How To Start And Run A Successful Affiliate Marketing Business

If you know a tiny bit of internet marketing, then I’m sure you’ve heard about affiliate marketing. Tons of internet marketers can swear that affiliate marketing is by far the most profitable way to earn money on the internet.

By definition,  affiliate marketing is facilitating the sales of other people’s physical and digital products, and you get to earn a commission from each sale made through your ‘unique link.

The Four Components of Affiliate Marketing

Merchant: This refers to the solo entrepreneur, company or owner of the product you’d want to promote. Different marketers refer to them as vendors, advertisers or creators.

Affiliate Marketer(You):  This is the promoter of the products or digital products.

Customers: These are the target audience who will buy the products you’ll be promoting. The customers are the lifeline of any affiliate business. Without customers, there are no sales and no commissions.

Network: These are platforms that act as an intermediary between merchants and affiliate marketers. These platforms function as the database for the products. As a marketer, you visit these platforms to select the products you’d want to promote. Some of the networks include Clickbank, ShareASale, Amazon, and so on.

How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business

Select a niche

Before you dive into the deep end with the excitement of making sales from other people’s products, it’s important to note that a great deal of research goes into identifying the in-demand niches.  You don’t just promote a product because you love it, you promote the product that is in- demand and can make sales.

According to most internet marketers, some of the best selling niches include:

1. Weight Loss
2. Health

iii. Wealth through investment

1. Self Improvement
2. Gadgets and technology
3. Personal Finance

Select the best products

After identifying the niche that intrigues you, the next important step is to identify the products to promote. Likewise, you need to promote a winner. Therefore, identify the best selling products in the niche and narrow down to what product you would want to promote.

The best way to identify a best seller is to visit a network like Clickbank and check their best selling section. Amazon has a very transparent system where you can see the metrics on each product.

How to Run an Affiliate Marketing Business

You now have the product you’d wish to promote, and you’re ready to start making the sales. Sign up to the network’s platform or the merchant’s website if they have affiliate products and get the unique link to promote. The next step is to get that product in front of your audience.

There are various ways you can choose to promote the product. Here are some of the most popular methods:

Setting up an affiliate blog.

This is the most common method where promoters write product reviews and publish them on their websites. This helps the target clients to read in-depth reviews on various products on the site and decide on what products to purchase.

You can also set up a website that is offering value to the audience and once in a while, you promote the products that you believe will be of benefit to your audience. https://creditrepaircompanies.com/ is one of those companies offering Personal Finance support for people who would want to improve their credit score rating.

Setting up a Youtube channel.

If you’re good with video, you can set up a Youtube channel and start reviewing products you’d wish to sell.

This method is also popular with Youtube Vloggers. Vloggers use their channels to review products and persuade their audience to buy the products using their affiliate links, and they get a commission out of the sale.

How to Build an Audience

This is possibly one of the most critical steps to monetize your affiliate business. It doesn’t matter how many great reviews you do if no one is visiting your affiliate site or Youtube channel, you’ll never make a dime.

Invest in SEO

This is the best way to increase your site ranking to leverage on organic traffic from the search engines. It could be achieved through on-page and off-page SEO to improve your site ranking. One of the most important on-page SEO tricks is to ensure that all your product review articles are keyword optimized. If you are planning to use network like Amazon, you can check out these Amazon SEO services to find out more about the varied ways to increase your site ranking.

Social media marketing

Social media is a beast when it comes to marketing. Therefore, where you’ll use organic or paid social media traffic, it’s vital that you leverage the millions of people on social media. The significant advantage of using Facebook Ads is the fact that you can specifically target the people who are interested in your product.

Paid Ads

Google ads and pay per click ads are also great ways to increase traffic to your site.  The more eyeballs you can get to your website, the higher chances you have to make a sale.

Once you’ve set up your affiliate business, you can start to enjoy traffic and semi-passive income with minimal effort on your side.