Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Have you heard of making money with affiliate marketing? Most internet marketers have.

Years ago I searched and searched looking for places to get “real” information related to the affiliate marketing business and had a hard time finding anything.

What I was wanting to sell online was not easily available to find and I had a hard time finding where to get the affiliate links for the products. T

After spending quite a bit of time online researching and reading articles and watching YouTube videos I came to understand that in reality, affiliate marketing is actually fairly simple it’s just hard to find the right information.

At the end of the day. Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest way to make money online.

1. The Basics: What is Affiliate Marketing?

At this point, you must be thinking.. What is affiliate marketing and how the heck does it work? It’s fairly simple, affiliate marketing is a “sell-through marketing platform” which allows you to take a piece in the profits for each of the product or services you sell.

One of the simplest and most popular ways to generate affiliate income is to create a blog and recommend affiliate products or servies on your blog through reviews and ratings.

One of the easiest ways you can promote your blog and affiliate items is through the use of social media (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) you can you is to find an attentive audience who may have interest in your product and simply click to buy it through your affiliate links.

2. Why Buy Via an Affiliate Link When You Can Simply Buy a Product/Services Directly?

For many people who are looking to buy a particular product, they hop on Google and will do their research before buying it. This is where bloggers and their reviews come into the picture.

Simply put they visit bloggers pages to know that the product they are buying is worth it.

Bloggers mention the affiliate link in the blog allowing the reader to simply click and reach the site where they will purchase the product. Once a purchase is made through the affiliate link a sales commission is earned.

3. Make Sure to Select The Right Affiliate Program

Ok, this is little tricky, but let me make it simple for you.

To really get started in affiliate marketing, you first need to find the right affiliate product.

Learning more about the product will help you to create good content around the topic realted to the affialte prodcut you are offereing.

Once you determine the topic and the product you want to promote, you need to check the actual demand and competition for the product and make sure there is a good balance between demand for the product and competition of others promoting the product. Once you determine that you can create the affiliate marketing strategies.

There are two free and super effective tools from Google to gauge the competition, demand, popularity, and trends.

• Google Keyword Planner – It is a free tool from Google AdWords that will help you determine the competition on a particular keyword.

You will be able to determine the demand for a particular keyword on Google. Then you select a keyword which has a high search audience with medium or low competition. This is important as a keyword with high competition will give you poor website traffic.

That said, you need to make sure that the keyword is relevant to your topic, otherwise, your audience will simply look at another page and you will be wasting your content.

• Google Trends – This Google tool shows you the popularity trends of a particular keyword or topic. This tool gives you a detailed analysis that enables you to determine the demand and popularity of the keyword or topic.

Google trends also is beneficial in determining the popularity of a particular keyword or a topic for the past few years, months and hours graphed out in all its glory.

4. Find The Best Affiliate Network For You

Once you determine what product to promote, the next step is to find the right affiliate network to get the maximum commission for each transaction.

Once you sign up with the affiliate network, you need to search for a product that you are going to promote.

To make it easy, most major Affiliate networks provide multiple affiliate categories and links to different companies in a single platform.

As a new blogger, a couple of simple programs to get involved with are the Amazon affiliate program or Clickbank..

If your blog or website has some significant traffic already coming to it then you should check out a few other programs such as FlexOffer, Maxbounty, Viglink, PeerFly, Shareasale and Commission Junction (CJ.com).

These networks have thousands of potential affiliate companies to promote registered with them.

Simply these affiliate networks allow you access to thousands of companies and their affiliate offerings in a single platform.

5. The Best Locations to Display Affiliate Links and Banner Ads

Where to place your affiliate links requires some marketing strategies. You should attempt to understand the behavior of your audience.

Simply, Why they visited your blog and what they want to get our of your blog. That determines what you can sell to the audience.

If you know the answer to those questions, you can determine where to place the referral link.

The affiliate link should be placed at the top, middle, or bottom of the page. Based on your content you can choose the right spot.

The main idea is to show give the reader a good idea of the content in the first four lines of your blog and then slowly start promoting the affiliate links.

Mention the product with the link and give that word a different font color so that your audience will recognize it as a link they can click on.

Other ways to promote the referral link is at the end of the paragraph, topic or content. This is one of the most effective ways to market as the reader has the opportunity to read the entire article and understand the content related to the product. This knowledge allows them to make the decision to click on the link and check what benefit they can get from it.

6. Ok, Now You Get It. Next Question, How Do You Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer?

It is possible that you have read or have seen on YouTube that successful affiliate marketers have made millions of dollars. How is that possible just by blogging and monetizing it with links and banners?

The reality is they are successful because they maintain a discipline of writing fresh content and through winning the trust of their audiences.

Remember, “Content is King”, that simple items is what separates successful bloggers from the rest.

High-Quality content should be the most important thing you do when you start writing blog content.

If the audience that reads your blog find the content helpful you will begin to gain the trust of your visitors, and begin to see an increase in the affiliate earning.

7. So You Have Learned A Lot. Now Is Affiliate Marketing Right for You?

The bottom line is that if you were to move forward with less knowledge then you learned here about affiliate marketing you would be simply wasting your time. While people can and do make millions of dollars with affiliate marketing, they do so becasue they have the proper knowledge to make it happen.

Staring a blog and advertising on Google, Facebook or other social media networks is really easy. However, if you don’t know how to get your audience to buy your affiliate product/services, you will find it very hard to make money.

8. So Getting Real..  Is Affiliate Marketing Legit?

Yes, it’s absolutely legit! People can make great money with Affiliate Marketing and we have outlined the tools and resources you can use to do just that.

9. What’s the Downside? Are There Problems With Affiliate Marketing?

Making money with affiliate marketing takes time. Especially when you don’t have an audience to start with. There are many ways to build a good audience but you need to put in the time to make it happen.

Advertising your blog on Facebook, Instagram or other social media channels can make a difference and help you grow your audience. It’s not a cheap plan but you will likely see positive results with yoru efforts. 

In Conclusion.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best sources of income you can generate online. Your content is the most critical aspect and its value is what will drive your overall money makeing abilities.

Blogging is the most effective way to earn from affiliate marketing, it gives you the best opportunity your your audence to learn and understand the prodcuts you are promoting.

The most important thing to remember is that affiliate marketing requires dedication, time, hard work and good content.

The more you learn, the more you earn. That is the basis of Affiliate Marketing.