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If you are reading this book, Chances are you already have a fair idea about affiliate marketing and looking to take your business in the fast lane. However, if you are still not sure about what affiliate marketing is – here’s a quick summary.
Affiliate marketing is nothing but promoting the products/services of other people to earn a commission from every sale that is made through your link. It involves building a website/blog (or social media page) about a niche that matches the products/services you are aspiring to promote.
Let’s consider an example to understand the power and benefits of affiliate marketing for everyone involved. You live in a town that is buzzing tourist hub. Every year lots of tourists make their way into the town to witness its famed tourist attractions. You own commercial premises in the heart of the town and decide to convert it into an information hub considering the huge demand and potential.
Soon businesses all across the town notice that a whole of tourists make their way to your information hub when they need guidance related to food, shopping, transport, attractions, museums and more. They decide to tie-up with you and offer y a commission in exchange for recommending recommending their services to tourists who may need it.
So each time you send them a visitor, who ends up giving them business, you earn a small commission. There are plenty of people who walk daily into your center, which means there are plenty of opportunities to make money through your recommendations each day.
This is exactly what affiliate marketing is in the virtual hub. Your blog is the visitor information center, and the affiliate merchants are various businesses that have products or services that may be of interest to your blog visitors. Thus you enlist as their affiliate and promote their products or services on your blog in exchange for a commission/completed action or sale.
You offer plenty of valuable content to your readers (in the form of informative and insightful posts), engage them in a conversation, build authority (through well-researched posts) and ultimately inspire a loyal following, where readers trust you enough to make purchases through your unique recommendation affiliate links.
If you pick a topic related to your area of expertise or passion (and research it to be profitable enough), there are tons of related affiliate programs across multiple affiliate marketing marketplaces. For instance, if you are a keen traveler or possess an inherent interest in adventure travel, you can create a blog around your experiences or adventures. Populate your blog with amazing, wow-worthy content that fulfills the vicarious wanderlust of your readers. Next, start finding profitable products and service within the adventure travel domain. You may find eBooks on ClickBank (one of the largest affiliate marketing marketplaces) related to adventure travel or travel guide to a specific destination.
Then there are lots of travel affiliate programs offered by travel booking sites. You can also promote tons of Amazon products (backpacks, camping gear, adventure sports gear, etc.) on the site. Get the drift? Here’s a typical step by step affiliate marketing business model.
1. Pick a niche
Start by picking a topic that is both interesting to you and has a sizeable profit potential. If you possess some expertise in the domain, it is like icing on the cake. Consider if there are enough profitable products/services in the niche for you to promote. I will mention secrets of profitable niche selection in detail later.
2. Find related products
Once you have chosen a niche, find related products and services that can be profitably promoted through your niche blog/website. I will show you tips on how to pick winning products on ClickBank. Once you have products that are perfect for your blog/website, get a unique affiliate link (that can be traced back to you when it comes to keeping track of commissions).
3. Build a blog or website
It isn’t a huge task to build a niche blog/website to promote/market affiliate products or services chosen by you. WordPress allows you to create professional looking, eye-catching and user-friendly sites in a few clicks.
4. Populate blog/website with valuable content
Know the golden rule of making money online? Get value before aspiring to gain value from customers/readers. Create compelling content that is interesting, useful and informative for your target readers. Keep the content related to the products/services promoted by you, so readers will be interested in making purchases related to the topic/niche.
5. Promote your blog/website
When you are all set with the content, affiliate links, and blog design, you need to put your brand where your potential customers hang out. You can employ a variety of blog promotion channels such as paid advertising programs, building fanpages on social media, creating guest post for other blogs (and kinking back to your site), ect.
Contrary to popular notion that affiliate marketing is dead as an online revenue earning channel, it is still making smart marketers a lot of money. You only need to adapt to changing trends and reinvent the game a bit to stay on top of it. Affiliate marketing is here to stay, and I am going to reveal all the little-know tips and secret strategies to help transport your business into the big league.
The toughest block to overcome is to get the ball rolling. Once you get started, you learn new strategies, latest trends and what works (what does not too) along the way.
Eight Golden Priciples od Affiliate Marketing
So you have decided to jump on the affiliate marketing bandwagon and make money from what is probably one of the most profitable ways to make money online. However, here are height golden rules that you must know before launching a rewarding affiliate marketing business.
1. Be genuine, honest and ethical wth your readers. Nothing will kill your credibility than sharing misleading infomation or lying to your readers to make a sale. Also, you are legally bound to make a full disclosure of the fact that you will be earning a commission if they purchase products/services through your link. be upfront, and inform your readers that in return for offering expert recommendations, you will be making a small commission for every sale and that the amount they are charged for the getting a commission.
2. Always promote high quality and time tested products that you can confidently vouch for. Do not opt for sub-standard products to make quick sales. They will hamper your reputation like no other, anl people will stop taking your recommendations seriously.
3. Do not limit yourselves only to a particular kind of product, though you should not be promoting more than 2-3 good products at time, especially in the early stages of the business. You can be a promoter for everything from large corporations such as Amazon (select product that are relevant to your niche frome a vast inventory) to digital courses to Ebooks.
4. If you do not want to be seen as a spammer, keep all your affiliate related to your niche. If your blog is about budget travel, do not strt selling teeth whiteners or weight loss supplements on it. Once you are seen as a spammer, people will not takr even relevant product recommendations seriously.
5. This is something not many affiliate marketers are aware of. However, affiliate commission rates on the same program can vary from the one network to another. Some networks may pay as much as 20-30% more than other networks, which means you should look up the same products/services on different networks to check who is offering the highest commission.
6. There is no fixed formular for success in affiliate though there are lots of guidelines and strategies that work. What works for someone else may not work for you. You will have to keep changing the rules of the game and evolve buu trying out different ad sizes, content pieces, affiliate links, visuals, placement of links and more. You have to keep testing different aspects of promotion and marketing untill you arrive upon a trategy that works best for you.
7. Read the Terms of Service for every program you plan to market extremely carefull bebefore promoting it. For instance, some affiliate marketing programs prohibit the inclusion of affiliate link within emails sent to subscriblers. To avoid all future hassles, go through the individual terms and conditions of every program.
8. Build brands, not spammy content frams. I cannot emphasize the value of building content brands enough for making a profitable living from affiliate marketing. Look at any affiliate site that's faring exceptionally well across verticals such as travel, finance, property, health, ect.
The blog is almost always a powerful brand such as Houzz, Agoda. Compare ect. have made it big in the world of affiliate marketing owing to their powerful editorial and content trategy, along with the value they offer readers. Creating content farms stuffed with popular keywords may seem like a tempting prospect to make a quick buck in the beginning. However, be assured that it iwll not help you build a long term and sustainable business.
9. Hve a clear audience to promote to by identifying acompelling need. Bill Cosby once famously stated, "The key to failure is trying to please everbody." This is exactly what will happen if you do not have a clear and focused audience. You cannot sell everything to everyone. There has to be a ser of clearly defined audience wo are interested in your products or services.
Affiliate marketing is nothing but promoting the products/services of other people to earn a commission from every sale that is made through your link. It involves building a website/blog (or social media page) about a niche that matches the products/services you are aspiring to promote.
Let’s consider an example to understand the power and benefits of affiliate marketing for everyone involved. You live in a town that is buzzing tourist hub. Every year lots of tourists make their way into the town to witness its famed tourist attractions. You own commercial premises in the heart of the town and decide to convert it into an information hub considering the huge demand and potential.
Soon businesses all across the town notice that a whole of tourists make their way to your information hub when they need guidance related to food, shopping, transport, attractions, museums and more. They decide to tie-up with you and offer y a commission in exchange for recommending recommending their services to tourists who may need it.
So each time you send them a visitor, who ends up giving them business, you earn a small commission. There are plenty of people who walk daily into your center, which means there are plenty of opportunities to make money through your recommendations each day.
This is exactly what affiliate marketing is in the virtual hub. Your blog is the visitor information center, and the affiliate merchants are various businesses that have products or services that may be of interest to your blog visitors. Thus you enlist as their affiliate and promote their products or services on your blog in exchange for a commission/completed action or sale.
You offer plenty of valuable content to your readers (in the form of informative and insightful posts), engage them in a conversation, build authority (through well-researched posts) and ultimately inspire a loyal following, where readers trust you enough to make purchases through your unique recommendation affiliate links.
If you pick a topic related to your area of expertise or passion (and research it to be profitable enough), there are tons of related affiliate programs across multiple affiliate marketing marketplaces. For instance, if you are a keen traveler or possess an inherent interest in adventure travel, you can create a blog around your experiences or adventures. Populate your blog with amazing, wow-worthy content that fulfills the vicarious wanderlust of your readers. Next, start finding profitable products and service within the adventure travel domain. You may find eBooks on ClickBank (one of the largest affiliate marketing marketplaces) related to adventure travel or travel guide to a specific destination.
Then there are lots of travel affiliate programs offered by travel booking sites. You can also promote tons of Amazon products (backpacks, camping gear, adventure sports gear, etc.) on the site. Get the drift? Here’s a typical step by step affiliate marketing business model.
1. Pick a niche
Start by picking a topic that is both interesting to you and has a sizeable profit potential. If you possess some expertise in the domain, it is like icing on the cake. Consider if there are enough profitable products/services in the niche for you to promote. I will mention secrets of profitable niche selection in detail later.
2. Find related products
Once you have chosen a niche, find related products and services that can be profitably promoted through your niche blog/website. I will show you tips on how to pick winning products on ClickBank. Once you have products that are perfect for your blog/website, get a unique affiliate link (that can be traced back to you when it comes to keeping track of commissions).
3. Build a blog or website
It isn’t a huge task to build a niche blog/website to promote/market affiliate products or services chosen by you. WordPress allows you to create professional looking, eye-catching and user-friendly sites in a few clicks.
4. Populate blog/website with valuable content
Know the golden rule of making money online? Get value before aspiring to gain value from customers/readers. Create compelling content that is interesting, useful and informative for your target readers. Keep the content related to the products/services promoted by you, so readers will be interested in making purchases related to the topic/niche.
5. Promote your blog/website
When you are all set with the content, affiliate links, and blog design, you need to put your brand where your potential customers hang out. You can employ a variety of blog promotion channels such as paid advertising programs, building fanpages on social media, creating guest post for other blogs (and kinking back to your site), ect.
Contrary to popular notion that affiliate marketing is dead as an online revenue earning channel, it is still making smart marketers a lot of money. You only need to adapt to changing trends and reinvent the game a bit to stay on top of it. Affiliate marketing is here to stay, and I am going to reveal all the little-know tips and secret strategies to help transport your business into the big league.
The toughest block to overcome is to get the ball rolling. Once you get started, you learn new strategies, latest trends and what works (what does not too) along the way.
Eight Golden Priciples od Affiliate Marketing
So you have decided to jump on the affiliate marketing bandwagon and make money from what is probably one of the most profitable ways to make money online. However, here are height golden rules that you must know before launching a rewarding affiliate marketing business.
1. Be genuine, honest and ethical wth your readers. Nothing will kill your credibility than sharing misleading infomation or lying to your readers to make a sale. Also, you are legally bound to make a full disclosure of the fact that you will be earning a commission if they purchase products/services through your link. be upfront, and inform your readers that in return for offering expert recommendations, you will be making a small commission for every sale and that the amount they are charged for the getting a commission.
2. Always promote high quality and time tested products that you can confidently vouch for. Do not opt for sub-standard products to make quick sales. They will hamper your reputation like no other, anl people will stop taking your recommendations seriously.
3. Do not limit yourselves only to a particular kind of product, though you should not be promoting more than 2-3 good products at time, especially in the early stages of the business. You can be a promoter for everything from large corporations such as Amazon (select product that are relevant to your niche frome a vast inventory) to digital courses to Ebooks.
4. If you do not want to be seen as a spammer, keep all your affiliate related to your niche. If your blog is about budget travel, do not strt selling teeth whiteners or weight loss supplements on it. Once you are seen as a spammer, people will not takr even relevant product recommendations seriously.
5. This is something not many affiliate marketers are aware of. However, affiliate commission rates on the same program can vary from the one network to another. Some networks may pay as much as 20-30% more than other networks, which means you should look up the same products/services on different networks to check who is offering the highest commission.
6. There is no fixed formular for success in affiliate though there are lots of guidelines and strategies that work. What works for someone else may not work for you. You will have to keep changing the rules of the game and evolve buu trying out different ad sizes, content pieces, affiliate links, visuals, placement of links and more. You have to keep testing different aspects of promotion and marketing untill you arrive upon a trategy that works best for you.
7. Read the Terms of Service for every program you plan to market extremely carefull bebefore promoting it. For instance, some affiliate marketing programs prohibit the inclusion of affiliate link within emails sent to subscriblers. To avoid all future hassles, go through the individual terms and conditions of every program.
8. Build brands, not spammy content frams. I cannot emphasize the value of building content brands enough for making a profitable living from affiliate marketing. Look at any affiliate site that's faring exceptionally well across verticals such as travel, finance, property, health, ect.
The blog is almost always a powerful brand such as Houzz, Agoda. Compare ect. have made it big in the world of affiliate marketing owing to their powerful editorial and content trategy, along with the value they offer readers. Creating content farms stuffed with popular keywords may seem like a tempting prospect to make a quick buck in the beginning. However, be assured that it iwll not help you build a long term and sustainable business.
9. Hve a clear audience to promote to by identifying acompelling need. Bill Cosby once famously stated, "The key to failure is trying to please everbody." This is exactly what will happen if you do not have a clear and focused audience. You cannot sell everything to everyone. There has to be a ser of clearly defined audience wo are interested in your products or services.
Affiliate Marketing: How to Scale Up Fast - Scott, David.
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