How to Get Started With Your First Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is a popular, cost-effective, and very simple form of online marketing. It is the process of earning a commission by promoting someone else’s product or service to customers. Affiliate marketers earn commissions by driving sales for other businesses. They do this by sharing links on their site, on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, or even through email campaigns or their own blog posts.

Affiliate Marketing is an integrated program most bloggers and influencers use to monetize their business. You can Start Affiliate Marketing by choosing a niche through earning a steady income. The following is a step-by-step guide to set up your own Affiliate Marketing Business.

Choose a Niche

Like blogging, Niche marketing strategy also applies to affiliate marketing. Unless you excel in your chosen niche, you won’t be able to leave a lasting impact. It is better to start with a small niche and go big as your business grows. Learn how to find a profitable niche for your affiliate program.

How to Choose a Niche?

There are different ways to choose a niche. One of the simplest ways is to find what already works. Experts. However, state that an individual can do fairly well with any niche if he/she commutes to work hard in their affiliate marketing business.

If you plan to promote your affiliate product via paid advertisement then you can choose any niche and start posting ads. For the free or organic way to promote Affiliate Marketing products, You must have a strong online presence. Affiliate marketing Marketplaces (Jvzoo, ClickBank, Peerfly, and Amazon) can also help you find the best niche. Just register and log on to the website, and you will see which product is earning the maximum commission.

Tools For Affiliate Marketing

Once you have decided on your target niche, the next step is to create a strategy of earning more and more through your affiliate marketing program. But wait! Have you decided which ways you will achieve your goals? Do you know which tools to use to get as much as a pro affiliate marketer earns?

According to researchers, the majority of pro affiliate marketers decide on their niche, and then instantly begin searching and analyzing the tools they can use to gain maximum profit. You don’t need to waste your time searching for tools, though there are some helpful affiliate marketing tools that you can use to double, triple, and quadruple your affiliate marketing passive income.

Affiliate Marketing Tools Used by Successful Online Entrepreneurs

Niche Websites, Blogs, YouTube, Podcasts, and eBooks are a few of the most popular tools which are used successfully by a number of online entrepreneurs. Let’s have a look at each of these independently.

Niche Website:

• A niche website strictly targets one keyword/key-phrase.
• While using a niche website, you have to make sure that the keyword is supplemented with LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and a Secondary Keyword. For Instance, if your primary keyword is Personal Development, a secondary keyword could be Linguistic Development, Personal Growth, Confidence Building, etc.
• A Niche website can be anything from totally content oriented, to an online store with all the shopping, paying and analyzing tools.
• A Niche website may or may not contain a blog, although the rest of the website marketing is done according to internet marketing rules, for example, through SEO or Social Media Marketing.

Blog:

• A Blog is a web page usually associated with a website or operated independently by an individual.
• It is also niche-oriented.
• In affiliate marketing, a blog may or may not be used as a Landing Page. A landing page is the entry point that diverts traffic to the marketer’s ads. In some cases, the ads are posted directly on the landing page.
• The purpose a blog is to provide helpful information to readers and long lasting build relationship.

YouTube:

• Affiliate Marketing at YouTube can be done in two ways: either by submitting videos and leaving affiliate links or by writing reviews on the videos.
• Besides, it is essential to have a YouTube connection tab on your website or blog, so that the people can easily link to your YouTube channel if you have one. This is just like placing your Facebook or Twitter connection link on your website/blog.

Podcasts:

• The majority of successful online entrepreneurs use podcasts as a way of communicating with their target audience.
• Podcasts can be outsourced: you can hire an individual to help you edit and publish podcasts.

EBooks:

• No one can deny the popularity of eBooks. In the past, they soared to popularity in native English countries including America, Britain, Australia and Europe, with the US and Australia topping the list. However, it is now a fact that the readership of eBooks has grown from North America to Asia, the Pacific, Australasia, and the Middle East.
• Thus, eBooks are considered a most lucrative affiliate marketing tool.
• EBooks could be sold as well as could be given away. The best approach is to ask the visitor to take an action and in turn issue a free eBook. It is, however, essential that the eBooks that you give away or sell, are of high quality, and they must add value to the reader ’s knowledge base.

Establish Online Presence

It is in the nature of human beings; that we trust those whom we know well. If you get a chance of purchasing a Gucci product from a roadside wander (provided that you have the money to afford Gucci or other high-class brands), which one would you choose? Of course, you will go for an established brand rather than trade on an uncertain and unreliable roadside stall. This is also the case in the online world. Why would people trust you and purchase your recommended products? Do they know you personally?

The people will only trust you when you have proven yourself. According to research, customers believe in Affiliate Marketers who have an established online presence. That means, they are not new in the market, they stay online, they update their blog/website regularly, and they maintain their online reputation. A website or blog is the fundamental part of Affiliate Marketing since it is the platform on which you are going to advertise your products, and earn a big chunk of money.

Usually, I encounter two scenarios: You have an inactive and unprofitable website/blog; you want to revive this website/blog and start an affiliate marketing program on it.

You do not have a website/blog and you want to start it from scratch. This is how you should deal with either situation.

Setting up a Website/Blog

I have a Blog/Website that I want to Revive Well that’s good news; you already have a platform to start your affiliate marketing business. The next step is to revive your dead website/blog.

In order to attract regular traffic to your blog/website, you should do the following steps:

• Write at least 3-5 blog posts daily. It can cover anything from articles to short product descriptions, product reviews, general how-to articles, lengthy guides, etc. You can outsource writing content.
• Make your blog/website Search Engine Optimized, popularly known as SEO. SEO helps to improve search engine ranking of your website/blog. Keywords and Key-phrases should be searched according to the requirement of the niche. Besides, they should be placed appropriately within the body of the articles as well as in the content published on the website/blog.
• Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the best platforms for any type of niche. However, for visual appeal, you can also use Reddit and Pinterest.

I Do Not Have a Blog/Website In this case you need to start from scratch.

WordPress is a great platform to get your own blog/website, you get hundreds of layout themes and plugins, and besides, it is very user-friendly. Furthermore, you can control your entire writing and promotion through your WordPress Dashboard and Control Panel.

Choose an Affiliate Marketing Program

There are third-party websites, also known as affiliate networks that offer you Affiliate Marketing Programs.

Amazon is the oldest of all, followed by ClickBank, Cj, Peerfly, and probably hundreds of more. These websites have lists of products placed under different categories.

The initial process of joining all these websites is simple and similar. You need to sign in as a Publisher, choose the products, and start selling them. However, as every single user is different from the other, you will need to get detailed procedures, so visit these websites and choose the one that is the best fit.

Which one is the Best Affiliate Network?

ClickBank: ClickBank offers the best technical products. However, over a period of time, it has evolved for the better; the website is now more user-friendly, and apart from technical products, it is the best place to get real deals on products such as eBooks, Software, and apps.

PMI declared Peerfly the number #1 Affiliate Marketing Network in 2012. This is primarily because of the high-profit opportunities provided by the network. Peerfly offers you the largest community of publishers and professionals.

It has the biggest CPA (Cost per Action) database. It has a very active administration and great news for beginners; most of the queries are instantly solved.

Amazon provides access to different online platforms and channels. It is the founder of affiliate marketing and offers good commissions.

Amazon has a huge online store; a huge plus if you want to monetize an Amazon store. Another beauty that Amazon offers is that even if a visitor from your website does not end up buying a product you advertised, and buys something else, you still get paid! They might buy an expensive watch or a video camera and you will get a pretty decent commission.

Choose a Product

Choosing a product is another important step towards a stable affiliate passive income. The benefit of joining affiliate marketing websites is that they will give you plenty of suggestions when it comes to choosing products. ClickBank and Amazon etc., have a number of products; besides, many brands and celebrities are associated with them as advertisers. When you join these networks it is quite easy to choose a product.

However, we recommend that you keep in mind a few essential factors: The product that you choose should be related to your field/niche.

Affiliate networks do not assign products to you that do not match with your website/blogs niche. Therefore, it is recommended to check which products pay the best commission and then establish your blog/websites niche.

However, if you already have a website/blog up and running, you can choose the products that fit in best with your niche, instead of the ones that pay more. In this way, you will be able to get the attention of the right kind of customers, and besides, the profit prospect also increases.

Promote Your Website/Blog

This is the last and the most important step in the overall process of Affiliate Marketing. The Success of your Affiliate Marketing depends on how well you can attract the attention of the target audience.

You can promote your website in a different way some are free which need lots of effort and time and another one is paid advertisement which cost you money. In the next blog post, I will take to step by step guide to promote your website using both ways free and paid, until don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter for the latest updates on my blog and comment below.