There are many different ways of earning money online and you may have heard that being an affiliate is one great way to achieve this. In this article, we’ll look at the best ways to get into the affiliate marketing business.
So, what exactly is an affiliate? An affiliate is essentially an online commission paid salesperson. Your job is to recommend services and products to people. When they purchase that service or product, you get paid a commission from the product owner based upon the value of the sale. Let’s look at the 6 steps you need to follow to start your own affiliate marketing business.
1. Make A Decision On What You’re Going To Sell.
First you need to decide what types of products or services you want to promote and sell. Part of promoting any product includes writing blog posts, articles and reviews on these products. So it will help if you start with a market that interests you or that you have some knowledge about. You’ll find it very difficult to stay motivated about a subject which does not appeal to you.
2. Look For Affiliate Programs In Your Chosen Market.
Once you have made the decision on what kind of services and products you would like to sell you can start searching for affiliate programs within that market. For instance, if you have chosen pet care, you need to look for affiliate programs in the pets industry. You can sell both digital and tangible as an affiliate marketer. If you want to sell tangible products, there are affiliate programs on websites like Amazon, CJ Affiliate and Share-a-Sale. To sell digital products, take a look at ClickBank, JVZoo or Warrior Plus.
3. Get A Website Online.
Getting a website online to promote your products and services is not as difficult as you may think. There are numerous software packages available that make website creation easy for new affiliate marketing business owners. Your website will need to have a domain name you will also need to ‘rent’ some space on the internet to host your website. The world’s largest domain name registrar and web hosting provider is GoDaddy.
4. Generate Traffic To Your Website.
No visitors to your website means no business. Your website may have the best design and products on offer, but without traffic, you cannot have an affiliate marketing business. You have to bring in customer traffic to your website. The two ways to do this are with free website traffic and paid website traffic. It is always best to use a mixture of both.
5. Build a List of Customers.
Collecting email addresses, or list building, is one of the most important elements of earning money online. When somebody first visits your website, the chances are that they will not buy from you there and then. But if you get them to provide you with their email address you can keep in contact with them via email until they are ready to buy. Email list building is the key to the success of any affiliate marketing business.
6. Learn How To Do It Properly.
If you started a new job working for somebody else, you would assume that someone would show you what to do and how the business operates. So why should it be different with your own affiliate marketing business? While there is plenty of free information available, it only goes so far. To be successful with affiliate marketing you do need to learn how to find the right products and the right buyers.
