Being an affiliate is a good option to choose from if you don’t want to create your own product or render your own service. But before you can become one you have to learn affiliate marketing by following a workable guide. Doing this will save you from reading in circles.
As an affiliate, all you do is to promote other people’s products or services. Your success in this business will depend on the strategies you apply. Some strategies work fine, some don’t and others will just give you an average income. We’re going to look at six steps you need to know about as you learn affiliate marketing.
1. Finding A Profitable Niche Market:
I’ll say that this is the first thing you need to know and do very well as you learn affiliate marketing. A niche can generally be defined as a subset of a market. What does this mean? It means that when you narrow down a market you’ll come up with a niche. For example, “SEO” can be regarded as a market, “SEO services” can be regarded as a niche market and “affordable SEO services” is a niche market that has been narrowed down further.
The niche you should commit yourself to should be a profitable one. A profitable niche is a niche where the demand is high and the competition low. You can find a profitable niche online by doing keyword research and by surfing online stores like Amazon, ClickBank and EBay. Finding a niche is a big topic in its own right but for a more detailed discussion on it, read this free affiliate marketing training ebook.
2. Doing Keyword Research:
Doing keyword research is another important thing you should know as you learn affiliate marketing. It involves compiling a list of highly targeted keywords that are related to your niche. This list of keywords will form the basis of your website’s contents and the link text of your backlinks. Therefore, before you start writing contents or building backlinks to your site you must do your keyword research first.
Keyword research helps you to:
- find popular keywords (i.e. keywords many people are searching for)
- find less competitive keywords (keywords that have less sites competing for them in search engines)
- find buyers’ keywords and
- find keywords that are relevant to the niche you’re targeting.
With little or no keyword research, no one or very few people will ever find your site through search engines. Just like finding a profitable niche, keyword research is a big topic in its own right. You can get more details here.
3. Finding Affiliate Products and Writing Articles:
After you’ve taken the first step of finding a profitable niche and compiling a list of profitable keywords, the next thing will be finding affiliate products in that niche and writing quality contents that presell those products. For every keyword you’re targeting, write one or more article that is optimized for that keyword.
You can find affiliate products or services to promote in affiliate networks like ClickBank, Commission Junction (CJ.com), LinkShare, and ShareASale.
4. Building Your Websites:
You can go about this in several ways depending on your budget. You can either make use of free web hosts or make some investment with paid hosting companies like Hostgator. You can buy a domain name and hosting and install wordpress on your hosting account. This way you don’t have to bother about messing around with a lot of HTML/CSS codes.
If you intend building a lot of websites, then it is better to use content management software (CMS). This kind of software is similar to WordPress but unlike WordPress, they help you to easily manage all your sites from one control panel. website thumbnail, what Affiliate Genie can do for you
A good example of a CMS is Affiliate Genie. With software like this, you’ll be able to focus more on promoting your affiliate business than on building and managing websites.
5. Attracting Targeted Traffic to Your Sites:
This is another important point you have to take note of as you learn affiliate marketing. Without traffic there will be no sell or clicks on ads. Traffic is the life blood of any website.
Attracting traffic to a site is all about building backlinks to the site and this can be done in several ways. You can use PPC, article directories, blogs, user-generated content sites (like Squidoo & Hubpages), and so on. If you want more info on this, read my article titled: 9 Ways To Get More Website Traffic.
6. Building Your List:
You must have come across the saying that “the money is in the list”. If you want to get the most out of affiliate marketing, you have to build your list.
List building involves capturing the email addresses of your visitors in exchange for one freebie or the other. This is very necessary because most visitors need more preselling before they can buy from you. Not only that, list building gives you the opportunity to make different products offering to your potential customers – If a subscriber do not buy one of your offers he may buy the other. List building also gives you the opportunity to make repeat sales to your customers.
Another important thing you should know is that your list is far more than just a list of potential customers. You can benefit from your list in several ways and they can also benefit from you. You can outsource some tasks to your subscribers and they too can help you to create your next new product by offering testimonial, tips or questions as the case may be.
To build a list effectively, you’ll need an autoresponder (e.g. Aweber, MailChimp and GetResponse) and a squeeze page. The autoresponder sends out pre-schedule messages to your subscribers and this saves you a lot of time and effort. If you don’t know what a squeeze page is all about you can view mine here =).
Affiliate marketing may look very difficult and the truth is that it is, depending on your niche and the amount of investment you budgeted for it. If you want to learn affiliate marketing I’ll encourage you to grab this free ebook that expantiate more on all the points explained above.