According to a past study by Jupiter Research, blog marketers and website owners receive staggering payouts. This has surged over the years in what internet marketers have discovered that: Affiliate marketing has gained prominence and has since become one of the most sought after business opportunities online as very little input is required in terms of start-up costs yet the returns or income generated can be mind-boggling.
Affiliate marketing entails running your own website or blog and redirecting your traffic to another site where they can purchase products and/or services on the respective sites. Income is earned when a customer or client makes a purchase that is initiated by a link coming from your site – normally a percentage (affiliate sales commission) is given.
Affiliates can choose to work on a part-time or full-time basis depending on one’s preferences. Interestingly, anyone intending to join the affiliate marketing business can easily start promoting products and services online. However, your success online will be determined by the amount of time and effort you are willing to devote. The following steps will help you jump-start your affiliate marketing endeavor.
1. Start a blog or Create a Website
To start out as an affiliate marketer, it is a requirement that you have a live site where you can place links to products or services that you choose to recommend to your site visitors – preferably one which has been in operation for at least six months. By conducting a Google Search, you can find cheap domains from domain registrars from whom you can buy a domain name for your site. Some of the companies I’d suggest include:
Additionally, you can easily start a blog for free using Google’s blogger blog network
2. Decide what product/service niche you wish to promote
As an affiliate marketer, your job is to assist companies and online entrepreneurs sell their goods and services. It is advisable that you choose an area you are comfortable with because you are likely to do the job well which you love and enjoy, as opposed to something that is less likely to bore you – even before you earn your first income.
3. Find a product or service
As an affiliate, you can choose to promote products or services online. On the internet, you will find a myriad affiliate networks which connect merchants with publishers (affiliate sites) who help the merchants sell these products and services online. Such companies include:
Clickbank
Clickbank
4. Affiliate content for your site
You need to come up with good affiliate site content for your site to get the best out of it. For this reason, you need to choose wisely one of the two business models if you intend to set up a good affiliate marketing site. The following models are what you need to establish an affiliate marketing site:
Review Writing
Review Writing
Remember, this model should be wisely picked, since most merchants require you to have at least used their products before reviewing – though this is not a MUST! For instance, if you have tried a certain product in the market, you can write up a review and rate its importance for the general public to see. When writing such a review, please remember to include a link(s) or banner ad that redirects a visitor to a merchants’ partner site. This way, you get to earn click through sales as an affiliate. For such sites, you don’t really need to update content on a regular basis; though you need to tweak your site to alert search engines of some activity that’s going on within your site. Most importantly, do not forget to keep building links as this will help you rank well in search engines.
Resource Sites
Resource Sites
If your requirement is to sell digital information online, then this is the preferred model for you. Such sites offer valuable information which then provides you an option to click on an affiliate link or banner ad for further details on the information. The catch here is that you need to update your content on a regular basis to keep visitors wanting more; hence, return to your site – clicking more links that generate money. Creativity is a plus in this model.
5. If you need to succeed as an affiliate – you require lots of targeted traffic
If I should be sincere here, most visitors to your site won’t necessarily click on affiliate links – this is the truth! To avoid this, you need to employ marketing mix tactics if you are to a high number of targeted traffic to your site.
Here are a few tactics you can use to get more exposure for your site, as well as attract prospective clients/customers.
Advertise your site for free
There are several classified sites such as pigiame, kenyaads, and OLX where you can place adverts for free.
Paid Advertising
The performance of this method is good when your headline, graphics and call-to-action interest and compel your visitors to click-through and purchase a product or service.
Article Marketing
This is a popular marketing strategy that offers several benefits. Firstly, you get to ascertain your credibility as a reliable source in your respective niche. This provides an opportunity for higher search engine ranking through increasing the number of links directed to your site, thus pulling in more traffic. To achieve this, you need to target keywords in an organic manner and avoid spam content with an aim of fooling search engines. The best place to begin article marketing is on established sites like Ezinearticles.
Email Marketing
Any visitors arriving on your site are valuable visitors. Therefore, you need to ensure that you get them to leave their email addresses and names so that you can contact them in future. As a norm, visitors are most likely to purchase goods or services from you on their third or fourth visit, after they have heard of your site or you. To achieve this success, you need to have a subscription box on your site where visitors can freely opt to subscribe for your newsletter or feeds from your updates. You can either choose a paid email subscriber like Aweber though other services exist.
6. Learn useful affiliate marketing tactics from forums
Forums are online communities where people with same commonalities and goals share and exchange insights and thoughts. To get started, you need to join one of the below online communities. Remember that you must ask questions and contribute in a generous manner to be in good standing in the forums. You also need to avoid any kind of spamming. You can join any of these affiliate marketing forums:
- Warrior Forum: This is a forum that welcomes beginners and experts. You can register, set up your profile and start participating meaningfully.
- Digital point: Considered as one of the busiest forums with over 30,000 active members, this forum has all the requirements that affiliates may need for marketing.
- aBestWeb: This is one of the largest affiliate marketing forums; and has close to 100 sub-forums. Take a ride on this forum and discover a broad range of affiliate marketing-specific topics. Your needs will be surely met here.
To excel as an affiliate marketer, you need to keep yourself abreast with opinions of peers and experts alike. However, before you commence, choose a niche wisely! As long as you enjoy what you write about, you will hardly lose focus and this in turn translates to more traffic, which even sets trends for your affiliate marketing money making venture, resulting to your success.
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