Today, affiliate marketing is becoming more and more popular as people make money in this business.Â
In affiliate marketing as an affiliate, you promote and market one or several products that you like and/or use. Then you get a commission on every purchase you generate.
One of the greatest things about it is affiliate marketing can be your true passive income.
In my previous post about affiliate marketing, I describe what exactly affiliate marketing is, how it works, and WHY IT WORKS. Why people start an affiliate marketing business. Â
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, or if you have some experience, I still recommend reading my previous post How Do People Become Millionaires With Affiliate Marketing?
Today I want to show and guide you step-by-step how you can actually get started right now.
1. Choose a niche
Choosing a niche is choosing a topic you want to write about, as it will help you with creating your content. There are hundreds of different niches that we can divide into:Â Â
- Health & Wellness
- Money & Wealth
- Gaming Niches
- Lifestyle Niches
- Romance Niches
- Hobby Niches
- Travel Niches and so on
To help you decide what you want to write about, answer these simple questions:
- What am I passionate about? Â
Answering this question will help you create content you have some knowledge about, and some expertise and it will help you create good content in the long term.Â
2. Are there any good affiliate programs available in this niche?
Can you find good affiliate programs in this niche? Do research.
3. Is this niche profitable?
I’m pretty sure that if you create great engaging content, you can succeed in any niche. The difference is some affiliate programs in some specific niches offer bigger commissions.
There are also multi-niches, where you talk about different topics. Â
What are the most profitable niches?
In my opinion, nowadays the most profitable niches are software and digital products.
Why?
Simply because software companies have lower overhead costs than physical product companies.
Why?
Because when you create software one time, it can serve many customers. You need to create it once, and it can serve 10, 30, 100, 20000 customers. But when let’s say you sell a t-shirt, every time you have to create a new one to sell, starting from scratch. It doesn’t replicate, while digital products do.
That’s why software and digital products tend to pay much more to the affiliates compared to physical product companies.
Digital product companies can pay a 30%-40% commission and some of them are monthly recurring. That means once you get a customer who signs up under you, you get paid every single month they remain a customer!
And just like that, you get that PASSIVE INCOME and you don’t have to get a new customer every single day.
But you can also go with physical products, there’s no mistake. Just be sure you’ll be able to sell a lot because commissions are going to be smaller than on digital products and services.
2. Consider a product
Once you figure out what content you want to create, you need to choose what product in your niche you want to promote.
There are thousands and thousands of products out there.
But you want to go with a winning product, right?
Some factors to consider when choosing a product for your affiliate marketing business:
- Pay attention to whether or not the product has a good reputation/credibility;
- Whether or not other affiliates are making money promoting that product;
- Whether the affiliate program itself is trustworthy, and people who promote the product are provided with resources, benefits; having their commission received, and so on.
Make sure you do the research and don’t start promoting a product that is new, that hasn’t been proven yet and other affiliates are not making money or having issues with that product.
You can check out a niche on affiliate retailers like ClickBank, AmazonAssociates, Shareasale, and others.
Or you can simply go to the Google search bar and type in your niche+affiliate program.
3. Choose a platform
After you choose a product you want to promote you need to find a platform WHERE you’re going to do that.
There are different platforms where you can promote your affiliate products such as:
- YouTube channel
- Email List
- Landing Page
- Website, etc.
Creating a website takes time with the content that you have to put in.
Is it possible to start affiliate marketing without a website?
Yes.
You can do that by having a landing page where you will add your affiliate links or by selling on your Instagram and so on.
With a landing page, it is going to be faster, and straight to the point in terms of not having to create a website with content.
To have a successful online business you should combine at least 2-3 platforms.
Let’s say you create a landing page (your first platform ) but to make sales you need traffic right? You need people to come to your landing page to make a purchase. Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, or different ads will bring traffic to your first platform. And the third platform you should have is your email list for collecting emails.
BUT!
There’s an important thing here. To be successful in affiliate marketing you need to have a platform where you can collect your affiliate links so you can sell.
So what is the best platform?
In my opinion, it’s websites. When you build a website it’s something that you own and when you get a lot of visitors that lead to sales, it becomes your online business.
Another great thing about creating a website is that it has a chance to rank on Google for SEO, meaning whenever people look up something on Google, your website can pop up. But you cannot do that on social media, because you don’t own it and there are millions of people’s profiles. Â
Do you see the connection?
When some affiliate programs don’t require you to have your website, other ones do.
Even from the perspective of companies who offer affiliate programs, most of them don’t want to have those low-quality affiliates who don’t even have a website, unless you are a social media influencer with a huge audience.
It’s like your business card, your proof that you’re legit, proof that can lead traffic and generate sales. They want to be sure that you won’t be spamming everywhere with your affiliate links because it’s going to be bad for the company’s reputation.
4. Build an actual website
Once you’re ready to create a website, you first, need to buy a domain and hosting. I use Bluehost, where you can start for as little as $3.95 per month (regular price is $7.99) plus you will get a free domain for a whole year.
There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee option in case you don’t like it. But I didn’t have any issues with it so far, and it has a great 24-hour support chat. It is VERY HELPFUL, especially if you’re a beginner.Â
Once you get the domain and hosting, you will need to install WordPress (by the way if you sign up with Bluehost, you can install WordPress with 1-click). Then you will need to choose a theme, and plugins, and create pages. Some of the most important pages that you need to have besides your content are:Â Â
- About page
- Contact page
- Privacy Policy page
- Terms of Use page
- Disclaimer page
5. Creating content
After you create your website, you start creating good-quality content.Â
The good thing about affiliate marketing and having a website is that you create good content one time, adding your affiliate links and it stays there for years generating revenue for you!
You get sales years after you create that content. That’s how it can become your passive income.
6. Join affiliate programs (From Step 2)
After you put up several posts, now you sign up with affiliate programs for the products you picked (or considered in your niche). You will be given a unique affiliate link that you will add to your posts.Â
7. Email List
An email list is the #1 communication channel for marketing. This way you collect your customers’ emails and you can communicate and promote your affiliate deals later on.
There’s a nice email marketing platform that I personally use myself. It’s called GetResponse.
GetResponse is a platform that has so many features. It allows you to:
- 1. Create different forms for your website, through which you will collect the emails.
- 2. You can create newsletters to send to your customers.
- 3. It allows you to create landing pages, which I was talking about before. Â
- 4. You can host webinars.
- 5. You can create an auto funnel.
- 6. You can create workflows, meaning you can automate the whole system!
 You spend some time setting it up: create newsletters, landing pages, and workflows, and the platform sends an email and does everything automatically. Â
It saves so much time and I don’t know any good marketer, blogger, an entrepreneur who doesn’t use an email marketing system.Â
As I said before any business requires investing, but you will gain much more if you do it correctly.
8. Getting Traffic
There are two ways to get traffic. It can be free (organic) or paid. Â
If somebody is looking up something and then your article pops up, and the person clicks on it, that’s how you get organic traffic.
It does take time to get organic traffic and get a higher ranking through SEO, you will need to optimize your whole website, but you’ll be happy when you start getting that organic traffic and get sales.Â
Another way is paid traffic, which means instead of having organic traffic you pay for it using Instagram ads, Facebook ads, Google Adwords, and so on. Â
If you don’t have an audience, you basically pay to show up as a search result on Google.
Both ways are good.
There you have it. I explained how you can get started on an affiliate marketing business in 8 steps. I hope these tips will help you to start!
What do you think about affiliate marketing?
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