So what is affiliate marketing and how can anyone take advantage of this online opportunity?
In this blog I will completely break down affiliate marketing, what it is, what is involved, the costs, the daily tasks to make affiliate marketing work, and how if you do it right, it can completely transform your life.
Affiliate marketing has completely transformed my lifestyle in many ways, and I can only recommend anyone to take action and get involved with this online opportunity.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where businesses reward individuals ( Affiliates ) for driving traffic or sales to a merchant’s website/s, landing pages, or promotional offers through various affiliate marketing strategies.
The business model lends itself to a worldwide market, low start-up costs, and once set up, will generate passive ongoing income with minimum input required.
The affiliate marketing process can be explained or summed up in just 4 steps…
Why Affiliate Marketing Is Attractive
- Any passion, hobby, or interest can generate income online.
- All you need is a computer and the Internet.
- Affiliate marketing can be done anywhere in the world.
- You can get started with affiliate marketing for free, and running costs are extremely low.
- You can access millions of products to earn commissions from.
- There is no handling of products, no shipping, no liability fees, or insurance.
- 100% unlimited earnings potential.
- You can work at any time of the night or day.
- Affiliate marketing is PASSIVE income… it works for us even while we are sleeping!
- Will bring financial freedom and flexibility in the long run!
These are just some of the main reasons I love affiliate marketing, and why I believe others should get on board and give it a go.
4 Steps To Affiliate Marketing
- Choose A Niche: Any passion, hobby, or interest can make money online! By brainstorming ideas and using keyword research tools such as Jaaxy, we can find niches online that are in high demand and have low competition. This is how we know we can fit into the market, and get free unlimited traffic through blogging and other strategies.
- Build A Website: Building your website is a fun and exciting time and this will be the foundation of your online empire. Your website is where you will be adding helpful information on your chosen niche. Information can be in any form such as a blog or video, infographic or eBook, etc, and should always help answer people’s questions or queries.
- Attract Website Traffic: Driving website traffic can be done in numerous amount of ways, however, I tend to stick with free traffic methods such as blogging and social media posting. There are endless options to get traffic to your website and potentially, one well-written blog that ranks on page 1 of Google, can flood your website with traffic.
- Turn Traffic Into Cash: Once your website is built and you have added relevant information, you can join affiliate programs and start adding affiliate links to your website/s. If people click through your affiliate link and make a purchase…you will receive a commission.
Summarized Explanation
In short, affiliate marketers are advertisers.
We sign up for affiliate programs, advertise those links, and get paid a commission when someone purchases through those links.
There are thousands of affiliate programs available for everyday people like you and me to join and take advantage of, including: Amazon.com, Digistore24.com Clickbank.com, eBay, and countless more.
With these affiliate programs alone we have access to millions of products to help advertise, this is why we say any passion, hobby, or niche can generate income online.
Breaking Down the Steps of Affiliate Marketing
Although the affiliate marketing process can be summed up in four easy steps, there is of course a lot more involved in running an affiliate marketing business or website.
In this section, I will describe from start to finish a simplified version of how affiliate marketing works and the steps involved.
- Niche Selection: Brainstorm your passions, hobbies, or interests and narrow down which niche you would like to investigate further. In today’s digital affiliate marketing world, board niches are too saturated, so we concentrate on what I call a micro-niche, or a small segment of your board niche topic.
For example, if I narrowed down my list of niche ideas to 3 topics, I could further divide them into micro-niche categories.
If my main 3 niche ideas were “Dogs”, “Cooking”, and “Scrapbooking” I could break these into smaller more targeted micro-niche categories.
Instead of “Dogs” we could do “Dog Nutrition” “Dog Leads” “Dog Clothes” etc
Instead of “Cooking” we could do “Butter Free Cooking” or “Hotplate Cooking” Fruit Deserts”
Instead of scrapbooking try “Best Scrap Books”, “Scrap Book Pens”, or “Scrapbook Supplies”
Ideally the more micro niche the better. and we can even dig further into these micro niches again, for a quick example, if we take our micro-niche “Dog Clothes” we could further sub-niche this into “Dog Jackets” “Dog Helmets” Dog Collars” etc.
As long as we know there is demand for the chosen micro-niche, and there is not too much competition for it, we can move forward…but before this, we need to investigate our niche to find the demand and competition for each of your chosen niche ideas.
- Keyword and Competition Research: Knowing how and doing keyword research before building any website is crucial, and if you do not do this step, you could be starting an endless journey of an uphill battle.
Jaaxy is the ultimate keyword research tool and should be used as part of any keyword research. Jaaxy is an online tool we use for keyword research to find out metrics like…
- How many times a keyword or phrase is searched on Google every month?
- How many other websites are trying to rank for that exact keyword or phrase?
- Other related keyword phrases.
- If keywords are available as a domain name.
- What our chances are of ranking on page 1 of Google
For this example, I will use Jaaxy to show you the results for the Keyword “Dog Helmets”
After typing the keyword “Dog Helmets” into Jaaxy I have these results:
The phrase “Dog Helmets” is searched on average 120 times a month, 21 other websites that are trying to rank for that exact keyword, and the domain name is taken.
This is not the best result and would keep searching down the rabbit hole to find more keywords with higher search volume, low QSR, and ideally an available domain name to go with it.
After you have searched and found a domain name for a keyword that fits your micro-niche, and has a high search volume with low competition ( Under 100 QSR score is best, lower the better ) you can now move on to building your website.
- Building Your Website: There are now endless platforms to build websites on although I would recommend a WordPress website hosted through Wealthy Affiliate as this is where I have been for the last few years and am more than happy with the cost, service, tools, and training included within the platform.
The Wealthy Affiliate Platform is an all-in-one affiliate marketing training platform that includes all the training and tools needed to become successful online as an affiliate marketer and was the turning point in my affiliate marketing journey.
- Brand, Logo, and Buyer Persona: After deciding where you are going to be hosting, and building your website, you can start designing your brand.
This includes your Logo, the title of your website, and a very important but often forgotten one, your buyer persona.
Your logo should reflect your business and its niche, and your buyer persona is who you are targeting with your website.
In other words, if you are designing a vegan website, you would not have a logo with a big rump steak on it, advertising meat.
Another example of this is the difference between talking to someone fresh out of school today and has just turned 18, to someone that is 80, and has multiple degrees in study…two very different buyer personas.
Make sure you have a clear and defined audience, this will help drive targeted traffic, enhance user experience, and more importantly, more leads and sales.
This is an example of a buyer persona I have made for one of my marketing campaigns:
- Start Building Content: There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, but most would agree, that targeted free traffic is better.
Blogging is the number one way to generate free traffic to any website in any niche. This takes time and practice to write blogs in a way that Google likes, and that are user friendly in offering information.
Remember all blogs should contain a focus keyword and to find focus keywords to use in all my blogs I use the Jaaxy keyword research tool.
- Google Search Console And Google Analytics. Once you have built your website and have added the appropriate pages for your niche, you should submit your website to Google Search Console.
GSC will inform you which pages are indexed in Google and which ones are not being indexed. You will also be able to find out why.
Redirection errors, 404 errors, and other information can be found on this platform as well.
Google Analytics which is now GA4, will be needed to find out other metrics of data including where your traffic is coming from, how they found your website or blog, and the type of device people are using, eg computer, phone, or tablet.
Once your website is submitted to GSC and GA4 they will start recording your website’s stats and information, this can take a while to see results depending on the nature of your website, the amount of consistent posts, the quality of the posts, and a few other variables.
Affiliate Programs and Monetization: Finding and researching affiliate programs that you can join is an exciting time.
Many affiliate program hubs offer multiple products under one affiliate program, and others are for each product.
Some affiliate programs are easy to join, have huge payouts, and offer promotional material to help with your marketing efforts.
Other affiliate programs offer small-based commissions and are not easy to get approved for.
Each program is different so please check out the fine print for each affiliate program application form.
Or you can ask me to look into one in the comments section below and I will see what I can find for you.
- Add Your Affiliate Links / Banners: Once you have been approved into an affiliate program you may now start adding your affiliate links to your blogs or other areas of your website.
Note, that only 20% of your blogs should be buyer-influenced and should offer affiliate products.
The other 80% should link to other pages on your website that do have affiliate links, or funnel into affiliate links.
- Share Your Content: Every single post or blog can be shared on social media.
This means that one blog can potentially be placed onto hundreds of outlets, exposing you to more traffic and potential sales.
For YouTube Shorts videos, I can split this blog into sections and potentially get 10 – 30 YT Shorts videos from each blog post.
The more we can share our content and post around media channels the better off you and your website will be.
- Collect Leads: Collecting email leads is a huge deal in affiliate marketing as this picks up yet again a good chunk of sales. Having a free eBook in exchange for a person’s email address is perfect for building an email list.
If we know people have opted in for our free “Dog Helmet Designs eBook” we know these people are interested in dogs, dog helmets, and most probably other dog-related items.
Imagine Sending one email with new “Dog Helmet Designs For Sale” to a list of 50,000 dog lovers…Trust me you are going to get sales.
More Helpful Affiliate Marketing Tips
Other Helpful Tips: Using link track software means you can find out which links are performing well and where those clicks are coming from.
If we post 1 blog to 15 social media platforms and we start getting sales it is important we know which social media platform the links are coming from, and which ones are not performing.
Quality Over Quantity: Spend the time to write longer, more informative blog posts, they will rank better and drive more traffic in the long run.
Keep Track Of Your Blogs: Keep a list of your blog titles so you don’t start doubling up and competing with yourself.
Always conduct keyword research, and ideally, spend a day doing this and conduct a list of all the keywords you can use in blogs or pages, this way you can pre-plan the next upcoming weeks, months, or even years of blogs.
This will be more time beneficial and speed up the process of completing blogs.
Take A Course: As I mentioned earlier, I strongly urge anyone interested in learning affiliate marketing to join the Wealthy Affiliate University.
This platform was the guidance and support I needed to be successful online with affiliate marketing.
The course is structured, well-established, and known for its student success stories. Banner Bellow…
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
There are huge benefits to the affiliate marketing business model, and huge benefits if you are successful in affiliate marketing. The biggest of these is freedom.
Complete financial freedom and flexibility is a dream many are living thanks to the way affiliate marketing works.
Affiliate marketing is passive income, and any blog you write can start earning you income passively over and over again, without you having to actively be involved.
Even while you sleep.
Affiliate Marketing As a Cost-Effective Strategy for Businesses
Affiliate marketing can be started for free and running costs are extremely small compared to a physical brick-and-mortar business.
Though the Wealthy Affiliate platform there is 3 membership plans and all of them are undoubtedly the most competitive prices for an all-in-one training and hosting platform.
The Wealthy Affiliate free starter membership is 100% free and is a great way to test drive the system before upgrading and unlocking all the tools and training.
Best Practices for a Successful Affiliate Marketing Strategy
There are a few best practices when it comes to running an affiliate marketing business online, and to make sure we comply with rules and regulations we always recommend having a “Privacy Policy” page, and an “Affiliate Disclosure” page.
When adding information to your website, consistency is key. You are better off writing 2 blogs every week, over 8 blogs a month all in one week.
Google and your audience love regular, consistent updates and this will also help with Google rankings.
Importance of Choosing The Right Affiliates and Products
Don’t join every affiliate program that comes your way. Make sure the company is well-liked and the products you are recommending are worth recommending.
Don’t advertise rubbish, you will lose the trust of your target market audience.
Always be transparent and don’t hide any information that should be disclosed.
Strategies for building trust with your audience
Offering value and not shoving products or services down people’s throats will gain a lot of brownie points when it comes to people trusting your website.
Offering a free eBook with helpful information about your niche will help gain the trust of your visitors.
The other is video content and being available to talk to others. This is hands down the best and most formal way to gain the trust of any audience.
Overview of Merchants/Advertisers:
In the affiliate marketing world, merchants are an identity such as a person, business, or corporation that offers a product or service.
Merchants that offer affiliate programs will allow approved affiliate marketers to advertise their products or services and will pay a commission to say thanks, upon each sale.
Understanding the Role of Affiliates/Publishers:
The role of an affiliate marketer is to help people find what it is they are looking for.
By knowing what people are searching for and recommending solutions to their problems, such as a product, informational video, guides, etc, we will build trust, traffic, and more sales.
Affiliates like myself can advertise in such diverse ways, that finding outlets to place information, products or services is practically limitless.
Affiliate Networks
Thousands of companies all over the world offer affiliate programs for people to join.
Affiliate programs can be found in every niche, and applying to join an affiliate program is as easy as filling out the online form that they supply.
Affiliate programs can pay anywhere from 1% to 99% of the ordered amount, and in some cases, this can result in massive amounts of cash from just 1 sale.
Take Action and Get Involved With Affiliate Marketing
Every day people all over the world are frustrated with their dead-end jobs and would like more than anything to build a better lifestyle for themselves, they just don’t know how.
Affiliate marketing can be done anywhere in the world, for anyone of any age, and all you need is the power of the internet and a computer.
Through the Wealthy Affiliate training platform people can get started for free ( Free Starter Membership ) and test drive the system, and if you like what you are doing you can upgrade to one of the paid membership plans and unlock all the tools and training videos you will need to be successful online.
Take it from me, nothing ventured, nothing gained!
You have nothing to lose besides time and a little effort to see if it is for you.
I hope this blog has been helpful in understanding what affiliate marketing is, and how it works, and I hope I have inspired you to take action and get involved…It may just be your ticket to a better lifestyle…
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