Affiliate marketing is a great way to make extra money. Once you have everything all set up and ready to go, you can begin making an income from your efforts. Affiliate marketing is when someone else pays you a commission or a percentage of what you sell for them. Here is the guide to start your affiliate marketing business in 6 easy steps.
1. Create An Affiliate Marketing Blog
Every great thing starts with simple steps and the first thing you will need to become an affiliate is to have an affiliate marketing blog or website. You can use the easy, click & drag website creator platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Weebly, and many others. Afterwards you need to fill it with useful content and then, buy a 1 or 2 years hosting service and publish your site or blog.
2. Choose A Product/Service To Promote
Advertisers want to market their products/service to as many people as they can, and they want to do it cheaply yet effectively. This is where you come in because you’ll be their affiliate who will write excellent reviews about what the advertisers are selling. In your blog posts you will include affiliate links or banner ads on your website. Once the customer is convinced that you have written honest reviews about the advertiser’s products or services, then they will click on those links and get redirected to their website form your affiliate marketing blog. If they’ll buy the product, then you’ll get a percentage share.
3. Sign Up In Affiliate Networks
There are a wide range of affiliate networks that you can partner with after you’ve created your affiliate marketing blog. You can choose one or more but if you’ll choose more than one, then you need to make more than one blog or website also. That’s because each blog has to be tailored for the product or service that you will be promoting. You do this to avoid confusion and get more people to subscribe and purchase, so you can have commissions on sales. Here are some of the famous affiliate networks:
Clickbank
E-junkie
PayDotCom
Commission Junction
4. Affiliate Site Content
Being an affiliate marketer gives you freedom from choosing the kind of products you want to promote, choosing the time when you want to work and, of course, choosing the kind of website you’d like to establish. There are 2 kinds of affiliate marketing blog. One is called a “resource site” and the other is called a “review site.”
A resource site is an information hub for the product or service that you are promoting. Let’s say you’re promoting LG’s products, your site then has to have detailed information about all of LG’s latest products for sale or under development. When people read your blog posts they must be able to find out what, where, when, how and why about LG’s smartphones or smartwatches afterwards.
A review site, on the other hand, is also informative although sometimes critical, but only up to a minor point due to highlighting the pros and cons of each product or service reviewed. You must give an honest review or you’ll lose credibility! But limit the criticism to a minimum or turning them into opportunities that customer can still appreciate. Readers who go to review sites generally want to find out which one is the best product/service that they particularly need.
5. Attracting Web Traffic To Your Affiliate Blog
Mixing internet marketing strategy or what some experts call it, “internet marketing blueprint” will have a dramatic effect in generating traffic and leads to your site as well as the advertiser’s site. Generally, you’ll want to broadcast news about your new affiliate marketing blog, so that people will know about it; and when they do know about it, then they’re going to want to check it out. That’s where web traffic starts to build. Here are some ways you can get traffic to your site/blog:
Paid Advertising – while you may think that this method is costly and not worth investing, you might miss the advantages that it brings. First of all, you can choose a paid advertising package based on the budget you have. Second, it will boost web traffic to your site minus the effort needed to put in it, because the advertising company will do it for you.
Free Advertising Sites – but don’t stop there because it’s better if you have other means to drive traffic to your affiliate marketing blog and you can embed a link while posting ads in those free advertising websites.
Article Marketing – this one is a must. There’s only one undisputed King of the Web and it’s not what you think it is, it’s web content. That’s right! Your content is the king! The blog posts you’re creating is your best chance at connecting to people. So, make more of it and not just the ones for your site or blog, but also for article directories, social media sites and others. The idea is to embed your website’s link somewhere in these articles for people to click and get redirected to your homepage.
E-mail Marketing – having done the above 3 methods of getting web traffic, you can now proceed with this cool method of getting more people to subscribe – email marketing. What you do is send out a custom newsletters and/or infographics weekly to people who have already subscribed to your affiliate marketing blog. This will ensure customer retention but you can also buy an email list of people who are looking for products/services that you promote and then, send out newsletters to them also.
6. Join Affiliate Marketing Forum Discussions
One last thing, you must also recognize that you’re a beginner at this whole affiliate marketing thing. There are more details to learn. So you need to keep yourself updated with helpful information from seasoned experts and you can find a whole lot of them in those forums or discussion boards. The best thing about them is that they’re very helpful to newbies like you. Here are some of the sites that you go to and sign up:
Digital Point Huge
aBestWeb
Warrior Forum
Attention!! You must take action if you want to make money online with affiliate marketing. The reading (Articles) is the theory. The action is the money.