Conversions are desired visitor actions based on the objective of a website, whether it be generating online sales or leads from contact forms/phone calls. You should care about CRO for a few reasons. First, you are most likely paying for traffic to your site in one way or another, and a high conversion rate means a better return on that investment (ROI). It’s also much more cost-effective to convert a higher percentage of the visitors you already have than to attract more visitors. In addition to improving your ROI, optimization helps to defend against the limited attention span of your average visitor by giving them what they want before they tire of looking for it and move on.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO or organic search):
Partnerships including affiliate and co-marketing
Social media marketing including Social CRM and Social Customer Care: Brands are trying in more ways than ever to connect with audiences across a range of social platforms.