Are you curious about affiliate marketing?
If you said yes then you have probably been hearing some really good things about it and all the profits you can make. Affiliate marketing is a 12 billion dollar industry!
However, before you dive into affiliate marketing you will need to learn all that you can about it.
Learning all you can is the quickest way to maximize your profits and increase your revenue. Here is a closer look at affiliate advertising.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing happens when you promote a company’s products for them. You earn a commission when someone uses your link to buy something.
An affiliate marketer is like a salesperson. When you help to make a sale the company will reward you by giving you a percentage of the profits.
The difference between being a regular salesperson and being an affiliate marketer is that you can work for several different companies.
How Does Affiliate Advertising Work?
When you sign up to do affiliate marketing for a company you will be given a unique link. This link will be used to track when you are responsible for a sale.
When someone clicks your affiliate link a file that is known as a cookie is stored on the device that they are using. This cookie helps the merchant attribute the sale to your link. The link often has an expiration date so that you can get paid even if the person did not make the purchase right away.
One of the biggest and most popular affiliate programs is run by Amazon. It is one of the best affiliate programs for beginners. If someone clicks one of your Amazon affiliate links and delays buying but comes back in 24 hours and makes a purchase you get a commission off of everything they bought.
Not all affiliate programs work this way but all of them will give you a commission on the product that was purchased through your affiliate link. The more people you can get to click on your link the more money you will make.
Get Started
For affiliate marketing to work, you need to have a platform. The best platforms are a blog or a youtube channel.
Starting a blog is not that difficult and it is not expensive either. There are several tutorials online that will teach you how to start a blog. Blogs are not that difficult to maintain you will only have to pay a few dollars a month for hosting.
Once your blog starts making money you will have more than enough to pay for hosting your blog. Of course, no blog can be successful without traffic. The more traffic you get the more likely you are to make money.
When your site is up you will need to do search engine optimization to get your pages to rank. Once you get ranking you will get the traffic you need to make sales.
Another great alternative is Youtube. You can upload your content for free and optimize your videos with some of the same strategies you would use on a blog. Affiliate marketing links can be placed in the description of the video.
Find Your Niche
You may want to start a blog about many things. However one of the best approaches is to niche down your blog or youtube channel.
Pick one specific thing and talk about that, this will increase your chances of getting found in search engines. It also makes it easy for you to keep up with content.
Look for Good Affiliate Programs
There are affiliate programs that have a low payout but the products have mass appeal. On the other hand, there are affiliate programs that target a small but specific audience and have a high payout.
The one that is best for you will depend on the niche that you have chosen and the audience. If your audience is made up of consumers then you should choose an affiliate program with high commissions and the ability to generate a high volume of sales.
If you are targeting businesses then the best affiliate programs are the ones that pay out a high commission.
Create Amazing Content
You can have the highest commissions in the world but if your content can’t hold your audience then you will not be seeing any sales. You need to make your content readable and weave your affiliate offers into the text or throughout your videos without making it seem like a sales pitch.
If possible test some of the products that you recommend. Don’t just blindly recommend things based on the bestsellers list. Try it out when possible.
Remember that gaining your audience’s trust is everything and nothing can erode it faster than recommending a sub-par product.
Tips for Driving Traffic
There are a few ways that you can drive traffic to your website. One way is by using PPC ads. This works best when you have a product with a high commission. It may take many clicks until you get a sale and that means you will be spending money.
You want to make sure that when you get that sale it pays for the ads and you also make a profit. You can use social media and search engine optimization to drive traffic.
You can do the latter by yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Once you get the traffic you should start building an email list through free offers such as ebooks or whatever your audience would find interesting.
Time to Earn
Now that you know how everything works you are ready to start making money through affiliate advertising. The next step is to implement everything you have learned. Remember that no matter how much you know you will have to make adjustments as you go along.
You may need to swap out your offers for products that sell better. There is nothing wrong with that, through trial and error you will know what works for you.
If you would like help with using SEO to drive traffic to your affiliate offers, please visit the SEO articles section of the website.