This is a detailed articled on Affiliate Marketing for Beginners and how you can get started with affiliate marketing journey.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
In Affiliate Marketing, there are three parties involved:
- Merchant or an Affiliate network- Amazon, Walmart, Ebay
- Affiliates- People like you or me who will promote their products
- Customers- Who will buy these products
As an affiliate you will promote the products of these Merchants. Whenever, someone buys a product based on your suggestions or recommendations using your link, you will make money from that.
In this article, I’ll explain step-by-step, how you can sign up these affiliate networks, how to generate affiliate links, how to promote your affiliate links to thousands of potential buyers for free and then make money from it.
Why Should You Join Affiliate Marketing
All popular companies in the world like Amazon, Uber, Ebay, Walmart use affiliate marketing to drive traffic or potential customer to their website. At the same time it saves them a lot of advertising cost.
But, as a beginner, you need to understand how this affiliate marketing will help you and what is in it for you?
- The first benefit of affiliate marketing is passive income. With affiliate marketing, you can make money from a product even after five years by doing a review today.
- Second, once your website gained some authority, things will pretty much run on auto pilot mode. This means, you will get regular free traffic even if you don't do any kind of promotion, link building or run campaign.
Who can learn Affiliate Marketing?
Anyone can start affiliate marketing at any age. You don't need any particular skill, technical background or qualification to get activated. All you need is a laptop or desktop, internet connection and a website and you are set. ....And most importantly, your willingness to learn and do this consistently.
The best part of this.... you can do this from anywhere, even from the comfort of your home.
What is the best method to learn Affiliate Marketing?
The best way to learn affiliate marketing is to follow someone who has been doing this for quite some time now. That way, you will get to know so many tips, strategies which might take you a lot of time to figure out yourself. Plus, this will help you to avoid all the beginner mistakes.
In this course, I will guide you step by step on how to begin with your affiliate marketing journey by giving a proper action plan. All you need to is take a note of these and take actions.
Which is the Best Affiliate Platform to join?
There are thousands of affiliate networks available in every niche nowadays. So the most important question to ask is which one you should join as a beginner?
When we talk about affiliate marketing, some of the renowned platforms are ClickBank, Warrior Plus, JVzoo. You will also come across platforms like Share a Sale or Commission Junction. But all these platforms are quite complex, and you need to have some sort of knowledge in advanced digital marketing to succeed.
This is why I recommend everyone to get started with Amazon Affiliate Program, which is also known as Amazon Associates.
Why?
- Amazon Affiliate is probably the biggest affiliate network of all. It is the world's biggest eCommerce website with worldwide presence with over 2.5B visitors every month
- It has a presence in many countries around the world. So you can earn money by targeting customers from different currencies.
What does it mean?
You have joined both the Amazon US and Amazon Canada Affiliate Programs. Your website is mainly focused on Amazon US website. Now, if a customer comes to your website to check a product (e.g watch), Amazon will automatically redirect him to Amazon Canada Website. And if he ends up buying a product, you will earn even from the Amazon Canada Affiliate Program - The cookie length of Amazon is 24 hours. This means if a visitor comes to your website and follows a link to Amazon website then whatever he/she will buy for the next 24 hours, you will make a commission from that.
So even if he doesn't buy anything immediately but decides to come back later within 24 hours and buy it, you will still make the commission - Amazon pays for you for the entire cart. So if you refer someone from your website to Amazon for a Smart TV, but the customer ends up buying both Smart TV and a Home Theater, you will earn commissions on both the products
How to Join Amazon Affiliate Program?
So if you are interested in Amazon Affiliate Program, all you need is a website. You can join the affiliate program by submitting your website details.
But before that, the first thing that you have to do is niche research and create a website relevant to your niche. So, to help you get started, I have created this step by step guide for you.
- Step 1: Niche Research- What is Niche and How to come up with your perfect niche idea?
- Step 2: How to Build your Affiliate Website- Everything you need to know
- Step 3: Keyword Research- How to find low competitive yet profitable keywords for your Blog
- Step 4: Writing articles- How to write articles that convert, Best Review articles structure
- Step 5: Amazon Affiliate Program - How to Sign up Amazon Affiliate Program, Walkthrough of the Amazon Affiliate Platform
- Step 6: SEO Strategies-How to Rank your Website on Google
How Much Money Can you Make from Affiliate Marketing?
That depends on how much time you will spend on your website.
The more time you spend in learning and implementing the strategies, faster you will start making money and you can scale it up further.
Things might be a little overwhelming in the beginning, but with the time you will be familiar with all these strategies, and it will come to you easily.
Common Mistakes beginners do in Affiliate Marketing
Let's talk about some of the common mistakes people do when they start their affiliate marketing journey.
- Mistake 1- Giving up early and quit: Most people set a high or unrealistic expectation that they start making hundreds of dollars from day one itself. When they don't see it happening, they quit.
In reality, you won't start earning money. Rather, you have to work on it. Consistently, build a foundation, and you will start seeing the results (make money) slowly. You can always scale it up from there. - Mistake 2- Losing Focus, trying to work on multiple websites: People start working on multiple websites at a time and lose focus. Result? They fail at everything.
Always start with one website at a time, and once you are successful in that, you can move into another website. - Mistake 3- Not Taking action: Many people will only go through the training, read a lot of articles on affiliate training. But, when it comes to following and implementing them, they do not take any action.
If you want to be successful, start taking action from the day one itself.
Conclusion: What Should You do Next?
That's all for affiliate marketing. I hope you have a clear understanding of affiliate marketing and how it works. If you are interested, jump into my next post on Niche Research, Where I have explained what niche is and how to choose a profitable niche for your website.