You must have come across people who told you that you could earn money while you’re asleep. And, I’m sure you didn’t believe that.
Well, that’s possible. Affiliate marketing can help you earn even when you are not online. When the whole world is functioning digitally, you must have thought about some ways of earning digitally as well. Isn’t it?
Wondering whether you have to create any product or service to sell online? Well, affiliate marketing doesn’t let you do any of those.
Then how do you earn through affiliate marketing?
In this blog, we will share with you everything you need to know to start affiliate marketing. So, brace yourself, and let’s get started.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a digital process where you, as an affiliate marketer, have to promote the products or services of a particular business or company through your website. When somebody visits your website and clicks on the links of these products or services you’ve promoted, you earn a commission. Generally, these commission rates are either a percentage of the sale price or the fixed price of a product.
For example, you are promoting a book by providing its Amazon link on your website. If any viewer of your website clicks that link and purchases this book, you earn a percentage as a commission. So, the more people click on the link through your website, the more commission you earn.
According to the reports of Statista, businesses in the US earned $8.2 billion only through affiliate marketing in 2022. Again, the reports of Influencer Marketing Hub profess that by 2024, the affiliate marketing industry may experience a growth of almost $15.7 billion.
Considering these data, if you can start with affiliate marketing today, you are sure to experience a hike soon.
Why should you engage in affiliate marketing?
You must be wondering why of all the other different ways of earning online, why should you choose affiliate marketing. Here are the solid reasons for engaging in affiliate marketing:
- You can begin affiliate marketing at a low cost. It does not require you to invest in a team. Once you learn it, you can do it alone.
- Since most of the tasks are done by the affiliates, they pay the cost for all kinds of affiliate marketing. Hence, cost management is an easy task in affiliate marketing.
- When affiliate marketing involves low cost, it means it comes with low risks as well. It is directly related to your sales generation.
- You get the opportunity to pick affiliates of your own choice. So, you know how the traffic is coming to your website.
- Affiliate marketing ensures a high return on investment. This happens because your target audience learns about your products or services through various affiliates. So, the affiliate partnerships are influenced by your website and its content.
How does affiliate marketing work?
The primary step of the working process of affiliate marketing is to join an affiliate program first. Once you join an affiliate program, you get a unique link.
This link contains a tracking ID through which merchants of various businesses and companies can track you as an affiliate marketer. Further, this tracking ID allows the merchants to figure out if you’ve referred anyone to their product or service.
The moment anyone clicks on the product links, they get a cookie. This is a tiny file that is stored on their device. Although this cookie has an expiry date, you still get your commission on delayed purchases.
Step-by-step process of getting started with affiliate marketing
Now the question comes how do you start affiliate marketing? It is a step-by-step process. Go through these 7 steps to start affiliate marketing today:
Step 1: Choose your niche
The first and foremost step of an affiliate program is to pick your niche. This is the category in which you want to create content.
Indeed, there are innumerable websites today. if you have to stand out, be as specific as possible. For example, you want to create a food and cuisine website. Instead of talking about food as a whole, narrow it down to something like baking, or organic cooking.
Here, you get a focused audience which will not only get you more traffic but also enhance the SEO of your website.
To find a good niche, ask yourself what you’re good at, and what you like doing. To succeed in affiliate marketing, you’ll have to create a lot of content. So, be as patient and consistent as possible.
Step 2: Decide the content platform
Most of you have an idea that affiliate marketing is suitable only for websites. Well, this is an absolute myth. You can do affiliate marketing via YouTube, Podcasts, social media, Newsletters, and Websites.
The kind of niche you choose will determine your content creation platform. For example, if you want to create content on dance, people will prefer videos that have text content. Eventually, you’ll choose YouTube or Instagram.
However, if your target is to rank on Google, we suggest you create a website and start creating written content. Make use of search engine optimization to enhance your position in the search results. This helps you to generate passive traffic as well.
Step 3: Find an affiliate program
Generally, affiliate marketing has three different types of affiliate programs. They are:
- High-paying, low-volume
These target niche products where buyers are less. For example, the website of HubSpot is only for business selling. But their affiliate marketing program pays handsomely.
- Low-paying, high-volume
These target products that appeal to the masses and therefore, have more buyers. For example, although Amazon pays only 10% as a commission, it offers this commission not just on the value of the product but on the entire purchase.
- High-paying, high-volume
These target expensive items that have a mass appeal and more buyers. For example, the various companies providing credit cards approach people of all economic standard and offers a high commission as well. However, only affiliate marketers with greater knowledge and expertise get to attain this kind of affiliate program.
The kind of affiliate program you should join depends on your niche and your expertise.
Step 4: Create good-quality content
For the success of your affiliate website, the only thing that you should focus on is the quality of your content. You’ll see a lot of people creating content. But those that stand out create outstanding and high-quality content.
The kind of content you create should be able to solve a problem for your reader. So, if you are writing a review of any product, go that extra mile to buy the product use it first, and then proceed to write the review. This will show your readers that you reviewed the product only after using it.
Step 5: Drive traffic to your affiliate website
Along with great content, you need to ensure that more people read your content. There are three types of traffic you can generate on your affiliate site. They are:
- Paid traffic
As you can understand from its name, here, you pay for the traffic generated on your website. So, the moment you start paying, you get traffic then and there. You don’t have to rely on organic traffic building.
- SEO
It is the process of optimizing your affiliate site to ensure it gets a high rank in Google search. You can get passive and consistent traffic as long as you rank high on Google.
- Building an email list
Through emails, you can engage with your readers and turn them into loyalists. Use email marketing to keep your readers hooked to your page. You can share your content creation process or anything interesting to keep them hooked to you.
Step 6: Get clicks on your affiliate links
Finally, it’s time to get clicks on your affiliate site. Make sure to have the links of your affiliates well scattered throughout the page. Further, add better context to your content for clarity. One of the best ways to attract readers is to use callouts.
Step 7: Convert clicks to sales
You can earn through affiliate marketing when these two conversions take place:
- Click to the product page
- Visitors purchasing the product
Here, the trick is to connect with merchants who have affiliate programs that perform well.
Conclusion
By now, you must have understood how the system of affiliate marketing works. Now, your primary agenda is to look for a secure place to learn affiliate marketing.
DigitalGlad Academy is here to teach you affiliate marketing right from scratch. We have a beneficial and affordable course on affiliate marketing for businesses where you learn everything related to affiliate marketing. The cherry on the cake is the language in which the course is put up. It’s in Hindi and easily understandable by all.
Check out our course here: https://www.digitalglad.com/courses/affiliate-marketing-business/
