Do you want to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing but need help knowing where to start? Or do you think that making money here is effortless?
Yes, affiliate marketing can help you make a lot of money. And it will flow into your account at any time of the day or night, even when you’re not physically at your computer.
Isn’t that the dream of many: to set up a passive income and make their lives a lot easier? Affiliate marketing can provide you with such a sweet life, but first, it is necessary to sweat a lot. In this affiliate marketing for beginners manual, you will find a ready-made plan for action.
Please note that only strategies and techniques that have proven effective in practice and will help increase your income noticeably will be described in the article.
But first, let us explain what affiliate marketing for beginners is and how it can be helpful for your business.
Affiliate marketing is a partnership in which an online retailer pays you a commission for selling their product to your referral (the customer you attracted).
It all takes on the appearance of traditional advertising in its less intrusive form. Instead of promoting someone else’s product on your site with banners, you do it through links in the text of your articles.
Does that mean that all you have to do is create a website, stuff it with affiliate links, and start counting commissions right away? Not really, but we’ll talk about that later.
First of all, you need to understand the algorithm.
Let’s say that the target action in affiliate marketing for beginners is not only a purchase: it can be a file download, registration on a dating site, creating a profile in an online game, entering your email address/phone number into the lead form on the landing page, and so on.
Let’s take a closer look at the process and understand what determines your efforts’ success in affiliate marketing for beginners. But first, you must take two necessary steps to become an affiliate.
So, there are two things you need to do:
Let’s break down each of these points in more detail.
You first need a website or blog to make money with affiliate marketing.
There are many options and ready-made solutions for everyone who wants to have a website. However, once you create a website, it’s time to decide on the products you promote on its pages.
Important: You can promote the product not only through articles on the site but also through emails, banner ads, or intermediate affiliate links.
Thanks to the unique identifier, the seller will always know which traffic to his site was redirected by your efforts.
As a rule, there are two types of business models that affiliate marketing for beginners uses. The first is an informational site, and the second is a review site. The choice of model depends on how familiar you are with the products or services you intend to promote.
Informational sites usually include an affiliate link or banner ad to the affiliate site in their training articles and publications. This business model requires frequent content updates, so customers return to the site regularly.
Product and service review sites discuss a product or service the affiliate has tried or tested. Each product or service review usually includes a link or banner directing the customer to the affiliate site. The advantage of these sites is that they can be updated less often. You will only need to make small changes periodically so that search engines continue to include them in search results.
The advantage of a blog (on Blogger, for example) is that you can do it for free, whereas you need money to create a website. However, services like GoDaddy.com and Hostgator offer relatively inexpensive sites to manage. In general, a website looks more professional compared to a personal blog.
Suppose your ultimate goal is making money with your blog, then free to choose WordPress.org hosting. In this case, the blog will be your property. But do not register a subdomain *.wordpress.com (it does not allow you to customize different settings or choose your domain name) or Tumblr to host your blog.
You’ll have to pay for hosting if you want to use your name. WordPress.org allows you to download tools and themes from different platforms, customize your blog design, monetize your blog content, and more.
One of the easiest ways to get into affiliate marketing for beginners is to sign up with a site that acts as an intermediary between partners (web admins) and the affiliate program. Although you’ll work independently, sites like Admitad allow beginner web admins to join for free.
Then you need to choose your traffic sources (contextual advertising, social networks, email lists) to attract interested users to the advertiser’s site.
Some sites allow you to use pay-per-click affiliate programs without running your site or blog. In addition, direct links to external merchant sites will enable you to make money from the ads without publishing them on your site. For example, you can create an ad on a Facebook dating site, and when someone clicks on your ad, they will go directly to that dating site rather than to your site or landing page.
Here are some affiliate networks that specialize in direct links: Advmaker, Bizzclick, and ClickIce.
Most affiliate marketing programs choose a niche, or in other words, an area of expertise. So before you start promoting a product or service, you’ll need to select the area where it’s easiest for you.
Such a niche can be something other than a field in which you are already an expert. You can choose what you are interested in or want to learn.
The initial work in affiliate marketing for beginners will be very stressful, so choosing a niche that you are willing to work hard on for a long time is important. This will help you succeed and build a new career from the ground up.
If you’ve already chosen a niche, picking affiliate products to promote will be easier. First, choose products that match your niche and the content of your web resource. It is much easier to do this if you join an affiliate network.
Affiliate networks are sites where marketers and affiliate marketers find each other and agree to cooperate. There are many affiliate products on these sites, so you’ll have no problem finding the best fit for you.
One of the advantages of affiliate networks is that they usually have a lot more data about how well a product is selling. You can then use this information to increase your profits from affiliate marketing.
Remember that you have a chance to optimize your affiliate strategy every time you make data-driven choices. Rather than just relying on your intuition, you can maximize your affiliate strategy.
Networks such as Cityads and Actionpay are ideal for promoting more traditional products and services. They offer various potential options, which is perfect for newcomers to the field who haven’t yet decided on their niche.
So, now that you’ve built your website and know what products you want to promote, it’s time to start making money finally.
Once you’ve joined an affiliate network and have a website, it’s a good time to start monetizing it with affiliate marketing.
In an effort to make money as quickly as possible, many newbies act very recklessly: they fill the site with random articles where they place links to affiliate products in large numbers.
In rare cases, this strategy can really work. Still, it is more likely to leave you with zero results, so if you want to increase your affiliate income, you need to ensure that the content you publish is exciting and in demand by your target audience.
Your audience is those who want to buy a product but need to figure out if it’s worth the money they’re asking for. Sometimes the user may need to learn what product can solve their problem.
Your role as an affiliate is precisely to use your articles to help readers find or select a product that fits their needs, decide to buy it, and give them a direct link to the seller’s site where they can pay for the product: this means that your article should contain so-called investigational-intent queries. These are keywords by which your target audience searches for information about the product they are interested in before buying it directly.
So, it would be best if you chose topics close to the people looking for a solution to a problem.
Once you have done your keyword analysis and made a list of ideas for future articles, it will be time to place affiliate links.
The placement option will depend on the nature of the material you start writing. For example, it doesn’t make sense to add affiliate links to 5 different products if you only review one of them.
On the other hand, if you’re talking about the top 10 tools for a particular task, you can easily put a few affiliate links in there, thus increasing your chances of making money.
Your job is to approach the issue of link selection and placement strategically.
Here are a few recommendations you can follow to get the most out of it:
Before you have a hundred or so affiliate links on your site, purchase an affiliate link plugin.
Imagine needing to sort and update hundreds of expired links, but you have no idea where they are on your site. Finding them will take more than an hour of your life, and every minute of delay can turn into lost profits from clicking on links that are no longer good for anything.
Fortunately, you can avoid this nightmare with an affiliate program management plugin. There is an abundance of them on the market. Choose anyone, and now the work that used to take hours will be done in minutes.
One of the biggest mistakes most new affiliates make is believing that revenue is directly related to the amount of traffic they bring to the merchant’s site. The logic is simple: if you want to make ten times more money, you need to send ten times more customers to the merchant’s website.
Actually, things are a little different, but no need to worry. Let’s look at an example.
Let’s assume that you are promoting a product for which each sale through your link, the seller charges you a commission of $1. But your conversion rate is only 2%, so out of all the 100 people you referred, only two will bring you profit, that is, buy the product.
This means you get 20 cents per click (CPC=1*2/100, where CPC is the cost per click):
CPC = your total income as an affiliate/volume of traffic sent
But what if you could send twice as many visitors to your affiliate product site? Given the price per click, at best, you could double your earnings. But the exciting thing is that you can achieve this without increasing traffic to your site. All you need to do is organize your conversion optimization activities.
The more existing visitors pass through your link to the seller’s site, the more your income will be. Undoubtedly, achieving this is more accessible than increasing the number of visits to your site.
One of the most effective tools has been popup windows for a long time.
Launching a popup campaign is the simplest way to attract your audience’s attention and convert most of your visitors into customers of your affiliate products.
When designing a popup campaign, you should pay a lot of attention to targeting. With the proper targeting, you can show the popup to the right users at the most appropriate time. For example, research shows that the best time to display the popup is when the user is about to leave your site.
To set up your popup campaign in such a way, you will need so-called Exit-Intent-technologies. Combined with Page-level targeting, you can place popup windows relevant to the content of the page the visitor was on. As you can see, this kind of interest-based product targeting allows you to achieve much higher conversion rates than conventional campaigns.
Have you heard of the 80/20 rule? Interestingly enough, it applies to affiliate marketing for beginners and suggests that 80% of your profits are generated by 20% of your content. This ratio is approximate and imprecise, but the meaning remains the same.
With that in mind, your task is more than clear: figure out what content is in that 20% and make it key to your promotion campaigns.
Once you know that a particular post or video resonates best with your audience, create a targeted campaign and increase affiliate sales.
This approach is more effective than developing campaigns for a random set of pages.
So, where should you start?
First, use Google Analytics to find the articles most frequently viewed by visitors and then develop targeted campaigns for those URLs.
Once you’ve identified which posts bring in the most traffic, you can optimize your content and conversion campaigns to generate more affiliate revenue.
This strategy ensures that you always prioritize the most profitable content. This will help you save time and maximize revenue.
No matter what you think, email marketing is still one of the most effective tools for generating passive income. All other approaches are much less effective.
SEO is helpful, but Google can change its algorithms, which will lower your ranking. Using paid advertising can give instant results but requires fabulous budgets. But you also have to spend a lot of attention on your ads so that the conversion rate will stay high.
But the email newsletter base is something that belongs exclusively to you.
Plus, it’s full of people who are already interested in what you do and interested in your content. Which means they’ll be an ideal audience for your affiliate marketing campaigns.
There is only one disadvantage of email marketing. Still, it is pretty substantial: business owners need to develop their contact list in every way possible to reach the peak when mailing lists start generating revenue.
For this purpose, you can use the arsenal already described above:
Once you’ve increased your email recipient base, start mailing. Whether you use a newsletter to drive traffic to your posts with a high conversion rate or send your users an affiliate link right away, email marketing is a great way to increase your income.
The basic idea of this method is that you register on several forums and then place referral links of profitable partners in their messages or “useful” responses to messages from other people.
Back in 2004, this really was a valid method of making money online. But I’m amazed that some affiliate marketing “gurus” still give this advice to newbies.
Why doesn’t it work anymore?
Well, because forum owners and administrators are tired of all this crap. So once they realize you’re an affiliate spammer, they’ll moderate you heavily and then ban you.
However, if you are an active and reputable forum member, you may earn money from affiliate marketing using this method.
You will be lucky if you make over $100 per year.
This affiliate program enrichment tip is repeated by everyone lazy:
You need to create viral content that solves people’s problems (for example, write an e-book or make a series of videos);
And then embed an affiliate link in the book or video;
People will click on the link and pay money for various services, and you get a commission.
You know, it sounds like a great idea, except for the fact that only 1% of all digital content ever created online can go viral.
Every marketer would do it if it were that easy to create viral content. And everyone would be making money with it.
And you could too, but you have a huge amount of work to do and absolutely no guarantee of income.
After all, you can make money promoting affiliate products through YouTube. Many people are already doing it, mainly because YouTube gets more traffic than several similar services combined.
What does it look like? For example, the Blogger leaves referral links in the description under the video, asking people to click on them, or telling them to use a specific promo code to get a discount. Or he can show videos of the unpacking of some products. This is all affiliate marketing.
Most training resources advise: “Just publish engaging videos with an affiliate link in the description.”
They should mention that you’ll need to build a significant audience (at least 25,000 real active subscribers) before you have enough traffic to generate income. The bigger problem most face is that YouTube can block your video, or even your channel, for whatever reason. But despite all that, Google shows a carousel of YouTube videos on the first page of search results, grounded in keywords.
In SERP terms, that’s oceanfront real estate (i.e., indescribable luxury). So affiliate marketing on YouTube can still be highly lucrative.
Yes, you can make money with affiliate marketing through your social media pages. No, it won’t be easy.
Unless you are an influencer with a loyal audience: if you have a large audience, you’ll soon find that product manufacturers and affiliate networks are looking for you themselves.
Combining social media and affiliate marketing makes it possible to make an income that exceeds the average full-time salary. But it would be best if you gained an audience first.
Here’s another way of affiliate marketing for beginners without a website that makes sense. You’ll need a list of subscribers to whom you’ll recommend products – you can create this list yourself, or you can buy it. The sensible way would be to create your email list because purchased ones tend to be bad.
So, how do you create that email subscriber list?
You can create your own free course/guide/information product and offer it to your target audience with the help of paid social media advertising. Send weekly emails to your followers with referral links, but only to products or services they find helpful.
It all sounds pretty simple. It is, except that you must be an extraordinary email copywriter to make real money from this type of affiliate marketing for beginners. You’ll also have to work nonstop to maintain (or increase) your subscriber count.
So you can do affiliate marketing without your website or blog. But affiliate marketing for beginners is still better to start with a website you own. However, affiliate marketing for beginners doesn’t require you to have one.
We’ve shown you a few ways to do affiliate marketing for beginners with and without a website.
But you’d better realize the following:
1. Building a business on a publishing platform, you don’t own is not a good idea if you are serious about creating a business on the Internet. Hang all your financial dreams on a content publishing and customer engagement platform that can disappear overnight, taking your goals and bank balance with it. Right now, that’s happening with Facebook.
Other essential factors to consider if you promote affiliate programs without a website:
The second point is the most important because you can easily sell an affiliate site for 40 times its monthly income.
So you could sell an affiliate site making $2,000 a month for $80,000. That’s why it’s crucial to consider where you go with your business with affiliate marketing for beginners in the long run.
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