Affiliate Marketing for Beginners | A Guide to Getting Started (Part 1)

If you have been looking for ways to earn money online, chances are you have come across this marketing method. If you are wondering what affiliate marketing is, then you are in the right place. Affiliate marketing is where a third party like you promotes someone else's, that is a business's products and services and get a certain percentage of the sales or web traffic that results from it. 

Businesses use affiliate marketing to cut costs. It lets affiliates, that is those promoting their products and services earn by promoting products and services that you love and find useful. To do affiliate marketing, it’s best to build up an online audience. 

A Deeper Dive into Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing method where a business shares revenue with a third party affiliate to help promote their products and services to reach new audiences. The business will pay a certain percentage of the sold product or service to the affiliate marketer who helped sell the product. Having a good understanding about social media marketing will help you reach a wide audience and generate sales as an affiliate marketer. If you are interested in affiliate marketing, you might want to consider taking online courses on social media marketing which are available as free courses on sites like Coursera and Udemy.

Businesses use affiliate marketing to get more traffic to their websites, increase sales, improve brand awareness and connect with their audience at a deeper level.

For instance if you are a book lover like I am, you could probably sign up to affiliate p[rograms like Amazon FBA and get affiliate links to your books and promote them with book reviews online. This is a great way to earn a side income and, what’s more, you can spend this money on new books or anything else you please. What I’ve come to realise is that having additional money doesn’t hurt. 

Usually businesses offer affiliate marketers with perks like commissions, free products, discounts, access to training and educational resources.

Affiliate marketing involves mainly four different parties who play different roles in the process. They include the affiliate or the publisher who creates content, the merchant, the affiliate network, and the customer.

The affiliate is the person who promotes the target product or service. Meanwhile the merchant is the person to whom the product or service belongs, the affiliate network is an intermediary between an affiliate and an affiliate merchant’s program. The customer is the one who invests money to purchase the product or service promoted. 

Affiliate marketers can connect to affiliate programs organically. Some companies offer programs where anyone can sign up to become an affiliate and promote their products and services. Check the bottom footer of ecommerce websites to see if they have an affiliate program available. You can also do a quick Google search to find out any affiliate programs that you might be interested in joining and promoting specific products or services. 

How to Get Started in Affiliate Marketing

If you are considering starting affiliate marketing, there are a few things that you might want to keep in mind.

First, Pick Your Niche

Affiliate marketers are important to merchants because they reach a target audience that consists of potential customers who are interested in purchasing products and services. If you have a clear idea about your market niche, it makes it much easier and efficient to create an affiliate platform and content around the targeted products or services that resonates with your audience. 

You can use tools like Google Trends to identify what people are interested in and are searching for online. You can ask questions like what topic areas are not being served in current online spaces, what are products and services that I enjoy using? What is my own experience using these products and services? What sort of content would let me offer value to my target audience and help them solve their problems?

Choose a Marketing Channel that Matches Your Niche

When you have an idea about the topic, audience, and products you want to promote as an affiliate marketer, you will want to decide on what marketing channel to choose next. 

You might want to start out by creating a dedicated website where you review products and services. You can also choose social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok! It all depends on your niche. You can find out more about the age demographics of specific channels to try and narrow down where your target audience is online.

Be a Part of an Affiliate Marketing Network

Affiliate networks connect affiliates to merchants. While it is not mandatory to join an affiliate network, joining one will make it flexible to build relationships with merchants and earn more from affiliate commissions.

The affiliate network you need to choose will depend on the different types of products you plan to promote that your audience might be interested in too. Various affiliate programs offer a variety of products and services which vary from niche to niche. When choosing an affiliate network, you might want to research networks and programs that match your target audience.

Some of the popular affiliate networks include Awin, ClickBank, Amazon Associates, Rakuten, Etsy Affiliates, eBay Partner Network and Coursera Affiliate Program. I believe that starting small would be best. If you are a beginner you might want to pick just one network that aligns with you the best. 

Grow Your Network

Creating a successful platform to engage in affiliate marketing takes time, commitment and consistency. If you are looking to grow your audience, you might want to take a look at a list of digital marketing strategies including content marketing, SEO, social media marketing and email lists.

Polish up on Related Skills

An affiliate marketer needs to have a range of skills including market research, competitor research, writing skills, graphic design skills and more. Taking your time to master these skills will help you stand out from the crowd!

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