How to Start in the Affiliate Marketing Business – Affiliate Marketing 101

How to Start in the Affiliate Marketing Business – Affiliate Marketing 101 is your gate to understand what is affiliate marketing, before deciding to enter any business, we should understand all the details about this business. Affiliate marketing can be so fun and amazingly good way to earn money and knowledge.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

This is one of the most logical common questions anyone would ask when they hear about Affiliate Marketing. According to Wikipedia, Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. In simple words, Affiliate marketing is a method or way for you as an affiliate to earn money (a commission) for recommending products or services either physical or digital products in your website (a blog) to your visitors.

As an Affiliate, you have to go through 5 stages or steps to reach the level of earning money from affiliate marketing including:

1- you need to design and own a website to be able to recommend products on your website.

2- Attract visitors (Readers) to your website through posts (content).

3- You find a product related to your niche from affiliate programs like Amazon (website idea, for example, a website about clothes and fashion).

4- Sign up for their affiliate programs and get a special link.

5- you use this link inside your website posts, anyone clicks on your link and buys the product you get a commission.

So easy and simple, right?

Of course, there are some advanced strategies and work to do later to make your business big, earn more money and have more readers. We are just going to start with the fundamentals here and get you to the point where you are ready to earn your money.

You can click here to read a review of my recommendation to learn affiliate marketing.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

There are so many different ways to track affiliates, but all of them fall under one concept, based on a customer clicking on a special link inside your website, the most common and used type of tracking is via cookie, we all saw or heard about that.

It is a structure that’s built on transparency and real relationships. The goal of an affiliate program is to create a structure between brand owners and their affiliate partners, it is a win-win situation for both of them, the brand owners get more customers and their affiliate partners gain money.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing on Your Website in 7 Steps

1. Start by creating your own website.
2. Search a niche that you are passionate about, So you enjoy your time while working.
3. Start building your website and content (posts or articles).
4. Research and find products related to your niche.
5. Find Affiliate programs for the products you want to review.
6. Optimize and track your ranking on google.com
7. Repeat for different products and contents.

Affiliate Marketing – Strategies and Examples

You, me and everyone saw affiliate marketing in different websites we visited, it’s not that complicated when you look at it, it is started by creating a post that is talking about the brand or product you are affiliated with.

Let’s say for example you started with a website talks about Dogs Health, and you are affiliated to a company that sells medications or Vitamins for dogs, you would create a post and start by writing about this company or the product like writing about its benefits, how this product going to help dogs get better, cost, instructions, etc.

After finishing with the writings you would include special buttons, banners or links. If the reader clicks on any of those it will redirect them to that product page or the website of the company. Once the order is done and the reader buys this product you will get your commission.

Things to be aware of and to Avoid with Affiliate Marketing

Of course, as an affiliate, there are things you should avoid if you want to have a successful business. You need to understand that your website is not a commercial website or something like that, you need to have good quality content, you aim is to help your readers to have the best decision related to these products or even anything related to your niche.

It is the best to write your content like you are trying to explain something to your best friend or a member of your family, your goal is to help them, If you start writing like a salesperson, you will not only lose readers trust but also Google trust, so be aware.

The other important part you need to be aware of is to avoid adding links or banners into posts that are not related to that post. You can give your reader an introduction and how is that related to your post so it can make sense.

As an affiliate marketer, it is important by law to have an affiliate disclosure statement on all pages that contain affiliate links. This is a requirement by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). You can read their guidelines here.

How Much Money Can I Make With Affiliate Marketing?

I can tell you that your limitation it’s your imagination. What I mean by that is you can earn as much as you can think of. The amount you can earn will vary wildly it can fall somewhere between zero and millions of dollars.

The better the quality of your content and your website is the more visitors you have, your income then will be directly related to the offers you promote. So once you have good traffic and good content with different products to offer to them you will start earning money related to that. Note that you can improve that, you can always start promoting your website by paying money and then get more readers and visitors and that can increase your income too.

How Do You Get More Traffic To Your Website and The Products Or Services You Are Trying To Sell?

It can be a difficult job at the start to attract traffic to your website, that’s why so many people give up after 3-6 months of trying because they couldn’t build up their traffic.

There are different ways to build up your website traffic, which includes:

Create Great Quality Content

I know, it is kinda difficult to do that, creating something so amazing and resourceful consume time and effort and a lot of dedication. But by the time you will find your way to that and it will be easier for you.

The post must be engaging and capture readers attention to continue reading and make them want to learn more about this product or service.

Practising and Performing effective SEO techniques

In any blog post, performing good SEO techniques, utilizing good strategies and driving traffic (Organic traffic) from search engines can be a good source of quality traffic. One of the most common technique is skyscraping, it is a great way to get good ranks for so many keywords and attract organic traffic to your website, it also generates good links to your posts by becoming the best and most resourceful website on the web.

Skyscraping is simply searching and finding the best content for a certain keyword and then create your own version with your own way and improve the content in a way that is better than these from your competitors’ piece or expanding on those topics, and become the best resource in the search engines for that subject.

Paid Traffic – Ads

When you start earning money from your organic traffic, you need to consider paid traffic. Most affiliate marketers pay for their traffic via social media like Facebook or Instagram, or via platforms like Google Adwords and other ad networks. Of course, it is not a must to do that, you can work hard on your content and keywords to gain more organic traffic.

Building Up an E-mail List

Building up an email list for your subscribers is one of the most commonly used methods to generate income from affiliate marketing, and it is one of the great ways to gain more traffic and attract your readers to always come back to read more of your posts.

Good email marketing is key to have a successful traffic build-up and gain your readers’ trust. To do this you need to action some email list building ideas in order to attract people to sign up and get in touch with your website. It can be like creating a giveaway such as a free ebook in exchange for their email and it works really well. Once you’ve built up trust with your audience, they will be more inclined to buy from your suggestions to them.

Upsell

Upsell is a sales technique where the salesperson encourages a more expensive purchase by a customer by persuading them to get an upgraded version of an item or to purchase add-ons.

Promoting products you would buy or try

When you have a passion for a certain product and you show that to your audience, or even try this product and write your experience with it, your readers will most likely gain more trust to buy this product.

If you have zero interest in an expensive bike the company you are an affiliate of sells, you probably want to avoid featuring it on your blog, as it is extremely difficult to persuade readers or anyone for that matter that they should buy something you wouldn’t. When you are at the very least interested in learning more about it, this will come through to your readers, engage them and better coax them to buy.

Helpful Resources & Guides For All Levels

*Whether you are just getting started, have some experience, or are an ultra-successful affiliate marketer, Wealthy Affiliate is made for you! a guide from A – Z with best training to start Affiliate Marketing: Read Here for more information.

*Best Affiliate Marketing Platforms – NEW 2019 EDITION: Make a websitehub.com

*How to Start Affiliate Marketing (The Complete Beginners Guide): Location Rebel

Do you have more tips and tricks to add to our How to Start in the Affiliate Marketing Business – Affiliate Marketing 101, Do you have another opinion about it? or a question about Affiliate marketing? feel free to write your comment, opinion or question below!

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