Are you wondering how to get into affiliate marketing? Anyone can join an affiliate program and promote their affiliate link for free. Amazon, for instance, has an affiliate program you can join here to promote any product from the site.
There’s other affiliate programs available too and if you have an existing website, it’s worth looking for affiliate programs which would be a good fit for your topic. So if you have a Yoga website, for example, look on Google for “Yoga affiliate programs”. There’s affiliate programs in almost any topic you can imagine too. So a Google search will bring up a program which might be suitable to join. It doesn’t matter which country you are in either. Affiliate programs are available globally.
Many affiliates prefer to promote digital products over physical products and although physical products sell well, the levels of commission tend to be smaller than with digital products. See affiliate marketing commission rates. You can find digital products on sites such as Clickbank, JVzoo, Rakuten Marketing, CJ Affiliate Network (Commission Junction), Affiliate.com and many more.
How To Get Into Affiliate Marketing: The Small Print
The easy part of affiliate marketing is joining an affiliate program and getting your unique identifying link. Once you have your affiliate link, you can promote it to drive sales online. There’s many ways in which affiliate marketers promote their affiliate links but here’s some of the most popular ones:
- PPC – (Pay per click advertising) using paid advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Email marketing – most top affiliates build a list of subscribers and promote their products through email marketing messages. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
- Content creation – blogging and video blogging are popular ways to get your affiliate links in front of potential customers.
- SEO – (search engine optimisation) is what bloggers and content creators use to optimise their content for the search engines to get found on Google.
- Social media channels – there’s a huge potential to find your customers on social media, both with free and paid for methods. See also unpaid social media marketing.
Joining an affiliate program is one thing, but successful promotion of your affiliate link is where most affiliates will struggle. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products. So it’s worth getting help and training when it comes to choosing a promotion method for your affiliate link. Access a training course here.
How To Get Into Affiliate Marketing: Why 95% Of Affiliates Quit
Yes, 95% of affiliate quit affiliate marketing largely because they see no results for the work they do. But that’s often because they are unsure of their direction and therefore lose momentum by jumping around from one strategy to another. Different marketing strategies will also have different timescales too. Blogging, for example is a slow strategy to attract an audience for affiliate marketing. It can take months of regular work through blogging to even gain a small following, depending on your topic.
A faster method of marketing is through using PPC or pay per click advertising. With pay per click, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This is also known as direct response marketing. With direct response, you can measure the cost of your advert compared to the number of sales you make to determine whether an advert is performing or not. When you hit upon a winning advert, you can simply increase your budget to make more sales. This takes some time and effort to get right of course, which is where many affiliates drop out.
With content marketing it’s much more difficult to scale up your affiliate business to a larger audience quickly. A single blog post won’t attract much attention online. But once you’ve built and shared 100 or 1000 blog posts, you should see organic traffic coming to your site and sales dropping in for free. This of course takes much longer than PPC advertising, and you’ll need to be very patient. Again, affiliates drop out after doing some work, but not seeing much in the way of sales.
As you can see, the longer term affiliates will have greater success because they stick out the tough months when nothing is happening so they can see the fruits of their labour. When affiliate marketing is working, it can give you a nice passive income. But in the beginning, it can seem like there’s a lot to do with little reward.
Summary
Anyone can join an affiliate program for free by signing up. This lets you refer customers to products for a commission based on sales you generate. There’s many affiliate programs in thousands of topics which you can find with a simple search on the internet. Amazon, and eBay are two popular ones you can use to sell physical products. However, physical products pay much less than digital products which you can find on Clickbank and alternatives to Clickbank which offer digital affiliate products.
The hard part of affiliate marketing isn’t the joining of an affiliate program. Most programs are easy to join, although some will ask for your marketing method and your number of followers and website details, etc. Some affiliate programs can be a little more picky than others as to who they allow to promote their offers.
The biggest part of being an affiliate is finding a strategy you can use to successfully market your products and services online. Your particular interests, abilities, situation and circumstance will determine which strategy is appropriate to meet your needs.
You can access an online training and education resource for becoming an affiliate which has everything you need here.