How to start making money online as an affiliate marketer

The field of affiliate marketing is probably the fastest way to make money online. After all, billions of ordinary people use the Internet every day. Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to target potential customers regardless of their location in the world.

For this reason, it is not surprising that a large number of people make a considerable amount of money through advertising and affiliate marketing. Many affiliate marketers end up making more money in this field than in their previous job and therefore some of them even quit their normal 9 to 5 job and go into affiliate marketing full time.

A quick overview of affiliate marketing

Now that we have a little idea about affiliate marketing capabilities, let’s dive in and take a look at what it actually includes.

The easiest way to describe affiliate marketing is when you help another company sell their products online and then they pay you a commission for every sale you offer to them.

If you are promoting a product priced at $ 200 and the business pays you 10 percent commission on the sale, you would earn $ 10 for each sale.

However, how are sales related? You can start promoting your seller’s products on your website, which receives specific site visitors in the same niche as the product you are advertising. For example, if you have a website that sells makeup, you would not advertise health insurance, but could promote makeup-related products. Every time one of your website visitors clicks on the affiliate link provided by the seller, you will be paid a commission.

How to choose a good affiliate network

One of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is becoming a member of almost every affiliate network they find. Without a doubt, it is considered a totally incorrect technique. This is for a number of reasons.

First of all, being an affiliate marketer is a very conscientious undertaking. So if you try to work with many affiliate networks at the same time, chances are that none of your initiatives will go as planned, and none of them will end up being very successful as a result.

Second, focusing on just one or a few products will certainly allow you to research them thoroughly before you start promoting them. This method also helps you refine your strategies, make any necessary adjustments, and therefore make your marketing that much more powerful. An effective approach will produce better results and will reward you for your effort and time.

Third, be sure to do some research on the affiliate network, as there are some networks that will only pay you once a month, which might not work for you, or worse, they might not pay you at all. I’m not saying this to discourage you from being an affiliate marketer, rather I want you to be successful in finding the right network and products to market to and earn your commission.

There are affiliate networks that resort to “shaving”, a very common exercise in affiliate marketing where the networks show a number of sales discounted than you mean, so they pay you drastically less in commissions.

Therefore, to avoid being a victim of this action, I suggest that you adhere to well-known and trusted affiliate networks. In any case, the only way you will be successful with a network is if you are comfortable with them and the products you are promoting.

How to start getting sales as an affiliate marketer

To get straight to the point, some affiliate marketers use social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more to do associate marketing, others decide to build their own site. Getting your own site is an exceptional approach to affiliate marketing, because it gives you control over everything.

Therefore, we will focus on affiliate marketing using your own site in the future. First things first, as mentioned above, you will want to find an affiliate network that you are comfortable with. This includes knowing the products you are promoting so that no products are coming that you know nothing about.

Amazon Associate Program

That said, many marketers consider Amazon’s partner marketing program to be one of the best. It is possibly the most trusted network and has a large inventory of products to promote and earn your commissions.

This gives you the ability to promote just about any product on the market, or choose a niche with little competition and you could be earning commissions in less than a week.

Find a good keyword

It is considered to be one of the most difficult parts of marketing. You just can’t blindly choose any keywords and expect to start making sales quickly. One of the reasons many affiliate marketers fail is due to the use of the wrong keyword.

If you are new to affiliate marketing, you will want keywords that have little competition. Start your keyword research by finding long-tail keywords with low search volume, that means a lot less money, but not really with the ones that have a lot of competition.

You can try the top 10 and 20 results and do some studies to find out if you can beat them. Review the keywords that your competition is using to determine if they are using identical keywords that you are looking to target. If they are, and they have a high authority website in that niche, I would recommend that you stay away from that niche and go for a new, less competitive one.

Quality content

This is significant. If you think that you are going to make a lot of money creating articles that do not help visitors in any way, you are very wrong. Although your goal is to make money by referring visitors to your offer, you will have to offer them something important. Simply by posting your hyperlinks along with lame sales pitches like “this is a wonderful solution, buy this product through my personal hyperlink and get a discount”, and so on, you might just be heading for disaster.

If you decide to join the Amazon Associate Program, you can write an informative article on your home page and include your main keywords and a few secondary keywords throughout the article. You can have the buying guide and write a short opinion about each product you sell. Remember that the higher the cost of the product you sell, the higher the commission.

Backlinks

We know that it is probably the most difficult method to achieve, unless you are an SEO guru. Contacting a high authority site and guest posting on these sites is a well known means of getting great backlinks. These great backlinks, along with guest posting on related sites in your niche, will rank you on the first page of search engines, as long as the keyword you choose has very low competition.

However, even when your site doesn’t make it to page one, as long as you’ve guest-posted to multiple sites in your niche, you’ll attract a substantial amount of targeted traffic from these sites. So it’s a great tactic anyway.

Mistakes to avoid

Now that you are aware of the process of becoming a great affiliate marketer with your own website, I want you to also consider some of the most common mistakes new affiliate marketers make.

Not providing any good value

Although we have covered this topic, it is certainly important to remind you that if you try to be extreme with your words to pressure visitors to click on your affiliate link, it is likely that many websites will consider it junk or spam.

Rather, it is suggested to help these people select the correct solution determined by their particular wishes. This method makes these people feel more, which in return will check the products you are marketing based on the value of your item.

Product research

Many online marketers will not do proper product research to gain insight into the product they are promoting but are only concerned with the amount of commission they will earn per sale regardless of whether it will provide value to their visitors. This is an oversight and, at some point, it will make your readers not trust anything you say to them.

Track your links

When you start advertising on Amazon or even some other affiliate network, it will be beneficial to track your affiliate links. It can help you figure out which website is generating the most sales and then you can make your other websites have the same type of settings.

Final thoughts

I would like to say that even though affiliate marketing can be very satisfying, it has a steep learning curve. You may face disappointment numerous times before making a good amount of money online.

That being said, affiliate marketing is suitable simply for people who are likely to have to deal with various failures, but who will come back with a positive attitude and willing to learn from their mistakes.