The affiliate marketing industry is probably the fastest growing way to make money online. After all, billions of ordinary people use the Internet every day. Affiliate marketing gives you the ability to target potential customers regardless of their location again world again.
For this reason, it is not surprising that a huge number of people are making a significant amount of money through affiliate advertising and marketing. Many professional affiliate marketers earn more money in this industry than they did in their previous job, and that’s why some of them even quit their normal 9-5 jobs and do affiliate marketing full-time.
A quick overview of affiliate marketing
Now that we have a little idea of the capacity of affiliate marketing, let’s dig deeper and discuss what it actually entails.
The easiest way to describe affiliate marketing is when you help another company sell their products online, and then you get paid for every sale you make to them.
If you advertise a product that costs $200 and the company pays you a 10% commission on the sale, you will earn $10 for each sale.
But how do you refer to sales? You can start promoting your seller’s products on your website that will get targeted site visitors in the same niche as the product you are promoting. For example, if you have a website that sells makeup, you wouldn’t advertise health insurance, but instead you could promote makeup-related products. Every time one of your website visitors clicks on the affiliate link provided to you by the seller, you will be paid a commission.
How to choose a good affiliate partner network?
One of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is joining almost every affiliate network they come across. This is undoubtedly considered a completely wrong technique. This is for quite a few reasons.
First of all, being an affiliate marketer is a business that requires a lot of awareness. So, if you try to work with several affiliate networks at the same time, chances are that none of your initiatives will go as planned, and thus none of them may be very successful.
Second, by focusing on just one or a few products, you can undoubtedly research them thoroughly before you start promoting them. This method will also help you refine your strategies, make the necessary changes and thus make your marketing much more effective. An efficient approach will produce better results and reward you for your efforts and time.
Third, make sure you do your research on the affiliate network because some networks only pay you once a month, which may not work for you or worse, they may not pay you at all. I’m not telling you this to stop you from being an affiliate marketer, but instead I want you to succeed in finding the right network and products to market and earn your commission.
There are affiliate networks that resort to “shaving” which is a very common practice in affiliate marketing where the networks show a reduced amount of sales than you mentioned and therefore pay you significantly less commissions.
Therefore, I recommend that you stick to well-known and trusted affiliate networks to avoid falling victim to this activity. In any case, they only way to succeed with a network is if you are happy with them and the products they promote.
How to start selling as an affiliate marketer
More directly related, some affiliate marketers use social media websites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more for affiliate marketing, others choose to build their own site. Having your own website is an exceptional approach to affiliate marketing because it allows you to control everything.
So in the future, we will focus on affiliate marketing using your own website. First, as mentioned earlier, you should find an affiliate network that you are comfortable with. This includes being informed about the products you are promoting so you don’t end up selling products you know nothing about.
Amazon Affiliate Program
Despite this, many marketers consider Amazon’s marketing program to be one of the best. It is possibly the most trusted network and has a wide range of products to promote and get your rewards.
This gives you the opportunity to promote almost any product on the market or choose a niche with little competition and you could be earning commissions in less than a week.
Finding a good keyword
It is considered one of the most difficult parts of marketing. You simply cannot blindly pick any keyword and expect to start making sales quickly. One of the reasons many affiliate marketers fail is because of using the wrong keyword.
If you are new to affiliate marketing, you want keywords with low competition. Start your keyword research by looking for long-tail keywords with low search volume. This means a lot less money, but not really for those with a lot of competition.
You can test the top 10 and 20 results and do some research to see if you can beat them. Check the keywords your competition is using to determine if they are using the same keywords you want to target. If they are and they have a high ranking website in that niche, I suggest you stay away from that niche and go for a brand new, less competitive one.
Quality content
This is significant. If you think you can make a lot of money by creating items that don’t help your visitors in any way, you are very wrong. Even if your goal is to make money by referring visitors to the offer, you need to offer them one important thing. Simply posting hyperlinks along with crappy sales pitches like “this is a great solution, buy this product through my personal hyperlink and get a discount” and so on, you might just be on your way to disaster.
If you decide to join the Amazon affiliate program, you can write an informative article on your home page and include your primary keywords and some secondary keywords throughout the article. You can get a buying guide and write your short opinion about each product you market. Remember that the higher the price of the product you are marketing, the higher the commission.
Backlinks
We understand that it’s probably the hardest way to achieve unless you’re an SEO guru. Contacting a high authority site and sending guests to those sites is a really well-known way to get 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 the competition for your chosen keyword is really low.
However, even if your site doesn’t make it to the first page, as long as you have visitors to several sites in your niche, you will bring in a significant amount of targeted traffic from those sites. So, a good tactic anyway.
Mistakes to avoid
Now you are aware of the process to become a great affiliate marketer on your own website. I also want you to keep in mind some of the most common mistakes new affiliate marketers make.
Doesn’t offer any good value
Although we have covered this item, it is certainly important to remind you if you are trying to be extreme with your words to push your visitors to click on your affiliate link. Many websites will likely consider it spam or spam.
Instead, it is recommended that these individuals be helped to choose the right solution for their specific needs. This method makes these individuals more familiar, which in return will check out the products you’re marketing based on the value of your article.
Product research
Numerous online marketers do not do proper product research to learn about the product they are promoting and are only concerned with the amount of commission they earn from the sale, regardless of whether it adds value to their visitors. This is an oversight and at some point will lead to your readers not trusting what you are telling them.
Link tracking
When you start advertising on Amazon or even any other affiliate network, it’s helpful to track your affiliate links. It can help you find out which website is selling more and then you can set up similar settings for your other websites.
Final thoughts
I would like to say that although affiliate marketing can be very rewarding, it has a steep learning curve. You may face disappointment many times before you earn a nice amount of money online.
However, affiliate marketing is simply suitable for individuals who are likely to face several failures but come back with a positive attitude and are willing to learn from their mistakes.
