Having said that affiliate marketing for beginners can be challenging if you have never made money online before.
Understanding Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a simple concept.
You link to a product using an affiliate link that identifies you as the referrer, the customer goes to the sales page and buys the product, and you get paid a commission.
Most vendors use a payment processor and it is usually the payment processor who pays you the commission.
Getting Started - Choosing A Niche
What's a niche? It's a product type. If you are an affiliate who promotes fry pans, then your niche is fry pans.
You may niche down and promote omelette pans and be the site buyers visit to read about the best omelette pans or you may decide that you want to be a reviewer of everything concerned with saucepans, fry pans, and roasting pans.
Your niche can be as broad or as specialized as you want.
Physical Products or Digital Products
Physical Products
People online are said to be more likely to buy physical branded products.
This is because they think they know what they are getting.
Physical products are tangible and can be exchanged depending on the vendor, but as an affiliate the commission is lower.
This is because of the manufacturing, logistic, and sales costs that physical products have.
But the ability to sell a high volume is more easily attained.
With the right priced product that pays a decent commission you can earn a good income.
Amazon is the most popular physical goods online retailer with a massive affiliate program giving you the opportunity to choose from a wide range of goods to promote, both physical and digital.
Digital Products
Knowledge, music, audio products, video products, and other digital products are popular and there are many millionaires made through digital products.
Jeff Bezos' Amazon Kindle digital books are popular, but it is not profitable to be an affiliate for Amazon Kindle books.
Many of the books don't cost more than $15 and attract a low commission.
But there are other networks and vendors depending on your niche that you can choose from. Clickbank is recommended as a digital product network.
It offers a large range of niches and is mostly the payment processor for digital products, although some online retailers sell physical products within the health and fitness category.
Commissions on digital products on Clickbank are high.
Some vendors offer commissions of 50% to 75%.
If you are promoting make money online products, the payment processor, Warrior Plus, at different levels, offers commissions of 100%.
This is because the vendor wants to acquire the customer and is willing to pay to acquire a buyer.
The Goal Of Internet Marketers
Most Internet marketers have the goal of getting repeat customers.
Most customers will only shop at a shop when they need something.
But if marketers can contact them whenever they are selling something that might be of interest to the customer then they need a way to contact them.
Whatever website you go to online, if you download something or purchase something, the vendor or affiliate will always ask you for your email address.
This is to contact you every day and sometimes several times a day to try and sell something to you.
This is the number one goal of internet marketers, to build a customer list that they can sell to again and again.
Getting Customers
To attract customers vendors, use either paid traffic (ads) or free traffic (SEO - Search Engine Optimization or social media).
Paid Traffic
It is not recommended that you start buying traffic when getting started with affiliate marketing because if you don't know what you are doing you can burn through a lot of money quickly without the wanted result.
Paid traffic can take the form of email ads, PPC (Pay Per Click) ads either (Search Engine Marketing) SEM, or Social Media Marketing, paid ads on social media.
Many marketers in the make money online niche get started with email ads (but it can be applied to other niches too), as it is easier to acquire a customer.
But the problem with email marketing is building trust with your subscribers for them to be willing to buy the products you recommend.
The problem that many affiliates encounter is that they get impatient and expect the subscriber to buy a product within the first few weeks.
But the products they are promoting are at times not suitable for the subscriber.
Search Engine Marketing
Setting up ads on search is complicated and requires testing and adjusting.
You don't want to pour money down the drain which is easy to do.
You need to select the right keywords and be selling or promoting the right product.
You also need to be bidding the right amount per click.
The search provider wants you to pay what they want you to pay per click, but you need to pay as little as possible per click to make the most use of your money.
You can find other people online to set it up for you to make it more profitable for you so you can avoid the steep learning curve.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
SMM is like SEM except the social media platform usually has more data that they are willing to share about members of their platform.
Facebook is known to house the most data about their users.
But it is still profitable to advertise on the other social media platforms as well.
Free Traffic
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be difficult to break into.
It takes a while before Google or the other search engines will rank your site.
But Google offers tools to help web masters.
These include Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
You need to have set up a blog or website before you can make use of either of these tools.
If you are new to the Internet it is advisable to start with a free blog (e.g Google's Blogger) to gain some experience with SEO and blogging, as well as affiliate marketing.
Social Media
Social media makes it much easier for bloggers to get website visitors because they can make use of the content platforms which include Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
It is not necessary to have a large follower base or friend base as all these platforms have work arounds.
On Facebook you can post in Facebook groups, and on Twitter and Pinterest you can use #hashtags.
Over time if you post good content you can build up a following, but it is always advisable to use hashtags to get extra exposure.
As an affiliate beginner you need to learn as much about affiliate marketing as possible.
You can share links on social media.
Free offers work well. Speaking of free, a free course I am currently enrolled in will help with building an affiliate business is My Online Start-Up.
It is completely free.
There are no trials or payments required.
Besides this watch videos on YouTube of other affiliate marketers to learn more about affiliate marketing.
Follow Me on Twitter and Facebook and if you have any questions or need help with anything send me a message. Comment on this post with your opinion of this post. Thanks for reading.
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