What is Affiliate marketing?
Well,to answer that question in straightforward terms...Affiliate advertising is the way toward acquiring a commission by promoting others' (or company's) items. You discover an item you like, promote it to other people and acquire a piece of the profit for every deal that you make.
It depends on income sharing. In the event that you have an item and need to sell more, you can offer advertisers a monetary incentive through an affiliate program. On the other hand, if you have no item and need to earn cash, at that point you can promote an item that you feel has value and earn a pay from it as an affiliate marketer.
Now you may ask "why choose affiliate marketing for earning money?" It's because...
1)Affiliate marketing is execution-based
The primary advantage of having an affiliate program is that it is entirely execution-based. Because affiliates are only paid a commission once the desired action has taken place, they’re more motivated to drive the conversion you’re looking for. This mitigates any endeavors that drive traffic with little to no value to your company while also ensuring that you get what you pay for.
2)It’s a lucrative and far-reaching industry
Have I mentioned affiliate marketing as a whole is a
billion-dollar industry? In such a wide field, it’s pretty easy to look
for products that you can actually use, belief in and in all honesty
promote to your audience.
That
kind of involved affiliate marketing where you actually have faith in
what you promote has been tested and proven to produce the best results,
especially commission-wise.
3)No expertise required
You don’t need to be an affiliate marketing guru to succeed. Not right away. This is a field where practice makes perfect.
You’re free to choose what campaigns to test and what learning method you want to use to become better at your trade.
If
you’re a blogger, for example, you can choose to start by writing
optimized content to attract more people to your blog. The more visitors
your blog gains, the higher the chances of getting in touch with the
right kind of people.
4)Targeted Traffic
Since
the affiliates are handpicked by you, it can ensure that the traffic
that comes to your site is from individuals that find your product or
service useful. This is because affiliates that resonate with your brand
will most likely have individuals with their area of influence that’ll
find your brand useful.
5)The techniques and strategies you can choose from are limitless
There
are myriad of ways you can market your chosen affiliate programs. You
can promote it on your blog, create online courses and then recommend
the product to your students, use affiliate emails. Social media is also
a good tool that you can explore when marketing.
Also,
you can create a website dedicated to your affiliate product. Then you
can install the best plugins for digital marketing to generate more
commissions.
You’ll find a lot of resources online related to this topic, and more ways are being discovered even as you read this.
6) Targeted traffic
All
traffic is not created equal. If you sell spa products, for example,
you don’t want to waste your advertising budget attracting people who
are looking for car products. By working with affiliates who understand
your industry and are already active in it, you will receive targeted
sales from a warmed up audience. This makes it easier to maintain the
relationship with your new customer going forward.
7)Affiliates can boost your reputation
By partnering with trusted bloggers and reputable websites, you can
further the reputation of your brand and its products. These partners
will champion your products and, in our opinion, will further solidify
consumer confidence in your product or service. While in the research
phase of a purchase, consumers are more likely to trust a 3rd party’s
opinion over content produced directly from the site selling this
product. Consumers also have a certain level of trust in websites they
frequent for product recommendations.
So...those
were just 7 benefits of affiliate marketing. And there's a lot more,but
I guess those were enough to explain why you should go for affiliate
marketing.
Now some tips to become a better affiliate marketer...
1) Concentrate on one niche affiliate business
Too often affiliate marketers use a shotgun approach, getting as many
products as possible to push when they should be focusing on their main
interest and niche-related products. If you want to develop a
successful affiliate marketing site, always stick to one niche. You can
create other sites to promote other niches, but don’t spread yourself
too thin, because that will lead to thin content sites.
2) Learn About the Product You’re Promoting
Never promote a product you have no idea about.
Always do research, see what the product is about, what are its advantages and disadvantages, and so on.
Also, it is important to know why this particular product is better than its competition.
Learn about the market.
By
this, I mean what product features are available, which are not
available in competitor products, how is your product better, and why
customers should buy it over the competition
3) Drive traffic to your affiliate site
You’ve created great content. The next step is to get more people to read it, so they will click on your affiliate links.
Here are three traffic strategies to consider:
A. Paid traffic
This is where you pay for traffic to your site. You can do this using PPC ads.
The advantage of paid traffic is that the moment you start paying, you get traffic.
However, there are some downsides.
First,
running ads will dig into your profits. It’s quite normal for
advertisers to lose money before they make it… if they ever do.
You need to be realistic about how long it takes to optimize a paid traffic campaign.
Secondly, once you stop paying for ads, your traffic will stop.
Generally
speaking, ads are a great traffic strategy if you’re part of a
high-paying affiliate program and can make the numbers work.
But
if you’re completely new to paid marketing and have no marketing budget
(or are working with lower commission programs like Amazon Associates),
then it might not be such a great idea.
B. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the practice of optimizing pages to rank high in search engines like Google.
For as long as you can rank high in the search engines for your target keywords, you’ll get consistent and passive traffic.
On the most basic level, SEO is about:
Understanding what your target customers are searching for;
Creating content around those topics (blog posts, product pages, etc.);
Taking care of the “technical” stuff to push these pages higher in the search engines (which includes link building).
C. Build an email list
Email lists allow you to communicate with your readers anytime.
Use
them to tell fans about new content and keep them coming back to your
site for more. This leads to more affiliate clicks and sales.
