How Newbies can Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Newbies desirous to make money online must first explore credible ways to monetize their blogs/websites. Affiliate marketing is one of such credible ways. Newbies may be new to affiliate marketing but they have many options and strategies they can profitably explore to make money online. Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online, especially if you’re just getting started and don’t have a huge following yet. Characteristically, affiliate marketing is readily the most accessible form of online marketing since it is premised on a simple business model. Affiliates simply help business owners to market their products and they earn commissions from the sales they generate from their efforts. Simple! For newbies, affiliate marketing is a great way to test their selling/marketing skills and they learn as they market along. By the time they get a hang on the business, they not only earn regular commissions, they can generate some passive income as well.

Following are some tested tips that can be of immense help to every newbie who wants to make money from affiliate marketing.
 
Know your Audience

It is of immense importance to know your audience well even before deciding which products to market in your affiliate business. You must know the demographics of the audience you are targeting who you expect will need your products and will be ready to buy them. The reason is because children, young adults, adults and the elderly don’t have the same needs in products. It is therefore imperative for you to know what your audience likes, dislikes, and what they’re interested in at any particular point in time. You can only find out such detailed information through diligent research efforts. To get reliable and dependable information about your audience’s interests, you can take your research to social media comments section, Google trends to know what people are busy searching for, online communities to know what people are concerned about and if you are a blogger, using your blog’s analytics to know what your audience traffic is in want of from your blog.

Carefully Choose Products to Promote

A product that people want and are willing to buy is what is best for affiliate marketing. It takes a bit of research too to get this vital information about products. Using Google Search Console, you can find out what products users are in search of online. This information together with products reviews in popular affiliate platforms like Strong Future International, SFI can help you decide on which products to promote to have a good market. Once you decide on a product to promote, next is to look into the terms and conditions of the affiliate program you are working with to know how these terms affect the commissions you hope to earn. The reason is because as each affiliate program is different so are their terms and conditions. You are in affiliate marketing to earn money, so you must at all times be concerned about how this money will be earned. Some affiliate programs will only pay out a certain percentage of sales and it usually ranges from 5-50% of the Commissions Volume, CV in most cases depending on the type of product and the affiliate program.

Consistently Create High-Impact Content

Content marketing now appears to be a must if you are marketing online. The higher the quality of the content, the better it is to attract traffic to your website. So, once you’ve decided on the products you want to promote, you need to consistently create and market high-impact content. This is hugely important because the content you create will largely determine whether or not you make money from affiliate marketing. The simplest way to create valuable content is through blogging. So, if you are not blogging yet, you must commence now if you want to make money from affiliate marketing. The content you create must be informative, educational and of high-impact. It should be engaging, useful, and easily shareable. That is the type of content that can help you to attract enough traffic to make your affiliate marketing business profitable.
 
Be Clear about your Goals

If you are a newbie in affiliate marketing, this is about the most important tip you need. No matter what you do in affiliate marketing, if you are not very clear about your goals, you’ll largely struggle with little results to show for your efforts. So, before you even start thinking about what to do and how to do it, you need to be clear about what you want to achieve and how you’ll achieve it in your marketing efforts. Goals like, how much traffic your blog will be getting a month, volume of products you want to sell per month, how much income per month you expect to earn and so on. These goals can either be short term or long term depending on the strategy you choose to adopt.

Develop a Workable Strategy

Once you’ve decided on the products you want to promote and have built relationships with the affiliate platforms/managers, you need to develop a workable strategy. This strategy will have to do with the marketing channels and techniques that will help you to promote products effectively, how to get traffic to your blog/website, the Call-to-Action CTA you have on the website to tell visitors what to do, whether you want users to sign up for newsletters first or to buy a product directly, or whatever else you want the users to do on your website when they hit it. Your strategy must encompass all these for it to be effective. Whatever your strategy is, be careful of trust issues when making promises online. Never promote anything online that can mislead your audience to do things they’ll later regret. The backlash could be devastating for your affiliate marketing business if you do so.

Network widely and even with Influencers

Affiliate marketing is all about building mutually beneficial relationships. You cannot expect to make any appreciable income from affiliate marketing if you are unable to build relationships. So, by deliberate efforts, you must strive to build great relationships with product merchants, business owners, fellow affiliates and social media influencers. These you can find from effective networking particularly on very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and others. You can effectively build great relationships with product merchants and fellow affiliate on a very popular affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI. Once you sign up FREE and join this program, you can immediately start reaching out and interacting with millions of other affiliates and hundreds of thousands of product merchants. The program manages your sales and arranges to pay the commissions you’ve earned monthly. Your main duty is just to promote products as much as you can and your earnings are paid out to you monthly. On social media, you can source influencers who can help endorse your products and even recommend same to their audience and they earn commissions as well.

Last Line

Even as a newbie, you can make money from affiliate marketing if you make efforts to understand the industry you choose to market in, work with reputable affiliate programs, find great products to promote, consistently create high-impact and engaging content, and drive good traffic to your website. That way, with time, you’ll get to see regular commissions coming in. By then, you’ll be well on  the road to making good money online by way of affiliate marketing.

5 Awesome Website Ideas Suitable for Newbies

As more and more people are switching to online shopping, it becomes imperative for many business owners to take their businesses online. In addition, many more people are choosing to work online from home. Both of these developments have necessitated the increased need for websites. A website provides business owners the best opportunity to successfully do business online. The reason any online business owner must as of necessity have a website to make contact with consumers online and to sell products/services to consumers. If you have just decided to take your business online, depending on your type of business and the products/services you are marketing, you have the options to choose from eCommerce websites to personal blogs, to run your business online.

1. eCommerce Website

Among small businesses, a website for an eCommerce store appears to be the most popular. It is easy to set up and operate with the right guidance from professional webmasters if you are unable to DIY. Typically, an eCommerce store website requires less investment to set up and it offers unlimited growth opportunities for your business. It is not even complicated to set up. If you are going the way of DIY, you can take advantage of popular Content Management Systems (CMSs) like Wix or WordPress to set it up. These platforms also offer all the necessary marketing tools you really need to build a successful online business. On these platforms, you can set up a functional website in a matter of minutes. Once set up, you can simply list the products/services you have on offer and you’re good to go.

2. Affiliate Website

If you decide to work online as an affiliate, you can join FREE, a reputable affiliate marketing platform like Strong Future International, SFI and they’ll offer you a webpage of your own to do business from. As an affiliate, you can then use the webpage to promote products/services in exchange for sales commissions. You can also take advantage of many different types of affiliate sites such as review sites. But, SFI provides all affiliates, a free webpage, training, marketing tools, unique affiliate links/codes, and excellent customer service. The business of the affiliate is to simply promote products/services and the platform takes care of the rest. This includes products packaging, handling and delivery as well as working out the right commissions earned by each affiliate at the end of every month.

3. Portfolio Website

Business owners usually build a portfolio website to showcase their projects and attract new clients. Such websites are common with Internet or web professionals. These are professionals who work in web development, digital marketing, or the art industry. Take for instance a photography portfolio website. Such websites usually have a simple interface with the visual content at center stage. When visitors approach the website from the homepage, it gives the visitors the options to choose between different project categories. With just a click, each section will show a gallery of the fine photographs on display with different image styles and quality. Onsite, visitors have access to the contact information section. This section helps to provide easy links for potential clients to connect in case they’re impressed with what they see on the site and are therefore interested in hiring the services of the website owner.

4. Membership Website

One other great website idea is a membership site. With a membership website, you can restrict access to some of your content pieces. Some of such content pieces are online courses, in-depth reports, video tutorials, or exclusive news coverage. Some very popular news websites often implement this strategy. On such news websites, by paying just a few dollars a month, users can have unlimited access to the articles, cooking recipes, buying guides and much more.

5. Personal Blog

A personal blog remains one of the most popular types of websites among business owners. If you are a newbie, blogging is one great way to hone your writing skills, showcase your expertise, and build an online presence. Just decide on a niche then write informational and educational content on topics related to that niche. This content will help the blog to attract visitors with similar interests and turn them into loyal readers. Your blog audience will start to build up from there. Be sure to choose a blog niche that you have real knowledge about and start creating content on it. Common blog niches are landscaping, home decor, fashion, lifestyle, travel, pet care, food and drinks, hospitality and so on. These are niches that interest a lot of people and when you create content on them, you attract readers easily. That is what helps to grow your blog audience. Once you build a sizeable and loyal audience, you can monetize the blog to earn good money from it. Through monetization, you can sell ads spaces on the blog, publish sponsored posts, sell eBooks, and run ads for Google AdSense.

Wrapping Up

The first step towards building a successful online business is by creating your own website. The foregoing are the types of website ideas available to newbies which they can easily use to go into business online. Having an online presence is vital for a successful online business. A website makes that possible online. Depending on your business inclinations, you can decide which type of website to build that will be useful for your online marketing efforts.

Social Media Marketing Tips for Newbies

If you are new in digital marketing and you haven’t joined social media yet, you are missing a lot. You are missing the power of social media platforms you can effectively leverage to market your business. Social media provides excellent opportunities for marketers to build a strong online presence, build a strong brand, nurture leads/customers, share quality content, do promos as well as effectively engaging and retaining customers. What else do marketers really need online they cannot get on social media? If you are new in social media marketing, here are tested ways you can start out and get real benefits from marketing on social media particularly when you open accounts on the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

 
 
Always Create Unique and Compelling Content

Content matters a great deal on social media. If your content is unique, educational, informative and of high quality, it helps to establish a distinct personality for your account. That is what makes your business distinctively different from your competitors and your customers notice. It evolves into some unique social identity for your business. You can nurture this identity with your own unique style of posts, unique content, visuals, graphics, logos, comments, interactions and unique hashtags. Doing these things regularly and consistently helps to build a great audience of followers for your business. You can validate and amplify your USP by posting links to blogs and articles that are talking about your business, highlighting its accomplishments or promoting its news. That helps your business a great deal because third party validation is one of the cornerstones of a successful social media marketing strategy.

Make Yourself Valuable

Social media users are always online to look for value. Without providing real value, you cannot hope to build a good following fast enough. Your first major challenge should therefore be to go about building a community of followers that are organic, relevant and engaging. Expert marketers recommend that you can go about this by introducing yourself to the social media community and getting them to notice you. Follow other accounts, engage and interact with these accounts by way of intelligent, relevant and unique comments. You can deliberately comment on popular influencer accounts and offer genuine input, feedback or expertise, helping your followers find what they’re looking for online, answering their questions and meaningfully engaging with them online. If you can do these things consistently, genuinely and intelligently, more people will start to pay attention to you. That helps to build your own audience of followers pretty quickly.

Take Advantage of Social Media Tools

Every social media platform has its own unique tools to assist marketers. You can take advantage of these tools to market effectively, promote your brand, grow your online authority, schedule your posts, share your posts, and interact with like-minded marketers by joining groups and suchlike marketing activities. You can save good time to create more content if you use tools like HootSuite to link all of your social media accounts together and schedule posts to appear at per-determined times across multiple social media platforms. With the help of these scheduling tools, you can develop a calendar of the best times to post based on the audience you would like to interact with and let the scheduling tool do the rest. Doing this allows your content to be automatically posted for you without having to manually do it yourself multiple times a day thereby enabling you to have audiences in different time zones and servicing them all adequately and simultaneously.

Network with Your Connections

Even when new in social media marketing, you can leverage the power of your connections when it starts growing. You can effectively market on social media and generate sales if you are able to use the media as a great tool to create a wide global network you can dependably leverage on to market your business. It allows you to get to meet a lot of people in your industry you can relate with and do business with. To enhance this, you can purposefully create relationships with thought-leaders and people of influence that have a wide group of followers in their own right. That helps to expand your network exponentially. You can identify influencers in your business niche, reach out and collaborate with them and they will in turn reciprocate by helping to promote your brand. On Twitter, a single re-tweet from the right influencer can help your brand/content to get in front of a whole new lot of hundreds or even thousands of potential customers.

Be Genuine and Authentic with your Followers

Reputation matters a lot in social media marketing. The reason you must endeavor to be authentic and genuine at all times in the content you post. Why people respond to authentic content positively is because they always want to interact with real people and not computer bots. That way, they tend to take appreciations and acknowledgments more personal if they know it is from real people. To enhance this, never fail to acknowledge and thank members of your audience/followers for complementing, posting and sharing your content. If you endeavor to return these little favors whenever you can, it will help grow your community/followers. Your audience engagement will grow in tandem as well.

Adhere to Community Rules of Each Platform

This is hugely important. Many social media platforms take their community rules very seriously. If you breach any of these rules, you get sanctioned. Such sanctioning may include but not limited to cautioning, taking out your content, temporary suspension or outright ban. You are visited with these sanctions when for instance you use the wrong or abusive language, bullying or when you promote any prohibited merchandise like drugs and firearms. Most social media platforms can greatly enhance your business if you stick with their community rules. Opening an account on social media platforms is free of cost. All they demand from you is to strictly comply with their community rules and regulations. That in all fairness is not too much to ask when weighed against the huge benefits you derive from being on the platforms.

Simple Affiliate Marketing Tips for Newbies

Are you new in Affiliate marketing? Do you need some Affiliate Marketing Tips? If yes, just pay attention to what is offered here. Every affiliate marketer wants to make sales and more sales online. To be able to do so, every affiliate marketer needs information and tips from those who have been in the business before them. If you are new in affiliate marketing business, there are some key steps you need to take if you want to get some traction real quick. One of the most important of such steps is to thoroughly research and understand the product/service you are keen on promoting. The essence is, if you get involved in promoting a product that is hot and consumers buy instantly, your business benefits from its viral advertisement. As a newbie, applying proven and effective tips in your blog greatly helps your inbound traffic, click through rates, leads and sales.


 
If you are a newbie, please pay very keen attention to these here time-tested and proven Affiliate Marketing Tips for beginners.

Quickly Establish Your Reputation

In online marketing business, reputation is of paramount importance. The reason you must strive to establish a good reputation/credibility very quickly if you are new in the business. Without a doubt, your credibility is one of the most valuable ways of making money online in this age and time. Once your blog readers believe in you and the advice you give, they tend to trust you more. They respond more positively to the product/service you are promoting as a result. This is the reason you must always make sure to give your readers only genuine information that helps them to quickly solve problems.

Deploy SEO Tools to Optimize Your Website

You cannot successfully run an online business without good organic inbound traffic. The reason you need SEO tools to optimize your website for Search Engines that are mostly responsible for sending traffic to your website. It is trite knowledge in online marketing that the more traffic you receive on your website, the greater opportunity you have to sell more and more products. Of course, the more products you sell, the more money you make. As a newbie, if you don’t have the technical know-how, you may need the services of a Webmaster to help optimize your website with specific keywords. Alternatively, you can build a simple affiliate marketing website using WordPress and its inbuilt SEO tools. A well optimized website is a site well positioned to receive organic traffic from Search Engines. The reason it is recommended for marketers to always work from well optimized websites.

Use Call to Action Buttons
 
Many visitors to a marketing website hardly know what to do to help your business while there. It is not enough just to get to the website. Taking some positive action while there is of utmost importance! A call-to-action button helps to somehow resolve that problem. If you have a call-to-action button installed on your site, your blog readers can easily see the action object and many do act appropriately as invited. When that happens, your business will be getting more click-through rates, CTR, and consequently more and better conversions which is good for the business. If your website is built from WordPress, you have additional advantage of using many of its in-built free tools including very flexible call-to-action buttons you can adjust to meet your business needs.


 
Use Exit-intent Pop-up Banners

Your website must have installed plugin or app to use this feature. Its function is to help trigger a pop-up on exit from your website. If properly used, it can help improve on your marketing revenue. What it does is to pop up with questions, inquiries and persuasions as soon as a visitor clicks on the close-down button to abandon your website. If the pop-up somehow manages to make the visitor to change his mind, you can get a click through or even a conversion from such “after thought.” That is good for business.

Deliberately Search for New Promotions
 
Yes, new promotions provide good opportunities that may not have been invaded already by expert marketers. Finding them helps your own business to make some impact if you are just starting out. If you are new, you can always position yourself to be among the first to propose new technologies and agreements. This can be learned if you diligently and regularly search the websites of your prospective affiliate networks. The essence is to position yourself to always be among the marketers who first take up their high selling and at times new products based on their “rating statistics.” That way, by the time you manage to pick a product that makes big sales, and is rated top list, chances are very high that your readers will be curious about the product. That curiosity is what helps click-through rates and conversions.

Use Tables Generously
 
Web surfers are characteristically very impatient. So, exploring ways to give them a whole load of information even at a glance is good for online business. That is where tables come in very handy. Marketers now know that one easy way to get more clicks on affiliate marketing links is by using comparative tables to display and compare data/statistics. A table also helps to display and allow a quick digestible analysis of the items on display. It allows for easy glance and appreciation of information by online visitors. If your website is built from WordPress, that’s great. WordPress allows you to have free access to its in-built table function which you can easily connect a list to. 

7 Simple Online Business Ideas for Newbies

Do you want to start a business online and still wondering what to do? Here’s what to do! Just get yourself a smart device and internet access then get started in your own business. Just like that! Hundreds of thousands of businesses get started each year and the internet is not saturated just yet. Don’t worry excessively about the numbers getting into business and how to compete. Once you are able to go along with a pretty good business idea, there is ample room out there for you too even if you are a newbie. You can get busy like all others and compete favorably in your own business niche if you are able to stay the course.

Consider these 7 business ideas for starters.

1. Business Brokerage Services

Building and selling a business is now a very lucrative business. The days are long gone when people just built a business and remained stuck with it all their lives. Now, you can build and flip businesses as fast as you can make them profitable. More and more people are simply interested in starting and selling businesses. That is where a business brokerage service becomes imperative. To ease transactions for people buying and selling businesses, business brokers step up to handle the details, making sure everything is in order and in compliance with extant laws. To get involved in business brokerage services, you need to know a bit of business law. In addition, you must endeavor to acquire some specialized knowledge in the industry you’ve chosen to operate in.


 
2. Affiliate Marketing

With or without experience, affiliate marketing is one business you can start pretty quickly. It simple involves positioning yourself to help sell products/services created by other persons and you earn tidy commissions for your efforts. Whether you have a product idea of your own or not is immaterial in affiliate marketing. With it, you don’t necessarily have to bother yourself dealing with customer service, product creation or any other activities relating to running a good business. All you need do is to position yourself well to promote and sell other people’s products/services real good. Tidy commissions come your way for your efforts and you are in business as a result.

3. Online Store
 
You can get into the business of opening and running an online store for your choice product(s). These days, more and more people worldwide are beginning to shop online because of its relative convenience. No doubt these huge numbers of persons need online stores to service them. You too can take a little bit out of Amazons lucrative online business if you work hard at it. All you need do for starters is to set up your own online store, build a strong brand and following. From there, you can commence promoting and selling your own products/services online to make a good income.

4. Bookkeeping Services

Not everyone who is in business knows something about bookkeeping. Business regulating authorities, tax authorities, shareholders and even Financiers require that proper books of accounting be kept for any business.  What a bookkeeper does is to help businesses with their balance sheets, provide income statements and create important financial reports. Anyone who knows some bit of accounting, some maths and is good with numbers can undertake bookkeeping business. The pay is good and you can build a good client base over time. What makes it easy to become a bookkeeper is that in some climes, you don’t necessarily have to be a certified public accountant which requires several years of study and certification.

5. Virtual Assistant Business
 
A virtual assistant business entails providing help to companies and executives to handle routine clerical jobs online. Jobs like servicing customers, handling mails, receiving, filing and distribution of communication to appropriate persons within and outside a business. Some suchlike routine chores which help to save time for executives to be better involved in more important management decision making. As a Virtual Assistant, you get paid for your services as per agreed terms. If you have a reliable access to the internet, you can run a Virtual Assistant business from anywhere. With that, you are well positioned to be involved in outsourcing jobs to any corner of the world thereby helping companies to cut down on running costs and ultimately helping to grow their profit margins.

6. Online Marketing Company

To run an online marketing company, you need a bit of computer savvy. That requires that you know some bit of online technicalities like Search Engine Optimization, SEO, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising and other methods of online marketing. These are imperative because you have to rely on them to fashion out your own marketing strategies which your business needs to succeed. With time, if other businesses notice how good you are at marketing your own products online, it can give them sufficient evidence to take you on as an affiliate to help them market their own products/services as well.

7. Language Translation Services
 
If you have a deep understanding of some foreign languages, you don’t have to compete with Google translate or some other online technology to run a language translation service. While Google does general translation services, yours can be tailored towards very specific needs on demand for branding and marketing services. Such services that really need human touch and people cannot afford to leave to technology. That makes it a specialized service and it pays well. International Organizations, NGOs, Missions and Donor Agencies servicing the entire globe will rely on translation services for as long as anyone can foresee. Many companies and persons reaching out to big audiences who regularly put out huge content online do require language translation services to help translate their content into other languages with a view to further growing their readership. Chances are good, you can pick up an engagement with such outfits if you search well for them and reach out to them. 

How Newbies Can Help Newbies in SFI Business

Permit to take on this topic with a real time truism in SFI business. “Nobody knows everything in SFI business.” Even the founder, Mr. Gerry Carson himself admits that much. Having said that, be informed that even if you are new in online marketing, you are not alone. Very many other affiliates are new to online marketing too. We are all still learning this business day in day out. Even if you do not know how but know where to refer your PSA where he can get valuable information to help him, you are doing great. Therefore, even if you are new in online marketing, you can refer the PSA to many specific areas in SFI for guidance and encourage him to be honest and diligent with the information therein. All the information is accessible in every affiliate’s Home Page. Just advise your PSA as follows:

1. To learn the basics of the business, use SFI BASICS.
2. For a detailed 30 day lessons, use the LAUNCHPAD.
3. Use the FORUMS to interact with fellow affiliates.
4. Join a2a for the purpose of interaction and networking.
5. For information and articles on Sales, Sponsoring, Getting Started etc, use the TRAINING PAGE.
6. Access real valuable information at the ASK SC forum.
7. Lastly, encourage your PSA not to shy away from the following:
- seek help when in doubt.
- read very far and wide in SFI.
- rely and depend on fellow affiliates to make progress.
- be honest and diligent in the business.
- be open to continuous learning.
- allow others to inspire you.

If you are able to use this advice as given above, I believe even if you are new in SFI business and new to online marketing, you can successfully help a new PSA who needs guidance. Good luck!!!