My favorite topic of all, affiliate marketing. After years of working online, doing everything from web design, SEO, blogging, nothing interested me like this for a living.
It can be hard, time consuming and you can feel lost at times, but the payback is worth it, and the most important thing it brings is the Freedom.
Doing affiliate marketing means doing something the best you can each day every day, no compromise and no days off.
Staying at the top of your game and testing everything, work can be exhausting and it can affect you financially at times.
In affiliate marketing you need to take chances, when it comes to choosing a niche, content, how much to invest, technology, etc…
You will take chances on your dreams, and last but not least you will fight against big players wanting to bring you down.
But like I mentioned before, at the end the financial freedom and your own freedom to work from anywhere and to work with whom ever you want is worth it.
I had to write this introduction for you, so you can know what to expect.
You need to have a passion for the niche you chose and for the business you start, nothing comes easy, I cannot do everything, you need to be consistent and to prevail, to work hard and to work smart after all.
Nothing comes easy, create a goal for yourself, keep that dream alive, for me that goal is FREEDOM, not to work 9 to 5, work few years like no one can and live the rest of your life like no one can’t
Ok , so let’s start with the article, I will spill out my secrets so you can do affiliate marketing properly and change your business approach for better.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a performance based marketing where you get paid for every customer or visitor you bring to the business you promote.
For all of you beginners out there, it means that you will get paid a percentage of every sale your bring to the business you promote.
It can be anything from software, web hosting, physical products, to all kinds of digital services like web design, digital marketing etc..
How Affiliate Marketing Works?
For the affiliate marketing to work for most of the parts we need to have 4 sides included.
1. Seller, product creator.
2. Affiliate network
3. Affiliate (you)
4. Buyer, visitor, traffic you bring in.
Firs you will need to find a good product that you’re either using or you’re willing to promote and have some knowledge about what you’re promoting.
Affiliate product can usually be found through affiliate networks or on product websites directly.
Ways of promotions:
Content – you can create a website or a blog around the topic with the affiliate offer to promote. This is one of the most secure and valuable way of getting organic traffic and making a percentage of the sale through the website. But it’s also one of the hardest ways, since you have to build the audience and attract the traffic through your content and social media channels.
Email – once the traffic is created and increasing, the right step would be to create email newsletter and start collecting emails from your visitors and readers. This is a fastest way to reaching the broader audience at once and not to depend on your SEO efforts and positions on search engines.
Paid Ads – if you have money to invest in paid ads then this road is for you. After finding out where your targeted traffic is spending their time and keywords they are using, you are ready to create ads and promote their favorite products in order to make a fast profit.
Most popular affiliate networks:
- Shareasale
- Commission Junction or CJ
- Peerfly (shut down recently)
- Amazon Associates
- Adcombo
- Avangate – 2checkout
- CrakRevenue
- Clickbank
Affiliate Compensation Methods/Offers
There are different ways to earn with affiliate marketing, and different types of offer to choose from.
Most popular ones are revenue sharing or cost per sale, where this method amounts around 80% of affiliate marketing programs online. These compensations methods are mostly dominated by big retailers like Amazon and Ebay.
Here are the few of them:
PPL – pay per lead
CPA – cost per action
PPI – pay per install
PPC – pay per click
CPS – cost per sale
How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
Now comes the most interesting part, how to make money doing all of this, finding a niche, creating content and making money online.
Here are the few simple steps of how I do it and I promise you they are not hard to acomplish.
Keyword research – you will need to find a keyword with a high CPC (cost per click) the higher the CPC it means that advertisers are spending a lot of money to advertise certain products and services.
Which means that someone somewhere created an affiliate offer and is willing to pay you high commissions for your affiliate efforts.
Find a keyword with at least 500 volume search a month, and don’t go with the direct and main keyword. Instead start with long tail keywords with three or four keyword phrases and build up from there.
Position for low volume keywords and with time you will start optimizing for the main keywords and positions will grow.
For example:
affiliate marketing – 40,000 monthly search volume
what is affiliate marketing – 3600 SV
I always start with lower search volume keywords and long tail keywords, then I would implement questions through content and help visitors find simple and clear solution.
Some will not agree with this approach but it’s been working for me for years.
Last year I tested affiliate network called adcombo, with the simple blog approach and content writing, here are the results:
It’s not bad for a passive income on the side, but you need to test the niche, create a working strategy and just copy and paste the tactics you used on the other affiliate networks.
Imagine now if you work on 10 different affiliate networks and promoting tens or even hundreds of affiliate products. There is no a better way to build a freedom than working online and implementing what you learned from the blogs like mine.
Tools to use for keyword research:
- Google keyword planner – free Google ads tool
- Semrush – premium tool (I personally use )
- Ahrefs – premium tool (my best decision using both semrush and Ahrefs)
In a few days I will write more in detail posts about affiliate marketing and best tools to use in combination with WordPress. In case you missed my previous articles and need introduction then pleas check posts: what is seo and what is a blog.
But for now, this covers the title of this article, the topic is too broad and sometimes it can be hard to fit everything in one piece without missing the point.
Affiliate marketing requires a lot of preparation, tools to be setup and SEO tricks to use in order to position your website.
Stay tuned and check out my new posts where I will cover best WordPress affiliate tools and best SEO plugins to use on a blog.
Thanks for reading
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