What is the best affiliate marketing strategy for beginners? Since it can take some time to generate traction with affiliate marketing, it’s worth choosing a strategy you can maintain for the longer term. Paid marketing strategies are much faster of course than free ones, such as blogging.
But they also cost more too! So it’s worth choosing your strategy carefully keeping in mind your own individual circumstances. How much can you afford to spend on advertising while you learn? Do you have the time to create content every day, or are you working full time?
Whatever you do as a beginner, it’s always worth building an email list of subscribers. A list puts you in charge of your traffic. Without an email list, you will be relying on sending traffic directly to your affiliate products. This can be a more precarious way of doing affiliate marketing and it can be more difficult to make sales. With an email list, you can build trust with your subscribers by offering value driven emails which help them with a certain problem.
Affiliate Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Helping Not Selling
The most successful affiliates have figured out a way to help people – either with their products, their content or through their email list. By helping people you are gaining their trust and delivering value. The “helping” intention will bring you much more success as an affiliate than trying only to “get” from people through selling.
Don’t try and get, give and you’ll naturally attract more people who will get to know, like and trust you. When this happens, they will also buy from you too! A good example of a very successful affiliate website is moneysavingexpert.com. This is an affiliate website which helps save people money. The products listed on the site are affiliated companies and services but the primary aim of the site is one of service – helping people save money on their bills, credit cards and purchase.
When you’re only trying to “get” from affiliate marketing, it can be much harder because this intention will naturally come across in everything you do.
Choosing Your Products
So when it comes to choosing products to sell as an affiliate, it’s also important to choose products which you align with and value yourself. It can be very difficult promoting products over the longer term if you have no affinity with them! How can you legitimately sell something you don’t want, value or need yourself?
By choosing to promote something you believe in, you can be much more congruent in your efforts of promotion; whether than is blogging, video creation, paid marketing or email marketing. It’s also worth looking at what you ultimately want from your affiliate marketing business. Do you want more financial freedom? Or are you only looking for a small secondary income to supplement your job?
Your marketing methods will also be determined by what you can afford. If you’re working full time, you might be better using paid marketing for your business. If you are doing this, it’s much easier to make a profit if you use high ticket affiliate items and subscription affiliate programs which pay recurring commissions.
Affiliate Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Organic Vs PPC
Organic marketing is what bloggers and video creators do. They create a lot of content and share it via social media platforms. Over time, their content gets traction from their bank links, shares and organic listings on the search engines (such as Google). Depending on your strategy and topic, this can take several months before you see the return on your investment. It can even take years in a particularly competitive area/niche.
With paid marketing, you can see results much faster, but of course it requires more investment. If you’re going the paid marketing route, you can increase your profit margin through using subscription products and high ticket products. It’s also worth combining paid marketing with list building, as discussed earlier in this article.
Content building obviously takes quite a bit of time. You’ll ideally choose a topic you have an interest in or passion for. It’s very difficult building content in a topic you know nothing about, or don’t have an interest in. Remember, you’re competing with many other online marketers who will have much more passion and interest than you in certain areas. So it’s worth choosing a topic wisely before you begin. Make sure you can monetise your topic, and that there’s a product in your chosen area which you want to promote.
See also PPC vs organic marketing.
and 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
Strategies which require a lot of work are typically much slower than those which require investment (paid marketing). However, over time, a strategy such as blogging can eventually give you completely free traffic organically! That’s great if you’re prepared to put the work in upfront, and reap the rewards later. But if you want it more quickly, you’ll have to invest more capital.
Of course you can also do a bit of each method; some organic and some paid.
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