First Steps in Affiliate Marketing

First Steps in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a preferred option to start an online business for many newbies in the online business models. It leverages the marketing campaigns of other marketers and allows you focus on few core tasks.

This is a process where you sign up to promote a link that’s connected to your account. Sometimes people call these referral links because you’re basically recommending a product.

With affiliate marketing, you are promoting someone else’s digital or tangible products.Whenever someone clicks on the link and then purchases the item, you earn money – a commission.

Affiliate marketing can be for courses and information products that you can find on sites like ClickBank, JVZoo or Warrior Plus. Tangible commissions can be earned when someone buy from your links in Amazon, Share-a-Sale or Commission Junction.

Why is Affiliate Marketing a good model?

There are dozens of reasons why you might like getting started with affiliate marketing.

1. It’s has booming business and will continue to be for many years. This model has been in the world forever. The sales by commission of anything is a very clear example.

2. There’s very little expense involved and sometimes, no expense whatsoever. Most of the work of preparing and designing the sales pages, creating the product, fulfilling the orders, managing the payments, etc. is performed by the seller. You only focus in bringing new customers.

3. It can be a good side hustle that you can build into a nice income-earning business.You don’t have to know everything about it to get started. You can learn as you go. There’s a lot of freedom with affiliate marketing.

4. The reason it’s so simple and easy is, at its core, this type of marketing is like having a conversation with a friend. If your friend asked where you got a cute pair of shoes, you’d tell her where.

The difference is that you are having that conversation online.You would point your friend (and others) to the link where she can purchase the same pair and you would make a commission as a “thank you” from the company.

5. If you have your own product, you may decide using the affiliates model to help you promote the items. This would work the same way, only in reverse. Your affiliates would share the link to your products, people would click and buy and you’d pay them a commission fee.

6. You select your niche of focus. Almost every niche you can imagine is involved with affiliate marketing and can be used to help sell products.

For example, if you’re in the keto dieting niche, a tangible that you could promote might be a set of portion control dishes or a body composition scale.

For digital, you could promote keto eating plans where the customer gets a PDF of how keto works, along with all their meals planned out for them. You could even promote something like a monthly program where they get a keto snack box sent to their house.

7. This could be a recurring income. With monthly subscriptions, affiliates may receive recurring commissions for as long as the customer stayed a subscriber.

How do I select the product of service to promote?

If you’re not sure what you want to promote, start by looking around at popular websites and blogs in the niche you like to see what’s already being advertised. This can help you see which products are popular and get an idea for what customers are looking for.

When you’re choosing a product to promote or thinking of one to create, make sure that what you choose has value to the audience. Almost as important, make sure that you are interested in the topic.

Never choose to promote a product based on payout alone. If the product is bad, you can lose your audience’s trust. Always put the value of the product first. You should investigate the product yourself if you can.

In its core, affiliate marketing is about recommending products for a commission. You want to be sure to recommend only the products that you trust yourself. Your reputation and building your trust is very important, especially when building a long term business model.

You might be able to order the product yourself and try it out. You can even do an unboxing video on Facebook Live or YouTube and put the affiliate link in the description.

Wherever you promote something or have others promote your stuff, make sure that you or those helping you disclose the affiliate connection. It’s legally required in many areas, but it also builds consumer trust.

Too many newbie affiliates make the mistake of writing glowing review and gloss over anything that might be a problem. When you promote anything, make sure that you highlight both the good and bad about whatever it is you’re promoting.

Sometimes negative (but deserved) topics in your reviews affect the sales. Here is a workaround: when you write your reviews, make sure you include a genuine opinion of it. If there is something negative, offer a solution or workaround to it. Be genuine and your audience will perceive and appreciate it.

For example, if you’re promoting a blender, you could say that while the blender is fast and makes a great smoothie, it’s a small capacity and it wouldn’t fit if the consumer is looking for a blender for a large family. However you have a review for a larger model that may fit their needs.

What shall I promote?

To get started with affiliate marketing, pick the niche that you’d like to be in. The big ones are Wealth, Health and Relationships. After you pick the area you want to be in, dig deeper to find a demographic or slant within that niche.

As example, if you chose health as your niche choice, under the umbrella of health, you could choose a slant like fitness or dieting or certain conditions for a particular demographic like diabetes in seniors or weight loss for women or whatever.

It’s always best to choose something that’s evergreen like heath or success because there’s always an audience for evergreen topics. People who are struggling to reduce weight are always going to look for ways to get fit.

Look for common issues that affect people and you’ll be able to select a good niche. Once you have all that, search the products or programs that are associated with your topic and research their affiliate programs. You can look products up on sites like ClickBank or Amazon.

What are other recommendations as an affiliate marketer?

You may have a place online to promote things, such as a blog, a Facebook group or YouTube Channel. All of them may be created with a free account.

Make sure that the content that you put on the page with the product is valuable content. This will help build your audience.

You’ll need to market your affiliate promotion. You can do this by creating written tutorials about whatever it is that you’re promoting and posting it in your blog or Facebook page. Create a buzz by talking about the product on your social media.

You can also create YouTube videos with your cell phone about the product, showing how you are using the product or comparing it with a similar one.

Each large niche shall be managed separately. Don’t promote Health products to an audience looking for Wealth products. However, you may cross sell diet products with other ones to get fit with exercise.

Affiliate marketing success is all about defining your niche or specialty, following a process and repeating the same cycle over and over again every time you choose a new product.