In this post, I’ll show you how to make money with affiliate marketing. The steps in this post are essential to doing affiliate marketing in a sustainable way.
With these steps, you’ll be able to create an affiliate marketing foundation you can build on. After creating your foundation you’ll receive consistent organic traffic that will be funneled to your affiliate links and make money online.
Sounds good right!
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Benefits of affiliate marketing?
There a crazy amount of ways to earn money online. Online courses, drop shipping, YouTube, selling your own products and many more. Each of these has their advantages and disadvantages I thought before I get into everything regarding affiliate marketing I’ll talk about the benefits.
The benefits of affiliate marketing are:
- No financial roadblock
In contrary to for example drop shipping there is almost no financial risk involved. You aren’t buying products the only thing you’re doing is promoting them and earning money through a commission. You don’t need a lot of money to promote affiliate products. - Semi-passive when done right
Once your website is up and running and you’re getting some traffic it’s pretty easy to automate all the processes that come with promoting and referring products to people. This way you can make more money without trading it in for time. - Highly scalable
Since everything is done online you don’t need extra manpower to scale your company combine this with automation and you got something very cool.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Instead of creating products and selling them you promote products from companies and refer people
interested in these products to those companies. When someone buys a product based on your recommendation you receive a commission which can be up to 50% of the product the customer bought.
Picking a profitable niche
Affiliate Marketing is most effective when you pick a specific niche (target audience) and cater to them.
People won’t listen to everybody when it comes to recommending products so you’re going to have to gain some credibility. The best way to do that is to become an authority in a certain niche.
Not every niche is going to be as easy to become an authority in, because of the competition. Your first thought might be to pick a niche with not as much competition. Don’t! Niches with low competition are that way because of a reason. Likely there aren’t a lot of people buying products in that niche.
A great way to find out how much competition there is in a niche is to use a keyword planner. Unfortunately, most keyword planners I’ve come in contact with aren’t even close to being accurate.
Luckily I found one that’s isn’t super precise, but precise enough to work with. It’s called Jaaxy and if you’re interested in using it, it gives you thirty free searches and you can find it here.
The right thing to do is to pick a really popular niche. The most popular niches which some may refer to as the big 3 are dating, health & making money online. As I said before it’s hard to become an authority in a crowded niche so you’re going to have narrow down your niche.
Example.
If you have a fitness blog you’re going to have a hard time standing out, because there are thousands of people with fitness blogs. Now how many fitness blogs are their specifically about weight loss? Probably a lot less and how many fitness blogs are they’re about weight loss specifically for post pregnant women? even less.
This is what I mean when I talk about narrowing down your niche. A great way to do this is to use the alphabet soup technique.
So how does it work?
The moment you type something into google it will most of the time finish your sentence with a suggestion before you’re done with typing.
The suggestion Google comes up with are based on the history of other users that typed those sentences. Knowing that these suggestions are popular search terms you can use this to your advantage.
Fitness on itself is a pretty competitive niche, but what kind of suggestions will pop up if I typed in “Fitness for A” or “Fitness for B” all kinds of different search terms will come up you can use as a niche. You can do this with the entire alphabet hence then name the alphabet soup technique.
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Find products to promote
There are multiple ways to find products to promote
- The easiest way is to just google them. Google Affiliate programs + niche
- Go to websites with a product in your niche that interest you.
There’s a chance that in the footer they have got a link with a name along the line of affiliate program or become a partner.
Standard Affiliate programs people use:
- ClickBank
- Amazon Associates
- eBay partner network
Register to become an affiliate and you’ll probably get a link to which you can refer people to their website with a tracking code so they know it’s you who recommended them to come to their website.
Tip* A lot of people try to find physical products or digital info products to promote, but right now their’s a huge opportunity when it comes to webinars. People are actually paying people to get them on their webinar.
Creating a website
Doing affiliate marketing through social platforms is an option, but you’ll be limiting yourself immensely when it comes to getting traffic through search engine optimization and you’re not in full control of what you want to present to the people you intend to refer to the companies you’re an affiliate of.
This why I advise you to create a website. Yes, you can still use platforms to create an audience and refer them to your affiliate companies but having a headquarter that you can tailor in any way possible is a very valuable asset.
Website hosting & domain name
To create a website you’ll need to have website hosting and a domain name.
Website hosting is a service that put your website on the internet. There are all kinds of website providers that can host your website all have their own characteristics and some are better than others.
Choosing the right website provider can be the difference between your website malfunctioning from time to time and having a 24/7 perfect running website. I’ll give you some recommendation at the end of this article.
You also have to create a domain name. A domain name is a link you put in the search bar of your internet browser to visit a website. Preferably you pick a domain name that’s brandable.
I, for example, got the name realdigitalsuccess.com, because of all the scams on the internet I strive to give you all the information you need to get REAL digital success.
A tip*. Don’t go on a spiritual journey for a month to come up with the perfect name. I value your time and you should value yours too. Just come up with a simple name.
Nobody knows what a “Google” is, but they made it work. In the end, a name is not going to be the difference between success and failure. Your actions and the value you’ll provide will dictate the success you’ll have.
Just having a website isn’t enough to get website visitors to buy your products. You’re going to have to spend time coming up with the right way to funnel people to the affiliate products.
Getting everything SEO ready
There’s a hard way and an easy way to get your website ready for search engine optimization. I’ll be honest with you I have no idea how to do it the hard way. I just download an SEO plugin and get my website ready.
There are two different SEO plugins that don’t cost anything that you can use to get your website SEO ready.
- All in One SEO pack
- Yoast SEO
A lot of people used to prefer Yoast SEO because it had a built-in XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a map that’s created to make it easier for search engines to find the content on your website and index it.
The All In One SEO plugin now has that same has that same function so it doesn’t really matter which one of the two you pick. I use the All in One SEO pack because I’m just used to it.
After this, with the help of the plugin, you’re going to optimize the title and description that’s going to pop-up when people find your website on search engines. You’ll also switch on the function that alerts search engines every time you post new content so that they can index it as quickly as possible.
Just doing this won’t take care of all the SEO you need to do but you’ve made your website ready to perform SEO on.
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Promoting your website
You might have the most beautiful and advanced website ever with insanely high-quality content if nobody knows about it you’re not going to earn money online. This is why you’re going to promote your website and the content on it with some simple marketing.
You can go two ways when it comes to marketing your website and driving traffic to your website.
- Pay for advertisement on search engines and social platforms
- Or you attract traffic organically through creating content
Paid advertisement is very attractive because you get eyes on your website immediately. You’ll have to pay for these eyes which means if your website isn’t optimized for converting website visitors their’s a chance you might lose money.
Most people pay for advertisement on:
Tip* There are a few other options that a lot of people don’t think of, but can help you a lot. One of those is Bing. According to some statistics, 33% of people still use the Bing search engine. While everybody is fighting for keywords on Google you can just do your thing on Bing.
Attracting traffic organically through putting out content takes a lot longer, but it’s way cheaper so for people who don’t have any money it’s ideal to start with.
Your aim should be to create high-quality keyword rich content and put it on your website so that Google can index and rank it. The higher your content ranks the more visitors will come to your website.
Even if you are going to pay for an advertisement from the start I’d advise you to also optimize your content for search engines for multiple reasons.
- As soon as you stop paying for advertising promotion of your website will stop. High ranked content will always be shown which means 24/7 promotion.
- Once websites are ranked high they tend to stay there (depending on your niche) which means as soon as your website attracts visitors you can just sit back, almost do nothing and money will still come in.
- You can test the conversion of newly made pages without paying money. This way you reduce the risk when you drive paid traffic to those pages.
Content creation vs. Promotion
When I started and got my first affiliate link I could use to drive traffic to I was so happy. I just stuck it to every bit of content I created and sometimes just posted the link with a short caption on social media.
Don’t do this!
This is called spamming which only chases potential customers away. I’ve learned from that experience that there should be a balance. Have you heard of Gary Vaynerchuk? He’s the head of a social media marketing agency in New York called Vaynermedia.
He brought a book out called jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, right hook. In this book, he compares marketing to boxing. To prevent spamming and get more sales he’d provide them with a lot of valuable content and than every now and than throw a right hook which is an offer to buy something from him.
Learn from my mistake and don’t just spam your affiliate links everywhere. Provide value by creating content and your audience will be happy to buy your stuff. There’s a balance between providing value and call to actions that you’re going to have to master.
Most Important Don’t Re-Invent The Wheel
This was probably a lot to read, but there’s one more thing that you should know before you start on your affiliate marketing endeavor.
Most people that try out affiliate marketing quit after 5 months without making any money. In most situations, this is a result of a lack of patience and training. The moment you don’t exactly know what you’re doing doubt can easily kick in.
Take it from me doubt is absolutely a success killer!
Instead of trying to recreate the wheel I highly advise you to get proper guidance and surround yourself with peers for motivation and support.
The place I found this is called Wealthy Affiliate. It’s an affiliate marketing platform that trains affiliate marketers.
These are some success stories that are posted in the members only area. They’re mostly there to motivate new members but I thought I’d include them because they show what you can achieve with the training given at wealthy affiliate.
Click here to create a FREE account and check it out(No Credit Card Needed!).
Get free access to their basic training courses, Unlimited hosting and they provide you with 2 free .siterubix.com website domains to try everything out in a practical way.
It’s the community I started at and still an active member of. I’ve also made a comprehensive wealthy affiliate review to see what it’s all about.
Click Here To Check Out My Full Wealthy Affiliate Review.
I wish you good luck on your journey
If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment
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