Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing and Making Money

Affiliate marketing is a online business promoting network that provides the chance to its clients to promote and sale their products easily over the internet through affiliate marketers. The client in an affiliate network is the vendor who owns the product or business. Affiliate marketers are basically the people who promote and help to sale out the vendor products in affiliate marketing network. In return to the each product sold the affiliate marketers gets a commission from the vendor. Affiliate marketing is now a days most effective method for the vendors to promote their business online. Vendors can’t sale every product via affiliate networks. Affiliate marketing networks have some terms and conditions that vender’s product must fulfill. There are certain types of affiliate marketing through which a vendor can sale his product and marketers or publishers can generate their commission. But here in this article we will discuss only one.

Product Sale Base Affiliate:

Sites like click bank, Amazon etc fits in this affiliate category. Amazon has both services in which shipment and no shipment is involved while in click bank there are mostly products that involve no shipment like eBooks, software etc. In this type of affiliate network vendors or merchants give their product details to sale them. Affiliate networks offer these products to publishers to sale them. Publisher then promote the products either by creating review blogs of the products or  by advertising products on different platforms like facebook, twitter, youtube. For youtube, publisher creates a video of the product describing the main features. On each sale through any platform the publishers get their commission from the sale revenue. In this way venders need not to worry about promoting products. Because many people or publishers for their commission start promoting vendors products once its on the affiliate network.

Now we discuss that being an affiliate marketer or affiliate publisher how will you promote the products to get sales and earn your commission?

How should you choose niche

Most of the people don’t spend time on it. They just pick product and immediately start promoting it. Niche selection needs time and a little bit effort. You should keep in mind these questions while selecting your niche

• What are you interested in?
• What you might want to promote as an affiliate?
• Whether people are spending money in the selected niche?
• Are there any products to promote in the niche that you have selected?

These questions will help a lot in selecting the right niche. The details of each is follows:

What are you interested in?

There are tons of different categories available on the net that you may choose. But we will focus on four main categories.

Hobbies: Hobbies are as you know the things people used to do in their spare time for entertaining themselves. Like cricket, chess, gaming etc. Choosing a niche in this topic can gives you a lot of leads.

Passion: Passion is not much different then hobbies but it effects the lifestyle of the people. Likes education of children, keeping your self fit etc.

Problems: The problems that you solve for yourself or help the people in solving their problems. Like giving a solution to someone to overcome his / her depression.

Trends: Trends are the ongoing activities or events that may be famous for a shorter period of time. This niche may not be good for building a long term affiliate marketing business but still it’s a really good niche to get sale boost for sometime.

Whether people are spending money in the selected niche

People usually spend money in almost all kind of different niches. But there are few niches through which you may not be able to generate money. Like promoting a niche through affiliate marketing in which people just want a little information. For example if someone wants quotes from your or your website. You can’t make money as a affiliate marketer by just providing quotes. So sensibly choose such affiliate marketing product through which you can generate money.

What to promote

There are two kinds of products to choose for promoting through affiliate marketing:

• Info Products (Likes EBooks, Software etc)
• Physical Products (Products that involve shipment)

So try to choose such niche whose products that your will be promoting involve no shipment. Because info products are easy to sell and also you will get your commission instantly as the product sold. Also choose less competitive niche. To choose the right less competitive niche you have to go deeper into main niche. Like health and fitness is a broad topic, you may not be able to rank such big topic. So you have to go deeper, if you go one level below the main niche and you pick a sub niche dieting then it’s also a competitive niche. Going deeper we found a sub niche lose weight at work. Now we found the right niche to select affiliate marketing product because its less competitive and much easier to rank as compared to heal & fitness and dieting. So go deeper in a niche until you find the right less competitive sub niche.

Main Niche  –>   Sub Niche   –>  Less Competitive Sub Niche……

Health & Fitness   –>  Dieting   –>  Lose Weight at work

Other examples to understand are:

Cooking   –>  Baking   –>  Cake   –>  Cream Cake   –>  Fresh Cream Cake

Sports   –>  Cricket   –>  Street Cricket

Once you selected the right niche. Choose affiliate marketing product in the selected niche to promote to start earning money.

Building Platform to Promote Product

A platform is where you will start promoting and selling your affiliate marketing product as a affiliate marketer. It’s a base for creating or building authority of the affiliate product and audience for the product. Website where people will come to see what are you selling? What your product that you are selling is all about? Why they have to buy the product. So your website should provide the content about the product which has the answer to all these questions of the buyer. Create your own website don’t rely on third party sources or platforms because these sources may change their policies about your product promotion anytime. Also if you use social platforms to gain buyer’s attention, you can’t be able to get any sales by just giving the link towards the sale page. No one will definitely wants to buy a product if he /she don’t know much about the product. Having your own website provides you the safety to do work on your product and to promote your product any way you like. Selling through a website is easy because here you can satisfy the buyers through the content about your product. Also if you have your own website you can promote your product easily on any other third party sources. Figure below is an example that how your website help to promote on other platforms.

This figure shows that you can easily promote your website on any of the third party sources like youtube, twitter, facebook, forums and blogs etc.

Other steps involve selecting the domain, writing the content for the product and ranking your website in search engines. All these steps are discussed in details in my previous articles.