Affiliate marketing is a great way to start taking income into your own hands and forget about the normal nine to five. You can find a niche or topic that fits your way of living and talk about the products you use to make money. But it is not as easy as it sounds and requires time to start kicking off.
So what is affiliate marketing? We’ll break down everything you need to know about affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of running a website, social media handle, or making videos. These platforms are used to promote products that you recommend through affiliate marketing programs.
These programs can come from a range of different websites, such as Amazon, eBay, or even Etsy. You are not limited to the number of affiliate programs you can sign up for, you should just make sure that the programs do not have underlying causes that would terminate your programs.
To start with affiliate marketing, you should look to find a niche before anything else.
What Is a Niche?
A niche is a specific type of product or service that you want to feature on your website or other platforms. Niches can be extremely broad, like if you wanted to just promote gardening supplies. Or they can be very specific, like if you wanted to just promote different types of hoses that you can use for your garden.
Niches can also be very competitive. The broader you go, the more likely you are to run into competition.
You are not limited to sticking to one certain niche though. You are more than welcome to broaden your horizons, but for the sake of ranking, it might be smart to just start with one or two.
How Do You Pick a Niche?
Picking a niche should start with something you are either extremely passionate about or something you don’t mind making content about. For instance, if you really like sleeping and could talk about the ways to make sleep the most enjoyable thing possible, you could consider a niche in pillows or sheets.
From there, you need to do keyword research. Keywords are the most important part of any affiliate marketing strategy because they are the searches people are going to be looking up and where you want your content to rank.
Using tools like Ahrefs, you find keywords that are high in volume with low competition. From there, you make content that focuses on those keywords, and over time, search engines will start to recognize your content and decide where to rank it.
How Do You Start Making Money?
With affiliate marketing, there are multiple ways to start making money. If you have an existing popular platform, like a big Instagram account or YouTube following, you can start taking sponsored posts.
These posts are associated with the products you like and are essentially paid reviews. You can also start to add ads to your website or videos that when clicked on and people purchase something, you gain a percentage of that money.
If you’re starting fresh, don’t worry, it will take time to start seeing that money flow in. When you start creating content for a website, search engines typically take a few months to categorize your content into their algorithm. So don’t be surprised if a few months after you posted content, it suddenly starts to blow up.
You typically want to follow the pattern of informational posts. This means you are providing quality content and not just copying and pasting whatever the product description is. If you can provide your own pictures and videos, rather than stock images, this also works in your favor.
Once people are onto your website, you can start signing up for affiliate programs, as they often require a certain amount of visitors or buys a month to be considered actively involved.
Look at these tips from a million dollar super affiliate marketer you should know.
How Do You Avoid Burnout?
Burnout with affiliate marketing is bound to happen. There is only so much you can write about sleeping, gardening, or whatever the niche may be before you start to feel tired of writing it.
This is why it is important to write about something you don’t mind writing about or even something you enjoy. The more you enjoy it, the less likely you are to become tired of it.
Another way is to hire content writers for you. There are plenty of websites that offer their services of having someone else do the research on keywords and write the article for you.
What Are the Costs of Starting an Affiliate Marketing Site?
While everyone talks about the money to be made from affiliate marketing, they rarely ever talk about the costs of starting one up. Thankfully, start-up costs are often negligible.
For your first year and website, you have to pay to buy the domain of the website and then have a hosting server. Website domains are often cheap, depending on what you are going for. These website domains typically run on yearly renewal rates.
Hosting depends on where you are getting your hosting. This can range from under $100 to a couple of thousand dollars, depending on the hosting company itself. These companies will often run new customer specials, however.
Getting keywords can also cost money depending on where you get them from. Ahrefs runs a trial for seven days but has monthly subscriptions that can start to hurt the pocket. Other keyword engines may not be as thorough, but can be cheap or free.
Affiliate Marketing: Your New Way of Making Money
So what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is the way of taking power into your own hands to make money. You can decide what products to feature, what type of content to post, and do as you please to make yourself happy.
If you want to learn more about the business world and making money on your own time, be sure to check out the rest of the blog. If you know someone that is interested in affiliate marketing, be sure to share this article with them.
