Affiliate marketing for beginners

There are plenty of interesting ways to earn money in the online world. However, not all of them are easy to manage or are as flexible and rewarding as affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a popular way to earn money for many website owners. There are many reasons why affiliate marketing has gained popularity and why it brings great value to both sellers and affiliate partners. In this blog post, we’re going to have a look at what it is, how it works and how you can start earning money from the comfort of your home.

First Steps In Affiliate Marketing

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that anyone can do it. However, to get started, you’ll need plenty of information about what it entails. Let’s get started.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

The term affiliate marketing is used often these days, however, you might have found yourself wondering what affiliate marketing actually is. To put it simply, affiliate marketing is a type of referral arrangement where an online retailer pays you a commission for helping them sell their products through your website or blog.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketing is simple at its core. It works via referral links, which can be placed on your website. This means you have to pick out a company and its products that are relevant to your website’s content, as well as your audience. There are multiple ways to promote products. You can create in-depth reviews of particular products, recommendation lists, send out newsletters, place banners on your website or come up with new unique ways to promote these products.

How To Earn Money With Affiliate Marketing

If you promote your chosen products well, your website visitors should be interested in purchasing them. Once on your website, they can click on your direct affiliate link and buy the product that they are interested in. After that, the original seller will pay you a commission for your sale. The commission rates can vary but they are usually between 5% – 30% of the product price.

How To Prepare For Affiliate Marketing Business

Preparation might be a lengthy process but luckily it is not as complicated as you might think. There are a few key areas that you need to pay attention to, and we’re going to go through each of them so you can get a better idea of what to do.

Build Your Audience

If you don’t have an established audience that’s visiting your website, you won’t be able to recommend products to anyone. That’s why the key to success in affiliate marketing is to build a loyal fanbase that’s interested in the content you put out. There is no exact recipe for what works and what doesn’t — however, in certain cases, there are essential tips that work for everyone.

So how do you get people to visit your website? There are multiple ways to do this, and the easiest one is to start creating content that will attract people to your website. Your content gets rated by search engines and people can find it easily if you use the right keywords. If you’re good at it, your website content might make it to the top of the search results.

In addition to SEO, social media is one of the most useful tools you can use to gain popularity and traction for your content. The goal is to get people to share your content between themselves and raise your number of subscribers or followers. Once they’re subscribed to you, they’ll be notified of any new content you post, without having to regularly visit your website.

Learn To Create Websites

Creating a website on your own is not as hard as you might think. There are many tools available online which enable you to create websites with no coding knowledge. However, if you have no previous web design experience, you might want to have a look at some key aspects of user interface and user experience design. There is nothing more frustrating to viewers than a website that isn’t intuitive or aesthetically pleasing. There is no need to create a superbrand if you’re just starting out, but your website should have its own identity so people can remember it easily.

The next step is to actually create the website. As mentioned above, there are multiple ways to create your website without coding or added cost. You can use various tools like WordPress or plenty of other popular website builders that are easy to find via a simple Google search. Many of them are free to use, and only require you to pay for hosting your website.

WordPress is a popular platform where you can build your website from scratch. You don’t have to know any programming languages, but it certainly does help. In case you don’t want to spend a lot of time designing your site, you can download premade WordPress templates. Many of them are free to use, but you also have the option of purchasing a template if you want to make sure everything will function as you want it to.

Most other website builders, such as Wix.com, are also a great solution. They usually don’t require any knowledge of coding and use a drag and drop editor. This means that you can build your website by putting premade individual elements together simply by clicking and dragging the elements into your desired design.

Learn Content Marketing

If you don’t know what content marketing is, it’s basically consistently creating and distributing valuable content to an audience in order to gain profit through marketing. There are a lot of guides, articles, books, and courses online that can teach you exactly what you need to do to create great content.

Build Passion For The Niche You Work In

If you don’t have a passion for your chosen topic, your content might be too bland and people are definitely going to notice. Make sure you pick a topic that piques your interest. Pick something you love to do or something you already know a lot about. You can create relevant content, raise some great questions to the audience and simply bring a new perspective to something you love.

Choose Your Marketing Channels

There are many marketing channels to choose from, some more popular than others. As the industry is constantly evolving, there are always new trends that you can take advantage of.

In the case of affiliate marketing, content marketing should be the number one priority. The next steps are always dependent on the kind of content you create and who your audience is. Ask yourself important questions such as: “Is my audience present on social media?” or “Does my audience prefer video content?” It’s possible that your audience will be in a certain age group that doesn’t utilize social media, or their interests will show you that they prefer different communication channels. That’s why it’s important to ask these kinds of questions and research where you can best reach your target audience.

Affiliate Marketing Tips

Make your audience loyal

By researching, testing, and planning you’ll be able to see what works and what doesn’t. However, you have to be prepared that unpredictable things can happen that can make you lose subscribers and page views. That’s why it’s important to engage with your audience consistently. When your audience will see that you care about them and the content you provide, audience loyalty will grow.

Track your links

This is surprisingly an often overlooked step. It is essential to know where your sales come from. If you don’t know where they come from, you cannot track what works and what doesn’t.

Retargeting

Often it takes a few tries to turn a visitor into a paying customer. Retargeting is a technique that enables you to follow up with a particular website visitor via an email reminder, a pop-up window or through live chat. On average, it takes 7 tries to turn a website visitor into a paying customer. It’s important to keep that in mind and to keep trying instead of giving up on your future customers.

Show your personality

Being genuine with your audience will make you seem more trustworthy, and will bring your audience closer to you. As humans, we love to connect with others, so don’t be shy around your audience.

Video content

Video content has gained popularity in the past few years. As of today, many people enjoy watching videos about products rather than reading reviews because they get to see the products being used in “real-time” rather than in marketing photos.

Show real-world use of products

Writing about products is effective, especially when you go into great detail. However, showing the product’s real-world use is usually a more effective strategy that can help convince your audience. Take photos, make videos and get creative in showcasing your products.

Focus on solving problems

People buy things so that they can make their lives easier or more enjoyable. You can relate to your audience by mentioning problems that they might be experiencing, and showcase how those problems can be solved by a product you’re selling. In this manner, you’ll be creating a bigger demand for your product.

Tell stories

Stories are a great way to catch someone’s interest. When you’re planning your next content release, think about how you can tell a story to connect with your audience on a deeper level.

Answer questions directly

Give your audience the option to contact you directly so they’re able to ask you questions about the products you’re promoting. It’s very likely that whenever you’re promoting products, you won’t be able to cover everything about them in detail. Customers are often curious, and by answering their questions you can convince them to buy the products you’re marketing by providing them with relevant information.

Alternatives

Sometimes you can do everything possible to promote a product, but people just won’t be interested. That’s why it’s great to promote alternative products. If you give people more options to choose from, you increase your chances of making a sale.

Special deals and scarcity

Create special deals like discounts, combo packages, and limited-time offers to increase your sales. Scarcity is a great tactic because it forces a consumer to either buy quickly or miss out on the product altogether.

Recap

Hopefully, you now have a good idea of what affiliate marketing is, and how you can take advantage of this marketing technique. Affiliate marketing allows you to get creative with what you’re passionate about and earn money while you’re doing it. So what about you? Are you ready to dive into the world of affiliate marketing? If yes, keep this guide in your bookmarks in case you want to have a look at it again.