There are plenty of articles on the Internet warning bloggers about the risks of affiliate marketing, or stories where misguided advertising campaigns have ruined successful bloggers’ careers. Have you never stopped following or unsubscribed from a content creator simply because of the onslaught of adverts, especially bad ones, which irreversibly changed their platform for the worse? Haven’t you at least considered it from time to time? I know I have, and then some!
No matter how loyal of a following you might have, they can only be pushed so far before your platform begins to crumble like a house of cards. So exercise extreme caution and never forget your integrity, your audience may care about it even more than you do.
So how can you actually make money from affiliate marketing?
Business Model
Basically, there are 2 models you can choose from: resource and review sites. Your choice of business model depends on how familiar you are with the product or service you’ll advertise.
In resource websites, a merchant partner’s (vendor) website is embedded in affiliate links that are included in your website’s contents, e.g., posts and articles. The resource site model is one that needs regular updates and relatively fresh content to keep customers coming back to your website. So if you’re going at it on your own, it will require some work, especially if the site’s sole purpose is to draw ad revenue. As always, the writing can be allocated to others for a higher degree of passivity in your income. This form of advertising is among the most passive in and of itself, though, or rather, it is very tame. Usually, it comes as links on the sidelines of your content posts. So you can imagine, this is the form of advertising your readers are least likely to be annoyed by, as it just sits there waiting to be clicked on by those who are interested. This is precisely why it is so important to attract traffic from people who are most likely to want to buy these products, and it is why you must go out of your way to ensure that the products have value and are related to your niche. Being random or leaving anything to chance in this racket is a sure way to failure.
On the other hand, review websites feature — as the name suggests — product or service reviews of products or services you have personally used or availed of. Each of those review articles feature links or banner advertisements that — when clicked by your readers — will direct them to your partner merchant’s website. One advantage to this kind of business model is that it doesn’t need frequent updates or regular new materials. As a marketer or publisher, all you need to do is make minor tweaks on your site to let search engines count you in their search results for relevant keywords.
Now, there are various kinds of partnership programs when it comes to review websites. In particular, one successful form of advertising through reviews is an agreement between you and the manufacturer wherein he supplies you with his new products for you to test and review them. There are many such examples easily found throughout the Internet. These gigs don’t necessarily have to go through a website either, as many successful tech blogs, YouTube channels, etc. have formed such relationships with companies, sometimes not just any companies, but some of the biggest names in the business. The founders of these pages and websites make quite a prosperous living this way.
Again, it’s all about amassing a sizeable following first, so this system may not be within your reach at the very start, but is definitely something to consider as a long-term goal.
Website
To be an affiliate marketer, you’ll need your very own platform from which to advertise stuff. You’ll need either a website or a blog for this purpose. If you don’t have a site or blog, you’ll need to create one. This is where a lot of the necessary work comes into play, but it is also important to fully understand the difference between these two platforms before you get to it. Consider these different advantages and shortcomings, and see what fits best with the kind of dedication and approach you plan to implement.
The main advantage of hosting a blog as a means of promoting your merchant partners’ products is that you can do so for free, with platforms such as WordPress or Blogger. On the other hand, you’ll need to pay certain fees, however minimal, to set up a new website. You’ll also need to design or hire someone to do so for you if you choose to set up a website while the blog sites I mentioned provide templates, both free and paid, so you don’t have to worry about having to design your website.
If you want a more professional sounding blog site, simply buy a domain name and link it with your blog site — usually for a fee — or you can directly pay for such on your blog site. Between the two, http://passiveincome.com sounds more professional than http://passiveincome.wordpress.com, right? Although it may seem silly to some, little things like this do matter as they showcase a certain level of dedication and even reliability. It’s never a waste of time and money (within reasonable limits, of course) to try and improve your image, especially when you are trying to make a name for yourself and expand. This is true for basically all business ventures in life.
Pick A Niche
Before you even choose your products or services to promote, you’ll need to first figure out your niche or specialization area. While it’s certainly ideal to pick a niche that you’re already knowledgeable about, you shouldn’t be limited by it. You can also consider niches that you’re merely interested in or are enthusiastic in learning more about. Because the initial work of starting up can be very thorough, it’s important to pick a niche that you’re interested in so you won’t mind the relatively long hours required to set it up at the beginning. You can use the same guidelines listed in the chapter on niche website marketing to pick a good niche for affiliate marketing.
This can be a purely strategic choice if you want it to be as well. Some people are able to disregard their own areas of interest and their passions completely; they instead focus solely on the income potential of the niche they are choosing. These individuals can adapt and prosper in virtually any field. You don’t have to be one of those people just to make the right choice, but the truth is that this kind of attitude is an automatic advantage in the business of making money. A wise consideration of pros and cons and a compromising approach to choosing your niche will do just fine, though.
Pick The Product or Service
After picking the niche you’d like to specialize on, it’s time to choose the products or services you’d like to promote on your chosen platform. The nature of your chosen niche will determine — to a great extent — the products and services you’ll promote as well as the amount of work you’ll need to put in.
Some niches may be profitable, but they might also be very limiting in a sense that they don’t offer much room for you to maneuver. What I mean by this is that certain niches are too specific, and thus don’t provide a wide range of topics. Always consider the amount of material in your chosen area. It could be a good idea to go with niches which are very general, but also enjoy an immense amount of interest, like tech for example. This is a niche with possibly the widest spectrum of topics and products today, and not only that, but it is constantly in the focus of the public.
For more traditional products and services, go with companies like Commission Junction while if you’d like to focus more on digital products, ClickBank and PayDotCom is the way to go. You can find details on how to join them on their websites. On these websites, you can find many partner merchants to work with for your niche and platform.
Direct Traffic
After you’ve chosen your product or service, it’s time to get prospects to visit your affiliate program. How do you do this? There’s a multitude of ways to go about this, and they usually entail different forms of networking, or simply content output. But, whatever needs doing will have to be done because traffic is the alpha and omega of affiliate marketing. With some kinds of affiliations more than with others, but as traffic increases, so will your income.
Probably the easiest and highly successful way of doing this is posting web articles or blogs and — if you already have an email list — use your email newsletters to entice those in your email list to get on your affiliate marketing program. As always, be mindful not to end up spamming people as they’ll quickly block you and politely show your emails their way into the junk folder. It’s all about balance and optimization if you are to keep everyone happy, including your bank. Science is still to determine whether those old school pestering adverts we encounter in our daily lives are worse than spam, but the odds are about 80% in spam’s favor as of yet.
You can also drive traffic to your program by giving away free but quality content like free reports or ebooks on your particular niche that can help drive a significant amount of traffic to your affiliate links. People just love free stuff, especially those related to the things they’re interested in or are passionate about. Amazon’s Audible Company is a great example of this tactic being effectively implemented, by giving away free audio books to draw in more customers, and it works great. Note, however, that one reason contributing to it working so well is the sheer awesomeness. It’s not hard to make people want to buy more of the product they just got for free if the product is great. Better yet, potential customers get to choose which particular audiobook they want to download!
Providing free products to your audience can also be an efficient means of acquiring emails for your list. Coupons or even discounts, as well as the products I already mentioned, all of these can be offered in exchange for a person’s email. This is 10 seconds of your reader’s time, so you both benefit. We’ll get deeper into this later on.
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