Affiliate marketing has grown immensely in the recent past. Many online bloggers are now earning huge sums of money, by just setting up a website and adding a few affiliate links. Keep reading to understand more about affiliate marketing and how you can successfully get started.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing involves promoting a product or service of another company in return for a commission on the total sales that you make. Commissions are a percentage of the total sales although can be a fixed amount too.
Steps to Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing
1. Decide on a Platform
Deciding on the platform where you can get started is an important step. Theoretically, affiliate marketing can be done on any platform. However, you can easily build your audience and increase affiliate sales through channels such as a YouTube channel or a blog.
Starting a blog is cheap and easy. Once you have set it up, you can increase your ranking by optimizing your blog with search engines. On the other hand, creating and uploading YouTube content is free
2. Choose your Niche
If you decided to start a blog today, you are definitely going to face a lot of competition from other existing blogs. However, you can stand a good chance of success by being strategic. You can achieve this by choosing a topic that will focus on a specific category.
You can rank higher in search engines by ensuring that your topics are tight. This will help in building a more focused audience. For example, instead of talking about “hip hop” or “dance”, you can limit yourself to just breakdancing. You must also maintain consistency in your niche.
3. Find the Best Affiliate Programs to Join
At this point, there are different types of affiliate programs that you can choose from. They include:
- High-paying and Low-volume affiliate programs: They are affiliate programs for products that attract high payouts.
- Low-paying and High-volume affiliate programs: Includes affiliate programs for products that pay less but have mass appeal.
- High-paying and high-volume affiliate programs: They involve products that have a mass appeal and also pay high commissions.
The decision on the affiliate program to join will depend on your niche as well as your level of expertise.
4. Create your Content
You will have to create the best-quality content where the affiliate links fit naturally if you want to be successful. If you have less money to buy products that are involved, you can start with what you already have. For example, you can create reviews on your gadgets if you are running a tech blog.
5. Drive Traffic to the Affiliate Site
Once you have created good content, the next step will be getting more people to access and read it. Here is how you can achieve it:
- Paid traffic: It involves money in order to get traffic to your site. You can do it using PPC ads
- Search engine optimization (SEO): You will be able to get passive and consistent traffic once you rank higher in the search engines.
- Building an email list: This will enable you to communicate easily with your readers at any given time.
6. Get Clicks on the Affiliate Links
Once you have created good content and people are accessing and reading it, you will have to get them to click on your affiliate links. You will have to consider the following:
- Link placement: Links should not be at the bottom where readers rarely scroll
- Context: Ensure that the context is good
- Callouts: You can use callouts like boxes, tables, and buttons that can attract readers.
7. Convert Clicks to Sales
For you to make money, two conversations have to take place. They include the click to the product page and the visitor purchasing the product.