How To Become An Affiliate Marketer

More and more people are having to turn to additional income streams to keep help live theirs lives. There are of course 100’s of ways to earn extra income but today I want to focus on just one, so in this article I am going to show you how to become an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing is becoming very popular as it is very easy to start, there are no real upfront costs and anyone can learn it and be up and running very quickly.

What is Affiliate Marketing

Have you ever been out to a restaurant, had a lovely meal and then in passing conversation recommended the same restaurant to a family member or friend. You might have even done the same for a totally stranger. Anyway did the restaurant reward you for doing this, probably not!

But what if when you had recommended them and the people went and spent a lovely evening, with good food and wine. Then when they came to pay the bill the restaurant forwarded a percentage of the bill to you for recommending them in the first place.

How cool would that be! Well affiliate marketing works in exactly that way. You promote / recommend a product or service that you love and then when the customer you sent to them buys you get a percentage of the price.

You can now see why becoming an affiliate is growing in popularity.

How does Affiliate Marketing Work

Let’s dive a little deeper into how this actually works.

Discovering Which Niche

The first thing I do is choose which niche you would, like to recommend. Most people go with a hobby and something work related that they already know a lot about. This helps as you are then perceived an expert in your niche and by learning more people will trust you and the products you will be promoting.

A good rule of thumb is you want someone that is fairly popular and people would be searching for solutions to various things. There must also be companies that offer the solutions. You can then facilitate being the go between and offer these solutions to the people searching.

Sign Up To Affiliate Programs

Once you have made a decision about your niche, you then need to research companies that have affiliate programs that you can sign up too.

Don’t panic here the signing up process is simple and should be free. I would never pay to become an affiliate for any company. If someone wants to charge you then move on and find one that is free.

Most sign ups consist up your name and email depending on how they pay you might need add an address or a PayPal address maybe.

The easiest way to look for these companies would be to do a Google search. Put in your niche and then + affiliate program

Once you have located some companies and signed up you will then get issued with a unique link that is tracked to you, so when people click on the link and purchase, the commissions are tracked to you too.

Commissions can vary between companies from a few percent to 100% but the most common is around 50%.

Mobile Devices

When creating ads, content and other promotional material, don’t forget to make your content look great on mobile devices as over 50% of anything viewed on the internet these days is on mobile phones or tablets.

You can check this by testing on your own devices first.

Google Trends

Remember some niches may go up and down during the year. Ideally you would want a steady pattern throughout the whole year then your income will be the same. You can use Google Trends to check your niche and any peaks and toughs it may have.

Stick To One Niche

Don’t try to jump from one niche to another. Concentrate on just one and do that well. You will achieve success much easier by doing this. When you are successful and you have a steady income coming from your niche only then should you take on a second niche.

If you decide you want to change niches this is perfectly okay.

Keep Learning

To keep learning more about affiliate marketing and making money online I would recommend joining a site like Wealthy Affiliate where you can rub shoulders with 1000s of other marketers get up to date training and support and get access to some cool tools to help you.

Build Your Own Affiliate Website

Creating your own base (website) on the internet does a few things. The first is it enables you to build a brand around you as an affiliate and your niche. It also enables you to create and share content about your particular niche.

Using your unique affiliate links can be an issue throughout the internet, by having your own website you can then link to your affiliate products without having to worry.

The most simplest way to create a website these days is to use a platform called WordPress. You can start by creating your own website for free and then developing your site as your business grows.

Creating Content

The best way to get traffic to your affiliate links is to create some amazing content. Your website is a place for the content in the form of blog articles about the solutions that your customers are looking.

You can also use videos these can be ones that you have created or even what others have already produced. You can find these on sites such as You Tube and then embed this with your blogs.

With the recent growth of sites such as Pinterest and Instagram, images always work well.

Note:- before you use any images for your business be sure you have the right to use it. Creating your own is fine of course but there are many royalty free image sites too so use this.

Making Money

Within your blog content you can add your affiliate links. The best way to do this is to hyperlink them within some text. You can also add images with links too.

There are of course many other ways to promote your links. Although you can’t actively promote your affiliate links directly in places such as forums and some social networks there are ways round this.

Promoting Your Content

Time to dive more deeply into where you can promote your links.

Free Traffic

Like I have already said blogging is by far the best way to get your links in front of your target audience. Creating content that is keyword targeted will not only enable you to get good targeted visitors eager to find a solution for their particular problem, but if done correctly will get some of your content ranked highly in the search engines.

Master this and you will have a constant flow of free traffic to your affiliate offers.

Social Networks

I have touched on Social Networks and how some don’t allow affiliate links to be posted directly to affiliate pages, but there is nothing stopping your promoting your blogs, which in turn will get visitors to click through to your affiliate products.

Forums and Community Pages

Forums can be a lucrative place to hang out and get affiliate commissions, although you can’t directly promote affiliate offers in some forums you can add a signature which can be links of your choice.

Email Marketing

Probably the most effective way of promoting affiliate links is via an email list. Building email lists are very easy to start. You just need a free report, checklist, e book or similar item to give away in return for your customers details (email and name). You can then store these details in an email marketing service provider such as AWeber. From here you can then automatically send out promotional emails to everyone on your list.

If you make the gift and the promotional emails about solution the same issues then these emails can be super targeted.

Quick Recap

A very brief recap of how you can start with no money at all and become a highly successful affiliate marketer.

• First choose your niche and focus solely on this, without adding different niches along the way.
• Research relevant affiliate programs that you can sign up for.
• Set up your own website / blog and develop good keyworded content on a consistent basis.
• Add your affiliate links to various blogs, forums and social networks (that allow this).
• Start building your email list, and promote regularly.

Oh and don’t forget to use Wealthy Affiliate for free websites and the best affiliate marketing training, support and tools.

If you have any questions about starting as an affiliate marketer then please left me a comment below and I will help you out.

Disclosure :- Affiliate links may be used within this post. This means that if you purchase through my site after clicking a link then I get a small commission, at NO extra charge to yourself. This helps me to continue giving great free content. Thanks