This step-by-step affiliate marketing for beginners outline will simplify the complex working phenomenon for experienced professionals and beginners. Almost everyone wants to add some extra bucks to his bank account every day. People often search out ideas for making extra bucks online. If you are also looking for an easy way to earn money online, you need some passive money-making strategy.
Perhaps it seems vague to you, but this is the most efficient for hardworking ones. One of the standards and popular methods of passive monetization is affiliate marketing. Before we start, let’s learn about why affiliate marketing?
Why Affiliate Marketing – Step by Step Guide Affiliate Marketing
Because Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective processes to drive maximum sales of other brands' products to get revenue. Affiliate marketing is an online monetization process through which affiliates get a commission for selling and marketing other products and services. If you are starting your work as an affiliate, you must know what you will do. The proper knowledge is the basic requirement for promoting a product to persuade customers to buy it.
You might be thinking about how you will receive a commission from the products' selling. Well! The answer is all the sales of Amazon products are tracked. You will receive your commission whenever sales are made through your affiliate link because sales are tracked when a customer purchases by getting entry into the main site from others' websites.
Moreover, income through affiliate marketing depends upon various factors like a monthly and annual basis. However, annual income is more than monthly, and you will get more with time. Yes! No matter if you can still make only 10$, you will land about $10,000 one day. All you need is consistency for promoting products. You can check my complete guide about “how affiliate marketing works..
Key Factors Affiliate Marketing Step by Step Guide
The following are some prime factors you need to consider to achieve your money-making goals through affiliate marketing. Firstly, you will see a general overview of these factors and then elaborate on them.
- Find an appropriate niche in relevance to affiliate marketing.
- Program it as readers' reference but maintain the difference concerning readers' experience.
- Do search engine optimization (SEO) and proper keyword research to optimize content.
- Produce high-quality, attractive content to attract and persuade customers to buy a product.
- Must use organizational skills by adding HTML links so that readers can move directly to that portion.
- Conduct surveys by using marketing tools on different social media platforms to engage your readers with your content.
Step By Step Guide Affiliate Marketing Process
1- Choose Your Niche – Most important step of affiliate marketing
The first step to do affiliate marketing is to choose your niche. Proper research is very important because the more unique your niche is, the more you will earn. Beginners should ponder out of the box by looking at market needs. Your idea should be specific and viable, having every aspect clear. While choosing a niche, you must encounter the marketing basics by researching the audience's needs, scope, and interests.
Here are some important criteria of niche selection that will help you in finalizing your affiliate marketing ideas.
Look for Familiar Topics
Firstly, you should search out the topics on which you have some knowledge or familiarity. As product promotion needs content in blogging, you must have some personal perception to discuss. You know what the popular trendy blogging ideas are: health and fitness, fashion and beauty, online monetization, finance and management, food blogs, product reviews, and travel blogs.
Almost a large number of informational blog ideas are present. All you need is to create a difference from others through your work. For instance, mention different perspectives and approaches about a particular thing. For instance, if you are looking for travel blogs, you can involve hilly areas and mountains to attract visitors.
Check and Boost Your Ideas' Worth For Monetization
After getting an appropriate idea about niche and blogging, you need to check whether it can make money or not. Having potential importance will reward you with money when the audience visits your blog. Furthermore, your niche must have a strong potential to attract customers. Besides this, you can boost your ideas' worth by keyword research and audience to attract more audience.
The best thing every newbie should do is pointing out a pain point. Affiliate marketing ideas that are pointing to a pain point and then providing their solution with your product. This strategy will help you attract your customers to your product so that they purchase it.
Advertise your Products Smartly
To make your content more visible to your potential audience, you need to advertise. Although you can do affiliate marketing with and without a website, you can choose both but still invest smartly in it. You can advertise your content through Facebook ads. Just think about why and how people will purchase your affiliate link when your blog and content are not easily available for the audience.
Once you have done choosing a niche, you need any of the best affiliate programs. You can access and select one from the thousands of affiliate programs. If you are thinking of earning a huge profit, you are on the wrong path. Be patient because online monetization is a long-run but effective and rewarding process.
2- Choose Type of Payment
Affiliates will get a commission due to channelizing products between customer and brand, so there must be some payment modes through which you will receive money. There are several ways an affiliated person can profit from the sale done through his affiliate link. Here are some best modes through which you can receive payment.
One Tier Commission
Whenever a sale is made through your affiliate link, you will receive your commission. This payment process is simple as it involves only three people: affiliate, seller, and customer.
-
Two Tier Commission
This type of profit and commission is complex because several people are involved in this process. In this commission, you have to refer other affiliates to make a sale to get a profit.
-
Recurring Commissions
A recurring commission is a type of profit that continues to come from any business. YouTube videos are the most common example of this commission. As long as your channel has subscribers, you will be able to receive revenue from your business.
-
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC mode of payment is dependent upon the increment in your website traffic. As an affiliated person, try to pursue customers to land on sellers' websites through affiliates'. The more people land on sellers' websites from your website, the more engagement and clicks on his page will pay you back in the form of your percentage commission.
-
Pay Per Lead (PPL)
Along with other things, affiliates persuade and ask consumers to fill up some mandatory forms. This filling up of forms is a survey consisting of a trial version illustration of software, subscribing newsletter, and website. The more customers fill-up the survey for you, the more commission you will get as an affiliate.
-
Pay Per Sale (PPS)
Pay Per Sale is a standard structure of affiliate marketing. In PPS, affiliates receive a specific percentage of the product's price from the customer. It depicts that you will receive a huge revenue per sales percent by persuading more customers to make more sales through your links. You should have high marketing skills to convince customers to purchase the product and receive a commission in return.
-
Individual Affiliates and Marketplace
It has been observed that most sellers sell their products through their websites. That is a personal affiliate program in which it needs marketers. As a marketer, you will enjoy commission after every sign-up on the website and selling of products. However, some sellers prefer to advertise in the marketplace instead of a head start because individual websites need separate marketers. At the same time, most products are promoted better through marketplaces.
-
Amazon Associates
As amazon's affiliate marketing is powered through one of the biggest online shopping platforms, Amazon, the affiliates have a good functional program. The program through which you can receive immediate approval and receive on average 4% and up to 10% commission on every sale is done through your affiliate link. It is one of the best affiliate programs for beginners you can join.
3- Discover a Suitable Platform For Content
It is usually a difficult and important decision to choose a platform compatible with your marketing industry content. The most evergreen platform is blogging because it never gets stagnant and continues to change. Furthermore, it's easy to manage a blog by uploading quality content. Along with this, you can make high-quality tutorials as well.
The most effective tutorial-making strategy is DIY (Do It Yourself). For instance, people will pay more attention to the visual content than written one because they will relate how easier and more effective the technique or product is to handle. After making these tutorials, you should add their links to the blog to make your business better.
Have you ever thought about e-courses? These e-courses are in-depth tutorials through which a person earns money by providing web learning technology to students. You can make such tutorials and add your affiliate links after every tutorial. It's one of the best ways of promoting products.
4- Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Master this step in affiliate marketing
The fourth step of affiliate marketing is to master SEO. Search engine optimization is an effective strategy for attracting an audience through organic, free, and natural search engines. You can do SEO over every search engine, such as Google, Pinterest, Quora, Bing, and Reddit. These search engines usually display immediate results, while content delivery and web pages can rank videos, blogs, and images. Your products' images, blogs, and videos will be visible to the searcher on search engines by ranking these things.
Tips and Tricks To Follow During SEO
Here are some tips and tricks that you should follow while doing SEO for your product.
- Do keyword research properly. While doing so, avoid high-competitive keywords having more searches in the month. There are various tools, but the most effective way is organic traffic because it is a highly recommended, cost-effective, and accurate method.
- Put more emphasis on long-tail keywords consisting of 3 to 4 words because long-tail keywords are more specific and relevant to nature and information.
- Make sure to use keywords in the content as well as in headlines.
- Generate creative content by using unique blogging themes. Along with the theme for a website's quality design, use supportive hosting tools for your website.
- Try to make your content strong by making it long with the limit of 3000-4000 plus words. Furthermore, insert internal and external links in the content as well.
- Add your videos on the website by putting their links in your blog. You can optimize videos in the same way as keyword research but on youtube.
- Maintain a good interaction with your audience by answering all their queries and encouraging them to ask more in the comment section.
- Update your videos and blogs in an organized way. Try to update your website's content every 3 to 4 months to make your website ranking up.
- Create an HTML link for your blogs so that readers can directly go to that relevant content.
- Insert graphics in video thumbnails for improving the video quality and visual.
- If you choose blogging as the affiliate marketing platform and use WordPress, you can improve SEO with the Yoast SEO plugin.
- Avoid usage of extra plugins and external resources.
5- Build Email List and Do Email Marketing
It's important to build an email list as it is one of the business's most important assets. This step could be one of the most important in step by step affiliate marketing process. As people said, “money is in the list”. Many people or businesses do not build an email list. They really leave the money on the table. After you build an email list, one more thing that you need to do is email marketing. You will need to make a series of emails and can schedule to send the email to your list automatically. As people said, “the fortune is the relation with the list”. You can do this with email marketing with software such as Aweber or Getresponse. Two of the most reliable email marketing software in terms of delivery rate and have great features.
6- Manage Your Affiliate Links
When you are done with all other things, it's also important to manage your affiliate links. The best way if managing affiliate links is their cloaking. Cloaking is an effective process in SEO to convert long URLs to shorter ones. You might be wondering why there is a need to do so. Well! The answer is such small URLs consume less space, look neater, and are easy to remember.
Here are some tools that you can use for managing your affiliate links by cloaking.
- Pretty Links (a WordPress plugin)
- Affiliate WP (an affiliate coupon WordPress plugin)
- Clickmagick (a cloud software)
- Thirsty Affiliates (a WordPress plugin)
7- Mark Your Affiliate Links As NoFollow
When your website or blogs start ranking, your affiliate links can affect the ranking—no need to worry because it's quite simple to manage this issue. You have started SEO of your blogs only to attract customers to make sales through your affiliate link, so you can never neglect or remove it. But you can minimize or eliminate its effect on SEO by marking all the affiliate links as no-follow. To do so, you can use various tools like Thrifty Affiliates.
8- Put Affiliate Link in Your Content With Others
When your website ranks on the search engine and generates a huge audience, you need to insert affiliate links. Add all the affiliate links in your content wherever they are required. Never forget to add a description, videos, and images relevant to your affiliate link to attract visitors. You will be amazed to know that it's an effective strategy for converting your visitors into leads and sales.
9- Use Maximum Social Media Platforms
Along with creating full content, you need to connect yourself to as many social media platforms as you can. By increasing your visibility on every social media platform, you will be able to increase your audience. Some people don't like reading blogs and watching videos. So, you cannot restrict yourself to a single platform. We suggest you use leading affiliate marketing platforms for more product promotion and generation of more profit.
10- Must Ask For a Feedback – Last Step Affiliate Marketing
The last step of the affiliate marketing guide for beginners is to ask for feedback. Feedback plays the most effective role in moving your marketing business to the next level. For persuading customers to make them purchase a product, your audience has to believe in your recommendations. Do you think that anyone can believe without proof? Obviously! It won't be easy to approach the audience to sell products without any proof. Everyone is skeptical about other customers' reviews and feedback that are already present on your website.
Given this, it is very important to take a review from your audience. No matter whether the feedback is through amazon reviews or Facebook polls, it's very effective. For instance, nobody will be interested in your offering if there is no feedback on your website. And definitely, you need to generate more engagements on your website by communicating for feedback.
Another useful thing is your response to the comments of your feedback or review section. How can you expect product feedback if you have never managed to respond to comments and communicate with your audience? Furthermore, responding to comments on websites, blogs, and videos boosts your product's ranking and visibility.
Instead of representing your products first, you need to generate valuable informational content. In short, the essential thing is to build up the trust of your audience. So, it would be best if you focused on building trust first and then moving toward promoting a product through an affiliate link. Communicating with the audience is a key strategy for building the audience's trust.
For communication, you can create a newsletter upon which you can ask for their recommendations. Besides this, you can engage the public by involving them in writing. For example, you can ask them to write something that will publish in your website newsletter. You will be surprised to see that your audience will engage with you and trust your all products and services. And obviously, they will recommend your products to others by feedback.
Final thoughts
I hope this step-by-step guide to affiliate marketing for beginners helps you understand what you have to do. Affiliate marketing is profitable to earn a handsome amount of money every day. Whether you are doing it through affiliate marketing websites or youtube channels, you cannot achieve everything in just a night. No doubt, affiliate marketing can be thrived by money-making goals but with passion, hardworking, consistency, and dedication.
If you are a beginner who wants to learn more about affiliate marketing, read my other blog, How to make money with Affiliate Marketing. If you are ready to start your online business with Affiliate Marketing or are already in it and still figuring it out, you can join the One Funnel Away Challenge. You can learn how to use the different types of affiliate marketing appropriately to get outstanding results. Most importantly, it will help you to build an online business that generates income through affiliate marketing.
“The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer” – Nolan Bushnell.
