Passive income. It’s what most
bloggers aim for: making money while you sleep. And affiliate marketing is a
great way to start.
But signing up for every affiliate
program available and slapping up dozens of affiliate products on your blog is
not the way to success.
The key to making affiliate marketing
work is simple: planning. Affiliate income may be passive, but the steps you
need to take before earning that first check are not passive.
When you complete these ten steps
thoroughly, you’ll give yourself the best chance of earning a substantial
income with your affiliate marketing business.
Step 1: Avoid Scams
This one is easy. Avoid promises like
this:
“How to Make $10,000 Dollars with
Affiliate Marketing for Beginners.”
Avoid Affiliate Marketing Scams
Remember the old adage: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Nowhere is that truer than in the world of affiliate marketing, where phoney
products and fake reviews abound.
Stick to the tried and trusted
programs and products.
Step 2: How to Start an Affiliate
Marketing Website
Think about it. Would you buy from
someone you met in the street carrying a suitcase full of fidget spinners,
knife sets and Gucci knockoffs? Doubtful, unless you enjoy taking risks.
Selling online is no different.
Shoppers look to brands or people they trust. People with a good understanding
of a topic, who offer good quality products that will make their customers’
lives easier, safer, or more enjoyable.
If you already have a blog, you’re
likely to be at least part way there. You’ve chosen a topic. You’ve narrowed it
down so that you’re targeting a specific audience. You know what their problems
are. You’ve provided lots of valuable content that helps your blog visitors.
You’ve pleased the search engines, so you have a good amount of traffic coming
to your blog. And your audience has come to know you over time.
You’ve set in motion the traffic-generating
process. Now all you need to do is choose an appropriate affiliate program and
convert your loyal readers into customers. No need to panic — we’ll cover “how”
in the next steps.
But first: can
you start an affiliate marketing business without an information-rich niche
blog or website?
You’ll find some articles that say
it’s easy to sell from a general blog that does nothing but sell unrelated affiliate
products. But think back to our street sales from a suitcase. Why would anyone
buy from a site without a specific focus? The audience wants to buy items they
have faith will offer them something positive.
How to choose a niche is outside the
scope of this article. You’ll need to:
- assess what
you’re passionate about
- determine
whether that subject is in an already saturated market
- determine
whether there’s enough demand for it, and
- decide
whether there are products in the affiliate marketing sphere that will
allow you to make sufficient income.
- If you have
yet to find your perfect niche, we have a keyword brainstorming tool that will help you
discover the perfect combination of your interest, your expertise, and
market demand.
Step 3: Choose an Affiliate Program
There are many affiliate
programs for
beginners. When you’re
thinking about how to get started with affiliate marketing, there’s little
doubt that Amazon is the one to choose for promoting physical products.
Why?
It’s one of the world’s most famous
brands.
Shoppers know, like and trust it.
It has millions of products in every
conceivable niche.
Its return policies are excellent (and
all organized between Amazon and the customer so you need have nothing to do
with it).
Its commission rates are not the
highest, nor the lowest. Wise product choice can result in a good monthly
income.
Once you’ve cut your teeth on Amazon,
you can graduate to more complex programs.
Are there any drawbacks to Amazon?
Its “cookie” only lasts for 24 hours.
That means that if the person who clicked on your Amazon affiliate link buys
something within 24 hours, you will get a commission. Some program has a
time frame of 90 days or more.
Amazon insists on an active blog or
website with at least ten posts, and reviews the content during the assessment
process.
Step 4: Sign Up for Amazon’s Affiliate
(“Associates”) Program and Make Your Blog Compliant
If you have an active blog, there’s no
reason why you shouldn’t sign up for Amazon’s program now. Go to this page and
click on the “Join Now for Free” button.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing with
Amazon
It’s a very straightforward process:
you’ll be asked for your address, your blog or website URL and some basic
profile information. Once done, sit back and wait for Amazon to say “yay” or
“nay.”
Making Your Blog Compliant
Before you begin using affiliate
links, Amazon requires that you place the following statement on your blog: “As
an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” The typical place for
this is in your privacy policy and / or affiliate disclosure.
Step 5: Choose Your Product(s)
Here’s the exciting part: you get to
spend time looking through Amazon’s millions of products and deciding which you
want to promote. It can feel like you’re a kid in a candy store!
But it’s not quite that simple.
The critical thing to remember is to
promote a product that’s based on your customer’s needs or desires — not on
what you want!
Here are the basics of how to choose
your product:
Identify the problem with which your
potential customer is struggling to find a solution.
Consider what information you can give
that will help her solve that problem.
Think about a product you’ve used that
helped you deal with this problem.
List the pros, the cons and the
benefits of every feature of this product. This will form the basis of your
written content.
As you’re just starting to build up
your affiliate marketing website, concentrate on one main product
initially.
Step 6: How to Get Affiliate Links
Here’s how affiliate links work:
- You choose
the product and get the link from Amazon (or whichever affiliate program
you’re using).
- You place
the link, which includes your unique affiliate number, in a content-rich
article on your blog.
- Your
customer clicks the link, is taken through to the affiliate program, and
purchases the product.
- Amazon (or
whichever affiliate program you use) recognizes and stores your unique
number.
- You’re paid
whatever percentage commission the product attracts.
To get Amazon links…
Go to the product page you’re planning
to promote and look for the “Site Stripe” bar at the top of the page. Here
you’re given options for different types of links.
Text links are used, as the name
suggests, within a paragraph of text. You’ll be used to seeing these, normally
blue, links in most articles you read.
Below is an example, linking to two
products: a rat trap and an automatic chicken feeder. Coincidentally, these are
my two biggest affiliate income providers.
Image links, as the name suggests,
provide just the image of the product, with a choice of size.
Text+Image is the “old style” Amazon
image that everyone recognizes…
The relatively new “Custom” (“Native
Shopping Ads”) is a “stripe” effect, which stretches across the page.
Is one more effective than the others?
You’ll need to test this out on your own site. Every niche is different.
Make Your Links Legal
- To satisfy
Google’s requirements, any link that stands to make money must be
“nofollow.” How you add that to each link depends on the platform you use.
Solo Build It! members click a button to make the link “nofollow.”
- To satisfy
the US Federal Trade Commission guidelines, you must have a
clear statement using plain language near your affiliate link stating
that you stand to earn money should the visitor click through.
- It’s good
practice to open the affiliate link in a new window so that your blog
remains open for the reader to return to.
So you’ve chosen and applied to your
first affiliate program, you’ve selected your product, and you’ve discovered
how to create links.
You’re finished, right?
Wrong! You’re only just beginning!
Because now, you need to write
compelling content that will give your reader no choice but to buy the product
you’re promoting.
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Step 7: Write Compelling Content
Promoting products is a skill in
itself. There are different ways of doing it, but the most likely to be
successful is writing a detailed product review.
Here’s how to tackle this
all-important review:
- Acknowledge
the problem the reader is having.
- Find the
words the reader uses to talk about that problem, and use the same words.
- Write about
the product, if possible, from the perspective of personal experience.
- Talk about
the features of the product by mentioning their benefits to the reader.
- Acknowledge
the negatives.
- Wherever
possible, add images that clearly show that you (or in my case, my
chickens!) have personal experience of this product.
Image from my “Automatic Chicken
Feeder Review.”
For more detail about this critical
step, take a look at this article about how to write a product review. It
goes into detail about each part of this writing process.
But we’re not done yet.
Step 8: Promoting Your Products
Even if you have good traffic to your
blog, it’s rarely enough to add an article and leave it to make its own way in
the world.
You need to consider ways of promoting
it. Here are a few suggestions.
- Make your
own “banner” for
your product and add it to your most visited pages.
- Use a
Pinterest-sized image in
a site-wide column to ensure the visitor knows there’s an article. This
allows her to pin the image for later if she doesn’t have time to read the
article immediately.
- Email
marketing.
This sounds grand, but it simply means including a link to your review
page in your newsletter. Even a small list can make a difference in
affiliate sales.
Don’t have an email list? Start
one today! It’s never too early, even if your blog is in its very early stages.
Resist the temptation to send out promotional content until
your reputation as a provider of value is well established, though.
It’s unwise to promote products, or do
any form of selling, in every email. One in four is a recommended ratio. Learn
about the email marketing best practices to make sure you don’t
get more unsubscribes than you want — or worse, ending up in the spam or junk
folder!
- If you use
social media for business, it can be an excellent platform to promote your
product articles.
And don’t forget to promote your
website or blog itself!
Step 9: Test, Test, Test!
This is a step that many internet
marketers forget. Publishing and promoting a product review article without
studying the outcomes can leave money on the table.
Once you have a minimum of three
affiliate products, compare their success rates. What’s working? What’s not?
Look in particular at:
products. Are you targeting the right
product to answer your customers’ needs?
the types of link (in text, image,
text+image, stripe). Is one converting readers to customers more frequently
than the others?
the amount of commission. Never choose
products solely because of the percentage commission you’ll earn. But if
there’s similar product that pays a higher commission, at least consider it.
Step 10: Have Patience!
You won’t earn an income overnight
from your affiliate marketing efforts. And although its rightly called “passive
income,” you’ll need to invest a good amount of time and work first.
You’ll need to:
- Join the
right affiliate programs. Make sure to download our free checklist!
- Choose the
best products for your audience. Always ask yourself: What problem does
the product solve? How will it make my readers’ lives easier?
- Write a
product review that converts without “hard selling.”
Is it worth it?
Online shopping is a fast-growing
business. Online statistics predict that by 2020, online shopper
numbers will hit four trillion, with 47% of shoppers in the U.S.
buying their first item on Amazon.
Now that you know how to start
affiliate marketing the right way, you can grab your piece of the online
shopping pie.
Solo Build It!
(SBI!) has been championing the benefits of working from home for over 20
years. Enjoy what you do, while doing it better than most. More on that in a
minute, but first...
Now,
during these difficult times, we're offering SBI! at a heavily discounted price
(until things return to normal). We have slashed both the annual and monthly
plans to help you get going.
We've helped our
community — people from around the world — take back control of their future.
We can do the same for you, whether you're in your 20s and just starting out
or 50+ and planning for retirement.
Special
Offer — Fully Guaranteed
We
have cut the price of SBI! as much as possible. And you'll find a special bonus
on the order page. The whole idea is to enable folks to regain control of
their lives during these hard, stay-at-home times. This really works, but just
in case...
If
SBI! is not for you, for any reason, you don't lose a thing.
Just cancel and refund, no reason needed.
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