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Affiliate marketing business is one of my top 10 online side hustles to make money which I published sometime ago.
As a digital publisher, you’ve to understand that affiliate marketing business is simply driven by researching and finding the right solution with an affiliate program and recommending it to solve the problems and pain points which your target market is currently grappling with.
Beyond that, you should be able to show and demonstrate with proof to your target audience that the affiliate product or service you’re recommending will actually work for them.
This is why affiliate marketing success hinges more on “use, show and tell” promotional tactics. This is what I mean. If you buy and use a product and you’re satisfied with its efficiency or efficacy, you can promote that product if it has an affiliate program by signing up and relating your experience with the people will who need it also to solve similar problems they may be contending with as well.
It’s easier to close a sale of an affiliate product when you’ve first-hand experience than just philosophizing about a product’s features and benefits on an abstract level. More often than not, the discerning web users will know fake product reviews when they see it.
For example, I use HostGator for my web hosting services. My WordPress blogs and niche websites are hosted with HostGator Company. And because I’m very satisfied with their services including their excellent customer service, I boldly recommend HostGator to my digital marketing training students and blog readers.
What I do is to simply describe the benefits of signing up with HostGator and show them screenshot of my HostGator billing dashboard as a proof that I’m actually using them for my website hosting services.
This serves as a social proof that I have personal experience with the website hosting company and anybody following me will reasonably believe what I’m saying regarding the pros and cons of using HostGator hosting.
So, in this affiliate marketing guide, I’ll walk you through all the steps on how to make money with affiliate marketing right from the very basics to the point of promoting your blog website.
With that said, let’s dive in.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Simply put, affiliate marketing is a system whereby a virtual sales rep (otherwise known as affiliate, affiliate marketer or digital publisher) signs up with a merchant (also known as vendor, product creator, product owner or advertiser) who has an affiliate program in place in order to promote and sell his product or service and/or generate leads for a fixed or variable affiliate commission.
Majority of beginners, bloggers, internet marketers, webmasters, and so on are into affiliate marketing business because it has low barrier of entry and easy to start. As an affiliate marketer, you can quickly create a blog around a popular topic with affiliate products and services, promote these products and services so that you can close sales and earn affiliate commissions for yourself.
However, I noticed that a lot of people are not doing it right. If you want to become successful with affiliate marketing promotions, you’ve to build an email list of subscribers in your target niche market so that you can continually reach out to your potential buyers with high quality content and occasional promotional messages. It will help you to generate more clicks and sales.
In addition to that, you’ve to maintain a high quality content driven blog website where you can demonstrate your expertise with your target audience and continually build relationship with them on a longer term. As it were, online shoppers are mostly comfortable buying products and services from who they know, like and trust.
Also, they buy from e-commerce stores or websites they trust. This is why one can say that the likes of Amazon.com are so successful in the retail industry today. Your goal is to become a trusted expert in your field so that your followers, readers and subscribers will know, like and trust you for any product or service you recommend to them.
Let’s take a look at a typical PDF ebook for sale on a topic on domain flipping. let’s assume that the merchant sells the ebook for $47 and he has also integrated an affiliate program so that affiliate marketers can sign up and sell it on his behalf for 50 percent commission rate.
What this means is that for every affiliate who is able to close a sale for the vendor through his own online marketing efforts and promotional methods, he will earn affiliate commission of about $23.50. So, if you’re an affiliate to this vendor and you’re able to sell 10 copies of the affiliate product every month, you’ll earn an average of $235 commission per month.
That is, affiliate commission per sale is: $47 X 50% = $23.50
And $23.50 X 10 copies = $235 affiliate commission per month
But here is the caveat! If your digital marketing campaigns cost you $1,000 per month to generate $235 profits, that is a big loss already. And if it costs you only $35 in advertising to generate the same profit, you’ve earned $200 in net profits.
This is why a lot of affiliate marketing bloggers usually resort to SEO (search engine optimization) to generate free targeted traffic from search engines to their blogs and specific web pages. In the course of this side hustle blog, I’ll write a blog post on search engine optimization so that you can use it to prime your blog website for SERP (search engine results page) while targeting profitable long tail keyword phrases.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
For you to understand how affiliate marketing works, first let me explain the 3 to 4 parties that are usually involved in the affiliate marketing business relationship.
Depending on the choice of the merchant, there are usually 3 or 4 parties involved in any affiliate program, namely: merchant, affiliate, consumer, and/or affiliate network.
The Merchant
A merchant may also be referred to as vendor, advertiser, product owner or product creator. It could be an individual, JV (joint venture) partners or a company. A merchant owns the affiliate product he wants digital publishers to sign up for, promote and sell for him.
A vendor do most of the heavy lifting of researching product ideas to create, creating the product, writing the sales copy to promote the product or hiring a copy writer to do it, setting up sales or landing page, creating help desk to attend to customers issues, and so on. He also sets up an affiliate program so that he can invite affiliates to sell for him.
The Affiliate Marketer
An affiliate marketer is usually a blogger, internet marketer, webmaster, digital publisher, etc, who decides to sign up for an affiliate program of any particular product or service, promotes it and makes money online if he successfully closes a sale.
An affiliate will create a blog, build an email list of subscribers and publish constant content on his website or third parties’ websites to drive targeted traffic to his lead magnet page or the landing page of the merchant. It’s mainly about using content marketing to curry the favor of potential buyers to get clicks to merchant’s website and converting them to sales.
For instance, I’ve spent quality time to write this blog article on how to start affiliate marketing for beginners. And by extension, I’ve also included links to affiliate products which I’ve personally used to create affiliate websites over the years.
If you find this blog post helpful, useful and relevant to your affiliate marketing journey, you may want to follow my links to make a purchase of the essential tools which I use to create affiliate websites. So, it becomes a win-win situation for everyone!
This is how affiliate marketers operate i.e. providing unique content related to specific topics and products and complementing it with partnership links to merchants’ products and services that could help the consumer to solve his problems or achieve specific goals.
Basically, affiliate marketing works by generating referral link or banner for an affiliate product and sharing it with your target audience on your own website or any third party web properties.
As an affiliate marketer, this is what I suggest you should always do.
- Choose a niche market to focus on.
- Research pain points that require urgent solution.
- Find existing products with affiliate programs that could be the right solution to the problems which you discovered in (ii) above.
- Sign up for the affiliate program and get approval so that you can generate affiliate link or banner to promote and sell the product.
- Set up web property preferably WordPress blog where you can monetize your blog and promote the affiliate product by publishing high quality and unique content, building a list of subscribers you can continually reach out to with email messages and content marketing.
- Make money online, rinse and repeat.
The Consumer
A consumer is the buyer, customer or client who has paid for the affiliate product or service. He is the final decision maker in the affiliate marketing relationship. He can decide to open his wallet now and pay for the product immediately or defer it to a later date before buying it.
However, there are usually cookies set on the potential buyer’s browser on his laptop, PC or device to track the sale and credit it to him as the referral affiliate even if the consumer doesn’t buy immediately. The number of days for cookie tracking, of course, will depend on the affiliate program agreement in place.
For you to generate more clicks and get sales of the products which you’re promoting, you must be ready to subscribe to reliable email marketing software. Autoresponder will help you to collect email addresses of potential buyers who you can market to later down the sales funnel.
As a matter of fact, you’ll sell more of an affiliate product if you’ve targeted list of subscribers who know, like and trust you. If you ask me, list building is an integral part of affiliate marketing business success.
The Affiliate Network
This is the fourth and last party in the loop. Some vendors can decide to set up an in-house affiliate program and manage it themselves such as Amazon Associates program. This will limit the parties to just 3 i.e. merchant, affiliate and consumer.
But where affiliate network is involved in the relationship, they usually handle everything related to the affiliate program of every vendor who has signed up with them. Affiliate network acts as the middleman between the merchant and the publisher. This will extend the process to four parties i.e. merchant, affiliate marketer, affiliate network and consumer.
Affiliate network may host the affiliate product and landing page for the merchant and at the same time handle the product delivery to the buyer after payment has been processed. From there, merchant is paid his share of the sale, affiliate is paid his appropriate commission and the network takes their cut to cover their administrative expenses and then some.
For ease of management, making use of an affiliate network program is critical to your affiliate marketing success. For me, I only sign up with reputable affiliate network programs which will give me the confidence to focus on creating blogs, publishing content and doing content marketing to generate more leads for the merchants who I’ve partnered with.
Some of these affiliate networks include:
- Impact.com
- CJ.com
- MarketHealth.com
- Clickbank.com
- JVZoo.com
- ShareASale.com
- Rakuten.com
- FlexOffers.com
- PepperJam.com
- Affiliate-program.amazon.com
- Etc
I get paid by these networks without working with individual merchants all the time.
Essential Tools to Start Affiliate Marketing Business
You’ve to invest in the following essential online business tools before you can run and grow an affiliate business profitably and successfully. In short, they are the bare minimum which you’ve to include in your digital marketing toolbox.
- Domain name
- Web hosting
- WordPress blog
- Email marketing software
- Keyword research tool
- Content (for your blog and promotion)
For domain name registration, I mainly use Namecheap to buy domain names because they are cheap, reliable and have excellent customer service. And as a digital marketer, I usually separate my web host from my domain registrar.
As for website hosting, I use HostGator. As pioneers in the web hosting industry, HostGator have the resources to manage your websites and blogs in terms of bandwidth, disk storage, security, customer service, free SSL certificate, etc. Click here to sign up with HostGator web hosting and reach out to me for my premium blogging ebook. I’ll send it to you gratis!
For self-hosted WordPress blog, it’s free to install and set up if you’ve signed up with a web host that supports WordPress hosting like HostGator. WordPress is an open source CMS (content management system) platform which makes it easy for non-techie blogger to install it on a domain name.
Email marketing software is the bread and butter of affiliate marketing business. Reputable and reliable ESP (email service provider) will have the capacity to manage and automate your list building campaigns. GetResponse email marketing software has a 30-day free trial which you can take advantage of if you’re on a budget to get started.
Keyword research tool is necessary to have in your marketing arsenal as an affiliate because you need to write blog posts targeting profitable long tail keyword phrases. And the only way to discover these search queries is to launch keyword research software like Google Keyword Planner tool which is totally free for advertisers if you sign up for Google Ads program.
As a digital publisher, creating content is free and should not be a problem at all. But if you hate writing, it means you’ve to outsource content writing to a freelance writer.
How to Create Affiliate Marketing Website
The affiliate marketing steps below are what I usually follow to create affiliate website and you can follow suit.
- Choose a niche market to focus on
- Identify pain points and problems to solve in the niche market
- Find existing affiliate product or service to solve the problems identified in (ii) above
- Conduct keyword research to identify profitable search terms to target
- Register a domain name with your target main keyword in it
- Get web hosting
- Create affiliate marketing website using WordPress
- Configure, customize and optimize your blog website
- Regularly write and publish content on your blog
- Monetize your blog website and content therein
- Promote your blog and build backlinks to gain authority
- Track, measure and review your website metrics
- Make money online and grow your affiliate business
This is my step by step affiliate marketing for beginners’ outline which I always follow to a Tee.
As you can see, this is how to make money with affiliate marketing and it’s not rocket science. And I’ll be publishing a detailed blog post on how to start a blog and make money blogging online to complement this article so that you can hit the ground running in a matter of weeks.
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