Affiliate marketing is the process by which you earn a commission by simply promoting a company or individual's product or service.
As an example, you ( as an affiliate) can promote a product from Amazon to a specific
group of people or audience, and every time someone buys the product you earn a commission.
This is at no extra cost to the buyer, meaning that even if the buyer went straight to Amazon and bought without going through your website, they will still buy that product at the same price.
Another example is there could be a company or individual offering an online course in web designing.
And if they have an affiliate program and you are signed up,
every time you guide a person to enroll for the course or they purchase the course you earn a commission.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
The Internet Is Everywhere
Internet is everywhere and almost everyone in the world has got access. Which means you reach practically everyone in your chosen niche.
2. Low Start-Up Cost
The cost of starting affiliate marketing is substantially very low, aside from the little amount you will spend on web hosting, autoresponders, and a few tools.
However, the return on investment (RIO) is very high when it is done right.
Hosting a website with Bluehost is very cheap at about $3.95 per month and you would need an autoresponder for your emails, which you can get from getresponse free for 30 days when you are just starting out.
3. You Are Your Own Boss
Affiliate Marketing allows you to set your own time and schedule without asking or answering to anyone.
4. You Can Work From Home
As an affiliate marketer all you need a computer or laptop with an internet connection. You can work from anywhere without the need to drive through rush hour.
5. Potential Earnings Are High
Commission earnings can be very high especially for digital products which may range from 5% to 75%.
And you can increase the earnings by setting up different niche sites in different niches. Read this article on the top 10 Profitable Niches.
How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
Now that you have established that affiliate marketing is cool, how then do you get started? The steps below are what I took and I recommend you do too.
The process I took above is called the rinse and repeat process and you can repeat the process for different products and services in different niches. Nothing more nothing less :)
If you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, finding your niche and target audience must be done right. Unfortunately, a lot of people flinch when doing this step and that includes me.
Take the following steps when choosing a niche:
1. From the top 10 profitable niches article, pick a topic and write down all the topics that interest you
2. Write down a particular topic that interests you
3. Write down a specific sub-niche within that topic
Let's take for example your interest in the make money online niche, this topic is too wide.
You could choose to create your own information courses programs about money or create ebooks, or even coaching programs.
After selecting the niche you need to know the type of audience for your products or services, these could be students, retirees, or working-class employees who wanted to supplement their income.
You can continue this process, niching down until you're confident with what you have chosen.
However, a word of caution here, if you niche down too much you might find that creation becomes limited or your audience may become too narrow.
How to Start affiliate marketing For Beginners
You don't have to wait for a perfect niche, choose something if it doesn't work, pick another one and try again. Repeat the rinse and repeat process until you find what works.
Finding Products and Services
After establishing your niche you now need to establish the products and services you need to promote.
To promote products from affiliate networks, first, you have to register as an affiliate and in most cases, the affiliate programs are free while are a few that you pay something to join.
Their many affiliate networks you can register with and here are some of them;
Amazon
Clickbank
Digistore24
Cj
Maxbounty
Warrior plus
JVzoo
etc
Clickbank is the largest affiliate network in the world and mostly deals in digital products.
And its also not in certain countries such as Pakistan and Zambia,
if you are from these countries you can register with other affiliate networks.
JVZo and Warrior plus also deal in digital products.
Once you have registered and you have been accepted into the network, you will find all the products and services mentioned in the article on the top 10 profitable niches.
Keyword research is one of the most important areas of your affiliate marketing journey. Without keyword research, it's very difficult to rank in search engines like google, bing, and yahoo. You have to do keyword research for your articles before you write them down first.
You can search on google and use Google suggested keywords or you can invest in a keyword research tool. With time keyword research becomes easy which will advertently help you with coming up with the titles for your content.
Create A Website
You can do affiliate marketing without a website but it's strongly advised that you create your own website.
There are some people who will do affiliate marketing with just a sales page and an autoresponder.
This is not advised because once you stop advertising, the business also stops meaning that the revenue also stops.
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Content Creation
And lastly, you must create content that speaks directly to your audience about your chosen niche.
Content creation should be
Informative
Concise
Enjoyable to read
Should include keyword to increase google rankings
The idea is to info the reader about the product or service you are promoting and giving valuable information about the product or service.
Hopefully, the post above was able to help get things going
for you. If
You have suggestions, questions, or opinions about what
you’ve read,
There are lots of different reasons why you should niche down, these are a few that are most important.
Firstly, niching down is incredibly important for SEO (search engine optimization).
You see, when you write about one topic on your blog Google sees you as an “expert” in that field,
Therefore, it will show your posts higher in search results.
Secondly, its about your readers.
If someone comes to your blog to read a how to lose weight guide and sees that you also have posts about pets or relationships and personal development
or whatever, they will just look at that weight loss guide and leave.
They will probably never come back or think about your blog again as they aren’t interested in the other topics that you have put up.
Why would they come back to a blog where 1 out of 10 articles is something they are not interested in?
On the other hand, if they see that you also have a weight loss guide or keto recipe they will look around your blog to see what other weight loss tips and information you have.
They might even follow you or subscribe to your email list.
That’s the importance of niching down, you also serve your readers time!
When you are writing for a specific group of people they are more likely to come back to your blog and follow you as they know your posts are relevant to them.
Niching down is also helpful for YOU as it makes creating content easier.
When you’re writing about many different topics and don’t have limitations you can feel a bit overwhelmed.
When you have lots of different options it’s hard to decide on which topics you are going to write on next.
Again when choosing your niche it’s important not to go too narrow as you could end up with not having enough things to write about.
That’s why, when you’re choosing your niche, You should ask yourself if it’s
something you won’t run out of ideas to write about.
2. Pick A Blog Name
After you have decided the niche for your blog , you will need a creative name for your blog. Your domain name is your website site address.
You want your blog name to be unique and memorable.
It may be a good idea to have your niche somewhere in your website name, though it’s not totally necessary.
As time goes by, you will become an authority in your niche and you will want to
brand your blog name to your name, so i suggest you either use it now or reserve it
for the future by registering it so that no one else registers your name.
Remember the Top 10 profitable niches i asked you read about, write the topics you’ll read about, some info about yourself like your name, age, a word that best describes you, etc.
After you’ve written some keywords start playing with words to see what you can come up with.
After you’ve come up with a blog name lets go to the next step.
Step 3. Choose a Blogging Platform
The next step is to pick web hosting for your blog. If you are not familiar with what a web hosting service does, here is how it works.
A web host or web hosting service provider is a business that provides the
technologies and services needed for your website to be viewed on the internet.
Websites are hosted or stored on special computers called servers.
You will register your domain name and purchase your web hosting plan at the same time with the same service provider.
Even though that is not necessary it is the easiest thing to do.
There is a huge variety of web hosts available, but since you are starting out
I would highly recommend Bluehost. They are very popular among bloggers and you can get a FREE domain name!
Free Vs Self-Hosted Blog
The only time a free blogging platform is good is when you want to raise some funds with an intention of upgrading to a paid one later,
Don't make your free hosting a permanent one.
Disadvantages of a free blog:
You will not have your own domain name – Instead of having a domain name like http://www.acksonmwape.com
