Looking for affiliate marketing for newbies? If you’re a ‘newbie’ to affiliate marketing then tune in. In this article I am going to cover what it takes to get started in affiliate marketing. We will also look at how you can avoid the many affiliate marketing pitfalls, and why some online affiliate marketers fail. But first let’s take a look at what affiliate marketing is.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing, as you may already know, is a kind of referral marketing. By referring website traffic to various products and services around the internet, you can earn a commission. Because the internet is so vast, the potential for making money with affiliate marketing is also pretty limitless. However, that’s not to say it’s easy. Many people try and struggle to make a good living with affiliate marketing.
Like any business, affiliate marketing takes effort and consistent hard work in order to turn it into a full time living. Unlike a traditional business, there’s very little overheads in an affiliate business. You can get started very cheaply just by having a website and creating some content. Join any affiliate program online and you can access banners and pre-built sales material which you can put on your website.
When visitors use your banners and links to buy products, you earn a commission. But let’s not get over excited yet! It’s easy to jump in and follow a certain path, only to realise later that it wasn’t a good one. Let’s look next at ways of generating traffic to your website. Without traffic, you will never make any money, however good your products are.
Affiliate Marketing For Newbies – Traffic
As an affiliate your main job is in generating a constant flow of good quality buying traffic through your website (or advert) to products and services. This is the main hurdle in becoming a successful affiliate. Without this step all your other efforts are redundant. Traffic is key.
You can generate traffic through the organic searches (Google, Bing, Yahoo), by paid adverts and through your own email list. Each method is a huge topic and is constantly changing too. 10 years ago you could quite easily build a website and have it ranking on the first page of Google for some quite good keywords. Today there is much more competition. Today, ranking your website to get free traffic is much more difficult, not impossible, but much harder than it was.
Creating Content
Content creation is the cheapest method of getting traffic to your website, where you can sell affiliate products. However, it does take time and this arguably, is worth more than money! Google likes good, quality content so you should deliver something unique and valuable which people will benefit from.
Throwing up a tiny website and some low quality content is no longer a viable option. You simply won’t get any traffic. Google knows how long people stick around on your site and they use various strategies to see how people react to your content. Wafer thin, affiliate websites which offer little or no value don’t get ranked on Google. If they do it’s never for long. If you want to become an affiliate marketer you need to provide content which is better than the competition.
Google also likes websites which have been around for a while. New websites will take much longer to rank content on Google’s search engines than websites which have already got a good ranking and authority from the search engine. Your ranking on Google will also depend on what business niche you decide upon. Go into a competitive niche are it’s much harder to rank. Choose a topic which has fewer competing websites and you could be onto a winner. Ranking a website highly is great because it means you can get free traffic, potentially forever. You then need to turn your visitors into customers, by sending them to the right products for your chosen topic, or niche.
Paid Traffic
Buying traffic and sending it directly to products and services is definitely the fastest way to start an online business. It’s also something which should be approached carefully. The technology now available means you can ‘lazer’ target your desired audience very specifically. This is a huge advantage to online marketers and affiliates. However, you should start with a small realistic budget and only spend money you are prepared to lose in the first instance.
As you get better at sending the right audience to the right products, you will notice you are making more sales. When you get this right you can scale up. This is a huge advantage over content creation, simply because you can’t scale up your content when you get it right. You can create a nice piece of content and hope it will rank and get shared around the social media sites, but you can’t scale it like you can with a paid advertising campaign.
Ideally you would create an advertising campaign which makes double what you spend. Once you have a campaign set up which makes $4 for every $2 you spend, you can simply turn up your daily spend. Top affiliates spend thousands every day. However, they don’t start off spending this much. They start by spending $1 at a time and testing and measuring their advertising campaigns until they reach a profitable strategy.
List Building
An ‘affiliate marketing for newbies’ course should always offer the option of building your own list. Sending traffic straight to products can easily burn through your budget or waste your website visitors. You should always use your adverts and websites to send people to an opt-in page. This way, the visitor has only two choices – opt-in to your email list, or leave your website.
By making your visitors a tempting offer, (such as my amazing e-book!), you give them something in return for their email address. The email list is the number one ‘app’ for internet marketers. This is because people seldom buy from people they don’t know. They are more reluctant to buy from a website too.
But by getting your visitor’s email address and sending them useful information, you get to build a relationship with them over months, years and even decades. Building a list of subscribers also puts you in charge of your traffic. With a list, you are not relying on Google for organic traffic, or having to continually pay the various online advertising platforms to advertise.
Affiliate Marketing For Newbies – Products
So we have covered some methods of traffic generation. But you will need some products to sell if you are to become an affiliate marketer. Choosing the right products is as important to your success as choosing the right methods of traffic generation. Successful businesses have a range of products and services which they can continue to offer to their existing customers.
‘Affiliate Marketing for newbies‘ is an industry unto itself. There’s literally thousands of people trying to sell you their ideas for affiliate marketing. You need to take a long term view of your internet business and don’t get pulled into those that offer overnight ‘riches’. You should also choose products which reward you for ongoing monthly sales, and up-sold products. This is another key concept which can make or break your ‘affiliate marketing for newbies’ business.
Monthly Memberships, Lifetime Sales, Built In Sales Team
Selling affiliate products which offer monthly memberships is a complete game changer when it comes to an online business. A single selling product can make you a commission, but a membership product can earn you a living. If you only sold single products you would only ever make single commissions.
It is much more lucrative and powerful to sell memberships because each sale makes you a monthly commission for the lifetime of a customer. If you also choose products which reward you over and over again for customer purchases further down the line (up-sells), you can also benefit from lifetime sales closed by a built in sales team.
If you are new to affiliate marketing and looking for affiliate marketing for newbies, you can start here with a full free month of business training.
