In this article I will explain in detail what affiliate marketing is and how to get started making money with it in 2021. Get ready as you will discover a totally new world that you have most likely never considered before. At the end of this guide you will have all the information you need to get started right.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is you being able to earn a commission by promoting products from other companies.
The affiliate marketer is a reseller who earns a commission for each product he sells, a bit like offline resellers, that is, those door to door or those in call centers. I’m aware, it doesn’t sound very tempting, but trust me, it’s completely different online.
There are 3 parties involved.
- The advertiser , or the one who makes the advertisement available
- The publisher or the one who promotes the ad
- The consumer or the end user
The beauty of affiliations is that in the end, they all win!
- You’re happy because you made a commission
- The company is happy because it has made a sale or received a new contact
- The user is happy because he found what he was looking for
Doing affiliate marketing is not just about promoting and selling products created by others, but you could also be the one to affiliate your own product.
I’ll explain:
For example, if you have created an info-product, such as a video course, you can decide to share it on an affiliate network and allow others to sell it in exchange for a commission. This also means doing affiliate marketing.
Don’t worry, you will understand everything by continuing to read.
The work included is divided into 2 parts:
- The merchant or the person who creates the product
- The affiliate or the person who will promote the product
The merchant makes a product available to sell through a website or through an affiliate network which generates a link that ends with a reference (ref = “affiliate-code”).
That reference indicates that any user who starts browsing the merchant’s site through that link will do so in the name of the affiliate, who will earn a commission on a purchase/action.
The only thing the publisher will have to do is to promote that link.
On paper, it’s all very simple, in practice a little less. In fact, without relevant traffic sources, it will be difficult to bring home considerable commissions over time but don’t worry, we’ll get into that as well.
First, I want to explain to you why starting to do affiliate marketing can be a great idea.
Reasons to Do Affiliate Marketing
These 4 reasons are going to help you understand what affiliate marketing really is and how to start making money with it.
The affiliations are a great way to earn money, both for those who are beginners and for those already experienced in the field.
Here is a short list:
Getting started with affiliate marketing is easy
As an affiliate you don’t need to create anything, you just have to sell existing products, this will save you a lot of time and money.
Starting to work as an affiliate is extremely simple, just sign up for the affiliate program of the product you want to promote and get the link for your account, which will track all the user’s movements through cookies.
Basically:
- You will not have to spend time and money to create a product
- Don’t have to buy physical products,or have a warehouse to store them
- You will not need to manage an eCommerce or payments
- Won’t have to deal with customer support
Your only task will be to bring quality traffic to the product landing page, for the user to convert.
Through affiliation you can earn commissions even higher than 70%, it depends a lot on the type of product and the network.
Affiliate Marketing is an easy-to-grow business
Not having to personally create the product to sell, makes it extremely easy to test different solutions and find the one that best suits you.
In addition, you can also start multiple campaigns at the same time and devote all your energy to promotion.
There are no access limits
No previous experience or skills are required to start.
Of course, being an expert web designer or web marketer will certainly benefit you not a little over the competition, but I can guarantee you that many successful affiliate marketers have started from scratch, it just takes a lot of effort and perseverance.
You will learn how to best optimize your campaigns. Surely at the beginning, you will not get the desired results, but with each mistake, you will have a greater awareness of the right path to follow.
The only skills required to get started are:
- Basic use of computers and the internet
- Determination and perseverance
- Learning ability
- A lot of patience
Little initial expenses
One of the biggest benefits of affiliate marketing is the start-up costs. You don’t need large amounts of money to get started.
You could do affiliate marketing even without a website or a blog, simply by taking advantage of social media, but nowadays it is no longer so easy to earn significant amounts of money in the long term using only these tools.
Here you can learn how to create a Blog from scratch.
How to be a successful affiliate
To better understand how to get started in affiliate marketing, we need to clarify a few points.
There are many small, more or less important phases during the sales process, which we sum up in 4 fundamental steps.
1.Choose a niche
The very first thing to do is to choose your niche.
A niche is a small part of a larger market, where you may be specialized.
Don’t choose topics that are too large or varied, they will drastically decrease your chances of success. Try to be as specific as possible, people like specialized sites, they find them more reliable and worthy of attention.
The more specific the niche, the better, always remember that.
Last advice: Look for an evergreen niche, that is, one that lasts over time.
2.Market analysis
Once you have chosen the niche, the second thing to do is to find the product to promote and use thorough market analysis to decide if the product you have chosen is actually popular with your audience and profitable.
To do this, you can research Google and evaluate the competition.
Also, check for advertisements within the search results. If people are investing money in advertising, it means there is a market.
3.Create a website
Once you have chosen the product, you will have to build an entire specialized site around it, or develop a landing page, or a sales page.
I usually use the WordPress CMS for creating and managing my sites.
Unfortunately, it is not enough to have a simple website to be able to guarantee sales, everything must be optimized to the best in order to convince the user to make a purchase.
4.Get traffic
No visitors = No sales.
Obviously, you will need to generate constant traffic to your site. There are many possible traffic sources:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
The best technique to attract organic traffic, that is, in a natural and free way is SEO .
Using advanced SEO techniques, you will be able to optimize your website so that search engines notice you and show your site among the first pages of search results for certain keywords.
- Social Media
The social networks like Facebook, Instagram or YouTube have become a constant in the life of each of us. Being able to create a solid presence on social networks can bring many advantages.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing today is one of the most functional strategies ever , if you can generate a relevant and quality contact list (email) you will get great results.
In this way, we will decide how and when to contact our users and selling will be much easier.
Obviously, to organize, catalog, and automate all these processes we will need an email marketing platform, such as GetResponse.
- Paid traffic
This is definitely the traffic source of choice for the vast majority of marketers .
It is a fast and effective method.
It basically consists in creating paid advertisements through social media, search engines, or banners, which entice the user to click and access your offer. You will typically be charged every time a user clicks on your link.
Affiliate networks – What is affiliate marketing and how to get started
An affiliate network is the tool that acts as an intermediary between the merchant and the publisher.
If you intend to put your product in affiliate, let the network take care of the management of payments and the generation of links for the affiliate, you will save time and money, also the network will give you a lot more visibility.
The affiliates instead often go on these networks is for convenience, as they can have the most offers available to choose from, and because some companies give exclusivity to a particular network for the sale of their product.
Here are some of the most notorious affiliate networks:
What is Affiliate Marketing and How to get Started – Conclusions
in this article, we have understood in a more or less detailed way what affiliate marketing is and how it works. Certainly a fascinating path that can bring huge gains without large investments.
Obviously, it’s not all as easy as it seems, the obstacles you will encounter along the way will be many, but with the right strategy and determination, you can reach your goal.
To your success!
S
