What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Do I Get Started?
Affiliate marketing is about making money, Tons of money., Money for doing nothing.
At least that’s what a quick Google search would have you believe, but as usual, the truth is a little more complex than that.
Yes, you can make money through affiliate marketing. Good money. And, yes, you can even make money while you sleep.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products.
You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Works?
Affiliate marketing is practically a simple 3-step process:
- You recommend a product or service to your followers.
- Your followers buy the product or service using your affiliate link.
- You get paid a commission for the sales made using your affiliate link.
Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing
Now that you know the basic definition of affiliate marketing and how the process works, so let’s talk about how to get started.
Many would-be affiliate marketers don’t take the time to plan and instead sign up for every affiliate marketing network or affiliate marketing program they can find.
They end up overwhelmed and overloaded.
Don’t be like them.
Take your time and work through these 7 steps if you want to set yourself up for success. Complete the first 4 steps before you even consider promoting a single product.
1. Find Your Niche
Choosing a niche will give focus to your business and help you with content. It’ll also make it easier to create targeted marketing campaigns.
For some people, they find choosing their niche difficult, the hardest part of starting their own business, but it doesn’t have to be that way. To choose your niche, it just takes asking a few questions:
Sit down and think, what am I passionate about? Typically, the things we’re passionate about are things we’re also already knowledgeable about, which makes it much easier to create content.
Will this topic bore me after a year? Is this topic big enough? Is there enough to the topic to create up to 100 blog posts? If not, you may struggle with search engine optimization or have trouble developing authority.
Is the niche oversaturated? Is there room for another affiliate in the niche? Before jumping into an overly popular niche and trying to compete with folks who’ve been around for a while, maybe give another niche a try.
Is there money in this niche? Money isn’t everything, to be sure. If you’re interested in a couple of topics and one is a moneymaker, but one isn’t… choose the moneymaker.
You can check out a niche on an affiliate retailer like ClickBank to see if it’s worth putting time into it.
To do this, go to the ClickBank site and click on Affiliate Marketplace:
Clicking on one of the categories will bring up a page with filters on the left and the different products that you could sell for your niche on the right:
What you’re looking for is products that have a high Gravity score, decent average income per sale, and that would fit in naturally with your content. If you’re finding plenty of products you would be able to write about, you’ve found a profitable niche!
2. Build a Website
Once you’ve found a profitable niche that you’re excited about, you’re ready to build a website and blog. WPBeginner has a great guide to help you choose the best blogging platform that will definitely make this process a lot easier, while Cloud funnels help you build a great website. It combines funnels and websites to create the best solution for your Marketing process, helping you with more leads, higher sales rates.
The primary focus of your site is going to be your blog, but there are several pages that you should consider including (and some that are a flat-out MUST for affiliate marketers):
About: Make it personable and let people get to know you a little.
Contact: This should include all contact information that you want to share with your readers, advertisers, or potential partners.
Disclaimer: If your site is monetized, this is where you share the how of it.
Privacy Policy: Let users know if you collect any information about them and how that information is used.
Terms of Service: This is a legal page limiting your liability in the event of misuse of information or services provided on your site. It also details user responsibilities regarding copyrights and trademarks.
Custom 404 Page: A custom 404 page goes a long way toward improving the user experience.
Advertise: If you plan on selling on-site ads, include a page for advertisers with information about available spots, monthly views, audience demographics, and a contact form.
It’s important to make sure that your policies are clear and upfront to avoid confusion and to build trust with your audience.
3. Create Quality Content
Now that the framework of your page is ready to go, you need to create content.
Some affiliate networks and affiliate programs require you to already have established content, site traffic, and monthly views at a certain level before they’ll accept you as an affiliate, so be sure to read the eligibility requirements for the specific networks and programs you’re considering before you apply.
This doesn’t mean that you have to create 100 blog posts before you can even think about becoming an affiliate marketer, but you should have at least 5 strong posts already on your site with more scheduled.
4. Grow Your Email List
Yes, email is still the #1 communication channel for marketing. And, it still carries a completely wild $38 return for every $1 spent. I advise you to use Cloud Funnels to grow your email list with a built-in powerful autoresponder as a single mail can land you hundreds of dollars in sales
What does this mean to you? That it’s 3800% worth it to invest some time and money into growing your email list.
One of the easiest ways to grow your email list is by adding a popup to your site:
Don’t worry if you’ve never done email marketing before; we’ve all got to start somewhere. I recommend cloud funnels because it's beginners friendly, has no coding required, easy to drag and drop. You don't even need to worry about email marketing if you have never done one before because it has in-built email marketing Autoresponder. It has got me more sales since I started using it.
5. Choose Affiliate Products to Promote
If you’ve done the work to choose a niche, choosing affiliate products to promote should be easy! Choose products that fit your niche and relate to your content.
Where do you get ideas for products to promote? Anywhere, really:
Promote Products you Already Use
What do you already use and love? There’s probably an affiliate program for that.
Make a list of all of the products and services that you use and hit up Google to find their affiliate programs. Then, write reviews and plug in the affiliate links.
6. Join an Affiliate Marketing Network
Affiliate marketing networks are essentially online marketplaces where retailers list their products and affiliates can find products to sell. The marketing network acts as a middleman. As an affiliate, you should never have to pay to sign up for an affiliate marketing network.
Here are a few of the more popular affiliate networks out there, but there are so many more than this:
Shareasale
CJ Affiliate
ClickBank
Jvzoo
Amazon Associates
7. Track Your Results
You can use Cloud funnels to easily track the performance of your affiliate products.
Cloud Funnels has a powerful insightful business analytics feature that helps you monitor how your business is growing and spot trends early. Always know your RoI and keep a track of your target with its analytic.
Tracking your affiliate links in this way can help you understand which products perform better with your audience which can help you provide better products to them in the future.
Even better, you’ll be able to use this knowledge to provide them with better content, increasing their trust and loyalty. This will keep them coming back to you time and again.
8. Invest In Marketing Sales Funnels
An affiliate marketing sales funnel is a series of steps (or a step-by-step process) designed to guide and take your visitors from the awareness stage (top of the funnel) down to the buying stage (bottom of the funnel) of your affiliate offer.
Lean more about sales funnel here
I recommend Cloud Funnels as the best sales funnel out there to build sales funnel that will maximize your sales with powerful features other sales have never thought of.
A sales funnel is a marketing strategy designed to turn cold prospects into long-term customers by funneling them through several stages.
You will need an autoresponder. Create and advertise a page ( Landing Page ). A page with a subscribe form that contains valuable information, content, and reasons why someone would purchase your product and services.
A call to action to entice a prospect to sign up. Request more information. or purchase your product.
You can create your own landing page within your autoresponder or a page on your website or blog. You advertise to your audience, customers, or prospects who may purchase from you.
Once they subscribe they are taken to a landing page, a sales page, or your affiliate link where they can purchase your product.
You also set up an email campaign. Some will purchase immediately, Others just seek more information and may not purchase immediately. Emails will automatically go out to the subscribers and reasons why they should purchase, Email Marketing
You can follow up with more information., or information on other products you may have.
A sales funnel is designed to lead your prospects down a path to purchase your products
More customers. More leads and prospects. More sales.
Conclusion: As a beginner affiliate, if you are using or planning to use sales funnels, then Cloud funnels is fantastic! It has everything within its dashboard. Super simple to use, excellent functionality and you will save a ton of time which as everyone in this industry knows is key.
P.S. If you liked this article, hit the clap button a couple of dozen times :)
