How to make money with affiliate marketing? Pretty easily actually… once you know what you’re doing that is. Affiliate marketing is a great way to get started making money online and if you haven’t started yet, start now with this. If you follow this guide it should be pretty straight forward. Lets get started…
Choosing a Niche
If you haven’t already, you need to decide on a niche. The best thing to do here is pick something you are interested in since it will make it a lot easier between the startup period and making your first dollar – it’s not fun writing about something you hate when you’re not even making any money doing it yet. If you want to promote physical products most niches are pretty good. I have a much more detailed PDF guide on niches. It goes through some cool stuff like how to pick a good niche, suggests a few niches and tells you how to be successful within any niche.
The Website
Okay this is the second thing you need to get sorted. This is where you will be driving traffic to and promoting affiliate offers from. When making a website you want to pick out a nice premium theme. Now there are 2 main types of website to choose from when promoting affiliate offers. The first type is a blog style website where you recommend affiliate offers. The second is a review style site/an affiliate shop, these websites tend to work a lot better with physical products. If you choose to go for and affiliate shop style site you will probably want to look up some eCommerce plugins and themes specifically for this. So go see this guide on how to make a website without knowing anything about code. Then come back to this tutorial to make the money.
The Blog Style
Okay so with this style you will want to get up some cool posts and have a good mixture between value giving free posts and posts promoting content. It’s kinda like the book “jab, jab, jab, right hook”. What you want to do is give away lots of value so then when you promote a cool offer your audience will be more inclined to get it because you already gave them so much cool stuff for free. This works because of the law of reciprocity.
The Shop Style
When going for the shop style you don’t need to do the whole give value thing first. For example: if your site is a review site for phones it’s likely the person on it is interested in buying a phone. Just try and get as many reviews on there as possible with good advice about different products. Then the person can make the best decision for what to buy and go through one of your affiliate links. Honestly you don’t even need to write reviews you can just post pictures and descriptions of products if that’s what you want to do, if you choose to do this I would suggest making a blog on the site as well to help with traffic.
The Affiliate Offers
So now you have you website set up, it’s time to get some affiliate offers on your site. Some affiliate networks: affiliate window, share a sell and clickbank. There are lots of other affiliate networks you should look at but the affiliate network you sign up to will partially be determined by your niche. Also you can just search ” ‘your niche’ + affiliate programs” and find products you can promote. To start off with you should definitely promote offers through an affiliate network. I have had some experiences (very rare) where websites with there own affiliate programs haven’t paid out the money owed.
Getting accepted
With some affiliate networks you sign up and that’s it you can promote offers, with others you have to undergo an approval process (it’s not as scary as it sounds). Make sure your site looks presentable: make sure it has a few articles, has a clean look and isn’t covered with ads.
Getting Traffic
Okay so now you have a niche, your site and affiliate offers. It’s time to drive traffic! Traffic is an absolutely huge topic but I put put a quick guide to some of the main ways below. After that check out some of my other guides specifically for this topic.
SEO
SEO = search engine optimization. It just helps you rank higher in search results. So instead of appearing page 3 you will appear in page 1 as the top result. Not the fastest way to get traffic, but if you’re in this for the long run you will want to get that SEO on point.
Here are some things you should do to get started:
- Make sure you sort out your meta data on each page.
- A good domain name relevant to your niche.
- A theme which helps with SEO
- A fast website – caching, cloudflare, good hosting.
- Text & content.
- Youtube videos
- Social media signals
- Bookmark submissions
- Guest posts on other blogs
- Backlinks!
Social Media
Social media is good if you’re on a budget and can drive some killer traffic when you have a large following. Think Facebook, Tumblr, Youtube. You should always grow your social following from the start. It’s an easy go to traffic source for websites.
Social media can be free or you can spend a little on software and automation etc. It’s definitely worth it to get some software. $99 dollars can save you hundreds of hours of you life and make certain things possible which weren’t before.
We made a guide on Tumblr Traffic over here.
Bookmark Sites
I’m going to start off by saying that you shouldn’t rely on these sites for traffic. Also your results will vary depending on your niche and the quality of your posts/content. However, these sites can also be really powerful at helping content go viral and give you a quick boost in traffic.
Examples of sites:
- Delicious
- Digg
- Stumbleupon
Paid Traffic
This covers any traffic you would pay for on the internet. You could use Facebook, Google, Bing or other ad network. The great thing about paid traffic is the amazing control you have over it. It makes testing so easy. You can drive traffic instantly when you want and you can also target who you want.
Facebook advertising is good for beginners. It’s very easy to get a hold of and understand. It also has lots of targeting options such as the person’s age, gender, interests, location and more.
Important: Split testing is more important with paid traffic than any other traffic source. Make sure you are always testing something.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great way to keep people keeping back to your site. It’s also super easy to do with an autoresponder like Aweber.
I know people who make millions just from their email lists. Seriously, email should not be underestimated.
The hardest part about email marketing is getting the opt ins to begin with. For this you need to use the other traffic sources. Paid traffic is a good way of building an email list quickly.
I will be making some more in depth guides to email marketing in the future since it’s a really important topic.
Affiliate Marketing Tips
If you truly want to be successful with affiliate marketing you need to work hard and be persistent. Below I have put some of the most important tips.
Don’t Give Up
When starting out things will be hard. You don’t know what you’re doing properly and will probably be doubting yourself that you can’t do it. Don’t fall into this trap. The first dollar you make will be the hardest, but once you get it you will have proven to yourself that it is possible.
Work Hard
When getting started so many people are hesitant to get started or procrastinate from working. You need to learn to love the work. Find a sense of pleasure in pushing your comfort zone and working hard when you don’t want to. The harder you work the faster you get results and when you get results everything becomes easier.
Dream Big
If you aim for a small goal you might reach it but you won’t pass it, aim for a huge goal and you may not reach it but you will get much further than if you aimed for the small goal. Thinking small doesn’t get you anywhere. You need to think big, big dreams and massive action. Don’t be satisfied with average.
If you are reading this I hope you have actually taken action. Don’t be the person who thinks they will do it later but never does.
See you on the flip side.
-Smart Income 101