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Passive income. It’s what most bloggers aim for: making money while you sleep. And affiliate marketing is a great way to start.
But signing up for every affiliate program available and slapping up dozens of affiliate products on your blog is not the way to success.
The key to making affiliate marketing work is simple: planning. Affiliate income may be passive, but the steps you need to take before earning that first check are not passive.
When you complete these ten steps thoroughly, you’ll give yourself the best chance of earning a substantial income with your affiliate marketing business.
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This one is easy. Avoid promises like this:
“How to Make $10,000 Dollars With Affiliate Marketing for Beginners.”
Remember the old adage: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Nowhere is that more true than in the world of affiliate marketing, where phoney products and fake reviews abound.
Stick to the tried and trusted programs and products.
Think about it. Would you buy from someone you met in the street carrying a suitcase full of fidget spinners, knife sets and Gucci knockoffs? Doubtful, unless you enjoy taking risks.
Selling online is no different. Shoppers look to brands or people they trust. People with a good understanding of a topic, who offer good quality products that will make their customers’ lives easier, safer, or more enjoyable.
If you already have a blog, you’re likely to be at least part way there. You’ve chosen a topic. You’ve narrowed it down so that you’re targeting a specific audience. You know what their problems are. You’ve provided lots of valuable content that helps your blog visitors. You’ve pleased the search engines, so you have a good amount of traffic coming to your blog. And your audience has come to know you over time.
You’ve set in motion the traffic-generating process. Now all you need to do is choose an appropriate affiliate program and convert your loyal readers into customers. No need to panic — we’ll cover “how” in the next steps.
But first: can you start an affiliate marketing business without an information-rich niche blog or website?
You’ll find some articles that say it’s easy to sell from a general blog that does nothing but sell unrelated affiliate products. But think back to our street sales from a suitcase. Why would anyone buy from a site without a specific focus? The audience wants to buy items they have faith will offer them something positive.
How to choose a niche is outside the scope of this article. You’ll need to:
If you have yet to find your perfect niche, we have a keyword brainstorming tool that will help you discover the perfect combination of your interest, your expertise, and market demand.
There are many affiliate programs for beginners. When you’re thinking about how to get started with affiliate marketing, there’s little doubt that Amazon is the one to choose for promoting physical products.
Why?
Once you’ve cut your teeth on Amazon, you can graduate to more complex programs.
Are there any drawbacks to Amazon?
If you have an active blog, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t sign up for Amazon’s program now. Go to this page and click on the “Join Now for Free” button.
It’s a very straightforward process: you’ll be asked for your address, your blog or website URL and some basic profile information. Once done, sit back and wait for Amazon to say “yay” or “nay.”
Before you begin using affiliate links, Amazon requires that you place the following statement on your blog: “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” The typical place for this is in your privacy policy and / or affiliate disclosure.
Here’s the exciting part: you get to spend time looking through Amazon’s millions of products and deciding which you want to promote. It can feel like you’re a kid in a candy store!
But it’s not quite that simple.
The critical thing to remember is to promote a product that’s based on your customer’s needs or desires — not on what you want!
Here are the basics of how to choose your product:
As you’re just starting to build up your affiliate marketing, concentrate on one main product initially.
Here’s how affiliate links work:
Go to the product page you’re planning to promote and look for the “Site Stripe” bar at the top of the page. Here you’re given options for different types of links.
Text links are used, as the name suggests, within a paragraph of text. You’ll be used to seeing these, normally blue, links in most articles you read.
Below is an example, linking to two products: a rat trap and an automatic chicken feeder. Coincidentally, these are my two biggest affiliate income providers.
Image links, as the name suggests, provide just the image of the product, with a choice of size.
Text+Image is the “old style” Amazon image that everyone recognizes…
The relatively new “Custom” (“Native Shopping Ads”) is a “stripe” effect, which stretches across the page.
Is one more effective than the others? You’ll need to test this out on your own site. Every niche is different.
So you’ve chosen and applied to your first affiliate program, you’ve selected your product, and you’ve discovered how to create links.
You’re finished, right?
Wrong! You’re only just beginning!
Because now, you need to write compelling content that will give your reader no choice but to buy the product you’re promoting.
Promoting products is a skill in itself. There are different ways of doing it, but the most likely to be successful is writing a detailed product review.
Here’s how to tackle this all-important review:
Image from my “Automatic Chicken Feeder Review.”
For more detail about this critical step, take a look at this article about how to write a product review. It goes into detail about each part of this writing process.
But we’re not done yet.
Even if you have good traffic to your blog, it’s rarely enough to add an article and leave it to make its own way in the world.
You need to consider ways of promoting it. Here are a few suggestions.
Don’t have an email list? Start one today! It’s never too early, even if your blog is in its very early stages. Resist the temptation to send out promotional content until your reputation as a provider of value is well established, though.
It’s unwise to promote products, or do any form of selling, in every email. One in four is a recommended ratio. Learn about the email marketing best practices to make sure you don’t get more unsubscribes than you want — or worse, ending up in the spam or junk folder!
And don’t forget to promote your website or blog itself!
This is a step that many internet marketers forget. Publishing and promoting a product review article without studying the outcomes can leave money on the table.
Once you have a minimum of three affiliate products, compare their success rates. What’s working? What’s not?
Look in particular at:
You won’t earn an income overnight from your affiliate marketing efforts. And although its rightly called “passive income,” you’ll need to invest a good amount of time and work first.
You’ll need to:
Is it worth it?
Online shopping is a fast-growing business. Online statistics predict that by 2020, online shopper numbers will hit four trillion, with 47% of shoppers in the U.S. buying their first item on Amazon.
Now that you know how to start affiliate marketing the right way, you can grab your piece of the online shopping pie.
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