To learn affiliate marketing basics let’s start with what affiliate marketing actually is. Affiliate marketing is simply a means to make money by selling other people’s products online. We can sell various products in a variety of ways but mostly we will do this by generating traffic (or website visitors) to a website or landing page.
A landing page is basically a webpage specifically built to collect an email address for the purposes of marketing a product or products. Websites have many options and you can click on various pages and have a look around. A landing page has only two options: opt in to a mailing list, or leave the site.
From a landing page we can collect the visitor’s email and from there we can market to them directly via email. We want to use email marketing simply because it extends the length of time available to market a product to a customer. From a website we maybe get a wimdow of 10-20 minutes to ‘sell’ our customers. If we can get their email address, we can extend this time considerably.
Affilaite Products
What makes affilaite marketing such a desirable career? Affiliate marketing can be done my anyone. Anyone can promote almost any product online and earn a commission on its sale. Many affiliates choose to promote digital products however, over physical products. This is for a number of reasons:
- Digital products are cheap to store (they can be stored on a hard drive, for example)
- They cost almost nothing to send out over the internet
- They can be delivered instantly and automatically
- Because of the low costs involved vendors (owners) of digital products can pay affiliates larger commissions (40%+)
However, as an affilaite you can promote almost anything online.
How To Generate Traffic
We can generate traffic to our website by creating content and posting it online. Our content gets found through either Google’s organic search engine, our own paid for advertising or a variety of other methods. These might include social media advertising, personal promotion or through our list of subscribers. There are a variety of ways to achieve traffic to your content and on to the affiliate products themselves. Learn affiliate marketing basics: Get a website, sales funnel and full training here.
Article marketing
Article marketing is one of the main ‘staples’ of affiliate marketers and has been successfully implemented by thousands of affiliates. By successfully targeting long tail keywords, Google’s organic search engine can find your content when someone types a term into Google’s search bar. If the term is targeted specifically to people who can benefit from your product, you are more likely to find a buyer.
Defining your specific niche in the market is the best way to find your ideal customers – see target marketing articles. Of course not all articles get immediately found on Google. There’s a huge amount of competition. Learn more about targeting your articles for the search engines in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit. Â You can write articles for article directories like ezinearticles.com, or put them directly on your website.
Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Affiliate products
Finding an affiliate product in your niche is easy. Just do a Google search for ‘your product/service’ affiliate programs. There are thousands of affiliate programs which allow you to promote online products and services. You don’t need to speak to customers or personally do any selling, cold calling or customer service. Once you join a program you can access banners and affiliate links which you then place on your website or blog and include in your copy. Access a range of affiliate products, a sales funnel and get your own website with this online training program.
Choosing your products
Choose your affiliate products wisely because unless you want to spend a fortune on advertising, you will need to create content which promotes and explains whatever it is that you are offering. Creating content on a regular basis is a good low cost way of starting your own affiliate business. Choose something which you have a passion for and can regularly blog about for a long period of time. In certain areas the market is very competitive and in others it is less so. Picking a product in a area which is not so competitive will allow you to find customers more easily.
To fully learn affiliate marketing basics and how to build your own affiliate marketing business follow this link for a free video series.
Best Affiliate Marketing Business Models
Not all affiliate products are equal. Some affiliate products pay better than others and some affilaite products are geared better for long term success. For example, a basic affiliate product might cost $100 and pay the affilaite $40. However, with a ‘one time’ payment product like this you only get paid once.
With the right products you can get paid repeatedly for sales you have made previously. This is a much better way to build an affiliate business since it gives you more stability for every product you sell. Subscription products which offer value over and over like software products and memberships can allow you to build a substantial business from affiliate marketing.
In addition you should also consider using:
- High Ticket products – Which let you earn more per sale
- Multi-tier sales – Letting you earn for sales made from a team
- Back-end sales – Later sales closed by the affiliate vendor can be attributed to your initial sale
- Built in sales team – Choosing affiliate products with a built in sales team can let you earn later on for sales closed by in-house sales people.
Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Summary
Most affiliate marketers start with a website to promote affilaite products from. (Access your own website here). From there they usually start blogging. Blogging is a cheap way to generate website traffic. Ideally you will aim your content to rank on the search engines or get shares over social media, or both. Good content get shared, bad content gets forgotten! You can also use paid advertising to advertise your products. With the right products and system this can work. Unless you get the right products you need to be careful using this strategy as it can get expensive! Access my ebooks The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing and Niche Blogging For Profit.
Get access to a training and education program which will show you step by step how to build your own profitable online business here.