Affiliate Marketing is one the many ways to make money online although some times, may be mixed up with scams. If you have been in search of genuine ways you can make money online, I will outline for you some of the best below; Reminder; I Build Websites.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is the art or the process of advertising/promoting someone’s products or services and earning a percentage (commission) on their profits per successful sale you make on their behalf. Relate this business to brokerage but this is an online based business.
Furthermore, it is a strategy where an online retailer pays commission to other website owners who accept to feature the retailers’ products or services on their sites to drive traffic or sales for this retailer. Because the internet is border-less and it is a remote connection, it can be easier for one to promote/make unlimited sales online than it would be physically.
How is affiliate marketing conducted?
A website owner applies/registers for a certain retailer’s affiliate program and is given a special link known as an affiliate link to promote in various ways and all actions e.g purchases via this link are always tracked by the help of a Cookie.
This link (Weblink) is then pasted/posted on the applicant’s own website page(s), social networks, emails sent or anywhere else as a hyperlink to link directly to the retailers’ conversion pages or purchasing pages. From there, each successful purchase or client who buys or subscribes for a paid plan or service, is then attributed to you as your referral and is recorded in the system. You now become a referer entitled to earn a percentage of profits per purchase or payment made by your referrals.
Imagine your website receives about 1,000 visitors per day. Out of 1,000 visitors, 100 of them click on your recommended affiliate product or service on your web page that redirects them to the retailers’ page(s). Out of 100 visitors who clicked on your affiliate link were interested in the product or service but only 2 of them ended up buying or subscribing to the recommended product or service and they became your referrals.
This means, you get an average of 2 referrals per day x 30 days = 60 referrals. If you are entitled to receive 10% as commission per paying referral per month and their monthly subscription charge is $35 let’s assume. Your potential monthly earnings will be; 10% of $35 x 60 referrals you have got in a month = $3.5 per client x 60 clients you have = $210 commission per month. The more sales a website owner makes for the retailers, the more profits (commission) a website owner makes because you earn a certain percentage per sale made via the affiliate link on your website.
Numerous Ways to promote your affiliate links
The success of affiliate marketing mainly comes from traffic. Ways of getting traffic or people who sees and clicks on your affiliate links can be many and the most common ones are;
Share Links Via E-Mails
This is commonly known as email marketing – the commonest and the cheapest to conduct. You need a big email list and people usually build these lists when you visit a website and register on it or subscribe to their newsletter. These newsletters you’ll receive, will contain outbound links of course for a business intent.
Use Of Social Networks
This is also superb because it is one of the best ways to get traffic for free. Having a fellowship there, depends on many factors like; how funny you are in your posts, educational, helpful, political, influential and so on. When some people find interest in your posts, they’ll love you, follow you and believe you. Anything you’ll then recommend to them, many will be interested to know more or pay for them.
Use Of Your Own Website
The good thing about owning a website, you can choose to make it anything you want it to be at any time without restrictions thus placing unlimited affiliate links or ads on it. Yet on other people’s websites like Facebook, affiliate links may not be accepted, building email lists may also be so much limited in protection of their subscribers’ privacy.
Use Of S.E.O Practices
This is the most effective way to get quality traffic for your affiliate links but it comes at a big cost! Paying for online ads can even cost you millions of dollars but in return, it can bring back billions if well conducted. Commonly known places for such practices are; google ads, facebook ads, bing ads, CPA Programs, PTC programs, Online Classifieds, online mentions, Radio and TV ads, and so on.
Common mistakes affiliate marketers Usually do
There’s a number of common mistakes affiliate marketers usually do that can affect their success in the business that you must avoid and some of them, I have outlined here bolow…
Fact No. 1
The most important thing in affiliate marketing is traffic. You won’t earn a penny even if you select the best product under the sun until you have traffic to your affiliate link(s). Here are my two premium suggestions for traffic sources but always be careful when choosing a service.
***Buy Shoutouts and Mentions from reputable online influencers, it’s among the best ways to get quality traffic.
Fact No. 2
When choosing appropriate traffic sources, formulate a right strategy that will drive quality traffic to your links which may include Free and Paid sources. Free traffic may cost you some time of consistent hard work before seeing good results. Whereas paid traffic methods like CPA, CPI, PPC, FB Ads, and native ads could drive immediate traffic to your links but at a cost of money. Hey, don’t be scared because of the term “Money,” the majority of digital advertising platforms give you flexibility to decide on your daily ads budget which means, almost any money is enough to start.
Fact No. 3
When traffic sources are now cited, then targeting is critically a very important aspect. Because; instead of having 1,000 visitors per day who don’t buy, isn’t it much better to have 10 visitors per day who buys? And this can be emphasized in targeting the right audiences.
Fact No. 4
When you have ensured good traffic, consider choosing quality products in your chosen niche with ample affiliate tools, good gravity, low refund rates, and preferably recurring commissions. The quality of your affiliate products can greatly affect your success. Someone can promote a product its single sale commission beats that of 100 sales.
Fact No. 5
When you get a few visitors to your affiliate website/Landing page, and it doesn’t make any sense at all to your Visitors, they don’t understand what it’s about, what do you think will happen thereafter? None will bother to share it on to others (you lose free organic traffic) and this minimizes your chances of being promoted for free to receive clicks on your affiliate products/links. Make your website/content appealing and worthy of sharing.
Fact No. 6
For any content you offer, be it sharing affiliate product reviews through blog posts, comments, replies, discussion answers, please share honest reviews and helpful/well researched info. Always make your content remarkably stand out. If it doesn’t and it’s not better than anything else out there, people won’t share it, they won’t be convinced to click on it. To emphasize this issue, start giving content that serves people with exactly what they want. The job of promoting your website, getting backlinks and traffic will become ridiculously easy and magical. When you choose to do the right thing and you do it right, the algorithm of online success is magically unclear to human understanding.
Fact No. 7
Fighting to rank for topics/keywords that are too competitive, is a killer point that can highly kill your success when sometimes, you have done everything in the right way. Imagine you are doing the exact thing that thousands of other websites out there have already done and they are doing it way much better than you do, they are investing in it more money and time than you do, and they are at the top already and you think you’ll scrap them off the wall so easily like that?
No. It might be a big task to scrap them off the wall. To get good results, don’t fight for highly competitive keywords and topics, it may cost your life! Try to be who you are, do what you love, give it time to grow, give yourself time to breathe and do everything you are supposed to do, that’s doing your role and leave the rest to God and Google!
Fact No. 8
When all that is put in consideration, email marketing is still a mandatory issue for every successful affiliate marketer to get quality traffic. You can create an email list of active subscribers on your website and reach out to them regularly by sharing your reviews of products, latest offers and so on. And if you have your own products, you can also upsell to existing customers. Attractive and personalized emails even to your known friends, is still a wonderful key to get quality traffic to your affiliate links.
Fact No. 9
Being active in online forums and groups in relation to your niche, is another wonderful key to get more quality traffic to your affiliate website/links. To conduct this effectively, take part in forum discussions by providing honest ideas as you throw in your affiliate/web link but do it in an authentic way, where it feels appropriate, or otherwise, you’ll be labelled a spammer and banned.
Fact No. 10
In very many cases, people ignore the act of generosity yet it works like magic. Giving freebies and incentives, discount Coupons, Deals offers or Promotions, can generate leads thus increasing traffic like nothing else. Sometimes, I can say that; if you are willing to invest $100,000 in ads with an intention to get traffic, it’d be better to freely give it out to the few members you already have. Indirectly, the results will be overwhelming!
Take an example of this YouTube Channel of MrBeast how it has managed to promote itself by doing nothing much but giving real money. See how he promotes himself and find out how much he makes in return. When he gives $100k, he gets back a million dollars or so in profits from video monetization and third party ads.
Fact No. 11
This is about Niche Influencing. Individuals who become good influencers gain more authentic relationships with their followers. Their audiences get trust in them and whichever they recommend to their followers, they obey and buy. By influencing others, you can make them click on the affiliate links you sling to them easily because they believe you. If you have a good following like on Instagram, WhatsApp or Facebook, Twitter, etc, never forget to throw some affiliate links or your own affiliate web address to your followers, it is another way to make smart money online other than gossiping all the time.
Fact No. 12
Use of Classified Websites is also superb. A classified website is a website where anybody can publish classified ads for free or for money. You can generate more traffic to your affiliate links by publishing your products on popular classified sites like; olx, jiji and such although some of these may not accept links on their sites but there can be a smart way you can do it safely and successfully when you use your head.
Fact No. 13
This one would be the first on the list, but it is the last because most people don’t want to hear about it; (SEO). Building a well Search Engine Optimized website, is the only magic that can drastically give immeasurable quality traffic to your affiliate links without allocating any money to achieve this success. But because of its complexity and metrics, people leave behind its overwhelming power and choose to hate it instead and I won’t also talk much about it, sijja kubazuukusa kambaleke but it does wonders when you master it.
