Are you still trying to get your head around what is affiliate marketing about? Ever wondered how to make money in affiliate marketing? Have you been wanting to diversify and increase your income stream without any cost to you?
If you answered YES to any of the above questions, your search is over. Because in this post I will let you in on what you need to know on how to make money in affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing About?
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to earn money online for a beginner! The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to have your own product or service to make money.
Instead with affiliate marketing, you earn commissions by promoting someone else’s merchandise. And the best thing is that it doesn’t cost you anything to join an affiliate program.
To become an affiliate marketer, you simply join an affiliate program with a company that sells niche products or services that resonate with you. You review or promote these products or services on your website or via social media. If someone purchases a product through your link, you earn a commission for that sale.
There are an enormous number of affiliate programs that have products that the owner would like people to promote. Two of the most popular affiliate programs are Amazon and ClickBank. So, no matter what you’re interested in, there are millions of products that you can recommend or promote on your website.
What Is Affiliate Marketing And Does It Work?
In any affiliate arrangement there are 3 major parties.
- The affiliate company or network.
This is the merchant, company or network that has products or services that they want to sell. They seek other people (affiliates) to help them sell their merchandise. In exchange the affiliate earns a commission.
- The affiliate or affiliate marketer.
This is the person or advertiser who reviews, promotes or recommends the product or service.
- The customer.
This is the person who buys a product or service from the affiliate company or network due to the affiliate’s recommendation.
When everything works well, all three parties are winners. The affiliate company wins because it makes a sale. The affiliate marketer wins because he/she earns a commission. And the customer wins because he/she ends up with a product or service that resolves a pain point.
How To Make Money In Affiliate Marketing?
In order to become an affiliate marketer and make money, you first need to find an affiliate company that sells the kinds of goods that resonate with you. Chose a company that sells goods that you have tried yourself, or products that have a good reputation.
When you join an affiliate company/network, you get an affiliate link that you use to promote their merchandise. You could be an affiliate with a single company such as Wealthy Affiliate or Bluehost and just promote their products.
Or you can join an affiliate network and promote products and services from many different businesses. Examples of affiliate networks include Amazon, ClickBank, eBay, ShareASale, or Shopify.
When you join as an affiliate of a network you can promote products from hundreds of different businesses. Affiliate networks give you a massive choice of millions of commodities that you could recommend. You can join for free and start recommending products immediately!
As an affiliate, you can use various mediums to make your recommendations such as your website, social media platform like Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, or via emails to your contacts on your list.
Your audience then learns about a product, or a service that may be useful to them from your reviews, recommendations or promotions from your website.
It is imperative that you promote items that have a good reputation and are what your customer needs or wants. Otherwise you will be wasting your time with items that are of no use to your audience. If on the other hand the items you recommend are dodgy, then you will lose your audience.
When your audience believes and trusts your recommendations, they will buy your product. If they use your affiliate link to make a purchase, you get paid a commission.
You can build your own free website in the box below.
Why Customers Are Important!
Of the 3 parties involved in affiliate marketing, the most import person is the customer. The customer is the one that keeps your business going! This is because the customer is the one that drives the sales that earn you a commission. Without the customer you get zilch.
But before a person becomes a customer, he/she needs to trust the person that is providing the review or recommendation. So, as an affiliate marketer it is important for you to know your target audience, and what their pain points are.
Identify what it is that keeps your audience awake at night. If you have experience with a product, tell your audience how it helped you and how it can help them overcome their problems. Only recommend products or services that you are familiar with, or that have a good reputation.
If through your recommendation they find a commodity that addresses their pain points, then your audience will trust you. Trust leads to sales. If customers are happy with their purchase, they will become loyal to you. They will be more willing to buy from you at another time.
Another way to gain people’s trust is by answering their questions. When people are interested in making a purchase they ask questions about the things that concern them. If you can answer their questions, this may sway them to go ahead and purchase that item from you rather than someone else.
Affiliate Marketing For Passive Income
For many people, affiliate marketing is a great way to earn some extra income without any cost. This is because they don’t need to own, or pay for the products or services that they review or promote.
Someone else (the merchant), designs, develops, guarantees and delivers the commodities at their own expense. The owner of the product or service is also responsible for all the costs involved from the manufacturing, through to delivery.
Affiliate marketing is a business, without the associated costs. So, if you love to blog or review products, and have your own website you can recommend products that may be helpful to your audience.
Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn a passive income. Through your website you can make money while you sleep. How good is that!!
Having said that, affiliate marketing isn’t a get rich quick scheme! Just like any business, affiliate marketing will require an investment on your behalf.
You will need to put in the time and effort to attract enough traffic to your website to generate an income. Doing this will work and patience and if you aren’t interested in that, then this website isn’t for you.
But before anyone will buy from you, you first need to gain their TRUST! So, make sure to promote commodities that meet the needs, or addresses the pain points of your audience.
“How to” videos can help you to establish yourself as an expert or as an authority that your audience can trust. Provide your audience with enough information to make a qualified decision about the usefulness of the product. Always be honest in your review and confident in the quality of the product, otherwise it will back-fire on you.
Click here to learn how to make passive income!
Affiliate Marketing In Amazon
Most people when they first start affiliate marketing become an Amazon Associate. Affiliate marketing in amazon is great for newbies. This is because Amazon is very well known worldwide.
Amazon has millions of products that are suitable for many different niche markets. So, no matter if your passion is fashion, gardening, beauty, technology, or sports, Amazon will have products that will be suitable for you to recommend.
The best advice I can give you is to get to know the product first hand. This way you can give an honest review of the product. Being honest is vital with affiliate marketing in Amazon. Your audience then knows that you won’t recommend products that are dodgy, or that don’t work.
Honest reviews leads to TRUST. Trust helps to build a good, lasting relationship with your audience. When they trust you, they will continue to follow you and your recommendations.
A great way to show your audience that you really do use the product that you are reviewing is to make a video. You can then show them how it works, or give them some tips that you have discovered that will make using the product even better.
Videos are an easy way to build a relationship with your audience. This is because you are talking right to them and they can see the how product works. Be honest and share both the good points as well as the bad points. Cover any tips, or tricks, that will simplify how to the use of the product.
If your audience then purchases a product using your Amazon link, you get paid a commission. With affiliate marketing in Amazon you don’t have to worry about payments, inventory, storing goods, shipping or warranties, Amazon or the merchant takes care of that.
The Pros and Cons In Affiliate Marketing
As with any business, affiliate marketing has its pros and cons. As previously stated, affiliate marketing isn’t a get rick quick scheme. Success in affiliate marketing is dependent on many factors.
It requires focus, hard work and time and effort to build up an audience and gain their trust in you and therefore the products that you recommend.
Not all affiliate programs are created equally. For example, the amount that you earn (commission percentage), when one of your audience purchases a product will vary depending on the affiliate company that you are with. For example, you will make less commission selling a product with Amazon than through ClickBank.
That means that you need to sell many more goods with Amazon to make the same commission. But on the other side of the coin, products through Amazon are generally better known and sell quicker than those through ClickBank.
Commission percentages also vary depending on the types of products or services you’re promoting. For example, you will earn less commission selling physical products then you will selling online courses.
Other factors will be solely dependent on you and the size of your audience. If you are new to affiliate marketing or to blogging, your audience will be small to start with. Therefore, the likelihood of sales in the early days will be minimal.
Another factor is dependent on how successful you are at promoting products or services to your audience. If you don’t have the trust of your audience, selling them anything will be very difficult if not impossible.
If on the other hand, you have a popular blog with a fair amount of traffic, then your online affiliate marketing business will be more likely to flourish.
Get Started In Affiliate Marketing For Free
If you are interested in learning how to make money in affiliate marketing, then I suggest you undertake a FREE affiliate marketing training course. You can learn what is affiliate marketing about and all the best techniques through Wealthy Affiliate.
Wealthy Affiliate has been around since 2005 and has over 1,400,000 members. It has helped hundreds of thousands of people find profitable niches to start up their own affiliate marketing online business.
Before joining Wealthy Affiliate, I tried to do it on my own by chasing down any free affiliate training posts on the internet. I was totally lost and confused as there were many missed steps. I then joined some online courses but found that they kept on asking for more money by up selling.
The best thing I did was to join Wealthy Affiliate as a free Starter member. As a starter member you have access to some free training to get you started. The training gave my online business a solid foundation. I had several moments where everything dropped into place while going through the training. Because I finally understood what I was doing wrong when doing it on my own.
Another advantage to being a Starter member with Wealthy Affiliate is that you get 2 free websites with hosting that you can keep for as long as you like. It’s so easy to create a free website with Wealthy Affiliate. The whole process takes less than 30 seconds.
Watch the video below to learn how! Click here if you want to build your free website and follow along with the video.
Affiliate Marketing Training For FREE
The best thing about Wealthy Affiliate is that it’s free to join! The training at Wealthy Affiliate is excellent for beginners as well as intermediate marketers. There are two training streams. The first course is the Online Entrepreneur Certification.
It consists of 5 levels as you can see from the photo below.
As a free Wealthy Affiliate Starter member, you get access to the ten lessons that make up Level 1. (See the photo below for lesson content). The Online Entrepreneur Certification takes you through the steps of creating an online business in any niche that appeals to you.
The second course offered is Affiliate Bootcamp. This consists of 7 phases as can be seen in the photo below.
As a starter member you get free access to the 10 lessons that make up Phase 1 of the Affiliate Bootcamp training course. (See the photo below for lesson content.)
This training course takes you through the steps of becoming an affiliate marketer for Wealthy Affiliate. This course walks you through the steps of creating a successful online business that generates revenue.
Both courses are great as they provide a solid foundation on how to start an online business. You can choose to do one course or both courses. By the time you are finished with either course, you will have your foundation for a long term and very lucrative online business!
What Is Great About Wealthy Affiliate?
There are many things about Wealthy Affiliate that I think are great especially for the beginner. Read my Wealthy Affiliate review here.
First of all, most of their training content is newbie-friendly and covers the best practices to follow. The lessons are set out in an easy to understand step-by-step format. After each lesson there are tasks to complete which help to reinforce the training
Doing the free lessons, and keyword research tools enabled me to realize my potential as an online business entrepreneur. They also allowed me to feel confident in experimenting with building my business.
On top of this there are weekly webinars where you can interact with the leader and ask questions. Many Wealthy Affiliate members have developed hundreds of tutorials that cover all manner of topics.
One of the best aspects of Wealthy Affiliate is that everything is all in one place. This means that you don’t have to spend hours searching the internet for the tools or training that you require. You can go over to lessons at your own pace and as many times as you like.
If you require help on any topic, you can ask the helpful community. Help is available via 24/7 in 4 different ways. You can use LiveChat, ask the community, direct message one of the community members, or if it’s a technical issue you can ask technical support.
The one downside is that all this training can be overwhelming for newbies. So, my advice to newbies is to complete the official training first. Once you have finished that then have a look to see what else is available. Otherwise you will be like a rabbit in the headlights and not know where to turn.
Summing Up
Affiliate marketing is a great way to increase your income stream. However, it’s not a get rich quick scheme. As with any business, to be successful you need to put in the time, work and effort.
Successful affiliate marketers are those that can attract traffic to their website. One of the best ways to do this is by building trust with your audience. And the greatest way to build trust is by helping your audience solve a problem, or by helping them to achieve their goals.
The best way for newbies to succeed in affiliate marketing is by undertaking a comprehensive course that covers everything you need to know. My recommendation is to join Wealthy Affiliate as a Starter member. It’s free to join!
As a member you get 2 free websites with hosting and some free training which will help you to create your affiliate business. You then can make up your own mind whether or not you want to benefit from the vast wealth of training and phenomenal tools that are available to Premium members.
The choice is yours!
Do you know what is affiliate marketing about?
What strategies have you used to find a profitable niche in affiliate marketing?
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