Do you know what is affiliate marketing?
Do you have an affiliate marketing strategy and guide?
Your probably have heard of the term of even know the concept behind it, but do you really know how it works and how you can make money out of it?
I’m a great fan of passive income, because I am lazy. If you want, like me, to make money on the side without making too much effort, this guide is for you!
But how does Affiliate Marketing fits as a passive income?
Well once set up, when people click on the link and buy, you get money. That’s quite passive for me!
This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may get a commission at no cost to you. Please see the Disclaimer for additional information.
Defining affiliate marketing
What is affiliate marketing?
The answer of that question has it’s roots in a very old concept: Getting a commission on a sale.
What you are actually doing is introducing your customers/readers to brands, services and products you thrust. Once they buy the product(s) and/or services, the affiliate merchant will give you a predefined amount of money for the sale.
Now, as a new blogger, or maybe you want to become a blogger (guide here), you probably know that you can make money by building an audience that will thrust you. In turn, you offer your readers advices, services and product to genuinely help them in their life and with their problems.
When you associate yourself with a company or person as an affiliate, it’s only a way to offer those product to your audience. It saves your from creating those products and services and still earn money from something that you would have offered your audience anyways. As such, you need to know and trust the product you are offering as an affiliate.
Maybe it’s not absolutely crystal clear for you so here is concrete example of an affiliate product link:
One of the first thing you need when creating a blog is where to host it.
This picture as a link, an “affiliate link” for BlueHost, which I use to host my WordPress blog.
If you happen to click on it, buy one of their fantastic hosting package (They are very awesome!), I will be very grateful to you and you will help me feed my voracious little daughter!
What I mean is that if you buy one of there hosting package to start your blog, I will be getting a small commission from BlueHost as a gratitude token for the new customer that you are.
Here is another example:
This “creative” will be sending you at Street Share, a very impressive company that give you the opportunity to invest in bonds for Veterans and mains street businesses. It’s a very social oriented way to invest your money and get a good return on it! And if you open up an account and invest in their mission, I will also get a small commission that will help me get a gift for my daughter’s birthday!
You can see that there are multiple ways to include affiliate links for your audience to see.
You can see that there are multiple ways to include affiliate links for your audience to see.
Why Affiliate Marketing?
That is a great question.
Why use affiliate marketing instead of selling your own stuff?
Another good question!
The reasons are many. But, if you put them all together you will see why it’s compelling to make the move towards affiliate marketing.
- Passive income. It’s really easy to set affiliate marketing off. Once it’s all done, you just need to promote your post and the money should come. Ok Ok! It’s not entirely passive since you need to promote your blog. But, you would be doing this anyway, so it’s an added value.
- Quick Blog Monetization. Using affiliate, you don’t need to create any product or provide any services. You simply need to refer your readers to a product you trust.
- Easy Implementation. It’s one of the simplest way to monetize your blog, you only need to share the link to your audience. No need to track clicks, sales, profits and you don’t even need to do any customer service!
- For everyone. You don’t need a Doctorate to understand how it works and how to use it. Also, you don’t need to be, or pretending to be, the All Knowing in your niche to refer a sale. You only need to know enough about the product to be the lead and inform your audience about it.
- Learn from your audience. You will know what your audience wants. You will know what is working and what isn’t. As such, when you will do the leap to create your own product, you will know beforehand what your audience will want to buy. And, that’s a huge head start.
- Build trust with your audience. By providing good affiliate product links, your readers will get used to you offering them good and trusty product. As such, when you will launch your own, they will be behind you and will buy.
- You can do this alone. There is no need to have a huge team of specialized people behind you to add some affiliate links to your blog.
As such, you can see that there are several good reason why you should use affiliate marketing!
The Complete Beginner’s Guide
Now that you understand what is affiliate marketing and that you can use some affiliate links to monetize your blog or website, it’s time to get into the How you can do it.
The one fact that is important to understand before we delve deeper into this:
- You need to add some value to your audience for them to click on the link and buy the product you are marketing.
There is a very high chance that the reader who stumbled upon your blog which is giving good advice and insight on a product, is not here by accident.
This reader is most likely on your blog knowing he want to buy the product and is looking for information on it. If you are able to convince him with your added value, you’ve done your job and your reader is happy!
1. Identify valuable product and services
You have a niche.
You have readers that are looking for information and help in that specific niche.
As such, you need to understand what type of products lies in your niche and be helpful to your reader. Once you have identified all the products in your niche, you need to do your due diligence such that you will be able to make recommendations and give good advices on those products. Otherwise, you won’t make any sales.
For example, if you are in the personal finance field, you can guess that your audience will be attracted to financial services, personal wealth management, high interest saving accounts and personal finance books.
If you have a considerable audience, you might try to ask them the product types they are looking for.
Send them an email with simple questions. Once they answer you could ask those who have answered some extra information and details.
This strategy will ensure that you are getting the right affiliate for your people.
2. Select Affiliate Products and Services
Before you start promoting any affiliate product, you should have tried it and liked before. It’s not in your audience best interest to promote a product that you don’t really know or dislike.
And it wouldn’t be very ethic.
Products you have tried
When you will do some research for your niche, you will come up with product that you want to try or that you have tried.
Also, if you feel good about a product and you feel that it helped you, there’s a good chance your audience will be liking it! It’s one of the best way to get an affiliate sale!
Let’s say that you have taken an E-course or you’ve read an E-book on a subject in your niche, if you think that your audience will like it, it might be a good idea to promote it to your people.
However, if you have tried a product and hated it, don’t promote it. Even if they offer you a good amount of money for it, it’s not worth the risk of losing your audience.
There are several features to look for in a good affiliate product to promote:
- Good Customer Support. Very important such that your reader will be able to get the information and the help they need while using the product;
- Refund Policy. Just in case your reader is not totally satisfied;
- Product you have tried or previewed. Otherwise, how can you make sure that it works correctly and that it’s satisfactory for your audience? Also, it will give credibility to your reviews and advices; and
- Good Product for your audience. You might think that it’s a given, but you would be surprised at the amount of product that people try to sell because it makes them money instead of being a good product for their audience.
Once you have selected a product, you need to find out if it has an affiliate program.
And, you would be surprised at the amount of resources online that have an associated affiliate program. As such, if you liked it, ask them if they have one!
Affiliate Network
Another way to find affiliate products is to join an affiliate network, such as Flex Offer, and to browse the offered products in your niche. The major difference with the previous process, is that you don’t know the product yet.
As such, you will need to invest time (at least) and money (most likely) to evaluate the product and get an opinion of it.
As always, you need to do your due diligence, before you will be able to talk about the product.
Why?
Because you might not know the product nor the merchant offering it, you probably don’t have any relationship with that merchant and no thrust in their product at first.
3. Become an Affiliate Member
Now that you have found the product that you want to promote, you need to become the affiliate. Whether you work directly with a merchant or through a network, you will need to send an application. Once the application is sent, the merchant and/or the network will have to approve your candidacy.
And once approved you will have become a full fledged member of that affiliate program!
There are a number of information you need to be prepared to give when you are making your application:
- Personal and business information;
- How you will promote the product;
- What type of business/blog you have; and
- Tax information.
Be careful when you are not in the same country as the merchant, tax are handled differently if you are a local or not.
Once approved, the merchant/network will give you one or more affiliate link and images that you can use on your blog/website. Whenever you write about the product, you can embed the link in the text and/or images and the merchant/network will be able to track your sales.
Also, the merchant and network will provide you with images, artworks and other assets to directly add to your pages and posts to help you sell the product.
Such as:
It’s great to have such artwork already at your fingertips!
Finally, they have to provide you with the affiliate terms and contract, a guide on how to use the platform and the program policies.
4. Affiliate Products Promotion
You now have a products you can promote through a link! Congratulation!
However, your hard work is not over! Affiliate marketing is all based on selling something to someone. As such, if you are not the affiliate products, you will not make any money out of it.
There are several options for you to implement to get some nice affiliate product sales.
Create affiliate product custom content
This is where you will shine and you will probably make the most of your affiliate links.
I believe that these strategies will add the most value to your audience and that is why they are the most efficient.
Write custom guides and How Tos.
You can use these comprehensive posts to soft sell the product you are describing or using to reach your final goals. Here is an example: A guide on how to start a monetized blog.
In there you can include your hosting affiliate for example and your WordPress templates or other add-ons.
When writing these comprehensive guide is to make them as “evergreen” as possible such as not giving any version number of a product, they need to stand the test of time. However, you need to stay away from a sales pitch.
And, you need to remember that you are here to help your audience, it’s your priority number 1.
Write a Product Review
Writing a detailed review is one of the greatest way to promote a product.
Also, it will give insight to your readers on what are the capabilities of the product and if it’s a good match for them. Again, don’t fall into the sale pitches, most people find them annoying and will leave your page without even giving a second thought to your affiliate product.
There are several types of review you could potentially write, you could write a very detailed review or a comparison of different competing products. However, you need to keep in mind that if you do write a comparison of multiple products and you are giving different recommendations, you might end up confusing or distracting your audience.
Create Bonus Content
This is something that I have started to seen more and more.
Some bloggers have push the offering of their affiliate even further by creating and giving their readers some added valeu to their purchases.
This is a tremendous idea!
Let’s face it, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like to have an extra when making a purchase.
And, it doesn’t have to be very complex, but it really need to add value to the person clicking on your affiliate link and purchasing the affiliate product. Here are some ideas that I have seen:
- Additional product support, free or paid for;
- Verification checklists;
- Quick Start guides. The most common and easiest to create in my opinion;
- Demos. Videos or PowerPoint presentation are a good starting points; and
- Any other ideas that brings value to the product and to your audience.
Note:
Not all affiliate merchant are willing to let you create these bonuses, while other will be very impressed by your creativity. As such, you need to make sure that your affiliate partner gives you permission to create and offer those bonuses.
Resource Page
This strategy might not be as intuitive as a Review or a How to, but it’s a good concept to promote a wide variety of products, affiliate or not, that you or your reader use or find useful.
Also, you can organize them by categories targeting specific needs or audience and what would be helpful for them.
Again, refrain from making a sale’s pitch. Keep it simple, concise and helpful to your readers.
It also might be one of the fastest and easiest strategy to set up when you know your products.
However, you shouldn’t be making one just for the sake of having several affiliate links on one page. Each one needs to be supported by a summary and preferably by a recommendation.
Using your Email List
Your loyal subscribers are the best source of potential affiliate products sale.
If your readers have subscribed to your list, there is a high chance that they are interested in the same kind of products you are using and testing. A such, your Email list if one of the greatest assets to drive traffic to an affiliate product and as the greatest potential of conversion.
Good practices would advocate that you already have some kind of Email relation with your list, sending them email on a somewhat regular basis. As always, you don’t want to sound too salesy. How often have you subscribed to a blogger’s list to be stormed by sales email promoting this Pinterest ebook or this Blog Strategy course that’s on UBER special? Personally I unsubscribe as fast as I have subscribed.
You don’t want to sound like the only thing you are doing is selling affiliate product!
However, you can participate in your affiliate merchant discounted product, by informing your audience of the deal!
Also, you can promote the product indirectly by sending a not an affiliate link, but a link to an epic How to guide for that product.
Social Media
You might have already encountered people using this strategy without even knowing it.
How often did you click on a Pin on Pinterest that lead, not to a blog but to some product?
You need to be careful when using that strategy and I suggest using it sparingly. If you use Pinterest to post affiliate product links, it needs to be identified, otherwise people will believe that you are trying to foul them and you don’t want that.
Also, some affiliate merchant specifically states that you shouldn’t be using that technique
Affiliate Marketing Strategy Tracking
A good strategy is never complete without a tracking solution.
How can you ascertain your success?
Are your able to evaluate how good you are doing?
How do you know what type of marketing strategy works best?
All these questions can be answered by tracking your promoted products and the links associated with them.
If you are dealing with an affiliate network such as Flex Offer, they will already give you some form of tracking that you can customize to get down to the detail you want and need.
Over time, you will be able to identify the types of strategies work best for you.
And don’t forget that it will take time, and that not every post you will create will attract the amount of traffic you expect.
You need to stay focused and patient.
Affiliate Product Marketing Best Practices
Different countries requires that you identify that you receive a compensation for the sale of affiliate product. And you need to know your local regulation and you need to comply to it.
But, being an ethic person, you should always be transparent to your audience. As such, even if there is no legal obligation in your part of the world, it’s a good practice to let your audience know that by purchasing product using the affiliate link you help me feed my voracious growing little baby.
Also, your reader will appreciate your honesty and good will and this is a huge step in improving your relationship with them. As such, they will be more inclined to trust you and buy the proposed affiliated product.
Another good practices, again increasing trust in your Words, is to assure your audience that you would not propose and recommend any product that you wouldn’t be confident would help them and solve some of their problems.
The final advice is that you should have some sort of Disclaimer on your website, normally a single page that will contain information on affiliate marketing.
The Conclusion of This Affiliate Marketing Guide
We all know that Passive Income do exist, it’s not a figment of your imagination. Is it possible to achieve some of form of passive income using a Blog or a website? Absolutely! It’s not a dream anymore!
However, you need to keep in mind that for it to work, you need to have some sort of good traffic to your website. For that, you only need to start your blog and use this guide to help you set up your affiliate marketing strategy.
Some people will tell you that you need a huge number of people to get some sales, but it’s not true if you know your audience and target it accordingly.
All in all, start investigating and implementing an affiliate marketing strategy, keep the good work and don’t give up! You need to be patient for this to work.
Remember: Keep the Dream Alive
Enjoyed this post?
Follow us on Pinterest for additional awesome ideas!
How to make money with Paid online survey website
Tuya Convert Guide – Flash Tuya SmartLife Devices
How to successfully start and set up a blog as an Income Stream for Newbies
Becoming a Successful Dividend Growth Investor
15 easy ways to make an extra 100$ per day in your free time
Smart Home on a Budget
Some posts on this blog contain affiliate links.
At no additional charge to you, I receive a small commission whenever a product is purchased through these links. The Dreaming Dad is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.
