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.
Enyewe uncle Walter knows a lot of stuff. Thank you for always sharing and informing generously. The LORD richly bless you.
Hi Valentine,
Always a blessing to share.
Thanks and God bless you too immensely.
Hello, Where do i register for affiliate marketing?
Hi John,
Thanks for reaching out.
Take a few minutes reading the article so that you can understand this.
Then go to websites that have affiliate programs and sign up.
Thanks!
Hello,
I am a new affiliate marketer. Please suggest to me” how to create a good structure of wordpress customization?” I am little bit confuse about wordpress theme .It design by other developer and i want to my template .what is the best tips for wordpress customization??? own theme or other theme??
Hi. I would suggest you check out YouTube tutorials on that. It will be easier for you to read and learn that way.
Hi Walter.
Thanks for enlightening me for free through such blogs.
I hope to catch up with the so many terminologies.
To start with, let me join Affilorama.
Hey Walter
Am very grateful, this article is an eye opener. I have been doing article writing and wanted to advance to get better money.
Thanks for this, going through it in detail
Thanks Edwin. Go for it!
My biggest takeaway was Affilorama. Heading there right away
That’s great, Felix.
Great piece.I would like to know the theme you are using for this site.Its cool
I thought i was alone;This theme is awesome
Thanks Waweru. I use Magazine Pro Theme.
Hi Walter,
Good stuff there.
I am getting started with affiliate marketing. I was thinking of doing a course on it on Udemy. Is there a good one you can recommend?
I want to concentrate with books in my affiliate marketing (I love reading books, I thought why not make money while reading them)
Hi Daniel,
Thanks a lot.
Sure, you can do Udemy courses. I’ve never done any there so you can do proper research to see which one is the best.
The ones that have many great reviews nowadays are Wealthy Affiliate and AffiloBlueprint. Not in Udemy but worth checking out.
It will be great to monetize your love for books.
All the best.
That was informative. I like it. Eye opener.
Hi Sam. Glad you found it informative.
Quite an informative site. Keep it up bro
Thanks James. Much appreciated.
I like your content will be getting in touch with you soon…
Great content about affiliate marketing. What if some people who sell tangible products approach you to market their products? How can i go about it with a blog or website? Thanks.
Thanks Lilian. For physical goods you can market at a fee over time. For example you can put up a banner on your website for one month at Sh. 20,000. It is important to make sure that the ad is related to our blog. Thanks.
Your comments and responses are just very practical. I discovered you today for the first time and I am enjoying the reading of your responses to questions and also your quality articles. If I knew about you in 2008, i would not have been scammed the $600 that I lost through online scam. But I am happy now I have found a niche.
Hi John. Thanks a lot. I am happy to have been of help. Sorry for being scammed all that cash back in 2008. Feel free to browse around and ask questions.
Thanks for the response.
I hope to follow your tips and ideas.
No problem. Feel free to ask any questions.
This is exactly what i was looking for.Thanks for sharing..
You are most welcome Mercy.
Great article! It has gotten me seriously thinking about affiliate marketing so you can be sure that I will be reading your follow up articles on this topic. I have some referral links which I have never used. Also reminded me that I have never used the $ 50 AdWord voucher I got from Payoneer.
Hi,
Thanks a lot for your comment.
I am glad you are seriously thinking about it since it is what generates the best revenue for most blogs.
Make sure you use up that voucher. It will drive some great traffic your way 🙂
See you at the top!