How to make money as an affiliate marketer

I get affiliate marketing commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

One of the simplest ways to make money online is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a quick way to make money while you sleep all you need is a website or social media. Affiliate marketing is one of the recommended ways of monetizing your website. If you get everything right in affiliate marketing, chances are you will make huge profits. However, there are basics you need to understand before embarking on your affiliate marketing journey.  

In this blog, we have all the aspects you need to know from scratch. While searching the meaning of the term affiliate marketing, you will get tons of importance, but the whole issue is about generating income without hassle. But, first, there are some aspects to understand because affiliate marketing is far much complicated. Worry not here; we will break everything for you.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing refers to where a company or retailer pays you a commission for driving traffic or sales to his or her business. In affiliate marketing, your major task is to go the customer to someone else website by referring to their services or products. It is a model of making money which can be referred to as a channel.  You get to partner with various brands, companies, or individuals to refer to you as an affiliate or partner. 

After an affiliate marketer, you will be marketing someone else business, services, or products and enticing the customers visiting your website to buy the services or products. You will earn after the referrals buy the service or product according to the agreed commission percentage. Affiliate marketing is, in a way, an intrusive way of advertising on behalf of some else, but there are no visual advertisements. 

Top players in the affiliate marketing 

In affiliate marketing, there are crucial players you need to know about because you will be interacting with them. 

Brand awareness as an affiliate marketer

Brands are vital plays in affiliate marketing. These are companies or businesses which offer the products or service you as an affiliate you will be advertising on their behalf. Examples of brands include travel companies or agencies, e-commerce stores, subscription services, and more. 

Affiliates or Partners

Affiliates are the second player in affiliate marketing, and it refers to the partners with brands. The affiliates can be bloggers, social media influencers, mobile apps, media sites, among others. Note affiliates apply to advertise products and services according to the niche more so if you own a website; for instance, if you have a traveling website or blog site, you will be an affiliate marketer to services and products related to travel. 

Affiliate Networks

The third player is affiliate networks. They are vital because they take care of all reporting, tracking, and payments to affiliates or partners. They ensure affiliates gate paid for all successful referrals they make. Besides, affiliate networks also offer management services. 

Additionally, affiliate networks provide other services, such as giving brands access to a network of affiliates who are willing to join their network. On the other site, the affiliates have also given a chance to a hundred, if not thousands of available affiliate programs. 

Software as a Service (SaaS) Platforms

The SaaS platforms offer affiliates tracking, reporting, and payment services. Hover, they don’t offer management services or access to network affiliates to brands or affiliates. The main focus of SaaS is on the technological aspects. You can only choose either SAAs or Affiliate Networks as your technology assistant but not both. 

Agencies 

Agencies are the ones who oversee the relationship between the brands and affiliates. They ensure a smooth relationship between the two by managing the day-to-day operations and strategizing the affiliate program on behalf of the brands, including recruiting affiliates, moderating the relationship, activation, and optimizing.  Agencies work directly with affiliate networks, affiliates, brands, and Saas platforms

Customers

Customer is also part of the players in affiliate marketing because they are the ones who generate revenue for affiliates. The customers are directed by the affiliates to buy certain products or services, and after they purchase, the affiliates make money. 

What it Takes to be an Affiliate Marketer

To get started as an affiliate marketer is simple hut you will need to have two things; 

1. Website 
2. Affiliate products to advertise or promote 

Here are more details on the two requirements. 

1. Build a Website or Blog for Your Niche

To start making money as an affiliate marketer, you need first to have a website. Today you don’t need to be an IT expert to create a website. There are various available options you can opt to create a professional website. Despite all the available options, WordPress is the easiest and recommended if you are a starter. You can build a WordPress website within minutes at no hassle. 

The advantage of using WordPress is that more tools are available to help you on top of other websites. With a WordPress website, your site is faster, functionality is on point, and there is a better user experience for all your visitors. 

2. Affiliate Products advertise or promote

After you have built your website, the next requirement is to decide which products you will be promoting through your website. It is easy to choose which products to be promoted because it depends on your website niche. Don’t be tempted to choose products not related to your niche or the content on your website. The ideal way of selecting which products to promote is through enrolling in an affiliate marketing network. 

As earlier mentioned, the affiliate networks are the ones which do connect the brands and affiliates so as both can benefit. The affiliates use the affiliate network to select the products to promote as per the content on their website. 

More so, the affiliate networks provide you, the affiliate, with data on how well to promote the products, and this boosts your chances of selling more as an affiliate marketer and make more money. 

Some of the best affiliate networks out there include; 

• ShareASale
• CJ Affiliate
• ClickBank
• Amazon affiliate program

How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Now that you have all the requirements to get started as an affiliate marketer, it is the right time to know how to make money with affiliate marketing. It is the most important part because after the hard work you will be expecting to earn. Here is how to make money as an affiliate marketer

Create Great Content 

The first step to making money as an affiliate marketer is to create attractive content. Several people overlook this first step, publish content, and then insert affiliate links within the blog or article. It is the wrong approach. To the few lucky, they may generate a few sales while others may not work at all. 

 If you wish to generate money from affiliate marketing, you have to create unique and top notch content. It is the content that does attract customers to your website, not the affiliate links. 

The content you post on your website also determines whether your target audience will buy the product you are promoting or not. Most of the time, the buyer or target audience doesn’t know which product to buy. Through your publishing stellar content, you will be able to convince them to buy the product you are promoting. 

The content you create as an affiliate marketer should be helping the target audience make a purchasing decision then add an affiliate link where the customer will click and be redirected to complete the purchase. Then you will earn a commission. 

Add links to products you are promoting. 

After creating quality content and relevant to your website niche, the next step is to add affiliate links in the content. Try to add these links naturally. First, you need to tell the target audience why to buy the products by answering directly to customer problems.

You should first do keyword research to know what the customer is searching for and then create content giving a solution to the problem. Afterward, it a time when you will add the affiliate links. 

Where and when to insert the affiliate links depends on the content you have created. It is not good to add like 10 links to like 500 words article. So the number of words or the number of products you are reviewing determines the number of affiliates you can add. However, the main goal is to add the links strategically to attract the audience’s attention. 

Turn your audience into potential customers.

It is time now to generate revenue through the links you have added to your posts. But you need to get traffic to your website. The good news is that you don’t need a huge amount of traffic to generate money. No matter the number your visitors you get, you can still make money. 

Optimize Your Existing Traffic

To generate a huge amount of revenue from your visitors, you have to optimize your website’s traffic. One way to optimize your traffic is to adopt the 80/20 rule. If you don’t know about this rule, it suggests that from your 20% content, you should get 80% profits. It may sound unattainable, but the rule stands firm with its basics well outlines. You have to identify your website’s content with high traffic and prioritize it and add enough affiliate links. 

Affiliate marketing success stories

Now you do understand how to make money as an affiliate marketer. We want to show you Successful people in their venture as affiliates. These examples demonstrate you can make money through affiliate marketing if you do it the right way, as explained above. 

Below are 5 people and websites which have successfully earned money through affiliate marketing. They pose as good examples to envy and also as a source of inspiration. 

Hieu Nguyen

Hieu Nguyen is of the leading affiliate marketer from Vietnam. He worked as a software developer before embarking on selling products as an affiliate.  

There is a lot to talk about Hieu, but his success is from creating websites that target unique Amazon products. He sold $17,500 for one of the first sites he created to make money with niche sites and sell Amazon products as an affiliate. Amazon affiliate program is one of the affiliate programs to consider. 

The Wire Cutter

The Wire Cutter is a big business that sold 150 million dollars in 2015 through affiliate marketing. In the field of affiliate marketing, this is a huge figure. More than 1 million visitors are currently drawn to the website every month. They write reviews of items like new devices, outdoor equipment, and fitness and wellness items.

One of their performance reasons is the thorough examination of all the items they review to generate genuine evaluations. These goods are not only worth pointing out the positive things; they also detail the weaknesses.

Chris Guthrie at UpFuel

Chris’s story is inspiring since he started affiliate marketing. At some point, he sold out his well-performing affiliate website and made a 6 figure amount. He used to share knowledge, strategies, and wealth tips through the website, which attracted a huge number of visitors on the website. 

He has made much money selling for various products online and is one of the best examples of success in this field, operating mostly with the Amazon affiliate program. It also hosts an online marketing podcast from different authority figures and experts, so you can also learn from him.

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor, perhaps one of affiliate marketing’s greates success stories proving affiliate marketing, can help you make you money. Most people don’t know TripAdvisor to be an affiliate. With around 116 million visitors a month, it is a perfect location for visiting the world’s best places to see restaurants, hotels, and everything else.

Travel companies primarily produce Their money, and high-quality goods are sold. There may be a bigger name missing in this post, but they’re a perfect example of a proper affiliate marketer.

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net

Problogger.com is a renowned platform for affiliate marketers to benefit from different techniques and to enjoy them. He has long been an affiliate marketer and has developed a prosperous career since the early 1900s. 

To date, he has made over £550 million and focuses primarily on products from Amazon. With only a few websites, he became one of the people responsible for affiliate marketing and a fantastic success story that motivates everyone.

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