If you have ever wanted to make money online, affiliate marketing is a great way to start. Simple! Sell other people’s products or get paid to make informed recommendations.
Affiliate Marketing is possibly one of the best ways to start making money online. When promoting an Affiliate Offer, you simply recommend a product that provides value to your target audience within a chosen niche market. With little effort, you can be up and running with systems that will help you to build a responsive audience whom you can make recommendations to.
To be successful with affiliate marketing, you will need the following:
- A responsive and engaging audience
- Lead capture and email list building tools
- Value adding products that pay well
- A ways to receive your profits
Gaining Traction by Building your audience
Before you even consider promoting anything online, building a base audience will get you better results. But when you are strapped for cash, you may be tempted to skip this part. From experience, many failed affiliate marketers will tell you; this will limit your success. Before you can start promoting your affiliate product, you need to build an audience.
There are two ways in which you can have an audience. You can either buy it or build it organically. It is highly recommended that you work on building your audience organically before you take the decision to pay for it. And this is how you can go about doing that:
Social Media – in today’s connected world, anyone and everyone with access to the internet has some kind of social presence – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, snap chat, etc. The list is endless.
The idea behind building your audience is simple, it is about creating a following of people that can give your affiliate marketing venture some traction.
If you have ever read the book, ‘how to make friends and influence people’, you will know the best sales are a direct result of how much influence you have. And this is how you grow your influence through social media.
- Make friends on Facebook by connecting with people that are interested in your area of influence – where you want to be an authority – this is called your niche market. You will want to have as many as 5000 friends on your profile – push for the maximum.
- On Twitter, follow people who could potentially be interested in what you have to offer. If it is going to be ‘bodybuilding’, find and follow people who are into ‘bodybuilding.’ For a start, 2000-5000 followers will give you good traction.
- If you are considering promoting any affiliate product with a lot of visuals – images and video, Instagram is the place to be. Because you can link your Instagram profile to your Facebook profile, the two are a great combination to get you started with your authority building exercise.
The same goes for all the other social media platforms. You want to be where your audience is. Connect with them and start building relationships.
GETTING STARTED – Four steps to successful Affiliate Marketing
You can start by directly promoting the Affiliate offer or sending the traffic to your Squeeze Page first to build up your list. Setting up your sales funnel is simple and easy. You can have the whole process up and ready in less than an hour. From there you are ready to start sending visitors to your offer.
I’ve seen many Affiliate Marketers (especially newbies) fail because promoting Affiliate Marketing products require some steps to be taken. If you skip one or more steps, your success rate or the chances that people will buy your recommended product decreases.
These are the 4 main steps needed to make you a successful Affiliate Marketer. Each of these steps is essential and all successful Affiliate Marketers take each of those steps into account.
ONE: Choose Your Niche (Area of Passion or Influence)
This is the first and most important step. If this step is not done correctly, everything else won’t matter. Just as you were identifying with your audience, you need to choose a niche that is proven to be profitable and with high demand. This will definitely increase the odds of people buying your products or Affiliate Products that you recommend.
Not all niches are the same in terms of demand and profitability. This is a very common mistake most marketers do. If you think you can just pick any niche and start promoting right away – you are only setting yourself up for failure.
The most proven profitable niches fall into the following areas – Health, Wealth and Relationships. However, there are many other niches that are profitable and with high demand. There are five main factors to consider when choosing your niche:
Passion: It is far better to choose a niche that you’re passionate about. This will help you to stay on when you are dealt one failure after the other. It is easier to keep trying on something you love and are passionate about than something you are merely interested in. Loving what you do is a great weapon to have when building a successful affiliate business. However, this by itself isn’t enough because you need to choose a niche that’s profitable as well.
Evergreen: When you choose a niche, you need to ask yourself “Is it evergreen?” If you don’t know what an evergreen is, it means picking a niche that is always in demand and never gets old. Wealth, health and relationship are great examples of evergreen niches. That’s because at all times people look for ways to make money, become healthy and find or maintain relationships. Whatever niche you choose, you will want it to be an evergreen niche to keep profiting from your products not only for a certain amount of time.
High Demand: This is the most important factor to consider for product creation. The niche should be in demand by others in order to make sales. No matter how great your product is, if it is not in high demand, you may get away with a couple of sales but your business not sustainable.
Specific: Choosing a broad niche isn’t going to bring you targeted traffic. This is because you didn’t make it clear which segment your chosen niche is. For example, if you make a product and only indicated that it’s about wealth, this is a wide topic to talk about. Because wealth could be Internet Marketing, Forex, Real Estate, Physical Business and the list goes on. By only indicating that it’s about wealth, you’ll get traffic from all these segments and most won’t need what you provide. However, if you specified it’s about Affiliate Marketing, then more targeted people will see your offer and you are more likely to make sales and get a sustainable income online.
Digital Product: When choosing a niche, ask yourself, “Can I make a Digital Product out of it?” Some niches or products are in high demand but you cannot make or sell Digital Products from it. For example, T-Shirts are in high demand, people buy T-shirts every day. However, if you make a Digital Product about ‘T-Shirts’, chances are you will not make any sales? Who wants to watch or read about T-Shirts? People like to wear them. To be successful as an Affiliate Marketer, it is important that your product is in high demand as a Digital Product.
TWO: Choosing Your Primary Platform of Engagement
This step is a great way of marketing yourself and becoming an authority. Using this step, other people see your work and know that you know what you’re talking about, not just someone who’s only willing to promote products to make sales.
There are four great platforms to use:
WordPress: Every successful Internet Marketer nowadays has a domain with WordPress installed on it. WordPress is an easy to use website creation tool and mostly the easiest way of creating websites. It just requires some steps to make your website ready to be live. You can create any type of web page using WordPress, one of the most common ones is a blog. Internet Marketers create a blog to create content that provides value to others and may also promote products.
Facebook: Who doesn’t know Facebook? You cannot ignore the largest social media website with more than a billion active users. You can take advantage of this huge platform by creating a page with content that gets you tons of visitors who may turn to your ongoing customers. Your content will be ranked high because of the power of Facebook online. People like searching for Facebook Pages related to their needs and this creates a huge opportunity that you may take advantage of.
YouTube: YouTube is the most popular video website on the planet, with visitors watching around 6 billion hours of videos monthly. The great thing about videos is that they create more engagement than text or audio. People enjoy watching videos and they learn more from video tutorials than reading reports or blog posts. This is a huge opportunity for you to keep creating valuable videos on regular basis. This helps you to rank your videos higher and thus get more visitors to watch your videos.
Tumblr: This is another Social Media platform that you can use to create blog posts. Tumblr is a popular platform to use and may even be your main platform for creating your content and branding yourself.
THREE: Growing Your Audience
This step is for getting traffic to your website to build your business. As you know, traffic is the bloodline of any business online and without it, there is no business.
There are many sources of traffic but these five powerful traffic sources stand out to be the best:
Social Media: This is a great way to get traffic online. Almost everyone uses at least one Social Media platform which is a great opportunity to work on. But this of course requires some work by creating content on regular basis on matters that other people need to know about.
Solo Ads: Solo Ads clicks traffic comes from people who open the email that is sent by the Solo Ads Provider. This means that the Solo Ads provider sends an Email to part of his list (depending on the number of clicks) with a link to the website you provide to him.
PPC: Which stands for Pay-Per-Click, is an internet advertising model that directs traffic to a specific website; you create an advertisement (text and/or image) that when visitors click it redirects them directly to your website. If used correctly, you can get highly targeted traffic for your business which increases your sales and income consistency.
Blog: As we said above, blogs are very powerful in term of branding yourself and becoming an authority. You get free highly targeted traffic and you get them to trust you and buy products from you because they’ve seen that you can provide them with valuable product recommendations.
YouTube: Video Marketing is a very powerful weapon to use nowadays and so you may take advantage of it. You can create some informative tips, product reviews, ongoing tutorials and much more using the power of YouTube. You get free highly targeted traffic and people will enjoy watching your videos and learn from you.
FOUR: Promoting the right Products
This is the final step which makes the entire experience of affiliate marketing all the more exciting – it’s called monetization. All the previous steps not for fun but to make money online. This step provides you with a great way of getting sales online either by selling your own product or promoting other people’s products.
There are five great websites that provide products to promote:
ClickBank.com: One of the most popular affiliate websites online. It has products for almost all niches online which helps you to choose the niche you want to build your business on and choose products that are proven to sell.
Clicksure.com: Similar to ClickBank.com and very powerful as well. Offers a variety of other digital product you can promote as an affiliate.
Warriorplus.com: This is another great affiliate website to consider, but only if you’re in money making niche. All products on WarriorPlus are on money making techniques so if you’re in a different niche you can just skip this website.
JVZoo.com: Similar to warriorplus.com but with products of higher prices generally. If your audience has a higher spending budget, then this is a great option.
Mucheye.com: This website is very useful because it shows products that haven’t launched yet. This allows you to be more prepared to promote the product you choose and will have less competition because most people promote launched products. It shows products from WarriorPlus, JVzoo and some other affiliate websites. If your strategy focuses on doing product launches, then this is the place get your products.
Now you know the four main steps you need to know to become a successful affiliate marketer online. This guide will help you to know how to choose your niche, build your platform, grow your audience and promote products.
The best thing you can do for yourself as a newbie in the world of affiliate marketing is learning from other successful affiliate marketers. As a recommendation, consider the following resources and programs – WealthyAffiliate and Inbox Blueprint
For more information on how you can start and grow our online business, leave a comment.
