Affiliate marketing is essentially referral marketing with a commission. When you refer a new customer to a business that has an affiliate program, you get paid.
There are several types of affiliate programs. Most will pay you a flat rate or percentage of the sale you make. Another common type is when you’re paid per action or lead.
For example, if you refer someone who signs up for businesses free trial, the business pays you for the sign-up. Although not seen as often anymore, some will pay you per click or per impression.
Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to earn a commission by selling products or services offered by other companies. It’s a great way to supplement your income from the convenience of your own home. Fortunately, it’s also easy to become an affiliate for companies that are household names.
Of all the ways to make money at home and online, affiliate marketing is one of the easiest to start. While most successful affiliate marketers have a website or blog, you don’t actually need one. To get started:
- Choose a niche.
- Research potential affiliate products and services that fit in your niche or with your website.
- Decide how you’ll promote the affiliate products.
- Learn Internet marketing and begin sharing your website, blog, squeeze page or affiliate links.
- Make your business legal by checking out the business licensing and business laws in your area.
It has been observed that – out of all the industries – these three niches are the most in demand:
- Health, such as medical services, pharmaceuticals, and herbal therapies, because people nowadays are investing in fitness, weight loss, and organic cures
- Wealth, such as online selling, foreign currency and stock exchange, given that ordinary people are looking for places to invest their savings into
- Romance, such as online dating, because of the rise of online social media and the need to find groups of people who belong to the same demographic or have common interest.
Steps for Affiliate Marketing Business
Start a website relevant to your niche.
Before becoming an affiliate, many companies will want to know the URL of the website that you’ll use to sell their products. They do this because they want to ensure that the content on the website won’t hurt the company’s reputation.
Research affiliate programs.
Find an affiliate program that offers products or services in your niche.
Join an affiliate program.
It’s almost always free of charge to join an affiliate program.
Include visual ads in your sidebar.
Your website, like most websites, probably has a sidebar. That’s a great place to include visual ads for products relevant to your niche.
Continue producing content relevant to your niche.
If you want to keep people coming back to your website time and again, then you need to keep on producing original content that’s of value to your visitors.
Here are a few types of content you can try out to get started:
Reviews
One of the easiest types of content you can use to promote affiliate products is reviews. Simply write up your opinion of a product based on your experience. You can describe how you used it and how it helped you.
Product comparisons
You will want to answer the questions your readers are most likely to have when it comes to choosing what products to buy, like trying to figure out what is the difference between two competing products in order to determine which one is best for them.
Informational Videos
While text is the most obvious format to stick with when it comes to affiliate marketing a lot of people do prefer consuming content in video form rather than reading it.
How to articles
You could take a couple of different approaches when it comes to using how-to articles for affiliate marketing. You could write articles that describe how to get the most out of a product or make use of certain features. Or you could use more general how-to articles to point readers toward affiliate products.
Video tutorials
Like how-to articles, video tutorials give you an opportunity to show your readers how to make the best use of the product you’re recommending. These can particularly be useful if the affiliate products you promote on your blog are complicated to use, like software that has lots of features.
Gift guide
While it’s possible to put a gift guide together that includes affiliate links together at any time, you’ll likely get the best results if you publish a gift guide around the holidays when everyone’s scrambling to find good gift ideas for loved ones.
Educational webinars
Businesses frequently use this tactic to promote their wares and there’s no reason affiliate marketers can’t do the same. Consider what informational topics are relevant to the affiliate products you represent and craft an educational webinar around them.
Long-form guides
This is another common content tactic businesses use.
They often employ long-form guides as a way to collect leads, but where a business is likely to put their guide behind a sign up form, you might be better off publishing it to the open web to make the affiliate links more accessible.
Seasonal content
Many of the topics people care about and seek out vary throughout the year. In some particular month, suddenly everyone loves costumes and pumpkins while during other periods, vacations and days in the sun dominate our thoughts.
List roundups
Sometimes simply doing the work of curating a list of similar items is valuable to readers. The Wire-cutter maintains an ongoing list of good deals, along with more specific lists of products.
Note that all the affiliate marketing tips for newbies are going to be ready to use from the moment you start your affiliate marketing journey. As mentioned before, these decisions will spell out how things turn out for you, so pay attention to do your thing right!
Make sure you take the time to think things through before investing your time and money on anything. That way, you can guarantee profit through your efforts and careful planning rather than just relying on beginner’s luck like a little dweeb!
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Business, marketing, and blogging – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of Burban Branding and Media, and a self-taught marketer with 10 years of experience. My passion lies in helping startups enhance their business through marketing, HR, leadership, and finance. I am on a mission to assist businesses in achieving their goals.