The affiliate marketing field is probably the fastest developing way to make money online. After all, billions of ordinary people use the Internet every day. Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to target potential customers regardless of where they are in the world.
For this reason, it is not surprising that a large number of people make a considerable amount of money through advertising and affiliate marketing. Many qualified affiliate marketers end up making more money in this field than their previous job and therefore some of them even quit their normal 9 to 5 job and go into affiliate marketing full time.
A quick overview of affiliate marketing
Now that we have a little idea about the power of affiliate marketing, let’s dig in and discuss what it actually includes.
The easiest way to describe affiliate marketing is when you help another business sell their products online and then get paid a commission for each sale you make to them.
If you are promoting a product priced at $200 and the company pays you a commission of 10 percent of the sale, you would earn $10 for each sale.
How do you refer to sales? You can start promoting your seller’s products on your website, which receives targeted site visitors in the same niche as the product you’re advertising. For example, if you have a website that sells makeup, you would not promote health insurance, but instead you might promote makeup-related products. Every time one of your website visitors clicks on your affiliate link provided by the seller, you will be paid a commission.
How to choose a good affiliate network
One of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is becoming a member of almost every affiliate network they come across. This is certainly considered to be a totally incorrect technique. That is for quite a few reasons.
First of all, being an affiliate marketer is an undertaking that requires a lot of awareness. So if you try to work with many affiliate networks at the same time, chances are none of your initiatives will go as planned and consequently none of them will end up being very successful.
Second, focusing on just one or a few products will certainly allow you to thoroughly research them before you start promoting them. This method also helps you refine your strategies, making any necessary adjustments and thus making your marketing that much more powerful. An effective approach will produce better results and will reward you for your efforts and time.
Third, be sure to do some affiliate network research, as there are some networks that only pay you once a month that might not work for you or worse, might not pay you at all. I’m not saying this to discourage you from being an affiliate marketer, but I want you to be successful in finding the right network and products to market to and earn your commission.
There are affiliate networks that resort to “shaving”, a very common exercise in affiliate marketing where the networks display a number of sales at a discount than what you referred, thus paying you drastically less in commissions.
Therefore, to avoid falling victim to this action, I suggest you stick with well-known and trusted affiliate networks. In any case, the only way you will be successful with a network is if you are comfortable with them and the products they are promoting.
How to start getting sales as an affiliate marketer
Cutting to the chase right away, some affiliate marketers use social networking websites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more to do affiliate marketing, others decide to build their own site. Getting your own site is a great approach to affiliate marketing, because it gives you control over everything.
Therefore, we will focus on affiliate marketing using your own site in the future. First things first, as mentioned above, you will want to find an affiliate network that you are comfortable with. This includes being knowledgeable about the products you’re promoting, so you don’t sell products you know nothing about.
Amazon Associates Program
That being said, many marketers consider Amazon’s Associate Marketing Program to be one of the best out there. It is possibly the most trusted network and has a large inventory of products to promote and earn your commissions.
This gives you the ability to promote just about any product on the market, or pick a niche with little competition and you could be earning commissions in less than a week.
Find a good keyword
It is considered to be one of the most difficult parts of marketing. You can’t just blindly pick any keyword and expect to start generating sales quickly. One of the reasons many affiliate marketers fail is due to using the wrong keyword.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you’ll want keywords that have little competition. Start your keyword research by finding long-tail keywords with low search volume, that means a lot less money, but not really ones with high competition.
You can try the top 10 and 20 results and do some research to find out if you can beat them. Review the keywords that your competition is using to determine if they are using identical keyword phrases to the ones you want to target. If they are, and they have a high authority website in that niche, I would recommend that you stay away from that niche and go with a new, less competitive one.
quality content
This is significant. If you think that you will earn a lot of money by creating articles that do not help visitors in any way, then you are sorely mistaken. Although your goal is to make money by referring visitors to the offer, you will need to offer them something important. Simply posting your hyperlinks along with lame sales pitches like “this is a great solution, buy this product through my personal hyperlink and get a discount” and so on, you may just be heading for disaster.
If you decide to join the Amazon Associates Program, you can write an informative article on your home page and include your main keywords and some secondary keywords throughout the article. You could have the shopping guide, and write your brief opinion of each product that you are selling. Remember that the higher the cost of the product you sell, the higher the commission.
backlinks
We realize that it is probably the most difficult method to achieve, unless you are an SEO guru. Contacting the site with high authority and guest posting on these sites is a well-known means of getting great backlinks. These great backlinks, along with guest posting on related sites in your niche, will get you on the first page of search engines as long as your keyword of choice has very little competition.
However, even when your site doesn’t make it to page one, as long as you have guest posts on multiple sites in your niche, you will attract a substantial amount of targeted traffic coming from these sites. So it’s a great tactic anyway.
mistakes to avoid
Now that you know the process of becoming a great affiliate marketer with your own website, I want you to also consider some of the most common mistakes new affiliate marketers make.
Not providing any good value
Although we’ve covered this topic, it’s important to remind you that if you try to be extreme with your words to pressure visitors to click on your affiliate link, it’s likely that many websites will consider you junk or spam.
Rather, it is suggested to help these people to select the right solution according to their particular needs. This method makes these people feel more, which in turn will verify the products you are marketing based on the value of your item.
product research
Many online merchants will not do proper product research to gain knowledge about the product they are promoting, instead they are only concerned with the amount of commission they will earn per sale, regardless of whether it will provide value to their visitors. This is an oversight, and at some point it will cause your readers to not trust anything you tell them.
Track your links
When you start advertising on Amazon or even some other affiliate network, it will be beneficial to track your affiliate links. It can help you find out which website is generating the most sales, and then you can make your other websites have the same type of setup.
final thoughts
I would like to say that even though affiliate marketing can be very rewarding, it does have a steep learning curve. You may face disappointment numerous times before making a good amount of money online.
That being said, affiliate marketing is just right for people who are likely to face several failures, but will come back with a positive attitude and willing to learn from their mistakes.