Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Want to make some extra money with a blog or website? You’re in luck! Read on to learn everything you need to know about affiliate marketing.

Keyword(s): affiliate marketing

Approximately 15% of the revenue collected from the digital industry comes from affiliate marketing. Unlike before, affiliate marketing has become the primary source of income for online marketers.

Thousands of professional bloggers depend on it, and this has expanded the industry. Also, more online businesses have emerged, thus creating more opportunities for bloggers.

In this article, we will discuss its most important aspects, as well as a step by step process to affiliate marketing.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing. It is done online, and the participants get commissions as rewards. This type of marketing is promotional; it promotes websites, products, or services.

Four main parties are involved in the affiliate process. They include the merchant, the affiliate, affiliate network, and the consumer.

Merchant is the company which sells the service. Affiliate is the person who promotes it. Affiliate networks are the online networks used, while the consumer is the buyer.

What Do the Parties Get out of It?

Merchants want to maximize the sales of the services or products. The affiliate marketing promotion helps them to achieve this. When the network is extensive, the merchant gets more profits.

The affiliates get a small commission each time they recommend the product. They only get paid when a promotion results in a transaction. They also get commissions when they refer others to get the product or service.

The main benefit here is to get paid even without creating your product. However, an affiliate isn’t a free ride. You have to create your website and have excellent marketing skills.

The more customers you have, the more you get the profits.

The affiliates get a commission through different payment models. The models are Pay Per Sale (PPS), Pay Per Lead (PPL), and Pay Per Click (PPC).

In PPS, the affiliate is paid for every transaction. It is the most commonly used method.

In PPL, the affiliate is paid for the leads they generate. These could be through free demo registrations and form submissions.

Lastly, In PPC, affiliates get paid for the traffic generated. The method is quite rare since all risk goes to the merchant.

Affiliate Marketing: Step by Step

You should consider affiliate marketing if you run an online business. It is one of the best customer acquisition methods, as 38% of online marketers use it.

However, to become a successful affiliate marketer, you need a collection of products. You also need the right marketing platforms, enough audience, and a good marketing strategy.

In this section, we will take you through the crucial steps to becoming a good affiliate marketer.

Step 1: Plan Your Affiliate Marketing Success

Don’t dive in the affiliate marketing arena with a vague idea. Be ready to take risks.

Consider the budget that you will work with and how much your website will cost you. Consider also the money you will use on marketing tools, creating content, and advertising.

Don’t forget to figure out your targets and the profits you expect to get. Your goals shouldn’t be unrealistic. Once you get the right answers to your objectives, you are good to go.

Step 2: Choose Products to Promote

Create a list of all the products you have interest in. Your list should start with the most important to the least.

With such a broad choice out there, it can be hard to narrow down the options. So, use the right strategic approaches to choose only the best.

Step 3: Promote Your Products

Promote the products you have strong enthusiasm for. Also, don’t recommend web design software to web professionals if you have never designed a single site. This is because you will lack enough details for valid recommendations.

Instead, do research enough to get accurate details about the products.

Affiliate marketing is all about creating awareness to the less informed persons. For this reason, customers will only trust you when you have a perfect knowledge of the products.

Step 4: Use Affiliate Programs to Search for Products Within Your Niche

Pick specific products from your niche and focus on them. Since you already have a list of them, check their website to find out if they have affiliate programs. If they have them, add them to your records of favorites.

If they lack affiliate programs, drop them as they won’t generate profits. You can, however, use them for recommendations on your site.

Move to the alternative programs once you are done with selecting those with affiliate programs. For instance, if you have a mobile POS (Point on sale) in your affiliate products list, look for its rival merchants.

Choose the ones with affiliate programs and read the reviews. Through the reviews, you will know which ones will earn you the highest commission.

Step 5: Search Affiliates Networks

Once you are done with your manual search for affiliate programs, expand your search to affiliate networks.

Affiliate networks connect merchants with the best affiliate marketers. They, however, charge a small fee for this.

Nevertheless, they are beneficial as they save time both parties the time spent looking for the best partners. Some of the best affiliate networks include eBay Partner Network, Amazon associates, Shareasale, Clickbank, and Avantlink.

Affiliate networks are particularly useful when looking to add new products to an already existing list. However, new marketers can conduct a manual search alone.

Note that the affiliate networks have a few downsides. Only use them when you are well experienced with them.

Step 6: Choose Platforms for Your Affiliate Content

Once your affiliate programs have been sorted, you will need a platform to promote your links. Although you will use much of your efforts on the website, the platform will increase your traffic.

It will also help you maintain control over your affiliate links and content since your aim is to complete your information resources to win the customer’s loyalty.

The best marketing platforms include the following:

Email

With an email, you can give your customers an incentive to sign up to your mail newsletter, and for the voucher coupons. The email allows them to watch your webinar and download in-depth guidelines.

By so doing, you will get a comprehensive idea of what your clients like most. You will also get their email addresses and reach them easily.

According to recent research, 62% of clients watch product review videos before purchasing. The search giant also says that product unboxing videos are the most significant influencers in buying sessions.

Even when your affiliate marketing does not include electronic products, publish the content on video platforms. YouTube is the largest video platforms you should consider.

Social media platforms

You can promote your affiliate products organically or with paid ads. Social media doesn’t allow you to post the links, and thus, you should make your content great.

The best things to promote in social media are guides, blog posts, webinars, and email signup content. The goal here is to increase your number of visitors and not to increase sales directly.

How Do You Ensure That You Get a Broad Audience for Your Marketing?

If you have a blog with a large network of new visitors, you are in a great position.

However, in most cases, new marketers start from scratch. Either way, your main aim is to increase your traffic. Use the following tips to boost your traffic:

Tip One: Create the Best Content

This is the most crucial element for any affiliate marketing strategy. The more you create good content, the better the results you get.

Also, your site will be competitive if your content is top notch. Search engines will rank you well and even encourage people to share your content.

The best content should be audience-centric. It should consider all type of audiences. It should be to give the audience the best advice and ideas.

The content should also be easily accessible and offer in-depth information. Lastly, the information should be correct and trustful.

To create your content, find a large social and search base. Also, don’t hesitate to write about the services or products that you are not promoting.

Be honest and talk about the benefits and drawbacks of your products.

This will help them to know what to expect. If you tell them the positives side only, they will leave when they learn about the side effects. Create affiliate content which recommends the best products to your audience network.

Know what’s best for large business, small firms, and individual customers so that you can recommend the best. Look for a professional to help you craft the best content.

Tip 2: Build an Organic Search Presence

People turn to search engines whenever they want to get detailed information about something. As such, you should ensure that your site ranks on top always. This way, you will increase your traffic and affiliate marketing strategy.

So, how can you be ranked well on the searches? Improve the quality of your content. Good content will earn you more, even from the third party sites.

Don’t forget to focus on your niche, on page SEO, technical SEO, loading times, mobile optimization, and user experience.

Besides these core essentials, consider having structured data. Structured data gives Google more details about your content. It also allows Google to pair your content with the most relevant audience

Tip 3: Use PPC Ads to Promote Your Content

A strong search presence is a top affiliate marketing strategy. It, however, takes time to build one.

Paid advertising gives users the option to pay for their traffic from day one. Although it’s a little bit costly, you will boost your traffic and start earning more than what you get on commissions.

Basically, you will be paying for all visitors who land on your site, regardless of whether they will use your link or not. To use this method, be ready to spend some time experimenting with the PPC which workers well for you.

You might lose little money at first, but be assured you will get substantial profits out of it.

Email marketing is the best cost-effective channel to use. So, create ad campaigns and encourage users to sign up to your email. You will get multiple touch points to maximize your affiliate sales.

Tip 4: Use Social Media to Drive Traffic

Social media is a powerful tool to promote content other than selling it directly. There are many social media platforms, and you should choose the one you are familiar with.

The most influential social media networks are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and medium. Facebook is excellent only if you like social advertising. It is, however, not the best for organic reach, something which limits affiliates use.

On the other hand, you can get a decent audience on Instagram. Just like Facebook, the platform allows you to advertise your products by pinpointing your target audience.

Twitter is the perfect place to reach a broad audience and organically get immediate results.

The main challenge here is that you must be responsive and active on the network to convert your audience to traffic. Twitter is expensive in terms of advertising, as the network is still struggling to make ads work.

LinkedIn is a truly B2B social network. Here, you can reach professionals and like-minded people. Organic reach is still possible, although the ads are a little bit pricey for affiliate marketing.

Tip 5: Network with Other Sites

Medium is a great platform to get publishers with the most massive audiences. Although most of the viewers need fresh content, you can reach out to the publishers if your content is useful and relative.

This creates an entirely new audience whose interest match the exact type of content you publish on your blog.

To get the best publishers, don’t limit yourself to medium alone. There are many publishers out there. Just select the ones that you think your audience will like.

Expand Your Affiliate Empire

Affiliate marketing is hugely profitable when used alongside the best strategies. In 2015, Amazon’s revenue surpassed $100 billion, with $10 billion being generated from affiliate marketing.

You can also make it. Implement everything that we’ve talked about in this article and look for a professional to guide you.

Contact Josh Jacobs today and get help on how to create a successful online business. You will also get instant free access to personal branding, entrepreneurship and online marketing tips.