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Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative way to earn extra cash, however in order to reap the benefits long term you will have to put the effort in at the beginning. Set up costs are relatively low, as you can get going with as little as $100.
Let's start from the beginning for those of you who are unsure about what affiliate marketing is.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing allows you to become, in a way an unofficial sales representative for someone else's product or service. You can sign up to be an affiliate through a business affiliate program. You will choose a product or service you want to promote, and advertise that product or service via your affiliate link. When someone buys that product or service via your affiliate link, you will then receive a commission or percentage from the sale.
You can find whether or not a business has an affiliate program by simply typing into Google for example, "Ted's Electronics Affiliate Program".
How to Start Affiliate Marketing?
Set up costs are low, however in order to see long term benefits the effort rate will be high. I will go through the ways you can start affiliate marketing ranking from most beneficial in the long term to least.
Start a Blog:
Blogs are great vessels for earning affiliate commissions. You should think of a blog, or any website you own for that matter, as a piece of online real estate. When you build your own website, you are building an online asset. When starting a blog, you should focus on a subject you care about. For example, if you are passionate about snowboarding you may want to write content about your snowboarding trips and adventures, or you might review the, "top ten best snowboard brands." If for example you have used a particular snowboard brand, you can search as to whether that brand has an affiliate program and then incorporate your affiliate link into your blog as a recommendation. Therefore, you will earn commission for each sale that snowboarding brand gets via your affiliate link.
The effort rate for starting a blog is high. You will have to buy a domain name, create a website, create content and then focus on how to get traffic to your website. This will mean that you will have to spend time on optimising your blog for search engines (S.E.O), and possibly creating campaigns for paid traffic. However, once you start ranking on search engines for your particular topic, in our example that's, "Snowboarding." You will then get an audience, or following who trust your recommendations, and then the effort is reduced and the benefits are then increased.
You also have full visibility of your website’s analytics. Most website building platforms offer their own analytics data for you to review, but you can also integrate your website with Google Analytics for free. Having visibility over your website’s analytics will allow you to optimise your site for more traffic. You can review what keywords you are ranking for and which blog posts are getting the most visits and earning you the most commission.
Successful blogs contain content that adds value and fulfils a need. It's best not to make your blog too, "Sales like". You should promote products you either believe in, or have used yourself.
The most popular website platform for bloggers is Wordpress. Wordpress is easily customisable as there are many web developers that have created themes, plug-ins and APIs that can easily integrate with a Wordpress website.
Start A YouTube Channel:
A YouTube channel is another online asset. I've ranked this below creating your own blog in terms of sustainability, simply because you don't own the platform for your content (i.e., you don't own YouTube), because, you know, Google owns it. That said once you put the effort into creating useful content, and get a reasonable following the financial benefits from YouTube can be two-fold.
Creating a YouTube channel is free, the hard part is getting people to watch your videos. Once you get your view count up and people start liking, commenting, and sharing your videos, Googles Algorithm takes notice and starts adding your videos to the recommended list.
In order to be successful as a YouTuber, you have to be consistent with your content. Try and upload a video every week. It will take time before you start seeing some results, however once you do, YouTube will start paying you for allowing advertising on your videos, and you will also be earning commissions through your affiliate links. Going back to our snowboarding example, you could make a video reviewing the best snowboarding goggles. Either in the middle or at the end of the video you could say, "If you want to buy a pair of these goggles, click on the link in the description". Obviously that link would be your affiliate link, and if a viewer buys the goggles through your link, you will earn a commission. So, you can imagine how lucrative this can be if you are a YouTuber with thousands of followers.
The downside to YouTube is that if you fall out of favour with the algorithm you can start to lose views. You will have to make sure that you maintain your following through other social media, and your own website. Therefore, if you have the time and energy, combining a YouTube channel with a blog will reinforce the longevity of your affiliate marketing venture.
Direct Link Affiliate Marketing:
This offers the lowest barrier to entry, however in my opinion has the least sustainability.
In order to get started you only need to create a campaign on for example, Microsoft Ads (Google Ads does not allow direct link marketing). Within the final URL section of your ad, you will input your affiliate link. When a customer clicks on your ad it will take them straight to the website of the company whose product or service you are promoting. In essence the ad that you create will just look like an ad for that particular company’s website. The customer will not know that they have got to the website via an affiliate link.
You will get instant results if you choose to start affiliate marketing via this method, however you will have to spend money on marketing campaigns every time you want to promote a product or service. This method makes it harder to build an online audience or following, and you will not have full visibility of your analytics, or which ad set or keywords are driving the most sales. You are therefore blind advertising.
This method can become expensive and will require you to constantly create ad campaigns. At least via a blog or a YouTube channel you can eventually rely on organic traffic.
Where to Find Affiliate Programs
Clickbank is extremely popular with affiliate marketers, and the commissions on some products and services are incredibly attractive. However, as you can imagine, given its popularity most affiliate marketers are competing to promote the same products.
It's free to create an account, and once signed in you can browse the market place to find a product or service you want to promote straight away. Some of the products and services in my opinion look a little spammy and it may take a while to find a product or service that looks reliable and trustworthy.
In order to find products with the least competition you can use the filters on the left-hand side of Clickbanks market place page. I would choose a product that has a gravity of less than 60. The lower the gravity the lower the competition.
Products and services promoted on Clickbank are popular with marketers who choose to use the Direct Link Marketing method.
Everyone knows about Amazon. Amazon is one of the worlds biggest online retailers. If you use Amazon Associates it's recommended that you have an online asset in the form of a blog or YouTube channel. You will have to apply for Amazon’s affiliate program and wait for them to approve you. However, once you are approved you will have to make what Amazon calls, "qualifying sales" (usually 3 sales) within 3 months if you want to keep your affiliate status.
The benefit of Amazon Associates is that even if the customer does not directly buy the product your affiliate link is promoting, they have still visited Amazon through your affiliate link. Therefore if they buy a different product, you can still get commission from whatever they bought.
Amazon slashed its affiliate marketing commission rates in April 2020, leaving some long-term Amazon Affiliate marketers disgruntled. The earnings from Amazon Associates are not as high as they used to be, unless you manage to gain a large following, or you have a constant flow of heavy traffic to your website.
The easiest way to get started with Amazon Associates is to create some kind of review blog post or YouTube video. Pick a product that you have recently bought, for example a pair of the latest wireless headphones, then talk or write about the pros and cons, maybe explain how to use them. You can then incorporate your affiliate link inside your blog post or in the description of your YouTube video.
Other Affiliate Programs.
As mentioned previously, if you are a fan of a particular product or service you can search whether or not that company has an affiliate program.
Businesses are keen to make profit, and they know that affiliate marketing is a great way for them to boost sales and in turn reduce their advertising costs. Therefore, most well-known businesses and companies will have affiliate programs. However, the vetting process will be different for each program. Some will require you to own a blog or have some sort of social media following in order for you to be considered.
Conclusion
As you've probably guessed, I believe in order to sustain your affiliate marketing venture, you will have to build an audience. You will have to commit time and effort and be ok with the fact that you may not see results straight away. If you manage to do it right, it's a great way to make money. Some affiliate marketers have managed to match their monthly salary with paid commissions, and others have managed to earn more than they ever dreamed they could. Before you start having visions of yourself driving a Lamborghini, most affiliate marketers earn a modest amount just to supplement their income. That said, if you pick the right products and services, build an online following and implement a good marketing strategy, who knows how far you could go.
There are no affiliate links in this blog post.
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