Affiliate Marketing For Dummies – Step By Step Tutorial
Affiliate marketing is a difficult industry. There are many things that you need to consider. If you want to be successful in the industry, you need to know all the tricks and things that other partners have had to learn for years. It is for this reason that you should read up on affiliate marketing before you start. The more knowledge you start, the greater your success will be!
Articles like this one can be your affiliate marketing for dummies guide. You can learn what to do and how to do it to make money from home. If you know little or nothing about affiliate marketing and want to learn it, you’ve come to the right place!
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the business practice of introducing a new product or service to an audience. As an affiliate marketer, your goal is to introduce them to your product and convince them to buy or subscribe to your product or service. The main difference between affiliate marketing and regular marketing is that you do not own or are affiliated with the products. All you do is connect the audience to the products and get a percentage commission on every sale you make.
Sales attributed to your work are tracked through affiliate links, so you always know how many people you converted and thus how much money you made. This type of marketing is great for both the product owners and the people marketing it. Product owners don’t have to spend money on advertising campaigns, which can sometimes be a hit or miss. All they have to do is make their products available to affiliates. Affiliates, on the other hand, just need to focus on advertising without worrying about shipping, support, or anything else product-related.
Most newbies don’t know what exactly to do and this is why affiliate marketing is so valuable to dummies guides!
How much money can you make with it?
Money is always difficult to determine. Most affiliates brag about making millions annually, and while it can, most affiliates nowhere near making it. Especially not at the beginning. The sky is the limit, it all depends on how much effort you are willing to put in.
If you are a complete newbie, within a few months of practice and improvement, with a little work, you can make a few thousand a month. If you keep improving and scaling your campaigns, you can count on a six-figure profit annually! The best part is that most of them are purely passive! But don’t overdo it, getting started is tough and most beginners decide to quit after a month or two.
How do you come to that?
While there is no full-fledged affiliate marketing dummies guide online, here are some of the things you need to learn and use if you are looking to become an affiliate marketer.
- Find a niche for yourself
Newbies to affiliate marketing think they will compete with the top dogs in the most popular areas of the market. This is not something you can do at all. Your biggest hurdle as a newcomer is finding a place for yourself. Something where the competition is low but there is a chance of making a profit. This is where niches come into play.
Finding the perfect niche is difficult. You need to take into account your interests, what your audience likes and what is popular but not overcrowded with competition. The less competition there is, the better for you, as it is almost impossible as a beginner to compete with industry veterans.
- Build your website
Having a website is one of the first tips any dummies affiliate marketing guide will give you. And for a good reason. The best way to promote products that you want to sell through your website or platform.
You can tweak it to convert your audience as best as possible. Of course, that is easier said than done. You need to look at a lot of data and reports to know what your audience is responding to and what is not.
- Pick a domain name that is short and seems legitimate
- Use the right platform to host your website (s)
- Use WordPress and its incredible plugins to make things easier
- Spend some time making your website look good and functional
- Find affiliate marketing for dummies programs
Learning should be a daily part of your affiliate life. Finding programs for beginners is a good place to start. You have to choose between joining affiliate networks or individual affiliate programs.
Affiliate networks are usually a group of publishers who host a number of programs on a website. You must be accepted to join one, but once you do you will have access to many affiliate programs.
Custom affiliate programs are typically companies that choose to host their affiliate platform. This requires an individual application for each company that you want to advertise.
They can and will be turned down, but don’t take it personally, apply for other programs and improve your reputation and website in the future.
- Create content for your website
Now that you have a website and an affiliate program that you want to join, it is time to create content that promotes those products and services. Since you’ve already decided on your niche, try to incorporate the new products and services on blog posts or social media posts that focus on your niche. Your affiliate marketing should be subtle yet powerful.
Nobody likes having products shown down their throat, and promoting all kinds of products with each post can result in your audience having a less-than-stellar reputation.
In terms of content, it should always be interesting and offer your readers a certain added value. This is mostly done by providing knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere. People will be inclined to buy something from you because they got something from you.
The types of content to focus on are huge. You can try reviews, comparisons, guides, lists, best of, infographics, videos and much more.
- Learn SEO
Search engine optimization helps you get your website ranked on search platforms like Google, Bing, Yandex and others. While the exact workings of each of these search engines is unknown, some things will almost certainly contribute to an overall better ranking.
- Build an audience and promote yourself
Your content alone won’t be enough to be successful in affiliate marketing. You need to invest some time in creating and building an audience that will be interested in buying your products in the first place.
You can do this through guest posting on similar blogs or platforms. Building an email list through various techniques. Invest in paid advertising and stay consistent with your content generation.
After you have a slowly growing basic audience, it is time to promote your products and services. The goal is for people to know about your products and give them time to decide whether or not to buy them. This is usually done through promotional materials such as banners, ads, emails, or other types of content.
Miscellaneous Affiliate Marketing For Dummies Guides
After doing all of this, you may still be confused about what to do or how to keep improving. This is where the most important part comes into play. You begin to learn for yourself. To be successful, you need to do a lot of research yourself.
Google is your friend! Look for terms or topics that you do not understand, you will definitely discover new things. A great way to improve yourself is by reading posts on this blog. There are plenty of beginner-friendly guides and tutorials that can help you improve. You can also read my eBook “From Zero to Superaffiliate”. It’s a boog meant for beginners that will take them through the basics of affiliate marketing.
Another great resource for all of your beginner as well as advanced questions is the iAmAffiliate forum. Here you can meet thousands of partners with different levels of knowledge and time in the industry. You can connect with other beginners and get knowledge from the real professionals.
To finish things off
Affiliate marketing is not the easiest industry. But once you do this the possibilities are endless. You can make lots of money off of your campaigns, but you need to know what you’re finishing off before investing the time and money on your campaigns. Combining multiple sources of knowledge is key to learning the things you need to have a successful career in the industry. Don’t waste your time and start learning and improving your skills today!