A Beginners Guide To Affiliate Marketing

A beginners guide to affiliate marketing will explain how things work, how to find your niche and how to make your blog successful. Affiliate marketing is one of the many ways one can earn passive income through the internet.

By passive income, we do mean you can earn while you are sleeping. Literally!
Sounds too good to be true. Doesn’t it? But it is real.

Not just a dream. Before we delve deeper into the semantics of affiliate marketing, we will first cover what is affiliate marketing and how does it work.

The idea behind affiliate programs websites is to promote products of other people online and earning yourself a commission on each purchase. In other words, you are marketing a product and so you are in that sense, an affiliate marketer.

The merchant (or the seller) whose product you are promoting provide you with a unique link which is called an affiliate link.

This link acts as your affiliate ID. This affiliate link is used by sharing it on your blog, website, social media networks, and the likes.

Essentially sending potential clients or customers through the affiliate link to the main site of the merchant. The whole process is based on revenue sharing.

There are important things that you must know before starting with affiliate marketing. Let’s have a look at affiliate marketing step by step guide.

Finding A Niche

Choosing your niche is the very first step to be taken before you even think about venturing into affiliate marketing. Without knowing your niche, you will flounder around which will not help you in your endeavor.

To know how competitive your niche is, check the keywords you have in mind using this free keyword tool.

The keyword tool will let you understand more on what to write about.

If you don’t know what subject your site will be centered on, you can’t exactly build a website. There is an earlier article explaining a niche in detail.

To know your niche, ask yourself these questions.

• What are you most passionate about?
• When you are passionate about a subject or a topic and wish to work alongside that, it makes the job easier and more interesting. Since it is your passion, it is not too far-fetched to say that you are already quite knowledgeable about that.
• For example, if you are passionate about beauty and aging then beauty products could do the job. Still, if you have doubts then more researching wouldn’t hurt to be sure of your choice.

• Is there money in that niche? Are these products in demand?
• Determine whether the topics you have chosen have any scope in the market. Whether they will earn you money or not.
• Without significant consumer interest shown in the products, your niche is not going to make you much money. This is an easy way to know if your niche is profitable.
• Can you see yourself creating blog posts of about 300 or more words regularly?
• Does this niche have merchants offering the affiliate programs?
• Is there a space for another affiliate marketer in the chosen niche?

Before choosing a popular niche, you must ensure whether there is a room for another affiliate marketer in that field. Also are you ready to compete with the already established affiliate marketers in that niche?

Based on the above-mentioned points, shortlist your choices and head over to the next step in starting affiliate marketing.

Research For Suitable Affiliate Programs

After choosing a niche that works for you, it is now time to find a suitable affiliate program and products. For that, you need to dig deeper!

Now I`d like you to read this short post it will explain in depth how to find your niche audience and once you know who your audience is, it will be easier to choose your niche.

As a guide, keep the following points in mind while selecting a good affiliate program:

• Find out whether sellers related to your niche or similar are using the same network. It can give you an idea of the likelihood of your success with that program.
• The percentage of commission offered to ensure you get sufficient returns.
• Ensure that the products and services to be promoted are trustworthy.
• Promoting a bad product or lying to your audience can prove fatal for you and your reputation.
• Honesty is paramount here! If possible, buy and try the product yourself before making a decision.
• Make sure that the customer support of the program is reliable

The best affiliate program to get started here will be shareasale.com the program is free and easy to join, has 1000s of products for you to promote and has a good cookie period.

Don’t be hasty in choosing an affiliate program as that is what will make you money. Taking your time will be worth it.

Where To Find Affiliate Products

You can find these products at affiliate networks which are the websites that basically are controlling the affiliate program for the seller.

There are hundreds of sellers listed there which are waiting for new affiliates like you to sign up to their affiliate programs.

Some affiliate networks include Clickbank, JVZoo, Commission Junction, Linkshare, and this program here which pays 50%  recurring affiliate commissions.

Building A Website

With the research done, it is time to put your hard work into action.

Building a site has now become very easy. Anyone with basic computer skills can create a website for themselves. You don’t even need to do any coding for that.

For a newbie, WordPress is the best choice. It is very easy to understand and follow the steps in site creation. You can create your free website in less than 30 seconds by entering your domain name below

Buying A Domain
First things first, you have to buy a domain name for your website. Now, what exactly is a domain? A domain is the URL of your website. In simple words, it is the web address of your website. For example https://tennisfavors.com

Your web address must be unique. With so many websites on the internet, it is possible that the domain name you want is unavailable. So, it is better to make a list of possible domain names that you like.

The domain names are available at low prices on several platforms like namecheap.com. Make sure that the domain name is relevant to your niche and products you plan to promote.

Web Hosting

If the domain name is the address of your website then web hosting is very much the house of your website.  It is the place where all the content of your website will reside.

Much like domain names, web hosting is also affordable now. Choose a reliable and most popular hosting service. The better the service, the better will be the working of your website.

A good website that runs smoothly without any hang-ups and follows a good user-friendly theme helps make an impression on the audience. My choice host is Bluehost.

Note: If you buy the domain and web hosting from different websites then you will have to link the two of them together. It is easy to do. So, no need to worry about it.

Create Good Content

When the site is ready, you need to create and add content to your website. The content, whether it is a written, graphics or any other multimedia, must be relevant to the niche you have chosen.

The content must be unique and must be of good quality. Make it interesting and compelling to engage the audience to keep coming back.  Also, ensure that the content is easily searchable. Read more on getting your site ready for search engines here.

How To Promote Your Website

Well-Written and informational content will help bring in the audience. The interested ones will bring in more traffic.

But it is a gradual process which can take a long time so you need to help it along by promoting through other means. After all, good traffic means more possibility of sales. And more sales mean more passive income.

Here are some ways to bring traffic:

• Promote through social media.
• Promote through guest post requests on popular blogs similar to your niche.
• Promote by building an email list.
• Use good SEO to improve your content and make it more search-friendly
• Promote through paid advertising.

Promote Affiliate Products And Offers

This is where the actual affiliate marketing begins. Add value to your already valuable content by adding and promoting products that will interest your audience.

Promote the offers of your chosen affiliate program through:

• Product Reviews

You need to build trust with your audience as they rely on you for your opinion. So, be honest and don’t gloss over the cons in your pursuit to promote the product.

Try the products yourself and write an honest review based on your experience. Check how to write a product review that converts here.

Be more specific and detailed. Adding good quality images of the product also help.

If possible, you can even create and upload a product review video.

Add the affiliate link to the reviews so as to send your audience to the seller’s page.

• Banner Ads

Banners are creative affiliate link alternative offered by the affiliate programs.

Your affiliate link is embedded in the coding of the banner so it works the same way as the affiliate link.

Usually, affiliate programs provide their own creative banners. You only need to insert the banner on a most visited page. Adding banner ads in the right locations can generate good traffic and hence more sales.

• Email promotions

Build an email list and promote through email promotions. Build a good relationship with the audience first. Don’t go for the hard sell straight away.  The emails must contain affiliate links to the products you promote.

• Discounts and giveaways

Who doesn’t like discounts and giveaways? Many affiliate programs often run promotions that offer discounts or giveaways. It is a great way to promote affiliate offers.

Conclusion On A Beginners Guide To Affiliate Marketing

I hope this post on a beginners guide to affiliate marketing helped you understand more how affiliate marketing works and what you need to make money as an affiliate marketer.

An affiliate marketer sell products of merchants or sellers for an agreed percentage of commission on the amount of sale. Anyone can join the affiliate program either directly through a seller or through a set network that handles all the affiliate transactions.

The best way to succeed is to send targeted customers to the main website of the seller through your affiliate link or affiliate banner.

Directing the right person towards the right offer will have a good chance of product being sold so that you can earn your commission.

Let me know if you have any questions, just leave a message below and I will get back to you.