If you don’t have any products or services to sell, you can still earn money by promoting others’ products and services. Welcome to the world of affiliate marketing! It is now a billion-dollar industry. In affiliate marketing, you earn a commission when someone buys a product or service using your link. Once you start promoting a lot of products or services, the commission keeps on increasing.
Many people today are taking affiliate marketing as a full-time job; whereas others are considering it as a second source of income. You can also start earning today by learning how affiliate marketing works. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, most affiliate marketers get about $10K a year. But one in six people make $50K a year. Matt Giovanisci, for example, earned about $150K in 2021 through his site Swim University. If you work hard and allow some time for your site to grow, then you can earn a lot through affiliate marketing; that is, earn commission through sales, leads, free-trial users, website clicks, or even app downloads.
Earning Through Affiliate Marketing
Reasons For Doing Affiliate Marketing
If you want to start a business, then it involves a lot of money and risk. With affiliate marketing, there is very little risk and cost. So, you have nothing to lose. You can easily grow your income by promoting the products of more companies. Most of the affiliate programs are free to join. So, you can start earning without investing any money.
How Does It Work?
You will get a unique link when you join an affiliate program. This link will contain your tracking ID which will help the merchants to track you for referred customers. When someone clicks on your link, they will have a cookie stored on the device. The cookie has an expiry date, so even if the person pays later, you still get your commission.
Different Kinds Of Affiliate Marketing
By knowing the different types of affiliate marketing, you can learn the various ways you can earn money online. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a form of unattached affiliate marketing. Not much homework is needed to do this type of marketing, so it’s a popular choice. If you have an audience through YouTube, Blogging, or TikTok, you can promote different products or services to these audiences. This is called Related Affiliate Marketing as the product or service must be relatable to your audiences. Involved affiliate marketing is recommending a brand that you have used or believe in. In this case, the marketer goes for free trials and then writes reviews about them.
Get Started
Affiliate marketing is nothing complicated. You just need to know the process. Here are the steps you should follow:
✔ 1. Select Your Category
Choose the category of products you want to promote. Instead of going for random products, it is better to narrow down your list so that you can stay focused. Try to choose something that you are passionate about. As you need to create a lot of content you should have interest in the products you are promoting.
✔ 2. Choose A Platform
You can promote the products on different platforms like websites, YouTube, Newsletters, Social Media, and others. Choose a platform that you are comfortable in. Also, you need to consider your audience’s preference. For example, if you are promoting a dance academy, then audiences will prefer YouTube videos rather than written content. However, it is best to build a website and try to rank your site higher through SEO so that you can generate passive traffic all the time and keep your commissions coming in. When you start affiliate marketing, you should report to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) so that they know that your income is coming from affiliation.
✔ 3. Choose Affiliate Programs
You can choose from three types of affiliate programs: low-volume, high-paying; high-volume, low-paying; or high-volume, high-paying. The high-volume affiliate programs are for the mass audience, like Credit Cards, or Amazon Gift Card. The low-volume products are for specific groups of audiences, like businesses selling software-related products. You can earn as low as 5% of the sale or as high as 50% of the sale. Some affiliate programs give a flat rate for any kind of sale.
✔ 4. Create High-Quality Content
You should create great content and try to fit the links naturally. You should go the extra mile to create good content, like buying the product you are reviewing and testing it.
✔ 5. Drive Traffic To Your Website
You need to use some good strategies to drive traffic to your site. You can get paid traffic using pay-per-click (PPC) ads, but if you are new to affiliate marketing then this might not be your best option. You can try SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to rank your page higher in Google and other search engines to get more traffic. For SEO you need to understand your target audiences, create good content, and make sure that Google can crawl and index your website. Building an email list and sending emails can also boost your website traffic. You can send emails to your audiences talking about the new offer. Through email, you can ask the readers to sign up and offer something in return, like a free online course.
✔ 6. Get Clicks
Your ultimate goal is to get people to click on your link so that you get a commission. But it’s not easy to get clicks unless you follow some strategies. The link placement is very important. Don’t always place them at the bottom of the page because some people might not scroll down the page. You must place the links naturally so that they don’t look spammy. Don’t just write texts; use boxes, tables, and buttons to get the readers’ attention.
✔ 7. Get Sales
After getting the clicks, you should try to convert them to sales. For this you need to choose affiliate programs that have higher rates of conversion. Many affiliate marketers reveal their income reports; you can have an idea from these reports about the affiliate programs that are generating more income for them.
Affiliate Marketing Tools
You must use some tools for affiliate marketing so that your job is done faster and more comfortably. Here are some tools you can use:
Ahrefs — SEO tool for keyword research, competitor research, content ideas, website auditing, and others.
Google Analytics — Provides feedback about your affiliate website.
Rank Math — Helps in on-page SEO.
Google Search Console — Fixes technical errors on the website.
Thirsty Affiliates — Keep track of the affiliate links so that you know which links are getting more clicks.
Examples Of Affiliate Marketing Programs
To start affiliate marketing, you should learn about the companies that conduct these programs. Shopify’s Affiliate Program is a free affiliate marketing program. You just need to sign up, get approved, and start sharing the unique link with your audiences. Whenever a person signs up using your link, you earn a commission. Amazon’s affiliate marketing program offers products and services in various categories and you can earn referral money by recommending their products or services to audiences. Some other such programs include Impact, ShareASale, and others.
Conclusion
With affiliate marketing, you shouldn’t dream of becoming rich overnight. You must have patient and use the right strategies to build up your website. With time you will be generating a handsome amount of money.
