What does affiliate marketing means, this a question for many people that want to start an online business. In this article, we will briefly present what is affiliate marketing, especially for beginners who want to have an online business or just an extra income. Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s or company’s products and when someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you’re compensated with a commission. The topic of affiliate marketing has become extremely popular in recent years.
So if you’re a beginner to affiliate marketing and want to learn how to tap into this billion-dollar industry, you are in the right place.
Is affiliate marketing for beginners?
Now at the beginning, you are wondering who this type of online business is for. As we mentioned earlier it is for those people who want an online business or for those who just want additional income, no matter what experience you have. Online affiliate marketing is a huge market and there is room for everyone regardless of knowledge, language, or location, but of course, success will depend on each individual’s knowledge. One thing is certain, success will not come easily overnight, it takes work and perseverance.
What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?
Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s or companies products.
You receive a commission when a customer purchases something via your affiliate link. In order for the affiliate company to attribute sales to the right people, the merchant usually uses a unique link. And when a visitor from your blog page, Youtube channel, or somewhere else hits that link, a cookie is saved on their computer.
An affiliate cookie primarily serves two purposes.
First, it helps the merchant attribute the sale back to the right person.
Additionally, since cookies typically have an expiration date, individuals are not required to buy the item right away after visiting your link.
Let’s say a visitor comes to your website post and clicks on one of your affiliate links. This takes them to a product page on the merchant’s website.
They haven’t decided if they want to buy at that moment or if they have to go pick up children from school, so when they come back to the merchant website in their web browser they find the product again and then purchase it.
How to find your niche.
When you’re choosing a niche, remember you’re choosing a niche, not an industry. For that reason, we recommend choosing a topic that focuses on a specific category. For example, rather than going after the topic of “food”, try starting with something a bit more specific, like “grilling food”
Keeping your topics tight can help you build a more focused audience and rank higher in search engines. If you’re going to be the one, creating the content choose something that you’re interested in. The reason being I see so many affiliate sites die due to lack of consistency and on top of that, they spread false and inaccurate information. Even if you’re, not an expert in the field documenting your knowledge, can make great content and build an audience. You need to create high-quality content where your affiliate links will fit.
If you’re outsourcing the content, then I recommend looking for writers that are experts in the niche.
This will help you create better-quality work, which can lead to more traffic-engaged visitors and hopefully, more affiliate sales. And emphasize the importance of content quality. The last thing you’ll need is affiliate programs to join.
When it comes to choosing affiliate programs, there are generally three examples:
And all come with their own share of pros and cons.
The first is high-paying low-volume, affiliate programs.
The obvious pro is that they’ll pay you more for each sale, ranging anywhere from $ 50 to $ 500 to thousands of dollars per referral. The cons that come with these programs. That there’s generally more competition, meaning it’ll be tough for beginners to make a meaningful amount of money since they’ll be competing with more skilled digital marketers, with a big budget.
The second example is low-paying high-volume, affiliate programs.
The positive thing about these programs is that there are often lots of products to choose from and you’ll often get commissions on the entire value of the purchase, rather than just the product you recommended.
As for cons, unless you’re actually generating a ton of traffic and affiliate sales, it’ll be tough to generate a decent income.
There are tons of affiliate programs you can choose from, and the programs you join will likely come down to your niche and level of expertise. If you’re targeting consumers you’ll likely go with the second model of low commissions and higher sales volume.
Usually, the best way to find affiliate programs is to just search for them on Google.
The third one is high-volume, high-paying affiliate programs.
We will not talk about this third category of affiliate programs too much, but it is important to be aware that it exists. This is recommended only to those with experience because these will always be super-competitive and over-saturated with experienced marketers.
We’re talking about things like credit cards, loans, and gambling-related offers.
How much do affiliate marketers make?
The simple answer to that is that there is no limit.
Building your brand, it’s taken a lot of hard work and time, but the reality it is worth it.
First, you’ll need a website, Facebook page, YouTube channel, or something where you can use affiliate links.
Starting a blog is easier and cheaper than ever. There’re articles on our website with more details about what means affiliate marketing and how to create a website and it’ll cost anywhere from a dollar to ten dollars per month.
You’re then free to add your links to your content, get traffic to your website, and when someone purchases through your link then you get the commission.
We’ve got the fundamentals of affiliate marketing, let’s get into a basic formula to actually make money from your affiliate site, and the formula looks something like this:
Traffic clicks, conversions, = revenue.
It won’t be possible to receive any form of commission if any of these are omitted.
Getting traffic to your affiliate site.
And there are many ways to get traffic, but let’s talk about the three most popular ways:
The first is to buy ads through platforms like Google, Bing, and Facebook.
Paid traffic is great since it brings visitors to your site as soon as you start paying, but there are two major drawbacks:
1- Paid ads will take a lot of your profits, in fact, it’s quite normal for advertisers to lose money before they make it.
This can work well if you’re part of a high-paying affiliate program. For lower-commission programs wouldn’t recommend trying to run ads.
2- When you stop paying for ads your traffic comes to a halt, using ads to drive relevant traffic is good, but if you’re a beginner, we wouldn’t recommend trying it right away.
The risk will usually be too high for the reward.
The next traffic source is organic social traffic.
With most social networks, you need followers to actually get a decent amount of traffic.
Since we’re talking about building a sustainable affiliate business, we wouldn’t recommend relying on social as a main source of traffic.
The final traffic source is SEO.
Which stands for search engine optimization.
SEO is the practice of optimizing pages to rank high in search engines like Google. Best of all, it has the complete opposite effect of paid ads and social traffic.
Free consistent and passive traffic that doesn’t fade over time. What matters most for SEO is your content and how optimized is the website.
With affiliate marketing, in old days 2 conversions need to take place in order for you to make money. The first is the click you’re in control and responsible for this action, And the second conversion is the visitor actually purchasing a product on the affiliate partner’s site.
In this case, the merchant controls the checkout and should be committed to high conversion rates.
Conclusion
This is what we set out to present to you on this website, a business as an affiliate marketing and the necessary resources, such as what products to promote, which software, and tools to start this type of online business that we hope will lead you to independence finance.
And the final piece of advice that we have is to actually go and experiment.
Don’t expect perfection or a life-changing income that happens overnight. It doesn’t happen that way, otherwise, we’d all be billionaires. Focus on making that first affiliate sale, and as your site grows, set new reachable goals.
And don’t forget, if you need certain information that isn’t clear to you or you can’t find it on our website, leave a comment or send an email and someone from the Online Storage Kit team will respond as soon as possible.
