What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process in which you sell products or services for other companies. The idea is that you send traffic to a product or service and when people purchase you get a commission from the supplier.
For instance, let’s pretend that we have a website all about baking. Now let’s say that one of our favourite tools in the kitchen is our stand mixer, and we use it for many recipes. If we sign up for an affiliate program that sells this mixer, they would then give us a special link. We would include this link on our website, and if someone clicks on it and makes a purchase, we will get paid a commission for the item they bought through our link. It might sound complicated, but it really isn’t, once you learn what to do and how to do it.
What do you need to become an Affiliate Marketer in 2020?
To get started, you just need internet access and a computer, laptop, or tablet and some free time. Next, you would need a website, or blog to advertise on. You can do affiliate marketing without a website however, this is not recommended and setting up a site can be easy and does not cost a lot if your willing to put the time in to it.
Once you know what your site is going to be about you can sign up to affiliate programs, get your product links and start recommending things that you use or know about that pertain to whatever your site is going to be about.
You don’t want to get very far away from what your website topic is. In other words, if you have a baking site you wouldn’t try to sell dog collars.
Now that you know a little bit about what we are going to be doing, we can dive further into the process. Before we go any further, please know that this type of work does have the potential to bring in a lot of money, but it will take time to learn the ropes.
What steps do I need to take to start making money as an Affiliate Marketer?
First things first, you need to take some time to think about what you want your website to be about. This can be any topic that you already know about or something that you are interested in learning. You will want to make sure that the topic you are building your website about has products that are related that you can advertise easily.
Experts recommend finding something in the categories of health, wealth, and happiness. Don’t fret if your topic doesn’t fall into one of those sections though, money can be made in almost any niche there is. You could sell lamps and lampshades and make plenty of money.
It is recommended that you look at getting into a category that you are interested in or passionate about. this will make it easier when writing about the subject and will be more motivating for you when you need to spend the hours working on the subject.
Once you have a niche or topic we can then think of a name for our site. The previous baking website example could be called “Simply Baked” or “Baked Simply” something short but catchy is usually your best bet.
Next, you can set this up with the free domain provided if you go with Bluehost. If you choose another domain provider you can go to the likes of GoDaddy, or NameCheap to name a few and purchase a domain name for your new website. A domain name usually runs about $15.00 per year, some may be cheaper or more expensive so you can shop around.
No, you aren’t done just yet, you will still need to set up hosting through a Hosting Service Provider. Bluehost has been a favourite of mine mostly because it is easy to follow, and not very much upfront cost involved. I think you can get started with hosting through them for as little as $2 – $5. Once you have your hosting in place, you can then install WordPress, don’t worry it isn’t as hard as it sounds.
Another advantage of Bluehost is that they offer the Domain name for free with their subscription for the first year.
I review the “Top 5 Web Hosting Services” so you can make your own decision of who to go with.
Now at this point, you have created your very own live website, and you are ready to get down into the real task of thought creation. Again, going back to our bakery site example, we could write specific articles about recipes, tips, and tricks of a baker, and so on. If it were a site about dogs, we could write articles on “How to Potty Train Your Dog” or How to Train Your Dog to do Simple Tricks or Commands”.
We would want to focus to our topic and create content in that area. Each day or at least every other day you will want to write a 500-1500 word article to be added to your site.
It is also recommended that you get a Funnel building software to create landing pages. Although this is not a necessity, but it does help when you want to advertise a product on social media, direct links to the products sites are not always allowed and directing them to a landing page and then through a funnel can be a great of converting potential customers is to paying customers.
What are the Best Affiliate Sites to Join?
The best affiliate sites to join will be different for everyone depending upon the topic chosen really. Amazon is a very popular website for buyers and affiliates.
Amazon is a top choice for many marketers as they have a wide variety of things to promote, and people already trust amazon so it makes your job as an affiliate a bit easier because you don’t have to spend a lot of time gaining the trust of your audience on your own. The downside to Amazon is their commission payout is kind of low, I believe it’s between 4-7 percent of your total sale.
Another affiliate site that is also quite popular but not as popular as Amazon, is Clickbank. This site is known for selling mostly digital goods, such as eBooks, and software type products.
Clickbank pays out way higher commissions compared to Amazon, many products will give you between 50-75% of each sale. They wouldn’t have our stand mixer from our baker example, but we could probably find recipe books or something like that. If we were doing a site about dogs, they would have eBooks that would pertain to our site.
Many marketers use several Affiliate programs to add different offers to their sites, you are not limited in this area by no means. Another one to check out is Commission Junction, they are similar to Click-bank. There are many affiliate programs available to choose from even places like Wal-mart, Target, Booktopia and other brick and mortar stores that use affiliates. You can even do a search in Google to find more.
How Do I Get People to visit my Site?
Getting potential customers to your site can be tricky, it is not one of those “if I build it they will come” deals. There are two types of traffic that you are going to work to get, one is paid for and one is free traffic. Free traffic, of course, is great, but you will need to put some time into it. You will use keywords on your site, and the search engine will pick those up and place your website on their pages. The strength and competition of keywords will determine how much work you will need to do.
The paid version will go faster, but you will need to put quite a bit of money into advertising to get off the ground. This will also be a bit of a learning curve because if you don’t know what you are doing you could spend a lot of money and not get too many visitors out of it. Again, you can use both free and paid traffic if you like.
This would be a good time to read up on keywords and search engine optimisation before you get started advertising through the search engines. Getting good long-tail keywords in place is a tremendous help to getting your site moving in the right direction.
Is Affiliate Marketing Really a Viable Source of Work at Home Income?
Can I really make enough money to replace my job’s income? Yes, you have the potential to earn a large amount of money from marketing, even enough to replace your current job. You will not immediately start earning tons of money, you will work at it little by little. Most people do it in their spare time to make extra money, as they build their site up over time, they find that they start making more online than they do at the 9-5 jobs. The best part about this work is you have no commute, no boss, and very little overhead expenses.
In this article I have affiliate links that can earn commission at no additional cost to you.
This why Affiliate Marketing has the potential to earn you additional money in 2021 and beyond and is a great Working from Home Job!
If you want to learn more about ClickBank from the ClickBank University, then click on the link “I’m ready” and get trained from ClickBank themselves!
Take action and start today!
Regards
Ben @ Beka Products
DISCLAIMER
“Some of the links on this web site are affiliate links. Keep in mind that we may receive compensation for recommendations made in reference to the products and/or services.
This compensation comes at NO extra cost to you and may be in the form of money, services and/or complimentary products and could exist without any action from a website visitor.”
