Are you ready to learn affiliate marketing basics? The better your understanding of the basic fundamental principles of affiliate marketing, the greater your chances of success. There’s a huge drop out rate within the business of affiliate marketing and around 95% of those who attempt to build an income from affiliate marketing quit completely.
But there’s various reasons for this. Affiliate marketing is super easy to start, but not so easy to master. There’s a very low barrier to entry and almost anyone can “give it a go”! You can start completely for free and there’s no cost to join most affiliate programs.
Most businesses fail within their first few years so the fact that most affiliates quit shouldn’t come as a surprise. Once you understand the main concepts of affiliate marketing well, you’ve armed yourself with some insight and knowledge which many fail to learn.
Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Your Customer Avatar
One of the main principles to learn is that of your perfect customer, or customer avatar. This is super important. Once you understand that the internet is full of people who don’t really care about what you’re selling, you can focus in on those who actually do.
When I started out online I had no clue either. I threw up websites in the hope that people would just come and buy my affiliate products. They didn’t, and I was disappointed more times than I care to remember.
A website thrown into the digital world online is like a barren desert. No one sees it unless you market it. To market to the people who actually want what you’re offering is the main key to success with affiliate marketing. Knowing your customer avatar is key to this.
Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Customer Avatar?
Most people aren’t interested in buying online. Only certain searches will lead to sales. It’s these searches which you want to understand. For example, someone looking online for “how to fix a blocked drain” aren’t going to be standing by with their wallets open. They are looking for information as is the larger percentage of online users. The internet is an information gathering tool, after all.
A search for a product review on the other hand is a much more targeted online search. This type of user is more than likely looking for something specific to buy. These are the searches you want to focus on if you’re going to make sales online with affiliate products.
Who is your ideal customer? How old are they? Where do they hang out online? How can you tell them about your product in an automated way? More on customer avatar here.
Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Marketing
It’s in the name: affiliate marketing. But despite this it can be easy to think that products sell themselves. Many affiliate “guru’s” will exaggerate the ease with which online selling is done. It can be easy, of course, but generally it’s not so for a beginner, hence why so many quit.
The right products do sell themselves but as an affiliate marketer you need to put yourself between the customer and the product. Any point of contact between you and the customer can be termed “marketing”. A user landing on your website gives you a point of contact to communicate your marketing message. Someone opening your email message gives you another point of content.
Most online buyers won’t buy on their first point of contact, especially with someone they don’t know. It takes typically 6-8 points of contact before someone will buy online, unless the website is already well known to them – such as Amazon, for example.
This means you need to create multiple touch-points in many cases, before you can sell online.
Email Marketing – A Fundamental Marketing Tool For Affiliates
It’s very difficult to create multiple points of contact only from a website. This is why successful affiliates will always have an email list. An email list allows you to build trust and create multiple points of contact with potential customers. On a website, most visitors only hang around for a few minutes. This gives you little chance of making that affiliate sale. But get them on your email list and this timeframe is dramatically extended. I’ve had subscribers from my email list make purchases even years after they joined.
People often never return to a website they once “happened” upon, but once you have someone’s email address you can set up an automated marketing campaign which keeps them in the loop – potentially for decades!
By delivering useful marketing messages, which help your subscribers in some way, you build trust. Once you have someone’s trust it’s much easier to sell them your affiliate products. The online shopper today is pretty discerning. They won’t fall for the hard sell and have plenty of time to shop around. But give them value and build trust and you’ll become their first port of call if they decide they want your particular product/service.
This is where the email marketing tool comes in. With an autoresponder, affiliates can collect email addresses and build a large list of subscribers to promote their products to.
Choosing A Niche & Product You Love
Choosing your niche is an important decision for affiliates. Your niche is the topic or interest which which you can build your affiliate business around. For example, if you’re interested in fitness, you could choose to build around gym workouts. If you’re interested in cooking, it could be recipes which you build a website or resource around.
A niche you love is much more likely to succeed than one you’re only half interested in, or not at all interested in. If your marketing method is going to be content creation, you’ll need to build a lot of content. If you run out of ideas after a couple of months, it’s likely to fade away. But if you’re bringing a lot of passion to your topic, you can create in it for months and even years.
Likewise with the affiliate product/s you choose to promote. If you’re only interested in the end result – making money, it might not be enough to inspire you take consistent action in your affiliate business. So choose a niche and a product you’re proud to promote and which you genuinely believe in. I made the mistake of picking a niche I had zero interest in at one point. I spent 6 months building content on a website and eventually ran out of enthusiasm for it!
Mindset
This post wouldn’t be complete without a mention of your mindset. I always scoffed at mentors who talked about mindset because I only wanted to learn the strategies for making money through affiliate marketing. Little did I know how important mindset really was.
Your mindset is paramount to success with affiliate marketing and you need to learn the strategies for keeping yourself in an upbeat mentality. If your beliefs don’t support your affiliate business, sooner or later you’ll come a cropper. If you’re surrounding yourself with naysayers and you allow friends and family to talk you out of building your affiliate business, they will definitely do so!
Don’t have a “give it a go” mindset when it comes to affiliate marketing. Have a “never quit” mindset instead. Remember each “failure” is no failure at all with affiliate marketing. It’s only feedback with the right mindset. If you see each problem you encounter as a failure, it will soon or later dampen your enthusiasm. Keep your spirits high and keep reminding yourself of your goals.
Here’s another post I’ve written on affiliate mindset and here’s another on developing entrepreneurial mindset.
Summary
If you’re read this far congratulations. You’re definitely more likely to succeed as an affiliate with this knowledge. I’ll also add that I was pretty much failing before I found some affiliate marketing mentors who helped me. Having subscription products to sell and high ticket items is also a complete game changer. You can sign up on this site to access the same help and support I found over 10 years ago when I found a group of coaches and mentors.
Good luck!