Marketing Strategies Every Small Business Needs

The first major challenge everyone faces as a small business owner is competition. That gets stiffer by the day. So, if you want your own business to survive, you must always have your thinking cap on. Resolve to think strategically at all times. These here strategies are not one-size-fits-all strategies. You must look at yourself and your business very well to decide what will work for you and what won’t. Here are some of the best marketing strategies that can help you get your business in the right direction now and the years ahead.

If you’ve been around for a while, you may have deployed one, two or more of these here strategies to promote your small business in the past. Exact same strategies that have proven useful to many others around the world! Here's a list of a few proven strategies that are right now helping businesses across the world:

Building an email marketing funnel
Speaking at, sponsoring and or hosting events/seminars/webinars
Offering free business consultations
Traditional media advertising
Advertising on social media, particularly Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
Adding your business profiles on directories such as Google My Business
Investing in content marketing
Writing a column/articles factually, consistently and continuously

More hands-on strategies:

Write about your products/services: You may not know how to write a blog but not to worry. At least you are literate enough to write something. You may not need to worry about blog writing skills if you are literate enough to write something readable. Just write stories and articles about your products and or services and how they help your customers. Even if your platform is social media, so long as you are consistent and factual, you can build a reputation for your brand online and patronage naturally follows.

Create online visibility for your business: What that means is to be sure your business is visible and accessible online 24/7. To be able to do so, you must create your profiles across all available social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others. You must keep your contact details updated there so that people can drop a message anytime of the day. That is one great way to generate very valuable leads.

Maintain email contact with your customers: You can build a reliable email list from your online visibility. Thereafter, you can regularly send emails to your existing customers and also to potential customers you are targeting. This is one very useful way to promote your content, improve sales and nurture existing leads for the future.

Using word of mouth promo: A satisfied customer is a very big asset to your business. You should encourage your customers to speak about your business to others. You must therefore strive more to satisfy customers than turning a profit. Businesses that enjoy good customer satisfaction not only benefit from good customer retention, they also benefit from good word of mouth promos and customer testimonials on your website and even on social media platforms. The better and more the reviews your business gets, the more customers it continues to attract.  

Why Affiliate Marketing is so Convenient

  Here is the why! As every marketer very well knows, paying for conversions rather than ads is one of the best and safest investments for marketing. In conventional marketing strategies, companies often spend a considerable amount of time on researching, planning and executing marketing campaigns at considerable costs. Some companies may even have fulltime employees carrying out these functions. Affiliate marketing in a way helps to minimize some of these costly activities by taking away a portion of the research and planning work from fulltime employees. Doing so gives them more time to focus more on higher-yield tasks and better productivity as a result. By investing in online affiliate marketing, many small companies do experience a dual financial benefit very conveniently.

As an added advantage, merchants may benefit from potential customers who come to their website or to a product page via an affiliate link because they already have some information about the product. This also allows for potential customers to spend less time on the site. Ultimately, affiliate links are beneficial because there is not an advertising expense associated with each site visitor who does not make a purchase. Site visitors come on their own volition driven mostly by curiosity at no cost to the merchants and or publishers drawing them over. This is another cost-effective and convenient way of reaching potential buyers.

If you factor in ROI, Affiliate Marketing is one fantastic investment for smaller companies with lower budgets. That is because the arrangement allows for bloggers and aspiring influencers to make money in exchange for doing what they love and are passionate about. Smaller businesses are all too often passion projects for individuals who may also be working full time elsewhere. Most of such businesses are actually work from home projects not requiring brick and mortar requirements unlike conventional businesses. That says a lot for convenience as well. In terms of mutually beneficial trust which is vital for every business to grow, supporting bloggers and writers with an online following can help generate the much needed trust between merchants and new potential customers. And, very conveniently too if I may add!

5 Ways Businesses Benefit from Affiliate Marketing

By year 2020, online marketing experts predict that affiliate marketing sales figures are expected to reach $7 billion with around 85% of online publishers using affiliate marketing. Now, that is really huge! These numbers are helped by the fact that marketers now recognize as a big benefit, their ability to make money from affiliate marketing even while asleep. The real reason many more people are getting involved either directly or through companies. Here are some great ways companies benefit from affiliate marketing.


 
01. Easy Tracking of Sales and Profits
 
Just like other forms of digital and online marketing, in Affiliate marketing, it is very easy to track profits by means of very unique and peculiar codes. Most merchants have dashboards or central places where they can directly track affiliate sales and commissions. In some others, there may be summaries of important performance metrics such as click-through rates and related page views. Tracking these metrics is easy and very important for both merchants and publishers because both parties easily see which links are building up engagement and which are not. This vital information allows marketers to be abreast with links performance and to keep up with trends with a view to modifying their strategies and or tactics as needed, when needed.

02. Greater Online Exposure

Every business benefits from exposure. The more the exposure, the better for the business! By having affiliates, a company’s product or service gains exposure for the online world to see. Added to that, some affiliates are people who run websites or blogs that reflect a passion of theirs. They may run informational niche sites because they want to help their readers achieve a goal or learn more about a subject. Others may have a small business that they are trying to promote, and know that linking to big companies can be a beneficial part of marketing.  Using affiliate links helps them spread the word. The motivation to make sales and to generate blog traffic from the merchant’s end is also a huge benefit. Building a brand is by far easier and better when the exposure is huge for the company.

03. Building Valuable Partnerships 

While merchants may reap the rewards of the higher revenue overall, affiliates are also able to enjoy some of the financial rewards for simply sharing links in the first place. This structure can save merchants some money on what otherwise may be spent on traditional marketing making it a win-win situation for both parties. That mutual benefit helps to build and nurture valuable and lasting partnerships.

04. Relevant Site Content 


We always hear experienced marketers say, content is king. The more relevant the content, the better the traffic it attracts. These days, with many companies offering affiliate programs, bloggers and site owners who have specific purposes or cover specific topics have more options about the content they produce. That enables merchants to have a wide variety of advertising outlets available due to the number of bloggers and website administrators who are willing to promote affiliate content in many and diverse ways. All what Merchants need do is to make sure that their links are sponsored on sites that attract their target market. Smart affiliates key into that by choosing merchants with products that appeal to their site followers or blog readers. That helps the synergy for mutual benefits.

05. Affiliate Marketing is Cost-Effective
 
Cutting down costs and saving up here and there ultimately helps bottomline profits. Many smart marketers know this and also recognize that marketing is centered around growing ROI. The real reason marketers crave cost-effective marketing strategies at all times. Affiliate marketing costs is mostly performance based and can be measured accurately and directly based on agreed terms. The beauty of that is that performance-based marketing reduces the risk of having a bad return on investment. This is one very smart way to project costs and to adhere to them helping to drive real cost effectiveness in the marketing activities.


 

How Affiliate Marketing Works

It is simply amazing how really simple affiliate marketing is. Many do wonder how people who own and manage their own websites and blogs that don’t offer products make money. The simple answer is, most of these blogs and sites have page banners or links within blog posts, which are often features of affiliate marketing. This type of marketing typically involves a website or a blog author posting a link to another company’s website or product in order to earn a commission from a sale. This allows for potential readers to connect and for blog owners to make some extra money. The more these links are clicked by online surfers, the more the money the person who posted the link makes.

Every day, people go online searching for information and tips about businesses, life and health matters. For example, people may want information about a particular drug or supplement. Such people may then find online a blog post centered on their topic of interest. Because blog writers know that people who search for such niche topic are likely looking to buy a specific product, they insert links in their blogs linking to where that product is sold. The blog owner in this instance may provide a link to one or more companies selling the products to enable the buyers have a choice platform.  When readers click the links and purchase products, the poster gets a percentage of the sale as commission. In some instances, even if no sale is made at that moment, some affiliate structures allow for some form of payment to be made once the link is clicked. That is how it works.


 

How to Earn with Affiliate Marketing while you Sleep

“If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.” Warren Buffet
 
Online marketers have since discovered that one of the biggest benefits of affiliate marketing is that people can earn money while they sleep. Now, that’s really great particularly in this age and time when making money is one hectic business. In Affiliate marketing, it does not require for the blog poster to be present or working. It is a form of income that works when online visitors click on the link. The more they click, the more money the person who made the post makes and this can be in perpetuity 24/7.

Affiliate marketing not only allows for companies and professionals to benefit from exposure, but it also helps support bloggers and online influencers. Affiliate marketing allows for posters to get a percentage of revenue in exchange for sharing a link or post. One really good thing is that marketing professionals have been promoting this as a more financially smart way to make use of a smaller budget. That is, the whole idea revolves around cost-effectiveness. Every marketer cares about costs and affiliate marketing comes in really handy when it comes to doing business and earning money in a cost-effective way around the clock.

Quickest Ways to Improve Your Blog Ranking

Webmasters and online marketers now rely heavily on blogging to improve their website’s ranking on search engines. That is because they have come to realize that blogs have become a powerful source for online marketing. However, many newbie bloggers still fail to know that without proper SEO, many blogs never get to rank high in search engines.  The real reason their blogs and websites remain relatively unnoticed by web surfers. Therefore, if you want to utilize your blog for effective marketing of your business, you’ve got to do all you can to improve your blog’s ranking by search engines.

Here are some tips which can help you to quickly have your blog ranking high in search engines:


 
Get Your Blog on Social Media
 
These days, social media is where everyone seems to be. As a result, you get to find social networking sites in almost every corner of the web. Because of the popularity of social media sites, they have become the best places to meet people with the same interests online. That makes them very ideal places where you can get important links. You can easily create a brand name and improve your brand popularity on social media if you regularly post high quality articles which get noticed and attract comments from readers.

Do Blog Commenting
 
This is particularly very helpful when you comment on blogs which are already very popular. The popularity of such blogs somehow helps your comments to be indexed by search engines. That helps your own blog ranking as well. Adding relevant comments to other’s blog posts is another effective way to increase blog traffic. You must be sure your comments are relevant to the topic and informative enough to attract comments. When readers find your comments useful, they naturally get more curious to find out more about you. That consequently attracts clicks on your link back to your own website or blog. That means more traffic!

Give Your Blog Wide Exposure

To boost your blog’s search engine ranking and traffic, you must explore all ways to give it maximum exposure. One of the best ways to do so is by syndicating it with RSS feeds to give it full exposure. With RSS feeds, whenever any modification or addition is made on your blog, your audience gets updated quickly and seamlessly.

Do Social Bookmarking

This is one online activity which only experienced hands in the business can use effectively. When properly done, bookmarking helps immensely to increase both traffic and search engine ranking of your blog. Technically, what social bookmarking does is to allow your blog users to save and create a collection of their favorite bookmarks, categorize them and later share them with other users. These other users can further subscribe the bookmarks to other’s lists and even add bookmarks from other lists to their own. This way, your blog gets further propagation thereby getting exposed more and more. The more bookmarking you do, the more blog traffic you get and that helps your search engines ranking a great deal.

Glossary of Affiliate Marketing Terminologies

Every business has a peculiar vocabulary and terminology, so is affiliate marketing.  For a newbie, some of this lingo may be confusing at first. Not to worry! As you get along in the business, you no doubt become familiar with these terms, clichés, and concepts.

Here are some of such terms you just have to know:

Customer: The name for the end user or purchaser of the merchant’s product or service.

Merchant: The owner or creator of a product or service.

Affiliate: The partner who promotes the merchant’s products for a commission.

Publisher: The name an affiliate is also called if he runs his business from a website or blog.

Affiliate program: A program set up by merchants to pay commissions when affiliates refer people to their products.

Commission: An agreed percentage of the total sale that is paid to the affiliate for referring the sale.

Cookie: A smart web instrument used to assign a unique ID to the buyer in order to tag the purchase as being referred by an affiliate. Cookies usually have a predetermined lifespan. So, even if the buyer doesn’t purchase right away, the affiliate will still get credit for the sale if it occurs within the set time frame, say 24 hours, 7 days or even 60 days or more.

Referral: Credit for a click or a sale that occurs when the affiliate sends traffic to the merchant’s site.

Affiliate agreement: A contract that merchants and affiliates agree on specifying the rules, responsibilities, rates to be paid and other legalities.

Affiliate link: A trackable URL that identifies the affiliate as the source of targeted traffic to a merchant’s site.

Referral: A click on an affiliate link counts as a referral.

Affiliate network: An online marketplace where merchants list their products and where affiliates can find products to sell.

How Smart Bloggers Make Dumb Choices

 Do you know the pluses and minuses of affiliate marketing? Great if you do. Even if you don’t, it just takes a bit of digging behind-the-scenes to look. You’ll discover many dumb things even expert bloggers do. Here’s a sampler.

Some merchants may be above-board, but may not be a good fit for your own type of audience. Sticking with such merchants is a dumb thing to do. 


 
Regularly, some bloggers get fooled by unscrupulous merchants all in the name of business. For all you care, all the noise about a particular product may just be mere hyping and some bloggers easily get carried away by that. More often than not, these bloggers forget the cliché, “If an opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Not heeding that is exactly why many bloggers sometimes get seduced by the tactics of less ethical and unscrupulous merchants.

It is easy to find numerous tips and tricks in affiliate marketing forums that might help you make a quick buck.  Such tricks could quickly lead to a break in trust with your audience. That is not the best way to go. In any business, trust counts for much and once it is lost, a lot is lost.

Anyone, no matter how experienced and expert they are can get fooled once in a while. Here are some quick tips to help you stay safe:

Don’t promote any product until you have all the vital information you need to promote it. To get this information, be sure you’ve subscribed to your affiliate partners’ email list and know exactly what your readers can expect in terms of follow-up marketing. That leaves you on very sure and safe grounds to promote the product as expected.

Do not pay a fee to become an affiliate. That is inclusive of membership or setup fees. Most credible affiliate program are FREE to join and many even entice people with sign-up bonuses. When you see product merchants asking for fees, it is likely they are running scams. Beware!

Don’t get involved in using tricks and unethical methods to promote any product.  Some marketers habitually use aggressive SEO tactics that focus exclusively on tricking search engines to market their products. That is a very dumb thing to do even if you may record a few successes here and there. If humans don’t wise up to your tricks soon enough, search engines will and they could have you banned from search engine listings. A real disaster if that happens.

 

Why Bloggers Love Affiliate Marketing

If you are an affiliate marketer, blogging is not only the in-thing to do, it is also a very smart thing to do. I blog real good and I recommend it as well. Here are some really compelling reasons you too should get involved if you want what is good for your business. All pretty significant advantages to you and your business if you are a devoted blogger.

As many bloggers have found out, blogging for affiliate marketing really rocks if you know what you are doing even if you are a newbie. Here’s why:

You don’t need specialized expertise. Anyone can get involved and pronto they are into blogging real time. No one needs to be a world-renowned expert in any niche. The most you need to get cracking is to be familiar enough with your topic area to know what products are good and worth recommending to your audience. That’s it!!



You put in low-effort and at low-risk. Blogging for affiliate marketing doesn’t require any significant time or money investment on your part. You put in relatively low efforts and at very low or insignificant risks to get the business going. That rocks too if you are in the business.

You find it very easy to start and implement. The product merchants traditionally handle all the support the product needs. They also provide for you all the tools particularly links needed to promote the product. Very significantly, it is not your lot to worry about tracking sales, providing customer service, setting up payments, or anything else to help sales. All you need do as a marketer is to share the links provided by the merchants with your readers. That’s it! Easy and simple no doubt!

You don’t need any support team in place. With Affiliate marketing, you can easily run a one-man-show. Be your own boss that is. It is the product merchant who needs support teams not the marketer.  Your business is to promote and promote the product as best you can and in your own time and space. Now, that’s really business freedom no doubt!

You think that’s all? Not exactly, here’s some kind of icing on the cake. By getting involved in affiliate marketing:

It is easy to learn what types of products your audience is clamoring for thereby reducing the risk of any future product launch of your own, with its attendant costs, risks and all.

It is easy to build trust with your blog readers and getting them used to the idea of buying from you preferably.

It becomes fairly easy for you to make money by monetizing your blog.

With all the foregoing benefits, it is easy to see why bloggers love affiliate marketing. For them, the business really rocks no doubt.


 

Importance of Audience Targeting in Digital Marketing

To target your audience effectively, first you must correctly identify who exactly they are and collect as much information about them as you can find. Doing so involves a considerable amount of time and resources which most marketers can least afford. Audience targeting is not only all-important, it is the foundation of every marketing component most marketers ever implement. If you are able to target your audience correctly, it is almost a given that your messaging, content and effectiveness will attract, convert and retain connections to customers more effectively and efficiently.


 
Here are some credible ways to check costs and save some time in digital marketing using audience targeting.

Content Creation:

When you know exactly who your target audience is, it is fairly easy for you to determine correctly, their interests, needs, concerns and desires. This information helps you to create content that speaks to and on those issues intelligently. Doing so helps you to attract traffic efficiently to your message, your content, your website or blog.

Content Sharing:

You can’t share content effectively without knowing the interests of your target audience. If you know their interest, that information allows you to share content that focuses pointedly on them. Sharing content that interests your audience readily creates affinity and connection with them. That somehow manages to open the much desired door into the world of your prospects. By targeting the correct audience with the correct shared content, somehow, you get to open to them the many opportunities your business provides.

Paid Media Targeting:

Since this involves some costs, you must be sure of what you are doing before you get involved. To use paid search marketing or paid social media marketing efficiently, be sure that your audience targeting is accurate. If not, you will be dissipating valuable energy and resources needlessly. If you spend money on digital media advertising that is not specific to your proper audience target, it is akin to blindly throwing money away. A real waste no doubt! Proper audience targeting is what makes paid media advertising effective. Anything contrary is a clear waste of time and resources which you can least afford.

Website Ads/Messaging:

Experts always say, “Know your customers well enough before you can successfully sell to them.” If you don’t know who your target audience is, how will you know the specific solution that your product or service can address for them? If the messages on your website or blog are untargeted, that will make it ineffective. Most internet surfers always have “the attention span of a crazy gnat.” For that reason, your website or blog always manages to get a few seconds of their attention if they drop by. If your messaging is targeting the wrong audience, that time span may not be enough for you to retain their attention long enough to notice your message and be influenced by it. So, if you fail to retain their attention long enough, it adversely affects your ability to earn their business. Meaning, you are needlessly wasting your time and resources without results.


 

Most Profitable Niches in Affiliate Marketing

 Many marketers have realized that people are really concerned about their health and wellbeing. The real reason the niches in health and health related matters are very popular to market products on. On theses niches, the quest for information and help never slows down as people are always looking for the next best thing on health improvement, wellbeing and much more.

Here are some good examples of health-related niches marketers have found very profitable.

Anti-aging

High Blood Pressure

Fatty Liver

Stuttering

Bed Bugs Treatment

Colic Relief

Childhood Obesity

Eczema Treatment

Increasing testosterone

Joint pain

Diabetic recipes

Cellulite Removal

Bad Posture

Acid Reflux

Hair Loss

Erectile Dysfunction

Bad Breath

Healthy Gut

Natural Pain Relief

First Aid

Natural Skin Care

Panic Attacks

Anger Management

Wrinkle Treatment

Insomnia

Vertigo

Menopause

Common Pitfalls in Affiliate Marketing

 As many marketers have discovered, Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn fast and easy money provided you target the right audience. As you very well know, promoting products is key in this business. However, there are some common mistakes affiliates make when it comes to promoting. If you are new in affiliate marketing field, you might want to keep the following 8 points at the back of your mind so that you can avoid them. They are all avoidable mistakes which many marketers inadvertently make from time to time. Keep a very keen eye on them unless you want to fail like other marketers who ignored this advice. Your promotional efforts will not yield the desired results if:

01. You do not capitalize on the right opportunities at the right time. Timing can be key in this business.

02. You go over the top by habitually bombarding your followers with requests to try the product you are promoting. You risk putting them off altogether if that is what you do.

03. You fail to verify that the people trying the product you are promoting have all the information that they need to know about the product. Information is always key in promotions so provide it well.

04. You do not pay enough attention to your customers’ social media presence. Social media is on nowadays and it helps products promotion very well. Pay enough attention there.

05. You do not realize that building a strong affiliate marketing structure takes time and effort, and you give up during the initial stages of becoming an affiliate. It takes time and efforts on the web to establish an authoritative and commanding presence. Be patient!

06. You promote your product or service to irrelevant groups and forums. That is a profound waste of time and resources and it should be avoided.

07. You keep emailing and messaging user groups every day or, worse still, every hour. That is called “pestering” and it can easily put off potential customers.

08. You do not spend enough time to research and find the right target audience for the product or service before promoting products to them. Very wrong approach! The use of Google Analytics comes in very handy here to measure and gauge consumer behavior which information you really need to direct your promotional efforts.

 

What Makes an Affiliate Program Good To Promote?

 In affiliate marketing program, promotion is really key. Just because you’ve found a high paying affiliate program, doesn’t mean you should promote it right away. If you find an affiliate product which meets these here 4 criteria, you are best advised to consider taking the time to promote it.

Therefore, before promoting an affiliate program, always be sure it meets following key criteria.

01. Have I used it myself? Use a product first and be sure it works as promised before you undertake to promote it. This is rather obvious though but surprisingly, many marketers don’t consider it as very important. By using a product yourself, you will discover both the pros and cons of the product you are using. That information helps you to write more credible reviews or case studies on the product. This is important because the more trustworthy you are, the more likely your readers will click on your affiliate links.

02. Does it work for me? You can only answer this question if you have used the product. Consumers are aware that there are so many products and services out there that don’t do what they promise. Even if they do, they just don’t do it as well from the promotional promises. If you don’t want to lose trust and credibility fast enough, promote only products/services which you have used yourself and they work well for you.

03. Is it a trusted Brand? In affiliate marketing trust is earned over time. Trust readily attracts customers to the brand. That is the real reason many marketers prefer promoting affiliate products of a company or persons they already know and trust. When you know their products are solid and they treat their customers well, you get involved. Such brands readily make the best affiliate programs to promote because people are more likely to search for and buy from only the trusted brands they know.

04. Are the products evergreen? Some marketers prefer to make quick money hence they readily latch on to products that may launch for only a week or two and then close. To others, that is not a good strategy because there is too much work involved in such promotional efforts. It is best to focus more on evergreen programs that you can always promote on the long term thereby earning residual commissions for many months or even years down the road.

How to Select a Profitable Affiliate Program

Online, the numbers are very large and the competition is very fierce. There are thousands of products available for affiliate marketing on the Internet. For that reason, it’s never very easy to choose the best product to promote as an affiliate marketer. Depending on what the marketer prefers, there very many issues worth considering before selecting an affiliate program. Here now are some pointers you must take into account while selecting the best affiliate program which can help you to make good money.

01. Be sure you choose a product which appeals to your niche, making sure you have enough experience and influence in the segment to make an impact in marketing the product.

02. Do not run only behind big brands or popular products. When brands are big and the products popular, the competition is always very high. When the competition is high, it is difficult to get conversions smoothly. You are best advised to choose a product that has low competition. That gives you higher chances to convert from the audience that you have built up over time.

03. Always give preference to products which offer recurring commissions. You make money faster with such products. Experts advise that it is best to have a limited number of products in your portfolio so that you can promote them effectively. If such products have high and recurring commissions, they will ensure a very high return on your investment.

04. Make sure the program you select provides all the necessary resources related to their product. In most affiliate programs, that is a given. Without good resources, it is very difficult to promote affiliate products successfully. Besides, with good resources, it is fairly easier for you to build great value around any product you are promoting.


 

How to Promote Affiliate Products

 Products promotion simply means to drive traffic to the products and get people to see and buy them. Depending on the niche of your blog, you can apply directly to companies and become an affiliate. Thereafter, by means of your website or blog, you commence promoting the products you have selected. Your promotions work best and are most effective if you have your own website or blog. When you drive traffic to your website or blog you are not just promoting the affiliate product, you are promoting yourself too. Promoting yourself effectively helps a great deal to increasing your channels of making money online.
Some effective channels and tools you can use to promote affiliate products include but not limited to:

Hand bills
Placing banners in your website or blog
Inserting affiliate links in your website or blog
Paid traffic
Writing product reviews
Email marketing
Social media marketing
Search engine traffic, SEO
Flyers
Car stickers, etc.
If your promotions are efficient, you start earning commissions almost immediately. When you start earning commissions, getting paid should not be a problem. For now, the most popular and reliable payment methods are through PayPal Accounts, Direct bank deposits, Cheques and Payoneer Master Card. You must endeavor to find out what is accepted and smooth to use in your Country of operation before you settle for any of these methods.

 

3-Steps to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business

Everyone must go through this process if they seriously want to be affiliate marketers. You too can start affiliate marketing even as a beginner in just 3 steps.



01. Pick a niche

The first thing you must to do before you venture into affiliate marketing is to pick a niche. A niche is simply a topic or an area of interest which you like and are really knowledgeable about. Settling for a niche you like enables you to speak to a particular target audience instead of trying to talk to everybody thereby dissipating energy needlessly. Some examples of very popular niches are:

Food
Drinks
Business
Family
Entertainment
Automobiles
Finance
Health
Travels, etc
For full effects, each of these broad niches can be further broken down into sub-niches. If you are a beginner, you are best advised to settle for a narrower sub-niche instead of focusing on a broad niche where your knowledge and expertise may not be fully convincing. Another advantage of having a narrow niche is because it allows you to focus on a much targeted customer base. Instead of focusing on Health for example as a broad niche, you can decide to target dieting, weight loss, skin care, health supplements, etc, etc which are narrower but still on health matters all the same.

02. Build a website or a blog around that niche
 
After settling for a niche of your choice, the next thing you must do is to build a website or a blog around that niche. The website or blog now serves as your online promotional base for the business. If you want long-term success in the business, having a website or a blog gives you an indispensable advantage. With them, you derive the freedom to connect with your readers with a view to giving them helpful and fresh information on a regular basis. That way, you can build a subscriber base and follow-up with them until they trust you enough to follow your recommendations as they come from you. If you have your own website or blog, instead of sending visitors directly to an affiliate offer, you can direct those visitors to your own website or blog where you can convert them to loyal followers through your email list. A reliable email list allows you to promote many other affiliate offers through your email list thereby expanding your business exponentially.

03. Join Affiliate Programs

There are many credible and reliable affiliate programs online. Search and locate them, making sure you understand and agree with their rules of engagement before signing up. If you have your own website or blog, the next step is to sign up for affiliate programs and start making some money as you promote products out of your website or blog. Be sure you select only good, proven and effective products to promote. Doing so will enable you to hit commissions real quick. That is what most affiliate marketers really want, making real money from commissions.

 

What Type of Business Model is Affiliate Marketing?

Simply put, an affiliate marketer is an online salesperson who promotes products in exchange for a commission. It is an online business model where you are paid commission for promoting other peoples’ products and services. In the business, the people promoting the goods and services are called affiliates while the people who have a product affiliates can promote to earn a commission are known as merchants. Of course, the people who buy the products are invariably called customers.

In that type of business model, the affiliate is expected to do just 3 routine things:

Promote products

Gets paid for every sale you generate

Repeat the two processes over and over
 
Simple no doubt! If as a marketer you are able to do these things repeatedly, there is no upper limit to how much you can earn as an affiliate marketer. The harder and better you work, the more you earn, simple! So, how much you earn depends entirely on you. This simplicity makes affiliate marketing one of the most popular home-based businesses around. If you are keen, you can start your own affiliate marketing business right now in your room, making hundreds of dollars any time from now. This model stands out as one of the simplest ways to start a home-based business even without formal training or experience.

Therefore, anyone can start affiliate marketing and make money. There are no financial risks involved. You needn’t pay anything to promote an affiliate product. If the product does not convert well, you are always free to switch to any other products you want. Even if you may not need to have prior experience at selling, you must however be willing to commit to a learning process if you want to succeed fast enough in the business.

As an added advantage, you do not have to design, develop or manufacture any products yourself. It is the sole business of affiliate merchants to design and produce their own products and promotion materials like images, banners, product links etc. The only job you have as an affiliate marketer is to simply promote the products using the materials such as banners and product links as supplied by the merchants. There is a lot of money to be made in the business and that can not elude you even if you are a newbie.


 

Best Affiliate Networks Online

Every newbie affiliate marketer always wants to know where they can be to get good results. We are immensely pleased to make some recommendations. At the moment, some affiliate networks offer hundreds of affiliate marketing programs all in one place. Instead of chasing numerous individual programs, you are best advised to simply register with an affiliate network to enable you gain access to numerous affiliate marketing programs they have on board. In my view, the very best options currently available are:

VigiLinks

Skimlinks

CJ Affiliate

ShareAsale

Rakuten LinkShare

Avangate

LinkConnector

FlexOffers

Affiliate Window


 

Best Affiliate Marketing Programs Online

 Many affiliate marketing programs online offer different variants and commission paying structures. You can check them all out, research them and sign up to work for any of them you fancy. Here are some of the best and most popular affiliate marketing programs you can get on the web presently.

Aweber

SFI

Amazon

AliExpress

EBay

HostGator

Warrior Plus

Gearbest

ClickBank

Shopify

SEMRush

 

Effects of News and Viral Sites on Affiliate Marketing

Compared to evergreen content, newsy content characteristically always have a very short life span. If you are unable to quickly take advantage of the moment, you hardly stand a chance while doing affiliate marketing on a viral website. Some kind if dilemma if you ask me! Characteristically, news sites tend to get more views on their home page. For that reason, it is best to highlight your best promotions on the home page. News content is not entirely useless for affiliate marketing. They are most effective in promoting deals which are time bound and hot, exact same way the news itself could be hot. You can always try to make the deal hot news and it gets attention and clicks that way.

Let’s say for example a dealer is offering a 20% discount on a certain product, instead of just plastering the promotional banners all over your website, you could write a news article alerting your audience of this once in a while offer to buy a good quality product at a very reduced price. You get your commission as a marketer if in your news promo, you add an affiliate link to the product from the dealer to enable them easily secure the offer. Many marketers rely on same strategy for pre-order and product launch announcements as well as highlighting best deals during popular sales seasons like Black Fridays.

Tips for Successful Affiliate Marketing Program

 If you are involved in affiliate marketing, no doubt you want to do business and make money. If that is the case, here now are some tips to help you in that quest by increasing the conversion rate of your affiliate marketing campaigns:

You Must Be Authentic

Rely always on ways to present the facts as they are but in a compelling way while recommending only good quality products and services. Do not over sell any product; hype it or lie about in order to get people to buy. You must endeavor to be authentic at all times because that is the best way to build a good reputation.



Focus more on Targeted Traffic

In affiliate marketing, traffic is important, but targeted traffic is king. Targeted traffic ensures your content is seen more by people who have a buying intention. That is all you need if you want to be really successful as an affiliate marketer. The more targeted traffic you get, the better your results.

Habitually Track your Performance
 
Results, results and results, that’s what most marketers really care about.  Knowing what people are looking for puts you in a great stead to give it to them. Sometimes, visitors may be looking for products on your website that you currently do not cover. Knowing about these content gaps opens new earning opportunities for you. By deploying online tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track content gaps, you can get the intelligence information you require to target your content better to satisfy your visitors. The real reason you must endeavor to habitually track your results.

Be Contextual

One of the best ways to succeed at affiliate marketing is to ensure that the promotions you are sharing are relevant to the content and your audience. The trick is to ensure that affiliate ads you are promoting match the content you are selling. For great effects, your content should always be relevant to the product you are promoting.

Use Deep links

The business of affiliate marketing if online is all about promoting and propagating links online. Most affiliate marketing programs usually offer links and banners to make it easy for you to start promoting their products and services. The problem with these promotional materials is they are usually pointing to the home page or a category page, which is most cases is too generic. For best results, it is recommended that you use deep link tools to point to the exact product or service you want to promote. Why, because the deep link tool will enable you convert any product link from the merchant website to an affiliate link thereby enhancing click rates.

How to Promote Affiliate Marketing on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media. Many already have a formidable audience built up over time on social media. For that reason, social media has become another effective way of promoting with relative ease affiliate products and services. If you are a celebrity, with the help of social media, you can easily play an influencer role to promote products and services. As a celebrity influencer, your fans will respond to your recommendations simply because they like or trust you. Many of such fans routinely follow your lead so when you endorse a product or service, you easily get them to try the product or service based solely on your endorsement. That is the power of social media. Here is how it works in some of the most popular social media platforms around.


 
Affiliate Marketing on Facebook

With about 2.2 billion active monthly users, Facebook appears to be the most popular social networking platform at the moment. On Facebook, if you are having a Facebook page or group that is focused to a niche, it is likely to be more effective to promote any affiliate marketing product/service. It is therefore readily one of the best platforms to do affiliate marketing. It is most advisable to use Facebook Groups more to promote affiliate links because organic engagement is still positive in Facebook Groups inspite of platform restrictions elsewhere.

Affiliate Marketing on Instagram

This is a photo-friendly social media platform. But, one big drawback on Instagram about affiliate marketing is that it does not allow you add links to your posts. The only effective way around this drawback is for affiliate marketers to routinely put the affiliate links (shortened by way of URL shortening service on Google anyway) in their profiles for the duration their ads campaigns will be running. That is the only way your site visitors can get to have an opportunity to click on the link displayed in your profile.

Affiliate Marketing on YouTube

This no doubt is the most popular search engine and the largest social media platform for videos. This dual nature makes YouTube a very effective source of traffic for affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer, you can use YouTube effectively if you can create a video guide, tip, how to, or review of the product or service you want to sell. In this description, you can add links to the product using your affiliate link. When your viewers get to know through the information you provide that you have included a link to the product or service for their convenience, you get them really curious and that earns higher click-through rates as a result.

Affiliate Marketing with Email Marketing
 
Many marketers sometimes argue that Email marketing is a thing of the past but to others, it is another effective way to promote your affiliate partnerships. Most experienced Email marketers still believe in it and use it efficiently. For good results using Email marketing, first you must build a list of email addresses of leads and customers using the opt-in form in the entry point of your sales funnel. That done, you can then offer your visitors something of value like an e-book for free then ask them to enter their email addresses in the form so that you can send them the free offer. After building up the list, you can segment the audience for effective affiliate marketing campaigns. That done, it becomes fairly easy to target the appropriate deals, and offers to the right audience. Ultimately, such efforts lead to more responses and better sales which is what thrills many affiliate marketers.