What are the best affiliate marketing strategies for beginners? There’s many affiliate marketing strategies you can use, but it’s important not to spread yourself too thin as an affiliate. Jumping from one strategy to another or from one course to another might mean you spilt your resources and have less impact in any of them. As a result you might find none of the strategies working for you. So it’s a good idea to find a course/mentor you like and stick to it/them. Find also a strategy you like and stick to it. Get good at it and use your own feedback to help you learn from experience.
Affiliate marketing is a great business when it works, but not so great when it doesn’t! As a beginner, you’ll likely experience some setbacks. But being forewarned is being forearmed. Although there’s many strategies you can use (see 22 ways to promote affiliate products), it’s wise to choose one and stick at it for long enough to gain some small success. Once you have achieved this, you can use the feedback to focus on the specific actions you have already done which brought about your success. Celebrate small wins because they lead to larger wins and help you maintain your enthusiasm for the longer term.
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Affiliate Marketing Strategies For Beginners – List Building
I’m going to mention list building as my number 1 strategy here because it was a complete game changer for me. At first, I expected affiliate success to come from a website, and for a long time I was largely disappointed. Sales can and do come from websites.
But a list is so much better. On a website, a visitor will hang around for less than a few minutes, in most cases. This means they only have a few minutes to make a buying decision on your affiliate website. Most will leave without purchasing anything and never return!
But if you can offer them something on your website, and get them to subscribe to your email list, this time period can be dramatically extended. With an email list, you can continue communicating with your subscribers over a much long time period than you can on a website. I’ve had subscribers purchase things even years after joining my email list. This just isn’t possible from a website.
An email list lets you build trust with your subscribers by offering information which they are interested in. Access a free email marketing service here. See also the power of email marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Strategies For Beginners – A Website
To get people on your email list you can use a number of strategies. One of these, and the cheapest strategy, is to have a website. A website is a great place to start for an affiliate because it gives you an online presence. You can use a website to share content, promote your affiliate products and even give away products of your own to help build your email list.
A website on its own doesn’t automatically guarantee you sales of your affiliate products of course. This is something which is easy to believe as a beginner. I imagined the money flowing in as soon as I published my website online. The truth is a little more different. Imagine a petrol station in the middle of a dessert and you’ll be getting close to what a website does without any promotion.
There’s millions of websites online and to get people to find your website takes time and or money. You can pay for advertising your website, or you can create content which helps people find it. Or, do a combination of the two. Watch the above video to see how you can set up your website with this software in a few clicks:
Affiliate Marketing Strategies For Beginners – Blogging
Yes blogging is a super cheap strategy which is great for beginners to get them started doing something productive online for their affiliate business. Blogging is a long term free strategy which can be used to attract visitors to your website through the creation of articles which you can share.
By creating content which is targeted to likely customers, bloggers can attract free traffic to their website. Once on your site, people can view your affiliate products or sign up to your email list. There’s many blogging tactics but one I’ve used extensively is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. SEO = search engine optimisation. It’s what the search engines such as Google, Duckduckgo.com Bing.com etc. use to determine what content to show for different internet searches.
By researching keywords within your blogging topic, you can choose those which are most likely to rank on the search engines. If you’re successful, you can attract free traffic to your website, which can be monetised with your affiliate products. See also niche blogging for profit and best micro niche for blogging.
Paid Marketing
There’s various paid marketing strategies which beginner affiliates can use. Depending on your particular affiliate marketing business model this may or may not be appropriate to use. If you’re using low cost physical affiliate products, which pay lower commissions, this may not be the best option for you. But if you invest in a high ticket sales funnel, it’s much more realistic to make a profit when running paid ads.
High Ticket
What is high ticket affiliate marketing? A high ticket product is simply a product with a higher price tag. If you promote high value products, your return on investment will be much higher than if you only use low value products. With paid marketing, your profit margin is the difference between advertising budget and the commissions you make. So high value products are better when approaching affiliate marketing with paid marketing. Some of the best paid marketing platforms affiliates use are:
- YouTube – Using a video campaign
- Facebook – Video or text advertising
- Google Adwords – Uses search and display text based adverts
- Bing/Microsoft & Yahoo – Similar to Google Adwords
- Various other social media platforms also offer paid marketing (Twitter, Linkedin, etc.
Paid marketing is a fast and effective way for affiliates to market their products and services online. It’s best to be combined with email marketing because this gives you more scope for building trust with your customers over longer time periods. But this does depend on the kinds of products you are selling and who you target with your marketing. See how to know your target market.
Social Media Platforms – Free Strategies
Affiliates also use various social media platforms to attract their target audience and promote their affiliate products. See also unpaid social media marketing. for some strategies.
Although you can use social media platforms to run paid advertising, you can also build an audience with them for free if you’re prepared to make habits out of your activities. Facebook users, for example, will find groups which have their target audience in them. They join the groups and interact with members, encouraging them to view their Facebook profile.
Link to your website in your social media profile and use this strategy to generate hits on your website and get people on to your email list. Over time, and with considerable effort, this can be a good tactic to generate website traffic. You can also direct mail other social media users and let them know about your products.
Sniply – Sharing A Call To Action
Snip.ly is a software platform used by affiliate marketers to share content and add a call to action for every piece of content they share. There’s a few ways you can use this software but here’s a strategy I’ve used to great effect.
Grab a trending article, or piece of content which has already gone viral. Ideally it should be in your particular niche within your affiliate “zone”. You need to target content which will attract your target market. So choose content which your ideal customers would be interested in.
To find trending viral content, use a site called Buzzsumo.com. Type your main keyword into the tool and find trending articles which are being shared on social media sites around the world. Grab the article and add your own unique call to action (CTA) using the Snip.ly tool. Paste the new link on your social media sites. As people share your article, and click on your CTA, you’ll get more visitors to your website, or affiliate landing page.
This is another strategy which requires consistently in order to generate traction. But if you make a habit out of it, it can give you some great results.
Quora.com
Quora.com is a question and answer website which is a great resource for beginner affiliates to generate traction with their content. I use Quora.com to connect people to my website content. Here’s how the strategy works.
Find questions which relate to your affiliate products, create content on your website which answer these questions. Then, answer the questions on Quora.com and link through to your articles are part of your answer. Quora.com won’t accept spam or tiny answers with only links to your content in. You need to actually provide value in your answers too, or they are likely to remove your content.
So provide some real value in your answers. If you do you should be allowed to link to relevant content. This is a great tactic and has worked for me. But again it’s one which requires consistency to see any benefit from it.
Affiliate Marketing Strategies For Beginners Summary
The fastest way to build a profitable affiliate business is through using a high ticket product range and running paid advertising. But even then, there’s a lot of work involved and you’ll need to risk capital. Other cheaper marketing strategies will tend to take a lot longer.
Some of the strategies I’ve shared in this article will need consistency and to be done over a long period of time. If you’re not patient enough, it won’t seem worth it! In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits he shares the picture below showing the “Plateau of latent potential”.
This I think sums up affiliate marketing quite well. We expect our results to be linear when we start out as an affiliate. But in reality, it takes a lot more than most people expect. That’s why the affiliate marketing failure rate is so high. To be in the 5% of affiliates who succeed, you only need to understand this concept. Keep going when everyone else drops out!
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