Start Affiliate Marketing Business Step by Step

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Have you ever asked yourself what is Affiliate marketing? I can still remember the first article I read about affiliate marketing. The topic was “Make money while sleeping” who wouldn’t love to be making money while sleeping?

I clicked the link to see the content. After reading the first and second paragraphs, I realized affiliate marketing was the way to make money while sleeping. The process was very easy according to the article. I only had to join an affiliate marketing platform, choose a product, grab my affiliate link and start pasting the link everywhere possible I can.

In the end, I end up giving up because my method was not converting. Just like me, many people are lured into believing that they can become rich overnight doing affiliate marketing following some old-style method.

In this article, I am going to share with you my experience with affiliate marketing and the best way I think you can do this business and start earning passive income even when you are sleeping.

What is Affiliate Marketing

Simply put and in my own words, Affiliate marketing means promoting other people’s products or services. Whenever somebody buys the product via your link, you will earn a commission from the seller. This commission varies depending on what percentage the seller wishes to give out.

To break it down in a simple way, this is how it goes

You search the web to find a product or service
After that, you find the product’s affiliate program
You register or sign up to to it
After siging up, you are given a link that you ue to promote the product. (This link allows the seller to track those who ckicked your link)
When somebody click your link and buys the product, you receive a commision

How does Affiliate Marketing Work

To understand in detail how affiliate marketing works right from when your affiliate link is clicked, and the tracking of the link is a very big topic on its own.

But as beginners, we are going to skip the most complicated parts and put them very simple for you to understand easily. Simply put, this is how affiliate marketing works

A merchant or Business has a product or service to sell and put it on his platform
You (the affiliate) sign up to the platform and grab a link then put it on your website or whicever means you are using to promote it
A customer clicks on the link a purchase the product or service
You (the affiliate) get a commission on sale.

How To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing

Ok. Now that we have seen the definition and the basic way of how affiliate marketing works, let us see the steps to get started with affiliate marketing.

1. Pick a Niche

The first and most important step to take if you decide to do the Affiliate Marketing business is to pick a niche. Make sure you pick a niche that is of interest to you. Also, more importantly, your niche should be one that brings solutions to people’s problems.

Usually, some entrepreneurs make a mistake when they want to start a business. They think, “I’m going to start a business to get rich.” Yes, you can get rich, but that’s only the side effect of helping others in the process. The more people you help, the bigger your reward.

So it is very important to select a niche you have an interest in and know a little about. this way you can be to present your product or service to people as one that is coming to solve their problems

2. Start a Blog

After you’ve determined your niche, the next step is to create your blog. While it’s possible to make money in affiliate marketing without a blog, I don’t recommend it. The best way to succeed in affiliate marketing is by creating a blog. Your blog and organic search traffic must be the core strategy of affiliate marketing.

Yes! it is possible to make money with Youtube but the problem is that you don’t own these channels. Youtube can decide to close your channel anytime they like if they think they don’t like what you are sharing. On the contrary, a blog you create is yours and you have full control over it.

Think of a blog as a bicycle’s hub. The hub is your blog. The spokes are channels such as email, paid traffic, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, push notifications, and the like. Those channels are the means to attract visitors to your blog. I won’t go too deep on this topic here but I hope you got my point.

3. Create a good Content

Now that you have created a blog as the core of your business, the next step is to create content on it. You must use Google search engine optimization to attract traffic to your blog. Of course, you can use other means to get traffic to your site but the first and premium method for you to focus on is Google Seo.

You cannot skip this step. You need a completed website before you even think about applying for affiliate programs. If your blog has no content, not only will you have no audience, but you’ll stand little chance of getting approved by an affiliate manager

Therefore, I recommend creating at least 25 articles before you continue to the next step. These shouldn’t be short 500-word posts, but long, in-depth articles pertaining to your niche. If you are in a niche about losing weight, don’t write articles about your cat. Stay in your lane and write about the niche you set out to create.

4. Build your Audience

After creating your blog and creating the minimum number of articles as I said in the recent step, now you need to build your audience.

The most common method is via organic search — otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. However, you can always use social media to attract more traffic to your blog. Ideally, you want to build up a fan base of repeat visitors to your blog. Stats show it takes more than one touchpoint before a visitor converts. The data shows it takes eight to 12 visits before a visitor trusts you enough.

5. Sign up for Affiliate Programs

After you’ve completed the first four steps should you go on to this step, Applying for affiliate programs before starting your blog is like building a house before the concrete foundation has solidified

Effectively, when you sign up for an affiliate program, you become a “partner” with the merchant’s sales funnel. Depending on your niche, you should consider signing up with merchants that have products and services that have to do with it.

These are the basic steps to getting started with affiliate marketing. Yes, there are many other details not included, but this is a solid foundation on which you can build with more advanced topics in affiliate marketing.

Is Affiliate marketing easy?

You have to know that affiliate marketing is business just like any other business out there. Whether online or not any business is difficult when you first start it. You have to be ready to work hard and keep learning from your mistakes until you find the right method that works for you.

Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It takes a lot of time and hard work before you start earning passive income from affiliate marketing. So, keep pushing harder and harder until you score your first goal.

Hoping I have been able to give you sufficient information on how to start Affiliate marketing, I hope to see you join the game as soon as possible.