The field of affiliate marketing is probably the quickest developing way to make money online. After all, billions of ordinary people use internet every day. Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to target potential customers regardless of their location in the world.
For this reason, it is not surprising that a huge number of people make a reasonable amount of money through affiliate advertising and marketing. Many skilled affiliate marketers end up making more money in this field than they did in their previous job, and since some of them even resign their normal 9-5 job and pursuit affiliate marketing full-time.
A Quick Overview On Affiliate Marketing
Now that we have a little idea about the capacity of affiliate marketing, Let's dig in and discuss what it really includes.
The easiest way to describe affiliate marketing is when you help another company sell their products online, and then you get paid a commission for each sale you bring to them.
If you are promoting a product priced at $ 200, and the company pays you 10 percent commission of the sale, you would make $ 10 for each sale.
However how do you refer sales? You can begin promoting your seller's products on your website, which receives targeted site visitors in the same niche as the product you are advertising. For example, if you have a website that sells makeup you would not advertise health insurance, but instead you could promote makeup related products. Every time one of your website's visitors clicks on your affiliate link which was provided to you by the seller, you will be paid a commission.
How To Choose A Good Affiliate Network
One of the largest errors new affiliate marketers make is becoming a member of almost every affiliate network they encounter. This is without a doubt considered to be a totally incorrect technique. That is due to quite some reasons.
Firstly, being an affiliate marketer is an undertaking which calls for a lot of awareness. So, if you try and work with many affiliate networks at the same time, chances are that none of your initiatives might go as planned and consequentially, none of them might end up being very successful.
Secondly, focusing on just one or a few products without a doubt will let you research them thoroughly before you start to promote them. This method also helps you refine your strategies, making the required adjustments, and then making your marketing a whole lot more powerful. An effective approach will yield better results, and reward you for your efforts and time.
Thirdly, make sure you do some research on the affiliate network as there are some networks that will only pay you once a month which might not work for you or worse they could not pay you at all. I am not telling this to discourage you from being an affiliate marketer, but instead I want you to succeed in finding the correct network and products to market and make your commission.
There are affiliate networks that resort to "shaving", a very common exercise in affiliate marketing where the networks display a discounted number of sales than what you mentioned, consequentially paying you drastically less in agreements.
Here, to avoid being a victim to this action I would suggest that you stick to known and trusted affiliate networks. In any case, they only way you will succeed with a network is if you are comfortable with them and the products you are promoting.
How To Start Getting Sales As An Affiliate Marketer
Getting instantly to the point, some affiliate marketers use social media web sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more, for doing associate marketing, other decide to build out their own site. Getting your own site is an exceptional approach to affiliate marketing, because it gives you control over everything.
So we will focusing on affiliate marketing using your own site moving forward. First matters first, as mentioned earlier, you will want to find an affiliate network you're comfortable with. This includes being knowledgeable about the products you are promoting, so that you do not come to be selling products you do not know anything about.
Amazon's Associate Program
That being said, many marketers look at Amazon's associate marketing program as one of the best. It's probably the most trustworthy network, and has a large inventory of products to promote and get your responsibilities.
This offers you a possibility to promote almost any product in the market, or pick a niche with low competition and you could be earning agreements in less than a week.
Finding A Good Keyword
That is considered to be one of the hardest parts of marketing. You simply can not clearly choose any keyword and expect to start making sales quickly. One of the reasons why many affiliate marketers fail is due to using a wrong keyword.
If you are new to the affiliate marketing, you are going to want keywords that have low competition. Start your keyword research by finding long tail keywords with a low search volume, that means much less money, but not really with the ones that have large competition.
You may test the top 10 and 20 results and do a few studies to discover if you may outrank them. Review keywords being used by the competition to determine if they are using identical key phrases you are looking to target. If they are, and they have a high authority website in that niche, I would recommend that you keep away from that niche, and opt for a brand new, less competitive.
Quality Content
This is significant. If you think you will make a lot of money creating items that does not help the visitors in anyway, you are very wrong. Although your goal is to earn cash by means of referring visitors to the offer, you will have to offer one thing of importance to them. Merely posting your hyperlinks along with lame sales pitches like "this is a wonderful solution, purchase this product via my personal hyperlink and get a discount", and so on, you might be only heading to disaster.
If you decide to join Amazon's associate program, you could write an informative article on your homepage and include your primary keywords and some secondary keywords throughout the article. You could have the purchasing guidebook, and write your brief opinion of each product you are marketing. Remember that the greater the cost of the product you market, the greater the commission.
Backlinks
We realize it's probably the trickiest method to accomplish, unless you're an SEO guru. Contacting site with high authority and guest posting on these sites is a really well-known means of getting great backlinks. These great backlinks, along with guest posting in related sites in your niche will get you ranked on the first page of the search engines as long as the keyword you chose has really low competition.
However, even when your site does not reach page one, as long as you have guest posted on a number of sites in your niche, you will be bringing substantial amount of targeted traffic coming from these sites. So that it is a great tactic anyway.
Mistakes To Avoid
Now you are aware of the process to becoming a great affiliate marketer with your own website, I want you to also keep in mind some of the most common errors brand new affiliate marketers make.
Not Providing Any Good Value
Although we've got this item, it's certainly important to remind you if you try to be extreme with your words to pressure the visitors to click on your affiliate link, it's probably being deemed as junk or spam by many websites.
Rather, it's suggested to help these individuals select the right solution determined by their particular needs. This method makes these individuals feel more, which in return will check out the products you are marketing based on the value in your article.
Product Research
Numerous online marketers will not do proper product research to gain knowledge on the product they are promoting, instead they are only worried about the amount of commission they will earn per sale regardless if it will provide value to their visitors. This is an oversight, and will at some point lead to your readers not relying on anything you tell them.
Tracking Your Links
When you begin advertising on Amazon or even some other affiliate network, it will be beneficial to track your affiliate links. It can help you find out which website is doing more sales and then you can make your other websites have the same kind of setup.
Final Thoughts
I would like to say that since the fact that affiliate marketing can be very fulfilling, it has a steep learning curve to it. You may face disappointment on numerous occasions prior to making a nice amount of money online.
That said, affiliate marketing it's suited simply for individuals who are likely to deal with several failures, but will come back with a positive attitude and willing to learn from their mistakes.
