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l remember my early years in affiliate marketing and I can still recollect the questions I had to search for answers to like what is affiliate marketing, how does affiliate marketing work, how to do affiliate marketing for beginners or how to start affiliate marketing? And today, I want to believe every beginner has one or more of the above questions to ask Google. And if you search Google for affiliate marketing related topics, I would say,"how to start affiliate marketing for beginners" is one common question that has been asked a lot all over the internet. If you ask me, you can't know how to start affiliate marketing if you do not know what affiliate marketing is.
That brings us to the question, what is affiliate marketing? It is simply the act of selling product or service owned by a company or person for a fixed commission or a percentage e.g. Sell Mr. A's health product which costs $80 and get paid $30 for every successful sale, which is by commission. Or earn 35% for every sale you generate, which is by percentage. Affiliate marketing can be done either online or offline. The world is going virtual, same with businesses. So, in today's discussion, we will be talking about how you can work from home with just your smartphone or PC as a beginner, with little or no experience in affiliate marketing. If you ask me, you can learn affiliate marketing online for free without the need to apply for an affiliate marketing course on affiliate marketing online. The good thing is that affiliate marketing is FAR easier today than it used to be. I believe that this is due to the fact that there are hundreds of tutorials now online that are written by affiliate marketing experts who once made those mistakes.
But wait a second, in this line of online money making opportunities, there are steps you must follow as a beginner to guide you to success. Below are my 6 best strategies for effective affiliate marketing as a beginner:
Choose a niche.
Become an expert.
Choose an affiliate program.
Create a marketing channel.
Drive Targeted Traffic.
Educate Your Customers.
Below gives you explanations on how you can generate leads in affiliate marketing as a beginner:
1.) CHOOSE A HIGH PAYING NICHE
Before we move further, we need to know what is niche. Niche is a specialized category or segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service. If you know search engine marketing or SEO, you will understand why I want us to choose high paying niche. To me, this step is the most important part of the whole processes in affiliate marketing and I will tell you why. In a simple word, it has to do with your passion and getting passionate audience. If you can align both, you are good to go. If you miss a step in this process, you'll miss everything. It definitely will be a waste of time. So, when choosing a niche, you don’t just choose what you think you love and enjoy to do, because that reason alone might not work for you. Remember, as an affiliate marketer, your #1 goal is to make money. And you can't make money without a buyer, and you might not generate sale if you don't drive targeted or passionate audience to what you have to offer, either product or service. So, when choosing a niche, you have to consider the following:
Passion – What is passion? This has to do with a strong and barely controllable emotion toward something. In this case, we are talking about niche in connection with affiliate marketing. First you have to do thorough research about the niche you are choosing and be sure it aligns with your passion. I will use myself as an example. In my early time as a blogger, I thought I could cover almost all the niches (Jack of all trade, but master of none). Because passion was not my driving force, I later got burned out and became so lazy. And when I realised my mistakes, I had to trim it down by following my passion and that is what has kept me going all these years.
Passionate Audience – In simple term, it has to do with the type of audience who share same or similar passion with you. But one thing you should also know is that this category of audience do not necessarily need similar passion but might be in need of your indept knowledge about a niche to resolve a problem. This is where you come in with the solution through product or service offer and then you get paid.
2.) BECOME AN EXPERT
Some buyers can be so inquisitive. For example you have passion for cars or autos. You will be expected to be a pro in anything related to autos and auto parts, including its mechanical functions. Some potential customers will want to first know about what you are selling and how it works, before they will make any purchase. In such a case, it will be easier for you as a pro to convince your potential car buyers to listen to your offers and possible advice. You can learn on online yo be a pro in affiliate marketing or pay some marketing experts on Fiverr to help with your internet marketing.
3.) CHOOSE AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM
The wonderful thing about this is that, there are thousands of free affiliate programs online you can choose from. Some of these affiliate marketing programs are geo-targeted and others are worldwide. In this case, first you need to consider your audience. If you are getting audience from all corners of the earth, then go for affiliate programs with products or services that are available to everyone worldwide. Making money with affiliate marketing can also be determined by the affiliate programmes you choose to go with. When choosing an affiliate program, consider the following factors for maximum income:
The Type of Brand(s) - Believe me, some brands are self-advertising. It is easier to promote known and trusted brands than the new or unknown brands e.g. An Apple brand against an unknown or new brand in the marketplace, 99% will definitely go for Apple products and possibly less than 1% will want to try the new or unknown brands. Although in this case, there can be exceptions. If the new or unknown brands offer a more affordable products or services that are of higher quality and awesome features, be sure to have such brands come up the chart in no time. But in this case of affiliate marketing, one can only take that chance if you have a huge fanbase or targeted audience who trust you.
Product Or Service Quality – Talking about Trust, you can only earn it when your product or service has been tested and trusted and also proven to be reliable. This means that the quality of the product or service you are promoting must be high if you want to establish a long term affiliate marketing business, otherwise, your customers won’t come back to buy your product or service again. Remember that one satisfied buyer or customer means ten more customers or buyers.
Customers Support – This is very important as this is what will keep customers. Good customer service is the key. Some affiliate marketing websites lack this important feature. Therefore, the company that you are affiliated with must have great and effective 24/7 support or help to their customers and you as an affiliate. If you check the list of best affiliate programs, they all have this in common, good customer service or support.
Product Or Service Reliability – Earlier we talked about trust and here I want you to understand that both parties, the affiliate and the company, have a role to play. In your own part, you must believe in the product or service you are marketing and be honest about your reviews, otherwise, you will lose it all. On the other hand, the affiliate company your are marketing for must also be reliable in their delivery and product or service quality. You must be ready to answer some disturbing questions that your buyers or customers may have, and also be ready to solve their problems related to the product or service. This is why it is very important to be an expert in your niche and also have indept knowledge of what you are promoting.
Best Affiliate Marketing Tools - To make your online marketing easier and successful, you will need to work with the best marketing tools. Good marketing strategies plus bad marketing tools equals poor results. Therefore, also consider an affiliate program marketing tools before you dive in.
4.) Create A Marketing Channel (YouTube or Blog)
After choosing a niche by understanding your passion and after learning about your niche to become an expert, it is time to create for yourself a platform to enable you showcase your product or service and make money. This platform will be used to share or throw more light on what you proffer, which includes its functions, features, quality, price and also give reasons you want your customers to buy what you are marketing. Don't also forget to mention the solutions the product or service can offer, as your audience want solutions to their problems. There are many ways to go about affiliate marketing. You can make it work like a single edged sword or a double edged sword. Since this post is about how to make money online, I would prefer we go for the double edged sword method. This involves using the method that favours you on both sides e.g. you make money from the product or service you promote and also get paid for your contents. This brings us to the two most popular ways to earn commission sharing contents, Blogging and YouTube. Imagine if those contents are about affiliate products or services and you generate some leads or sales and you also get paid for talking about it. YouTube pays you for your contents and you also earn money as a blogger either through Adsense or Sponsored contents. One wonderful thing about these marketing channels is that it is totally free! Isn't it amazing? Now let's talk about it below:
1.) Youtube Channel – Like I said earlier that it is 100% free to use YouTube for marketing. Some call it Vlogging, which is more like video blogging. Unlike blog, your contents are videos. YouTube is owned by Google, who also owns Gmail. To create a YouTube account, you must open a Gmail account. Now, visit YouTube.com and login with your Gmail account and click on Create Channel to begin your affiliate marketing journey. Just make video reviews of your affiliate products or services and put an affiliate link in the description below the created video pointing your viewers to where they can buy the products. If you are camera shy, you can use the Voice Over, which involves the use of recorded voice and pictures moving in succession. In your video, don't forget to refer your traffic to your description and also ask them to subscribe to your channel for more videos. You get paid for more YouTube subscribers. More subscribers, more views, more commission earned.
2.) Blog – Blog is different from website, as website is a collection of statistic pages with no content updates. But blog is different, as it has to do with contents that are regularly updated. Google and other search engines love blogs for this reason. Blogging is a very effective way to connect with audience. It is one of the best marketing tool for affiliate marketers, as content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies online. It helps connect you to hundreds of search engines. The whole blogging process is very simple, cost effective and very profitable too. Starting a blog is an easy task that you can do in 30 minutes. You can learn how to start a blog either by reading articles online or by watching youtube tutorial videos. Creating a blog can be totally free. It all depends on the Content Management System (CMS) or blogger platform you are using e.g. Blogger or Blogspot, Wordpress, etc. Blogger is owned by Google and it is 100% with some easy to understand features, which are hosted Google. But Wordpress, which is the best blogging platform, is not 100% free. It has more features than Blogspot and it will require paid web hosting. You can search online for cheap Wordpress hosting services and I want to also believe there's also free Wordpress hosting services too.
Basically, what you do in your blog site is to write about your niche, which aligns with your passion and in the process, you will be promoting your affiliate products or services to your blog readers or potential customers. This is called content marketing. Aside making money through affiliate links in your posts or contents, you can also make money on your blog through Sponsored posts, advertisements or Google Adsense. Create an income stream for yourself for free.
5.) DRIVE TARGETED TRAFFIC OR AUDIENCE TO YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE
If you are observant, you will notice that I used the word "Targeted" in the above statement. Your audience or traffic has to be targeted to some specific category of people that have similar passion with you e.g. You are a tech lover and you are promoting technology related products or services but you are targeting or marketing to some audience that are interested in health related products. This definitely will be a waste of time and money. For this reason, it is very imperative that you understand your audience and target the right traffic, if you want to make money. A good understanding of this will enable you sell your product or service only to those who need it.
No matter the marketing channel you are using, you will still need to drive targeted traffic to it. The internet is a world of its own. You can either connect to its users by yourself or allow search engines to connect you with little or no stress. Search engine marketing is the best and most effective way to market your business online, as your product or service will be shown to only customers who search for it. And one interesting thing is that you can do this for free if you have the right knowledge about search engine optimization (SEO). There are two methods to drive traffic to your blog or YouTube channel:
1.) Paid Website Traffic:
In this case, you are buying traffic by advertising your product or service on another platform as a campaign, with the aim of directing buyers to your offer page or landing page. With such marketing practice, it is advisable that you have a "Subscribe" button on your product page to help collect customers emails to help ease your marketing, so that next time you want to reach them with another offer, there will be no need to use a paid service. There are popular paid ads that can drive huge traffic to your product or service page e.g. Facebook ads, Google ads, Bing ads, etc.
2.) Free Website Traffic
This is my favourite method as it converts better. Although it is slower to build large audience but it is easier to target audience. It is more natural and easy to earn loyal customers. Believe me, Google prefers free traffic to paid traffic. One simple way to earn free traffic is to share knowledge.
With blogging, your work is simplified, as it is easier to build your blog visibility online with the help of SEO. This involves building quality dofollow backlinks e.g. submitting your blog to free website directories with high domain authority (DA), ask or answer a question on Quora with a link back to your blog, do social media marketing, etc.
6.) Educate Your Customers
We know what this implies. It involves teaching your customers or readers to throw more light on the product or service your are offering. Not all customers are patient enough to do research about a product on how it works. Everyone wants the easy way. This is one good marketing technique you should apply, to be a teacher to your customers. Therefore, write contents about your product, what it is, how it works and list out how it can solve their problems. Ensure what you say is what it does, and you will earn customers trust. Also, always be ready to answer your customers questions. This will make them come back always.
This is where we draw the curtain. You can use affiliate marketing to create passive income for yourself. I hope this post has helped you to understand affiliate marketing as a beginner. Do have a successful journey to the world of affiliate marketing.
