
Affiliate marketing can be defined as a kind of marketing strategy whereby commission is paid to an individual for promoting a particular product. It is one of the methods adapted by bloggers and influencers for making money online.
Affiliate marketing involves a very simple process, you find a product you think your audience will like, you promote it to your audience and then earn a percentage of the profit for each purchase that is gotten from your special link called affiliate link.
In being successful as an affiliate marketer, there are certain steps you need to stick to. I’ll present them, but before then, let’s look at the benefits of affiliate marketing.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
- Affiliate marketing helps you develop a right mindset about blogging from the onset: Once you start engaging in affiliate marketing, your perspective of blogging will change. You’ll find ways of writing articles that will make your readers want to patronize a product and it’ll also help you recommend the best products to your readers.
- You start monetizing your blog immediately: I have a friend that got her first affiliate commission with less than five posts on her blog. This sounds great right? Unlike the ad networks that you have to meet some criteria before getting approved, ad networks work well no matter the age of your domain.
- It helps you know the best products for your audience: With your new blog, you can just promote some affiliate products from Amazon to know the type of things your readers will be interested in. With that, you can work on starting your own business and also recommending similar products to them.
- It helps you get noticed: Even the biggest bloggers and influencers still want to get noticed. If you can successfully market an affiliate product, the company will put you on their leader board and you know what it means. It can help you get advertisers that will pay more than the revenue you generate from the affiliate company you are working for.
- It funds your business: Your major aim for blogging is to generate revenue and affiliate marketing can help you achieve that. You’ll get to pay your bills, renew your hoisting, domain and other plans for running your website and also gets you some savings.
- It teaches you how to sell: Generating an affiliate sale means you can also generate a sale for your company or business. It’ll help you train your audience on how to click-and-buy products, the dream of every business.
- You get to have a taste of success: This is the most exciting part of being a blogger. When you check your dashboard and see that you have earned commissions for the brand you are working for. Both you and the brand will be happy and fulfilled.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing
- Choose your niche: The first step in being successful as an affiliate marketer is to choose a niche that rhymes with your passion. This is the most important part of affiliate marketing because it is the foundation on which other steps lie. Is your chosen niche lucrative? What do other people that have previously promoted products relating to it have to say? These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself.
- Research on different affiliate programs: Browse the internet for reviews of many different affiliate programs and choose the one you think your audience will be more interested in. For example, if you are in Africa, promoting Amazon or Walmart links might not be favorable while if you are in the United States, the same will go for Konga and Jumia.
- Build a site: If you intend promoting your affiliate products through your blog, then you need to learn how to create a blog. There are many platforms that can get you nice websites depending on your budget. With the Blogger platform, Google will provide a free hosting platform while you’ll in turn purchase a domain. In the case of WordPress, you’ll have to purchase a hosting plan and a domain, they both have their advantages and disadvantages and you should review it before choosing the best for you.
- Produce excellent content: There is a saying that content is king. You can’t generate affiliate sales if you don’t write engaging and well researched posts on the related topics. For example, you can review the best 10 Samsung phones to check out in 2018 and give your readers links to check them out on Amazon, I bet you if the post was really made in a good way, you must get interested buyers from it.
- Build an audience: Grow your social media fan page and also don’t forget to get an email list. An email list is one of the ways of getting your visitors to return back to your website after visiting for the first time. You can offer them a free product or a promo code and in exchange, subscribe them to your mailing list. However, never sell the emails or spam the email list, it can do more harm than good.
- Promote your affiliate product(s): This is another important step in affiliate marketing. You can run Facebook and Twitter ads or make use of Google Adwords.
About the author
Igbo Stanford Onyemaizuchi is a Nigerian twin blogger and founder of Information Guide Africa and Opportunities For Africans. He is a tech savvy and passionate about helping people start good career online and offline by following their passion.
Wow, incredible blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? You make blogging look easy. The overall look of your site is fantastic, let alone the content!