Affiliate Marketing as a Beginner: A Complete Guide

Affiliate marketing is one of the best way to start making money from your blog or website. It can garner your income by placing advertisements on the blog post or on the website. Most of the bloggers income comes from affiliate blogging. So, let’s find out what affiliate marketing is and what you need to know and to start it. How can you monetize your website or blog by using different minimization program? Which one to choose? Which affiliate programs are best to start? Let’s discuss in in-depth, and look at everything there is to know about affiliate marketing.

Let’s Know First What Is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is not a short cut way to get rich. You need to work hard and have patient to get the goal. When you have reached there, yeah you are rich then. Good payouts from affiliate marketing are the result of hard work. The great thing about it is that you can do it from sitting in your home. To define affiliate marketing think of your store as a subtle type of online marketing trough which you market other peoples products. This is the era of online marketing, more and more people are turning to internet to do online shopping or search for a product to buy. So how people are actually searching internet to find what they are looking for?

It can be hard for people to find a perfect product that they are looking for with hundreds of retailers who sells the same products. Because of this it’s harder for those retailers to make sure they’re getting enough traffic to their websites. The solution for this problem is to get traffic from other websites. This is where, you and I, as a publisher come in. We, who have a website can form an affiliate relationship with a retailer. This can be done directly or via affiliate program. Then you drive traffic to that retailer site through your website or blog post to a specific product that retailer sells. To do this task you use specialized links within your contents.

When a user of your site clicks on that specialized link, tracking cookies within the customer’s Brower tell the trailer that particular visitor came from your website. If the customer purchases something on the retailers’ website you’ll get a commission of that sale. We are going to talk in detail later where you can place the links in your website or posts. For now let’s see how you can make your affiliate business more profitable.

How Can You Chose Most Profitable Niche?

Narrow down you niche idea as much as you can, it is an important part of creating a website in general. This will give you a focused audience who will find your contents in search results. Let’s tell you how can you know which niche is best for generating revenue with affiliate marketing? Let’s go through some important steps which need to be consider before doing affiliate marketing.

Finding Your Interest

It is important to find the topic that you are going to write about. Because you need to write a lot about it and you need enough information available. Your website will not do well if you chose something that is going to be bored after a few time. Pick something interesting and valuable to the readers. But remember just because you like something that you can write a lot about it does not mean it’s going to sell more. This mean your previous knowledge can be extremely useful in picking a niche idea but need to be careful selecting it. Don’t let this narrow you down too much. If you know how to do a good research and has the will to do it, it does not need that much of hard work. You don’t need to be an expert on that too.

Finding Out the Online Demand

If you do a bit research, will find out that popularity on internet is constantly changing. To get started let see what immediate demand for your topic is. You will find plenty of tools to check the search rate and popularity of certain keywords. Google’s Keywords Planner is a free tool inside the AdWords system that helps to see the search volume of certain keywords for a certain niche topic. Another great tool is Keywords Everywhere which is a browser extension. It lets you see the search volume per month of any keywords that you have typed into Google. Another great option can be the Google Trends. This is the most popular one to find out about a niche topic and its search result.

Look To See If People Wants It or Not

You can’t just go with any niche idea, your idea should me something that is interesting and valuable to people, something that people are looking for. You need to pick a niche that will make you the most money. You need to see how many people are interested. You need to see how many of online community has in you niche ideas, time to see what your potential audience is saying and doing. This can be done through a simple Google search. First find the blogs that are already there with that niche idea, and what the competition is. Find the things that they are missing out and people need those missing things. Go for those topics that are missing from the ideas and competitors’ websites or blogs. Also find out if there is any establish blog on that topic or not? Are those sites getting visitors? if yes then how much and who are their visitors? How people interact with their post? If they get social media shares or not? How are they making money and how much that is?

Checking this competition ahead of time will give you good ideas about the future of your niche idea or website. Remember that a popular topic may not be that much good to pick if there are too much good competitors, if you’re not sure about your success. Don’t give up the idea just narrow down it a bit more.

Make Sure Your Niche Idea Will Sell Products

To your readers affiliate marketing is all about recommending products or services. So let’s find out your niche topic ideas that actually has products to sell and people will buy. See this post on how you can chose a list for niche ideas list and take that list of niche ideas that you have and alongside each item, list the problems that people are going to face. Now list the products within your niche that can solve those problems. For example let’s say that your niche idea is about women hiking clothes. Now some problems that audience will face might include finding clothes those are breathable, needs good hiking boots and that are durable, purchasing clothing for hiking in winter, etc.

Try to research you niche keywords on Amazon and see how many products result you get. I hope you got thousands of results. Now check for the customers reviews and ratings, this will help you to select the right product to suggest to your audience. Find out how many reviews are you seeing on these niche products? Are there some products that have hundreds or thousands reviews or ratings? If yes, then congratulation, your niche idea is up for online.

Start Working with the Best Affiliate Networks

When you are done with you niche website or blog, then you need to search for the good and best affiliate networks out there. Need to be careful when choosing this networks. Few can be waste of time where some are great to work with. You can go for affiliate programs or directly involve with a company, depends on you. I’m giving some of the most popular affiliate marketing networks, and how they can be profitable for you.

1. Amazon Associates:

Amazon is the most popular affiliate program out there. We all know about Amazon and probably use it on a regular basis. Amazon affiliate program that they established is known as Amazon Associates. It provides huge income for many affiliates around the world.

Commission: Amazon recently made some major changes to its affiliate program commission rates. The commission rate now depends on category of products. The lowest rate is 1% and the highest one is 10%. Below is the table of amazon commission rate.

Fixed Standard Program Fee Rates for Specific Product Categories: Amazon Associates

• Extremely simple to start using and gives six months’ time to make minimum 3 sells to get to approve to the program permanently.
• Wide variety of products collections.
• Options to display ads and many more.
• Payout threshold of minimum $10 monthly or by target amount.

2. Rakuten: Rakuten is one of the oldest companies out there and was founded in 1997.This is the most respected affiliate market networks and has maintained itself as one of the best available out there. The key of Rakuten is its ease of use term. They make it extremely easy for the use of affiliate marketers. It features thousands of advertisers within brands that are well-known in the market and has a very good reputation. They cover many different categories, making them an excellent choice for affiliate marketers.

Commission: Rakuten offers commission from 1% to 6%, depending on which category affiliate marketers work on. Some good points about it,

• Easy to use user control panel for affiliates
• Rotating banners
• An excellent support system with customer’s support and tools that provides great features.
• Payouts depends on a fix rate or after a month date whatever you chose.

3. CJ Affiliates (Commission Junction):

CJ boasts some of the most well-known brands on the market has more than 3,000 merchants currently on their site, including many households’ names that we are all familiar with. That much of brands in one place can become both a positive and a negative feature. This brands can be an excellent way to earn a good amount of money, if you are an established affiliate marketer. The competition on this network is very hard which is not that helpful for a new affiliate marketer. You need to work very hard to get on this. When you have signed up, you need to join advertisers programs individually and have to wait until that advertiser approve you. This can be both a waste of time and reason of frustration.

Commission: Commissions are not listed on CJ’s website, but some users have mentioned that the commission is an average of 25%.Some good points about CJ:

• You will have the monthly payouts via check or direct deposit.
• Advertisers from different categories and well-known brands.
• You will get the notification if any ads or links is not working.
• Reporting is real time.
• Easy to use user interface.

 

4. Clickbank: Clickbank is in this business for 18 years now and has great reputation in affiliate marketing field. It focusses on lifestyle products. Most of the products on their site are digital products provided by entrepreneurs. Clickbank become most trusted in the field of affiliate market, because of so many years they are into it and the way they provide great services. Their user interface is great to use and has tons of features for affiliate marketers to see their reports.

Commission: Commissions on ClickBank are set by the vendors itself. The vendor can chose a commission from 1% to 75%.This is the sale rate that an affiliate gets when he sells any vendor products. Some good points about Clickbank,

• It provides one of the highest commission.
• Pre-approval is not necessary
• Has multi-lingual support
• You can set your own payment threshold
• Support is not that great.

5. ShareASale: ShareASale is one of the largest affiliate market available. The company has been in this business since 2000.They have more than 4,000 merchants within their catalog. This is the reason they have a wide range of products categories available in their market. ShareASale is easy to use and provides a wide range of assistance for their new affiliate marketers. You will find their blog is full of interesting topics and ideas, which will be great assets for a new affiliate marketer like you.

Commission: The commission structure of this site is not set to exact set in stone. Their each merchants has their own individual commission rate. Commission rate may go from 3% to 20%.Some merchants may give you a fix price on per sell you made. For example, WP Engine pays $200 for each sale. Some good points about it,

• 4,000 merchants to choose from.
• User friendly interface
• Reporting is in-depth with tons of features.
• Great support system.
• Payouts starts from $50.

Making Affiliate Marketing Relationships

If you want to become a successful in affiliate marketing field, you need to make good relationship with some good companies. You can work with companies like Namecheap, GoDaddy and Blushost. You can directly go to them and make a negotiation for affiliate rate. These companies offer affiliate programs to those who want to promote their products and services. It is a good idea to go for a direct company rather than going through an affiliate network. And the income really depends on your niche and how much you can sell. And direct affiliate marketing is far better than others. It increases your sell as well as you become trust worthy to those big companies.

Contents

Now it’s time to start creating good contents. Think about what kind of contents you should write? Which contents will catch reader’s attention? How you are going to promote these products through the contents? How can you make sure that your contents does not sound like big paid advertisement?

Try To Solve Problems

We discussed about writing a list of problems that your reader’s faces, and finding products that solves those problems. Going to social media groups and other sites like Quora to find what kind of problem people are facing about your niche, is always great choice. Now that you have got the problems, write contents on solving those and put the appropriate products that people need within that writing.

Try To Provide Honest Reviews

There are tons of people who like to read reviews on a particular product, before they are going to buy that product. So write products reviews and target those audiences. This is another great way to add affiliate links within your website or blog. You can start with telling people your real live experience with that product. Give a comparison between products or make good comparison table of similar products. This will help you to fit different affiliate links with the post. For example, let’s say your article is about drones. Then find few drones and make a comparison article on that and put the affiliate links with the drone’s names or price. That’s it.

Try To Write How-To Posts

The word “How-to” is most popular within Google and YouTube, I guess you know that already. So when you are done finding the problems, just write few post starting title with “Hot-to”. It will help you to get a good SEO and a huge amount of traffic to the site. Search engines like it most. If you are using a tool or instrument to accomplish a task within your niche, try to create an affiliate link to it. Another great option is to write about, how to use a certain product in your niche idea. Going back to your drones’ example, you can write a good amount of article by write on how a particular drone people can fly, how to add cameras to it etc.

Place Links and Banners

You can place the links within your contents text, which is one of the best way to place affiliate links. Never try to draw reader’s attention to the link that you have placed within your contents text. Just put it there, readers will click on it, believe me, they will. If you try to divert their attention to the like you placed, that will disrupt the flow of your content. One more time let’s take that drones example, you are talking about DJI drones and giving a brief description about that, in your writing you are telling your readers that DJI drones can be found online on Amazon.com or in other online stores. Did u noticed that I’ve put two links on DJI and Amazon? When a reader is reading, they will notice the link naturally and they will click if necessary…Remember, your readers are here to know about your contents, so what links you provide they will click to see.

Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing is easy and extremely good way to make a good amount of income. What you need to do is follow the instruction, not mine whomever you feel ok with. Work hard and never lose hope. Never delete any contents that you have written. Affiliate marketing has consistently proven that it is one of the most effective ways to earn money from a good niche idea website. It really does not matter if you chose to work with an affiliate program or with a particular company. Either way, you have the chance to earn a great amount and become successful in this area. Remember working on a niche idea website in a hard work, but it also pays in real cash by time.