You’ve seen the ads: “Earn up to $10,000 a month working from home online!” It sounds like a scam doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. Affiliate marketing does work, and you can make significant money through a successful affiliate marketing program.
The important thing to know about affiliate marketing, however, is that it’s not about getting rich quick. Building and maintaining a successful affiliate marketing program requires both hard work and patience.
But if you sit down in front of the computer everyday with the intent to treat your website like a real business, put in the work, and invest your time and a little money, you can not only generate a great supplemental income, you can eventually earn enough to quit your day job.
How To Start An Affiliate Marketing Program
At its core, affiliate marketing is essentially commission-based sales. You talk about, review, endorse, or compare products on your website and place affiliate links to the products on the merchant’s websites. Whenever one of your readers clicks on the link and purchases the product, you earn a commission for the sale.
It’s relatively simple, and starting an affiliate program can be broke down into five easy steps:
• Pick a topic – You should focus on one particular topic for several different reasons. You give off the impression of expertise when you focus on just one product. Your readers will also likely be confused if you talk about unrelated products. By focusing on a specific topic, you will also likely attract readers that are more ready to purchase a product.
• Find products to promote – Once you pick a topic, you can pick several products within that topic to promote.
• Build a website – Using intuitive, user-friendly services such as WordPress, you can build a professional-looking website with just a little time and experimentation even if you’ve never done it before.
• Generate content – Add content promoting the products you’ve chosen to your website on a regular basis, making sure to post affiliate links in highly visible places.
• Promote your website – To earn commissions, you need to generate traffic to your website. There are many affiliate marketing strategies for generating site traffic.
Advanced Affiliate Marketing Strategies
Each step of the process has many affiliate marketing strategies that you can use to help build a successful affiliate marketing program.
For example, when picking a topic and finding products to promote, you should try to choose topics and products that naturally interest you, but there are strategies to help you pick interesting products that will also be profitable.
Most affiliate networks will allow you to filter their products based on how well they are selling. You can also use search engine metric tools to see if people are searching for your chosen topics or products.
Another advanced affiliate marketing strategy is targeting your content to a particular audience. Most affiliate networks now pay for performance, meaning you only get paid if your readers make a purchase. It doesn’t matter if a million people read your website if none of them actually purchase anything through the affiliate links.
By targeting your content at a smaller, but specific audience, you are much more likely to attract readers that are ready to purchase the products you are promoting. When targeting your content think about the following aspects of your audience:
• Age of your target audience
• Gender of your target audience
• Location of your target audience
• Prior Knowledge of your target audience
• Expectations of your target audience
• Needs of your target audience
• Advantages of your competition
• Tone of your content
By using keywords, changing the tone and focus of your content, and advertising in targeted markets, you can generate smaller, but more valuable traffic.
Learn More About Affiliate Marketing
If you are ready to take the plunge into affiliate marketing, AffiliateMarketerTraining.com can help you learn the affiliate marketing strategies necessary to build a successful program. We offer in-depth lessons in market research, content creation, site building, marketing ideas, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and affiliate outsourcing.
We also offer marketing tools to help you delve into market data and analysis to further refine your ideas and content and convert them to revenue.
So take the plunge. Get your affiliate marketing program started today, and you can soon be living the dream of earning your primary income online working from home.