In this step by step affiliate marketing training, I’m going to discuss the main things you need to learn as an affiliate. You can also sign up to a free video training series on this website.
Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest ways you can earn from the internet. You don’t need anything of your own to sell and you don’t have to deal with any customers. However, you do need to attract customers in order to get paid. If you don’t sell anything, you don’t earn any money. But on the flip side, once you get the hang of selling, you can sell more and more products without actually doing much more with the power of automation.
It is the early stages of learning affiliate marketing where most new affiliates will quit. So it’s worth being prepared for this stage. Think of affiliate marketing as a personal journey, with a tasty prize waiting for you at the end! If you remember that prize when the journey is tough, it keeps you going!
Many affiliates will quit because nothing seems to be working straight away. But initially you should expect to try out some strategies without making any sales. But think of this as feedback rather than “failure”. There’s no failure in affiliate marketing if you take this viewpoint; only feedback and learning.
Step By Step Affiliate Marketing Training – Products/Niche
A lot of courses will tell you to choose a product and then think about a way to promote it. There’s thousands of possible affiliate products to choose from and so this can be quite daunting. So instead, it can be a good idea to choose your niche first.
A niche is a topic/area in which you’ll be building your affiliate business. You’ll be spending some time in your niche, creating content and promoting your products. It’s a good idea to choose a niche in which you have some interest or passion. A niche you’re passionate about is much more likely to become successful than one in which you have no interest.
As an example, I choose a niche I was uninterested in; mushroom harvesting! I spent 6 months building a blog on the topic but eventually gave up on it. Imagine blogging about something you have no interest, for months! Hardly the kind of business you want to be involved in. Compare this to something with which you have a passion for. Now imagine creating content around your passion, whether video content or a blog. It’s much easier and more fun to do this and that means you’ll be able to sustain your efforts for much longer.
So, have a think about a topic or interest you have, or would like to have. Then look for a product within that niche which you would like to promote.
Step By Step Affiliate Marketing Training – Finding A Product To Promote
There’s thousands of products you can choose from, in fact millions! Amazon alone offers 12 million products for affiliates to promote through its affiliate program.
However, before you rush in and choose an Amazon product to promote, you should do your homework! Amazon affiliate commissions are some of the lowest in the industry and although Amazon is popular and trusted site, it’s not the best bet for affiliates. Affiliates get paid as little as 1% commission on certain products from Amazon and although the top earning products pay 20% most of Amazon’s products fall within the 1%-10% commission band.
Clickbank is another possible venue to find affiliate products when you’re starting out. Clickbank houses thousands of digital products and these can be good for affiliates because they offer larger commissions. Digital products typically pay between 20% and 40% commissions, far more than physical products. Subscription affiliate products are also a good bet because they pay out recurring commissions. So for each sale you can earn a recurring monthly commission, rather than a one-off commission.
Some other product marketplaces include:
- JVZoo
- Rakuten (formerly linkshare)
- CJ (Commission Junction)
- ShareASale
- PartnerStack
- FlexOffers
To find an affiliate product in a particular category, simply have a search online for “{insert your niche/keyword} affiliate program”.
Step By Step Affiliate Marketing Training – High Value Products
The best products to choose are often the most popular and this can mean there’s a lot of competition with other affiliates. However, choosing unknown products which haven’t yet proved themselves can be a problem. They might not sell, or offer much value to the customer. So it’s wise to choose your product carefully.
Ideally it should be something which offers huge value – the more value the better because it will stand the test of time, give you larger commissions and your customers will be happy! Happy customers keep coming back and this is particularly important if you choose a subscription product to sell which offers recurring commissions.
Some products even have multiple items within a range. This is good news for affiliates because they can benefit from later purchases from their referrals. So a low level commission can turn into a high ticket commission if you have products which sell for much larger cost within your sales funnel.
Certain affiliate programs have this option built in. Access one here.
Marketing Your Product / Customer Avatar
One of the biggest hurdles for most new affiliates is getting enough people in front of their affiliate offers. This starts with traffic – either to their website or their landing page where they can collect leads.
Traffic can be bought or you can attract people by creating content. One of the most important factors to understand before you set out to attract traffic is your customer avatar or target audience. The internet is vast, with trillions of people browsing every day. Only a small percentage of those online users will be interested in your particular affiliate product. So before setting out with a marketing strategy, it’s useful to carefully identify who exactly you wish to attract to your offer.
When you understand your customer avatar and target audience very well, it can shave years of struggle off your affiliate journey. Your “customer avatar” is the type of person who will buy, and continue to buy from you. Get to understand their age, location, interests and hobbies to help you zone in on them as a specific demographic. Once you do this, it is much easier to attract the right kind of people to your offer.
Traffic – Paid Or Organic?
The next step to take is to start marketing. Without marketing your affiliate business is dead in the water. You need traffic (and the right kind of traffic) in order to sell your affiliate products. No sales equals no money! Remember affiliate marketing is a performance based business and although this means there’s no limit or cap to what you can earn, this can also work against you too!
Initially taking action in your marketing efforts can be daunting. After all, you don’t have the experience of a seasoned affiliate so you won’t know which adverts work and which don’t. You don’t know how many blog posts or videos to upload before you’ll make a sale. The key here is to keep taking actions on a regular basis. Trust the process and stick with a marketing strategy which you can sustain for several months at the least. If you don’t have a marketing budget, you’ll need to do content creation. If you don’t have time for content creation you’ll need a marketing budget.
You can also do a little paid marketing and some content creation. Be aware however that content creation is a much slower method of generating traffic than paid marketing.
Summary
As a new affiliate it’s worth getting help and support and joining an online community. You can access training and support here. You’ll be able to take a step by step training on the inside of the platform.
To make money as an affiliate you need to join an affiliate program and successfully promote and sell an affiliate product. Once you’ve done this once, you have the key to doing it again and again. So the first step for a newbie affiliate is to figure out how to actually make that first sale online.
Here’s the basics:
- Join a training program and choose a niche
- Find a product you would like to sell
- Settle on a single marketing strategy (for at least 6 months) whether paid or organic; understand who your customer avatar is
- Stick with it and keep going, learning as you go.
- Don’t stop until you make that first sale, however long that takes
- Rinse and repeat
As you learn you can tweak your action steps the more you sell. Over time, you’ll get better and better at selling and be able able to automate the selling process.