No matter your expertise, niche, or experience level, there is money to be made in affiliate marketing. Chances are, if you check with an online business or merchant, they’ll have an affiliate program where you can start doing just that. Or, if you’d rather, there are even businesses online that specialize in affiliate marketing, and many of them allow you to sign up for free before trying a premium membership so you can feel it out and see if it’s a good fit for you.
For some reason, a lot of people don’t realize that you can make money by doing this, and even make a career out of it, if you’re dedicated enough.
Here, I’ll go over how you can start making money online affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a program that many online markets and companies employ that gives their affiliates an opportunity to promote their products for them, while compensating the affiliate or affiliates for revenue generated on their behalf. For instance, if Bob writes an article about a product that you’re interested in, he’ll provide his affiliate link for you to click on that will take you to the company website. If you click that link and purchase something from them, Bob gets a percentage of the revenue generated from that sale.
Find Your Niche
Since there’s a market for everything out there, this should be fairly simple. Think of the things you like and are passionate about. Are there online stores out there that you frequent that sell these things? If so, a simple trip to their website will tell you if they offer an affiliate program, and if they do, all you have to do is apply. For some companies, they will want you to have a little bit of experience with affiliate marketing already, but for every one of those, there’s a company that will be willing to give you the chance to become an affiliate with them. If, for some reason, you’re not passionate about anything except making money, there are also generalized affiliate marketing sites that sell a wide range of products and services – Amazon Associates affiliate program, for instance – and you can start there, too.
Product Promotion
Once you’ve become an affiliate with the site of your choosing, find products to promote for them. Again, this can be anything you like or have experience with, or find interesting. You can choose to purchase these items to try for yourself, or you can do research on them to find out as much information as possible about the product or service. Then, you’ll promote the products using an affiliate link provided to you by the merchant or company.
Promotion can happen in a number of ways: If you have your own website, you can promote it there. You can also write articles about the product on blog sites that allow writer submissions, promote it on social media, or through online discussion forums.
A tidbit to remember when promoting through other sites, like the forums or writer submissions: Be sure that, before starting promoting this way, to read through the Terms of Service or Terms of Use on any website you want to promote through. Some sites have a limit to how many times an affiliate link can be used within an article, and some don’t allow it at all, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. You don’t want to get banned from a site just because you didn’t take a second to read the rules.
Know Product Demand
Just knowing what products you want to promote isn’t enough; it also helps to know how well these products sell, and what the overall demand is for them. Picking good quality products is a good start to this. You can research the average sales of a certain product you want to promote and see what your potential customers actually need versus what they aren’t really buying too much of. Watching your site and tracking your affiliate links is also a great way to see which products are selling better than others, and from what sites your revenue is generated, so you know which sites to grow and invest in in order to gain more traffic.
You can learn more about how to choose a great affiliate marketing product here.
Good Content
Whether you’re promoting through your own personal site or blog, or on social media, or on any of the other marketing outlets mentioned here, you have to produce good content to keep people coming back. Make sure that you’re educating them on the product, not just trying to sell them something. Tell them what it does, and how it could help them within their own life. Tell them, if possible, how your own experience with the product was, and what you liked and even disliked about it. And above all else – and I can’t stress this enough – be honest. Don’t just upsell it for the sake of gaining more sales; even though your ultimate goal is to make money, your first priority should be building a reputation with your readers. The first time they use your affiliate link to buy a product, they are taking your word for it. All other visits depend on how good that first experience was, so make sure you’re as up-front and thorough as possible. The general rule of thumb is to never promote a product or service you wouldn’t use yourself.
