Marketers often say give digital marketing a try, since it’s a gold mine of opportunities. Lensa shares how “digital marketing is a strong focus for many businesses now.” One of the oldest forms of digital marketing is affiliate marketing, whereby you refer someone to an online product and get paid a commission if they buy it as a result of your recommendation. Affiliate marketing is one of our favorites for many reasons:
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· It is not necessary to create your own product or a professional service
· No need to interact with customers or vendors
· It requires little economic investment (although quite a lot of time)
· Allows you to generate recurring income
Starting a conventional business means spending on products, employees, equipment, rent, etc. The only thing you need for affiliate marketing is a website or maybe a social media account. Even if it doesn’t work, all you’ve lost is time and a little money.
For all this, in this post we will give you some keys to guide you in affiliate marketing so that you are clear about how to start.
What’s affiliates marketing
Affiliate marketing consists of promoting the product or service of another company in exchange for a commission for the sales generated. Commissions are usually:
· A percentage of the sale price
· A fixed amount for every new client
· A commission every time the client renews a subscription
How affiliate marketing works
In affiliate marketing, three parties are involved:
· The merchant, the company that wants to sell your product
· The affiliate who wants to promote company products (in this case, you)
· The end user who purchases the product
Sometimes there is usually an additional intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate. This is often known as an affiliate network. It is nothing more than a company that connects merchants and affiliates and provides technology.
How affiliate marketing works is as follows
1. The merchant gives each affiliate a unique link to be able to track who is responsible for a sale.
2. The affiliate adds that link on their blog, social networks, in email campaigns, etc.
3. When an end customer clicks on that link, a small file called a cookie is stored on their device.
4. If the end customer buys the product, the merchant assigns a commission to the respective affiliate.
Each merchant has its own conditions that you must take into account:
· Some cookies can last for several months, while others are deleted when you close the browser
· Some merchants require you to make a minimum amount in order to claim your commissions
· It is usual that there are certain restrictions on how you can advertise the product
5 factors to affiliate marketing success
If you are just starting out, you should keep in mind that you need a large number of visits so that the income begins to be interesting. If your blog barely exceeds a few hundred visits per month, it is possible that you will not enter anything.
Success depends on several factors and all of them are of great importance:
· Number of articles published on your blog
· Quality of the posts as well as their length
· Your ability to disseminate your content on social networks or other media
· Choose well the affiliate programs you want to promote
Choose well the topics you will talk about in your blog
How to get started with affiliate marketing
The steps you must follow to get off to a good start in affiliate marketing are the following:
Step 1 – Choose the platform where you are going to publish
Theoretically, you can promote affiliate products on every platform, but creating an audience and increasing affiliate sales is much easier on a blog or a YouTube channel.
Starting a blog nowadays is relatively easy and cheap. You can sign up for a hosting company like HostGator and install your own WordPress blog.
Once your site is launched, you can create content and Google will eventually send you visitors through its search engine. Affiliate links can be added to your content after that.
Another option is YouTube. Creating and uploading content to YouTube is free, and it is ideal for lots of people. Use keywords in the description to ensure your videos are found by users. In the same description, you can also add your affiliate links.
Currently, the best strategy is to start with a blog and eventually add a YouTube channel to create synergies between the two channels.
Step 2 – Choose the niche or topic you are going to talk about
Let’s face it: if you’re starting a blog today, you’re up against some serious competition. However, there are still topics where it is possible to compete if you commit to doing a good job.
To have the best chance of success, you have to focus on a specific topic.
Choose a theme that focuses on a specific category. For example, the topic of “webinars” is a huge category. Instead of addressing it, try something more specific, like best webinar software.
Keeping your topics narrow can help you build a more focused audience and potentially help you rank better on search engines like Google.
To choose a theme, follow these steps:
· Choose a topic that you have great knowledge and experience about (you should be able to write tens or hundreds of posts about it)
· If there is no topic where you are an expert, choose a topic you would like to learn about or are curious about
· Look for affiliate programs that can fit with it. If you do not find affiliate programs for that topic, maybe you should discard it
· Give a unique approach to your topic to avoid being just another blog about that niche
Many affiliate blogs die due to a lack of consistency. So at the very least, if you’re curious about a topic, you’ll have a much easier time moving on when the going gets tough.
Step 3 – Create high-quality content
If you want your affiliate site to be successful, you need to create a killer content that your affiliate links naturally fit into.
If readers enter your blog and find pure advertising, they will simply leave your website and never return. Google is able to detect when readers like the content of a blog. That is why the only recommendation that we believe is possible is that you create content that you really like, help the reader and find it entertaining.
· You must be able to do a keyword search to know what your potential readers are looking for
· Play different sub-topics on your blog better to increase the possibility of finding those that may be interesting
· Try to understand what type of content is best for each post.
· Unless you are an expert on a topic, try to spend a good part of your time researching and preparing posts.
You can also include visuals like infographics to keep your audience engaged.
Additionally, you should make your landing pages SEO-friendly to rank higher in search results. This would be just a simple summary of what you need to do to start making money with the affiliate marketing. Keep in mind that knowing all the secrets of this profession will take a long time and that the process can be quite frustrating. However, over time you will realize how satisfying it is when things start to work, and the first income arrives.