Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method

If you’re looking for the easiest affiliate marketing method, you’re not alone. Most affiliates want to know this. Why choose the hard method, right? Unfortunately it’s not always so cut and dry with affiliate marketing. There’s so many ways in which affiliates can promote their products, and there’s so many affiliate products to choose from. Your choice of product and your promotion method/s will have a huge impact on your ability to make affiliate marketing work for you.

easiest affiliate marketing method

Your budget plays a significant role in your marketing method as an affiliate too. If you don’t have an advertising budget, you’ll need to find some methods which are cheap or free. Sadly these are typically going to take a lot more time and effort than if you’re using paid advertising.

Free traffic methods for affiliate marketing aren’t the easiest! They are slow and unpredictable. Blogging, social media marketing and building a YouTube channel are examples of cheap or free marketing methods. Depending on the competition in your affiliate marketing niche, it can take months of hard work before you break through and start generating sales. Many affiliates quit for this reason, even after months of hard work.

Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Think Big!

One factor which can dramatically alter the course of your affiliate marketing journey is scale. With pretty much any affiliate offer this is true; the more people you can get in front of your product, the more you’ll sell. To reach people in larger numbers requires getting a lot of website visitors and/or building a huge email list. The email list is the best resource for anyone who wants to build an affiliate business and reach a large number of people quickly. You can access an email autoresponder for free here.

aweber

To build an email list takes time and/or money! To build one fast you’ll need to use paid advertising. Otherwise you’ll need to build a resource such as a YouTube channel or through blogging, for example, but this is far slower. So, to answer the question “which is the easiest affiliate marketing method” succinctly I would have to say:

  • Build an email list
  • Using paid marketing

But there’s a few caveats to this premise too, because you can still burn through a lot of cash using this method and still fail!

Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Types Of Products

Your choice of product has a huge deal to do with whether you’ll be successful as an affiliate marketer too. Even with a large marketing budget, a good product, and an email list, you can make mistakes. For example, you can send the wrong kind of traffic to your list. You can pay too much to build your list, and not recoup your marketing budget, or make a profit.

With the right product and audience, you are in with a much greater chance for success as an affiliate. So what is the right kind of product to promote as an affiliate?

easiest affiliate marketing method

There’s many products to choose from an you can become an affiliate marketer quite quickly and easily through joining any affiliate program. Amazon is a good example of where many affiliates will gravitate to. But with Amazon, you can only make tiny commissions on sales you make, depending on what you sell. Amazon pays between 1% and 20% on items you promote from their site. So with a $100 item, you can make as little as $1 for making the referral. If you’re paying for advertising, that only leaves a tiny margin for profit and you’re more likely to run up debt than to make a profit.

But you can also sell subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products which pay much larger commissions. These kinds of products give you more leeway to make a profit while using paid marketing tactics.

Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Target Audience/Customer Avatar

With paid ads and email marketing, you give yourself the best chance of reaching the most amount of people in the shortest possible time with your affiliate products. But what if those people aren’t interested in your product, or can’t afford to buy it? You’ll spend a lot of money and sell nothing! This is why it’s vital to understand who you are aiming your advertising at – your target audience or perfect customer “avatar”.

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Your customer avatar is the “perfect” customer who will love you, your products and become a lifetime fan. When you can understand them and their needs, you can “zone in” to what makes them tick and communicate in a way which will appeal to them personally.

You can also aim your advertising campaigns to your target demographic using the various online marketing platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Google Adwords, Bing etc. You can do this by age, location, marital status, income, interests and a whole host of other important demographics. When you define your ideal customer very specifically, you can save a heap on otherwise wasted advertising and marketing aimed at the wrong type of person.

Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Products & Passion

What product do you genuinely want to sell? Do you have an interest in the product yourself? Who is your target audience and how are you going to find them? Answer these questions well and you’re in a much better position to do well with an affiliate marketing business.

When I started doing affiliate marketing I rushed in trying to promote anything and everything to anyone! It just doesn’t work because 99.9% of people online don’t want the thing you’re selling! You need to find the 0.01% who do! To do this in a competitive market is either time consuming or expensive or both. Running ads is expensive if there’s a lot of other competing affiliates in the same niche. Blogging, or building a YouTube channel is competitive too if you’re going after free traffic.

But if you can align your passions with your product, you can keep going for much longer than most people will. You can sustain the necessary effort much longer than your competition, which is particularly important if you’re building some kind of authority website for traffic generation.

Power Of The Email List

I’ve already mentioned the email list in this article but it deserves a bit more attention because of how important the email list really is. Some affiliates will try and sell directly from a website, which can be done. However it’s much easier to sell from a list because of the timeframe you can cover with an email list.

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On a website, someone only hangs around for a few minutes at the most. After that they are gone forever. Statistics show that most people don’t buy immediately from a website, especially one which is unfamiliar to the visitor. It takes several touch points before someone buys from you. This can’t be achieved on a one-time visit to a website. So if you’re an affiliate who is struggling making sales, this might be the reason.

Offer your website visitors a free giveaway and collect their email details from your website. Now you can follow up with emails, giving them help and advice and building trust over a much longer time frame. I have sold affiliate products to subscribers on my list who have joined it years before hand. This simply could not happen on a website.

Summary

So if you’re read this far you have probably realised that it’s not so simple as the “easiest” affiliate marketing method. You could choose a single “method” such as paid ads and building an email list, but falter on your product or get your target audience wrong, or even your messaging. I would definitely attest to the significance of using an email list and paid marketing. But for some, paid marketing might be out of their budget.

Even with paid marketing, some adverts will fail, and you should expect to lose some marketing budget while you’re learning. (See this as investment, rather than loss). If you’re not in a position to do this, you’ll need to use some cheaper marketing methods such as blogging, for example.

high ticket funnel
Easiest way to do affiliate marketing – with a six figure funnel, paid marketing and an email list

Blogging certainly isn’t the easiest way to earn from affiliate marketing. But if you find a topic you love, you can build a huge resource and attract free traffic, potentially for years to come. This can give you a nice, passive income if you align an affiliate product which is compatible with your topic and offers good value to the customer.

Overall, a single “method” of doing affiliate marketing is not really enough. You also need a strategy – a guiding overview which covers methods, messaging, marketing and product choice, and aligns with your long term goals, values and ideals.

If you’re serious about building a sustainable affiliate business from scratch, have a look at this video.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

The easiest way to promote affiliate links effectively is through an email list. With an email list, you can automatically follow up with your subscribers, sending them regular messages after they have signed up to your list. This is one of the best ways to promote your links for a number of reasons:

  • You can build a longer term relationship with people through a list, whereas on a website you only have a small time “window” to sell and one touch point.
  • A list can be built in multiple ways: with content marketing and paid strategies
  • You can connect with your subscribers multiple times. Data shows customers need multiple “touch points” before they will buy something.
  • People can buy from you long after they signed up, months or even years later.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links – Get An Autoresponder

You can access an autoresponder for free through the banner below:

aweber

Once inside the software you can start creating opt in forms which you can use with a website or landing page. Opt in forms allows you to offer something of value to your website visitors in exchange for their email details.

You can also use a landing page software to create specific landing pages which give your visitors less choice than a website. This forces them to make a decision: sign up or leave the page. On a website, they can browse around and look at your content. But on a landing page, you have a more specific intention for your visitors: to encourage them to sign up to your email list.

Here’s an example of a landing page (see below). As you can see, there’s only a small amount of information on the page, and only two options: sign up or leave. (Click image to view landing page).

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

Once you have set up a landing page, you can use it forever. You can also set up a number of automated follow up emails which offer your subscribers information and link to your affiliate products.

Once you have done this step, it’s time to choose a promotion method where you can drive traffic to your landing page. This blog, for example, is used to drive traffic to my various landing pages and put more and more subscribers on my email list. You can use content marketing (e.g. blogging or v’logging), or you can drive traffic with paid marketing.

Paid marketing is far quicker and easier to do than content marketing. Depending on your particular topic, content marketing can be time consuming and it’s a slow process. It can take many months before you have constant traffic flowing through your landing pages. But with paid marketing, you can get traffic much more quickly.

Paid marketing platforms such as Google Ads (Adwords), Facebook and YouTube offer some of the best targeting options – see target audience for affiliate marketing. Getting good at targeting means you are finding the right kind of audience who are the most suitable for your product/service.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links: Paid Ads

With paid ads, you’ll also need to set up a compliant landing page which is in agreement with the terms and conditions of your particular advertising platform. This might mean using disclaimers on your landing page and being in compliance with GDPR (general data protection regulation), as well as having things like privacy policy on your site.

Check with your individual marketing platform for compliance before launching any campaign.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

Paid ads are the best form of marketing when sending traffic to your landing pages for a number of reasons:

  • You can easily set up a campaign and learn from it very quickly
  • If it works, you can keep it going, if not, you can easily shut it down and try another strategy
  • You can target a specific group of people who are most likely to show an interest in your giveaway product and affiliate products/service.
  • It’s very scalable – if a campaign works well, you can scale up to an ever larger audience.

With content marketing, it’s very slow. You need to create multiple pieces of content and market them. Over time, your content will gain some traction, but it’s much slower initially and much more difficult to scale than paid advertising. It also takes a lot more effort than running a paid ad.

Landing Page Software

You can access landing page software with products such as Convertree and LeadPages. These softwares make it easy to build custom made landing pages according to your needs. You can also use the software to compare landing pages with each other – this is called cross testing. Cross testing is used by affiliate marketers to compare different pages and see which ones convert into leads and sales the best.

If you’re going down this route it’s well worth doing this, and comparing large volumes of traffic across two different pages to see which performs the best. Once you have done this across a number of visitors, you’ll get a picture of which pages are best according to your target audience.

You can also access landing page software through this all in one business system and online training resource.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

The Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is something which you can offer to your landing page visitors in exchange for their email address. This should be something of value which ties in with your affiliate products.

For example, one of my lead magnets is an ebook on affiliate marketing. I follow up in my emails with affiliate tools and resources which have helped me as an affiliate. If my subscribers buy something through my affiliate link, I earn commissions based on what they purchase.

beginners

See also lead magnet examples and ebook lead magnet.

Multiple Sources Of Traffic

The good thing about creating landing pages is that once you have created them, you can use them forever. Simply direct traffic to them from a blog, or a vide you have uploaded. You can also place ebook pictures throughout your text which lead people back to your landing pages.

Over time, you content (and paid ads if you choose to use them) will compound and you should see more and more traffic finding their way to your lead capture pages.

This can happen very quickly with a large marketing budget, or over a longer period of time with free marketing strategies. Or, use a combination of both depending on your individual situation to suit.

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