How Affiliate Marketing Works – Step by Step

Have you ever wondered how affiliate marketing works? If affiliate marketing is something that you’re interested in, but you’ve never pursued it because you don’t understand it, this guide will provide you with step-by-step instructions on what you need to do. Affiliate marketing is a proven method for earning money online, and it’s probably a lot easier than you think it is. Is it something that is going to make you rich overnight? Probably not, but it is something that you can work at and build into a legitimate, and lucrative source of income. In fact, if you’re willing to put in the time and effort, affiliate marketing can turn into a full-time job for you. So, how does it work and how do you get started?

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

If you want to learn how affiliate marketing works, the first step is to learn what it is. Affiliate marketing involves running a website and promoting the products of other websites on your site. Why would you want to do that? You do it to earn commissions. When someone on your website clicks on a link and makes a purchase, you get money. Since the internet gives you access to virtually the entire planet, that’s a huge customer base that you can reach. This means that your earning potential with affiliate marketing is enormous, and that is why it’s one of the most popular online business models in the world today. Is there going to be a lot of competition? Yes, but that just means that you’ll have to work hard to get your piece of the pie.

Figure Out Your Niche

Step number one in becoming a successful affiliate marketer is to figure out your niche. Your niche is the area of the market that you are going to focus your efforts on. When choosing a niche you should choose something that you are familiar with, but that’s also unique enough that you won’t be competing with millions of other people over. It’s also important that you try to pick a specific niche and focus on it.

When you’ve chosen a niche, go to Amazon and look at Departments. Are there any products out there related to your niche? If there are, then it is a good sign.

We always suggest starting with one niche. It will help you to understand how online business works and how to build trust with your audience. You need them to respect your opinion so you can use that to influence their buying habits. Remember, you’re running a business, and while you may have fun working on your website, your ultimate goal is to make money. You make money by building trust with your audience and convincing them to make purchases based on your recommendations.

Purchase Your Domain Name And Pay For Web Hosting

Once you’ve figured out what niche you want to focus on the next thing that you need to do is purchase a domain name and pay for web hosting. But, wait, aren’t there websites that will give you a free blog? There are, but accepting a free blog comes with a lot of strings, and when you’re running a business you don’t want to deal with those strings. One of the biggest benefits of running your own business is that you’re the boss. You don’t have to follow anyone else’s rules, you don’t have to follow their schedule, you can do just about anything that you want. Yes, you still have to work to make your business a success, but you do it on your terms. When you accept a free blog or website you have to follow the rules of the parent website that gives you your blog or website. That doesn’t sound ideal, does it?

There’s another major reason that you want to pay for your domain name and web hosting, and that’s because it’s cheap. For under $100 you can have a domain name registered and web hosting for a year. You can probably find a better deal than that if you spend some time looking for it. The cost of a domain name and web hosting is negligible, and not paying for it could be a mistake. Imagine if you spent years building up a successful affiliate marketing business and you were now earning a great living from it. Then, for some reason, the parent website that gave you your free website decided to shut you down. That would mean years of hard work going down the drain, and there would be nothing you could do about it. The point is that if you want to be an affiliate marketer, then investing in a domain name and web hosting is a small price to pay.

Design An Eye Catching, Functional, Easy To Navigate Website

When you go online you can usually spot a great website fairly quickly, right? If you happen to end up visiting a website that looks terrible or is hard to use you probably do what everyone else does, you exit the site and go somewhere else. The point is that there are so many websites online that you could never hope to visit all of them in your lifetime, and there are more going up all the time. With all of that competition out there you need to ensure that your website looks great and is easy to use. If it isn’t then it doesn’t matter how great your content is, people won’t stick around long enough to read it.

You have two options when it comes to building your website, you can do it yourself, or you can hire a professional to do it for you. My honest suggestion is you build it yourself. The website platform we use is WordPress.org.

If you have it in your budget to hire a professional, then that’s an investment that’s well worth making. If you don’t have the budget to hire a professional, there are a lot of great website building tools and training that you can use to build your site. With all the tools and templates available today, you will be able to produce a website that’s as good as a professional could create for you. If you spend enough time working on it you should be able to create a professional-looking and functional website. So, no worries. The main thing is to START!

This tutorial will help you to get started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt5L5RoaE5U

Provide Value To Visitors To Your Website

When the average person goes online and visits a website there’s a good chance that they’re looking for information. Or, they could be looking for entertainment. In either case, they tend to visit and return to websites that give them what they want. You can’t just put a bunch of affiliate links on your website and tell people to buy things without incentivizing them to do so. You could provide value by offering them advice about products, and general information and tips about the niche that those products occupy. Or you could provide them with entertainment in the form of funny stories, videos, cartoons, etc. Just make sure that you give people a reason to visit your site, or you’ll always struggle to get enough traffic to be profitable.

And the greatest TIP of all – you do not need to be someone else. Be YOU!

“Whatever you do, be different – that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can’t think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you’re different, you will stand out.”- Anita Roddick

Get Your Website Ready for SEO

Explaining what SEO, which is short for search engine optimization, in a small space is impossible. In short, SEO involves using keywords and phrases in specific parts of your text in order to capture the attention of search engines. Search engines use a lot of different factors to determine how high a website ranks, and SEO is right near the top of the list. Having a higher ranking website will give you more traffic, which gives you more potential customers.

People think it’s a very complex, constantly evolving subject that you need to pay close attention to if you want to become a successful affiliate marketer. Some even suggest hiring a professional.

Do not pay for SEO. I never paid for SEO. I learnt a few steps and it worked. My first website was just a couple of month old but I was on the 1st page and outranked websites which had authority in this niche. Keep in mind that their websites were more than 15 years old.

I do not understand why people make it so complicated. Simplicity and Content are the two main factors.

Here are some things which you will need:

• All-in-One SEO or Yoast SEO Setting up. These two plugins are available in WordPress. It’s up to you what you use. We use All-in-One SEO. It’s easy to use. There is an option to pay to upgrade, but you do not need to do that. Free is fine.
• The Title of your Article and Keyword which you will use in the article. Do not overuse it. For keywords, you can use Google search to find out what people are searching for. We call it “Alphabet Soup Technique.” People are searching all kinds of staff. As you see in the picture below, there are quite good topics you can write about swimming pool. That’s just from one search.

• Content Length – how many words in an article. We encourage people to write no less than 1000 words per article. You will also need pillar posts – 3,500 words and more. Content is the key! Many people concentrate on logos, the look of their website, rather than content. You can make little steps towards a good user experience website while you are posting your blog posts. Do not try to make it perfect. In a year or so, you would want your website to look different anyway.
• Content Structure – the headings, sub-headings.
• The image file name – Make sure you use your main keyword.
• The Meta Title and Meta Description – when you set up All-In-One SEO, you will find those options at the end of your post.

There are also a few more tips, but for a beginner that is already good enough. And do not forget about TIME. If you start from scratch it will take time for Google to figure out what your website is about or who you are. People think that they will earn money in one week, and when it does not happen, they quit. This is not a gambling scheme. It is a slow process, especially in the beginning, but it will be very rewarding in the year and years to come. Continue writing, continue engaging people, start your YouTube channel and you will see great results.

Place Affiliate Links On Your Website

Once you’ve figured out your niche, built your website, and placed search engine optimized content on it, the next step is to put affiliate links on your website. There are a lot of different companies that have affiliate programs, so spend some time and look at what they have to offer.

Amazon is obviously the biggest name here and they offer a lot of advantages, including a built-in customer base, so you should strongly consider working with Amazon. The only downfall is in April 2020 Amazon cut commission for a number of affiliate product categories. That’s why we shouldn’t rely on one company but always diversify. Keep this in mind when you build up your niche.

When placing your affiliate links make sure that you put them in strategic places. You should embed them in your text in a way that makes people pay attention to them.

Promote Your Website

The most challenging part of becoming an affiliate marketer is figuring out how to promote your website and drive traffic to it. Most people that visit your website won’t click on an affiliate link and make a purchase. That’s just the way that it works. The key to succeeding is to get as many eyes on your website as possible. The more visitors that you have, the more potential sales you will generate. It’s all a numbers game, so what can you do to get your numbers up? How do you attract visitors to your website? You do it by promoting it.

You have to start out with a website that people will want to spend time at. It doesn’t matter how much you promote a terrible website, people might visit it, but they’ll be out of there before they even think about clicking on an affiliate link. Once you have that great website it’s time to drive traffic to it. Unless you have a massive advertising budget you probably don’t see how you can get the level of exposure that you need. This is where social media comes into the picture. How many social media accounts to you have? How often are you on them? If you’re anything like the average person, you’re probably pretty heavily involved in your social media accounts. So take that and use it to promote your website. Talk about it on social media, offer tips, do anything that you can to drum up interest in your website. Social media advertising is free, which is perfect for anyone’s budget.

Is Affiliate marketing is what you would like to implement for your website? Let me know in the comments below.