Tips on How You Can Make Affiliate Marketing the Best Home Business for You

Are you looking for the best home business? One great home business that can give you great returns is affiliate marketing. This is where you get rewarded for your efforts in bringing visitors to a specific website where they go on to make a purchase or take a specific action.

I love affiliate marketing and have been doing it for years. Here’s a guide on how you can do it too!

Can You Make Money Through Affiliate Marketing?

The answer is a resounding yes.

38% of marketers state that it’s one of the best customer acquisition methods.

Amazon, one of the world’s biggest sites, had a net revenue of $135 billion in 2016, quite a chunk of it was driven by affiliates.

ClickBank is said to have paid out over 3 billion USD to their affiliates to date. This number is continuously increasing.

This just goes to show that people are actually making a kill out of affiliate marketing.

Tips on Successful Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is all about promoting products and services for a commission.

Once you join an affiliate program, you will be given a special link that will identify you as the referrer when commissions are being paid out.

You can also opt for a coupon code which can be entered by people you refer. They will get a discount when they make a purchase and you will consequently get your commission; resulting in a win-win situation.

Tips that Will Help you Succeed in Affiliate Marketing

1. Choose a profitable niche

Promoting products from a niche that is not profitable will just end up being a huge waste of time and money.

And you don’t want to do that, right?

Take some time and do some research on profitable niches. Research tools that you can use include search engines, keyword tools and data from large affiliate networks such as ClickBank and Amazon.

Note that the most profitable niche is not necessarily the crowded “make money online” niche. There are many other great niches such as “weight loss”, “save my marriage”, “home improvement” and “cure acne” among others.

You can always find great products on affiliate networks for these niches.

2. Look for profitable keywords

Keywords are short phrases that people type in search engines’ when looking for information online.

Profitable keywords are those that target buyer intent.

When creating content, you can optimize pages to make them more visible in search engines when certain keywords are entered.

Make sure you go for profitable keywords.

Look at this:

Let’s assume you are promoting Product A.

You can choose to use a keyword like “Product A”, “Product A review” or “buy product A”.

In the three instances, “buy product A” is a more profitable keyword. If you were to rank with that keyword in the search engines, most visitors will come to your site ready to buy the product you promote.

There are both free and paid ways to get the right keywords. The best free method is to use Google Keyword Planner. When it comes to paid keyword research tools, I recommend SEMrush or KWFinder.

3. Create valuable content

Content is and will always be king. Even if you create a site with the best design and get the best keywords, you will not gain much with poor content.

High quality, interesting and informative content will get you a lot of love from both humans and search engines. People will be more willing to click on your affiliate links and return to your website for more content.

The best content in the world is the one that solves a problem. When content is created and marketed properly, people will be flooding your website to get solutions to their problems. Your affiliate links will direct them to real solutions and both you and the reader will end up benefiting.

Remember to also be a giving person. Do lots of stuff for free. Have some non-affiliate links in your articles and respond to comments. Reply to emails, social media and forum queries. Let the fact that you are helping people come first and making money second.

4. Create a website

It is hard to do online affiliate marketing without a website. It is possible to post affiliate links on social networks, emails and forums but these may not really give you the best results.

Creating a website is very simple and affordable. You can easily register a domain, pay for it to be hosted and install WordPress. Doing this does not need much technical know-how and can be done by almost anyone.

4. Don’t forget the emails

Email marketing is one of the best ways to do business on the internet. You need to collect as many emails as possible.

There are professionals who even start before they launch their websites. This can be done by creating a buzz about an upcoming website and creating an opt-in box where users can enter their names and email addresses if they want to be notified when the site is up and running.

Personally, I use AWeber for email marketing.

5. Get the actual products to promote

You can get products to promote from different avenues. These include:

• Affiliate networks such as Amazon and Commission Junction.
• Standalone affiliate programs i.e. products that have affilite programs e.g. web hosting and email marketing companies.

6. Do some SEO and/or Paid Advertising

Once your website is up and running, and you have a list of products to promote, make sure each post you make is optimized for search engines.

Research on the best ways to place keywords, optimize images, use tags and build links among other search engine optimization (SEO) processes.

You can balance SEO with paid advertising. This can include using Google AdWords, banner ads and Facebook advertising among other advertisement methods.

Another great way of promoting your site is regular and quality use of social networks, forums and other blogs (guest posting). Note that paid advertising is not mandatory since you can still get droves of traffic from SEO, email marketing and social media marketing.

Personally, I have done both SEO and paid advertising with Google AdWords. I got some free $50 Google AdWords coupon from Payoneer which I used to advertise my site for a while.

7. Get Some Affiliate Marketing Training

I recommend Affilorama for affiliate marketing training. I went through their intense training, and was even featured as one of their success stories. Feel free to join Affilorama for free to get  one of the best affiliate marketing training courses worldwide. 

Final Thoughts

The methods above will help you start and maintain a great affiliate marketing business. Whether you are a writer, graphic designer or web designer, affiliate marketing can give you an edge since it will give you lots of passive income to add to your regular income.

Note that affiliate websites take time to start generating some real income. Therefore, do not get carried away from your core business when you are setting up affiliate properties.

My advice is you balance the time you take creating your affiliate site with your core business. You can use the ratio of 75:25, meaning 75% of your time should be doing your core business, even if it is an office job.

Once you have a couple of affiliate sites bringing in good income, you can opt to be a full-time affiliate marketer or still do it 50:50 with other freelancing ventures.

Never stop doing your research since new methods come in everyday while old methods become obsolete. Once you have successfully created a great affiliate website, make it your goal to create others so that you can optimize the income potential of your home business.