Affiliate marketing can give you four to six figures income if you have what it takes to reach the level of intelligence in doing online business. Online business is not a new thing now. There are various streams through which you can literally make money from your bedroom and affiliate marketing is one of those goldmines where you can build an empire of your own.
If you are also looking forward to diving into this non-orthodox work and try online business in 2019, you can try affiliate marketing. Here is a comprehensive guide for beginners to start earning through affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
The phrase “Affiliate marketing” may have become prominent in the internet-age but the concept on which it works is not new.
Let me give you an example. Have you ever referred to anyone any product? A new product which you purchased and loved using it, so you talk with your immediate circle and tell them the benefits of using the product.
Like, you have bought a new iPhone recently. Then you met your colleague or a friend in college and shared your experience with the new iPhone. Eventually, your friend too bought the same product after you suggested.
In another example, say you are an avid book reader and people around you come to you for suggestions whenever they want to try reading. They ask for books of different genre and you help them and suggest which book they should read. In the end, your friends go with the product you suggested.
Below two scenarios are an example of affiliate marketing. To put in words, you were the affiliate of the smartphone brand and the books. In the internet age, you are getting paid for being an affiliate whenever users buy products you suggested.
When you are reading a newspaper or browsing a blog, have you come across an article where the blogger has published a review of a specific product. Usually, website owners put a buying link so if their visitors want to buy that product, they can comfortably do so by clicking on that link.
Moreover, you might have watched a YouTube video where the Vlogger is giving a review of the products and put the link in the description through which you can purchase them.
These links which you clicked from the website banner, article or the video descriptions are called affiliate links.
Every affiliate marketer has been given an affiliate link. When the visitors buy something from that link; the affiliate gets the commission.
Why Affiliate Marketing?
Besides affiliate marketing, you can do blogging, vlogging, drop shipping, etc. You can be Instagram influencer or YouTuber by uploading specific type of content of a particular niche like travelling, fashion, technology, lifestyle, medical and so on. These streams can give you excellent returns if you are consistent and master of your niche.
Affiliate marketing has benefits that set it apart from other online business streams.
1. Affiliate Marketing is Flexible
If you are an affiliate marketer, you have complete flexibility of the place and time. You can design your own schedule and prepare a plan for your work routine. In case, you are forced to travel for your personal reasons, you can bring your desk with you. Because as an affiliate marketer, all you need to is a laptop or a desktop and a decent internet connection.
Moreover, if you are stuck at a monotonous routine where you are not able to find a quality time to spend with your family or pursue a hobby, then affiliate marketing can be your helping hand as it will allow you to indulge in other activities you wish.
Moreover, you will have nobody to report to as you will be your own boss. There are no subordinates or senior management who will check your records. That said, you need to put constant effort to establish your affiliate marketing business in order to generate a full-time income.
2. Returns are Excellent
Affiliate marketing can give you income in six figures. As per a study, 8% of affiliate marketers earn at least 50K to 100K USD.
Moreover if you have found a lucrative product to do affiliate marketing you can earn more than 100K. You need to research a lot to find the right products as manufacturers are giving up to 75% commission per sale. So, if you can provide consistent smart work, you can have success in no time. 12% of affiliate marketers are making at least 100,000 from their affiliate marketing activities.
3. No Need to do Door-to-Door Selling
Affiliate marketing allows you to sell your products without going anywhere. Yes, no need to invest your energies into travelling or relocating to other destinations to sell your products. Furthermore, you don’t have to hire salespeople to go door-to-door for you.
You can sell products with just a website. Thanks to the evolution of the internet, affiliate marketing expands the horizons of sales industries by providing a flexible and out-of-the-box platform for selling. As an affiliate, you will need only a website where you can publish relevant and quality content or place a banner to sell products.
4. It is Extremely Affordable
One of the important benefits of affiliate marketing is its affordability. It is comparatively cheaper than mainstream selling. In the mainstream market, you have to print and sell pamphlets and flyers to advertise your products or as already discussed, hire salespeople for the same.
Here, you just have to manage a website, ensure a stable internet connection and need a desktop. With analytical skills and smart research, you can make millions of dollars.
5. Earnings are Totally Up to You
The income from your affiliate marketing campaigns is equally proportional to how much effort you put in selling. If you hit the bullseye in finding the profit generating product, you can literally earn money while you are sleeping. The more you sale at a quick rate, more cash will flow to your accounts.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing from Scratch?
There are tons of marketing channels available through which you can promote your products and increase affiliate sales. There is a roadmap to get started to this lucrative platform and generate a passive income stream.
Note: Before diving into it, there are certain mindset shifts you need to make. Affiliate marketing is a game of patience. You cannot expect income in thousands within a week after just starting affiliate marketing. Unlike traditional jobs, you cannot expect monthly cash flow into your account. You will have to put a lot of effort to ensure consistent income. You need to understand that a successful affiliate marketing practice requires long-term vision.
1. Sign Up in Affiliate Networks
To begin your process of becoming an affiliate marketer, you need to sign up in affiliate networks that provide tons of products to promote. These networks work as a mediator between affiliate marketers and merchant affiliate programs.
These websites have categories of products to choose from. Famous affiliate networks are also known as affiliate marketing websites are:
ShareASale
ClickBank
JVZoo
Amazon Associates
Mobvista
AdCombo
2. Choose Your Niche
Choosing your niche is the basic step to initiate affiliate marketing. A niche in affiliate marketing will lay the foundation of strategizing subsequent steps of your affiliate campaign.
A niche will decide who will be your audience, where they are located, what are their demographics and so on. Based on these data, you can craft your content and pitch your product accordingly.
You can do affiliate marketing on any niche and for any product. You just need to explore the web and aggressively research the industry you want to try. To start, you can try selling products for which you are passionate about. Like gadgets, cosmetics, online tools, etc.
To begin, you can also sell Amazon products by signing up for Amazon’s associate program and it will allow you to sell millions of Amazon products. As a matter of fact, Amazon has one of the biggest affiliate networks.
3. Strategize Your Marketing Activities
Just like other marketing channels, you also need to plan and strategize your way to affiliate marketing success. You need to strategize how you are going to promote your website, what products you will sell and how much time you will invest every day to build a recurring passive income as an affiliate marketer.
You might be working as a fulltime employee or a student, so a plan will help you stick to your routine and create work-life balance.
4. Product Research
You can choose your niche and plan your routine but you should properly research which products you will sell.
Product research is the most important part of your affiliate marketing journey. You should not promote all the products as you prefer because it is not going to work that way.
Based on the type of product you choose, you will then have to build a website around it where users will come and engage. Hence, you need to ensure relevant products are placed as per your website’s niche. Relevancy is the key.
For example, you have created a website for photography tips and tricks and placed your affiliate links to buy DSLR and action cameras. However, the other webpages of your website are promoting yoga mat or gym equipment. It is not going to work that way.
You will have to build relevancy on the content you are writing and products you are promoting through it. Because the content will engage users on your website and the products will convert them as buyers.
5. Build a Website
As per your niche, you will need a robust website where you can publish content and promote your affiliation for the products. Usually, WordPress is a good choice for website management needs.
A website will give you a platform to publish content, place banners and promote the offers. In the future, that website will be an asset of your earnings.
As per your niche, you can also build separate webpages to promote different products.
6. Bring Visitors to Your Website
For any product development, finding a relevant audience and pitching your services to them are the most important factors to generate ROI.
After choosing your product and create an attractive website for your affiliate marketing, your next task is to build a strong audience who visits your website regularly. You can go for search engine optimization, pay-per-click ads, email marketing, social media marketing, etc.
SEO with content marketing is a good way to advertise your website initially. You need to craft and publish informative and relevant content of a particular niche to your audience.
Conclusion – How Soon You Can Achieve Success?
A simple answer is – it depends! Nobody can predict how soon you can become a successful affiliate marketer. That said, there is also no limit on how much you can earn from your affiliate marketing practices.
Successful affiliate marketing involves a mixture of every step discussed above. Starting from the affiliate network to picking your niche, building a robust website to generating traffic on it.
Hence, affiliate marketing demands time and energy to excel. But once you have picked the perfect niche and established your website, your commission earning will increase.
A renowned business and marketing blogger Matthew Woodward shared his earning from his blog. As per his latest report, his income of one month from affiliate marketing is more than 28,000 USD. He showed in a blog post what he did in that month to achieve 5-figure income from his affiliate marketing activities.
There are tons of affiliate marketing success stories which you can find online. People are making massive income from affiliate marketing. So, if one person can do it, why can’t you? Affiliate marketing requires a tenacious attitude and hunger for exploring possibilities of online business.
Stick to basics and be persistent in your hustle of achieving excellence. Do let us know what do you think about the ideas discussed in this article. Also, if you too have experience in affiliate marketing, share it with our audience in the comments. Your insights will help someone change his life through affiliate marketing.
