Affiliate Marketing Guide for Beginners

Make money through affiliate marketing usually poses awesome challenges to beginners. What many beginners do not realize particularly at the outset is that the potential to earn money out of affiliate marketing is practically limitless. You’ll be OK if as beginner you fully understand that affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model requiring affiliates to help product merchants to promote products to consumers and the affiliates earn agreed commissions from the sales they generate.

The common pitfall of many beginner affiliate marketers is their inability to focus. Try to avoid this. Do not attempt to do so many things at once thereby neglecting to do the real meaningful things and activities that can help grow your affiliate business. Avoid trying to enroll in too many affiliate programs at a time. If you do, particularly with products in different niches, you risk getting bogged down with the huge and at times conflicting amount of promotional work you’ll have to do. Even though some marketing experts do advise people to launch multiple niches all at once, doing so can confuse a beginner who may not be organized and focused enough to take on too many niches all at once. It is best to focus on one niche at a time until it becomes profitable enough before you move to another. The best approach therefore is to start with one niche. You must plan the approach carefully and stay focused on the activities prior to launching a product. Once it becomes sufficiently profitable, you can then move on to the next.

As a beginner, you must carefully select the products you want to market. Choose a niche with products that many people like and want to buy. Specialize on that niche and be well known as a marketer in the niche. You can choose a niche like car accessories for instance then promote all accessories you can find that resonate with car owners. By the time you get well known in that niche, you’ll have the benefit of selling to repeat customers and new customers. Without the right niche, it is very difficult for your affiliate marketing business become profitable.
 
The niche you select must be something that you really find interesting and you personally like. It can even be a niche you are very passionate about. If you know the niche well, you like it and you have a certain degree of expertise on it, selling a product in such niche can make your selling experience enjoyable and profitable. Your selling activities in such niche become much more like fun instead of work. Your affiliate marketing business becomes more fulfilling as a result. You must however be very careful to select a niche that has the right balance between your interest and its potential to earn.

If you want to earn good commissions, make sure the niche you select has products in very high demand. No matter how much you like a niche and how vigorous you are ready to promote the products, if the products are not in high demand, you cannot earn good money by selling the products. The more people buy your products, the more sales you make and the more commissions you earn.

New affiliates usually ask, how much exactly can I earn from the sales I generate? The answer is usually varied with a range of 10-50% of the sales volume depending on the products and the affiliate program involved. A commission volume of 10% may look small but when charged on a high volume of products sold, it becomes substantial.

If you market in a niche that is profitable, you have a great opportunity to scale and develop your business. Increased demand means increased product sales and your business should be flexible enough to meet customer demands no matter the magnitude of demand. If you target very high volume of sales, your business must be structured to sell the right products that can help you to meet and even exceed sales targets.

At the beginning, it is always advisable to look for merchants who are linked to a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI. In SFI, you can sign up FREE without any obligations. You will be assigned your own home page and unique affiliate number. You can commence promoting products using the unique affiliate links the platform assigns to each product for sale. This way, all sales you generate are easily attributable to you for the sake of commission payments.

You are at liberty to use multi-channels online to promote affiliate links. You can use your blog content, social media and even paid Google ads. The essence is to make sure you deliberately put the affiliate link out on the web as widely as possible through hyperlinks on words and even pictures. Once the link is clicked anywhere in the web, it directs the person to the product merchant’s website. If a purchase is made through that process, it is easy for the merchant to know who the referrer is and therefore entitled to commission payment.

If you are new to the online marketing business, you must also have a clear and understandable marketing approach. Haphazard and unorganized marketing activities cannot help you much. You need to have a sharply focused marketing strategy to avoid too many costly errors. It is recommended you carefully plan and start a blog. Consistently post high quality and informative content on this blog to attract traffic. Widely promote your blog particularly on popular social media platforms. Be systematic in making these moves and measure through analytics data the results you are getting.

If you take to blogging, don’t ignore marketing with videos because videos are very effective online marketing tools. You can carefully create video content and upload it in your own YouTube channel. The idea behind this is to regularly provide your subscribers valuable visual information that is really helpful to your marketing efforts. You can get better marketing results from your subscribers if you make sure they get fresh information to enable them learn something new from your videos every time they watch the videos.

Finally, as a beginner marketer, if you want to succeed in affiliate marketing, it is important for you not to make it too obvious that you are attempting to sell a product. The blog and video content you market must be seen to provide real value and teach something to your audience. That is the best way to get their attention. If they get hooked on this content which you have inserted with subtlety the links to the product you are marketing, your readers will click these links to find out more. That’s a very effective online marketing strategy that is really good for affiliate marketing.