Step-By-Step Guide to Earn Passive Income with Affiliate Marketing

If you like to promote products/services online, you can become an affiliate marketer and earn good commissions. Once properly set up and you get a hang on affiliate marketing, you can even earn passive income in perpetuity for as long as the affiliate links you are promoting are live online. This depends hugely on the type of content you are promoting, your type of ads, and the type of online channels you are using for your promotions. The following steps can help to guide you to earn a passive income online by way of affiliate marketing.

 

Build a User-Friendly Website
 
If you want to promote affiliate links with your own content, you need to build a user-friendly website first. If you build your own website, it gives you more and better control over the design, functionality and content on the website. This makes it easier to customize the site to fit the content you are creating and to give your readers a unique user experience. For income earning purposes, you can monetize and optimize the site for that purpose. You’ll have the liberty to add additional features, such as product reviews and comparison charts, to make it easier for consumers to find the right products through the site.

Identify Popular Categories

Do diligent research to identify popular categories that are related to your website/blog. Since a business website/blog must have a niche it is known for, identifying these popular categories will help your content to fit your niche. You can then focus on and effectively promote products/services in these categories to attract more buyers. Every smart marketer usually sells what is selling well in his niche market. Once buyers identify your marketing with a particular niche/category, they keep coming back to your website when they need products in that niche/category. That is quite helpful for your passive income earning.

Analyze Market Trends

Take some quality time to analyze current market trends. That’s the best way to identify products that are popular with consumers. Affiliate marketers make money only when they make sales. It is products that sell well they can rely on to make good sales and consequently earn good commissions. In your analysis of market trends, you can easily identify products that have high sales volumes and good review ratings. These are about the best indicators that a product is in demand. Seasonally, some products really sell well too. Analyzing trends will also help to identify such products. So, if you look at seasonal trends, you can determine which products are likely to see increased sales during specific times of the year. Targeting such periods with increased promotion of such products can help increase sales.

Select Appropriate Products

If you want to succeed in online marketing, it best to select products that are appropriate and suitable for your website/blog. Products that sell well too! Be sure the products you choose are aligned with your content, niche and the interests of your audience. The price point of the products you select is also an important factor to consider. Reason is because higher priced products typically offer higher commission rates. But, if lower priced products can be sold in large volumes, the volume of sales can make up for the lower pricing. You can therefore make your products choices factoring in volume of sales and increased commissions earning as your guide. 

Market on Social Media Platforms

With presently over 4.5 billion active-users worldwide, social media is one huge market out there affiliate marketers actively make money from. Having an account on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and the likes is great for affiliate marketing. Some of these platforms even have in-house marketing tools affiliate marketers can always take advantage of. You can promote products even for free on some of the platforms. Marketing on social media is therefore really ideal for affiliates who want to quickly reach a large audience. On social media platforms, you can post product links and images directly to your followers. The platforms are structured in such a way that you can also use social media ads to target specific audiences and maximize your reach. Doing this consistently engenders good marketing returns for your business. However, you must be sure you understand the community rules of each platform and comply with them to have seamless marketing benefits from the platforms.

Wrapping up

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways among digital marketers to monetize a website. If properly set up, the income from affiliate marketing can be earned in perpetuity as passive income. If you diligently follow the steps outlined above, you can become a successful affiliate marketer and earn passive income over a prolonged period for your efforts. However, besides affiliate marketing, the more the income streams you consider when monetizing your website, the more passive income you are capable of earning from the website.

5 Tips To Succeed In Digital Marketing For Strategic Marketers

Marketing successfully online had become a matter of strategy because of the highly competitive digital marketing world. Even though most marketers do the same things in their digital marketing efforts, marketers who do these same things better, tend to succeed better. It is all a matter of strategy and digital marketing tactics marketers choose to adopt. Strategic marketers tend to take advantage of this by focusing more on their customers’ needs and adapting effective strategies to get results. They strategically invest their time and resources in digital platforms to remain competitive within changing market trends.

Expert marketers like to offer these here five useful tips that can help strategic marketers to withstand competition in digital marketing space.

1. Be Active on Social Media

For quick exposure, viral marketing and ease of info sharing, getting your business on social media is hugely important in today’s digital marketing world. The most popular of these social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn are highly recommended. For instance, LinkedIn now appears to be the best social media platform that allows you to easily get recognition for whatever your business is doing and what it is all about. For this reason, simply updating your LinkedIn page regularly is one great way to get customers for your business. Same thing applies in the other popular social media platforms if you are active and you endeavor to post valuable fresh content on the platforms regularly. You can attract customers and generate more leads by freely displaying your products/services on these platforms. Being active on social media is one great way to get and stay on top of industry news and latest marketing trends. You can actively follow industry leaders and learn from what they do that tends to make them industry leaders.

2. Design and Use a Practical Website

If you are in digital marketing business, having a website of your own is very necessary. Your website is your marketing window to the vast virtual world of digital marketing. If your website is well designed, informative, practical and easy to interact with, it serves as an excellent tool for you to lure potential consumers, tell them about your business, generate leads and make sales. To do this effectively, your website must be content and design-driven to make user interaction seamless. In addition, your website must effectively provide services for a two-way communication gateway between you and your customers. This is very necessary because communication is hugely important in digital marketing activities.

3. Market with Email Marketing

Most digital marketers generally agree that Email Marketing is one of the best and hugely effective marketing methods to attract customers/leads to your business. It is cost-effective and easy to use as well.  With email marketing, you can easily segment your audience based on their demographics/activities, then design messages for the different segments based on what interests them most. By efficiently combining these personalized emails and your website landing page tools, you get better audience engagement, attract more traffic that is organic, get more leads and ultimately better sales.

4. Encourage Customer Feedback

Always remember this, customers are the real reason you are in marketing business. Therefore, what your customers say is hugely important for the growth of your business. This is the reason you must actively encourage customer feedback. Customer feedback is what you really need to manage your online reputation effectively particularly in the highly competitive virtual world of digital marketing. A very high percentage, (up to 90% in some studies), of buyers usually rely on customer feedback to make their buy decisions. The more and better the reviews therefore, the more traffic your website attracts and the more sales it makes. Getting more and better traffic organically from search engines also partly depends on reviews. According to Google reports, customer reviews are very important considerations for website ranking in SERPs.
 
5. Create a Good SEO Strategy

You can create a good SEO strategy for your website by carefully using the right title tags, meta-description and keywords in your website content. There are free online tools such as Google Keyword Planner that you can use to help you plan your SEO strategy. Your carefully chosen keyword(s) should be on your content titles, meta-descriptions, headers, and inside the content text proper. Be careful not to abuse this process by excessive use of keywords unless you want Google to penalize your website for doing so. A good SEO helps search engines particularly Google to drive significant and targeted traffic to your website. If you are unable to optimize your website for SEO yourself, you can hire the services of professionals to do it for you. Without a good SEO strategy on your website, it will be difficult for it to receive organic traffic from search engines. An effective SEO strategy helps to increase your website’s ranking in the SERPs of search engines. A well-optimized website positions well to attract good traffic and good leads to the site, and subsequently helps to make better sales.
 
Conclusion

If you understand these tips well enough, you can formulate an effective digital marketing strategy that can help your business to withstand competition and to grow. For every marketer, what is most important is getting quality traffic to help business growth. If you can skillfully combine the above tips in your own digital marketing strategy, they will help you to engage your audience better, attract better in-bound traffic, get good leads and make better sales.

Exploring Free Digital Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business

If you are in digital marketing business, it is of utmost importance for you to understand the nuances of today's increasingly competitive online small business market. You get the best out of your digital marketing business if you truly understand your customers and your competitors well enough. That is in addition to being fully abreast of the latest market trends in your industry. This is a very useful knowledge to have no doubt. However, unless you have the right tools, all the digital marketing knowledge in the world may not be of much help in your business. If your business is still in its early growth stages, and cash-strapped to boot, it is best to rely more on free digital marketing tools to grow it.   

Find below some of the best free digital marketing tools that can help grow your business to new heights.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is one very useful tool you can use to find relevant influencers within your business niche. You can do this by analyzing bios, follower counts and engagement rates on popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Ubersuggest
 
Ubersuggest helps to provide insights into what people are actively searching for around the world. This it does by reviewing summaries of Google's "suggest" or autocomplete results in various countries. These reviews reveal some insights into what people are actively searching for worldwide within any industry or niche.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite digital platform allows marketers to easily program social posts and maintain a posting schedule weeks or even months in advance. It is a very useful tool for blog schedules and targeting. Hootsuite helps to provide the useful insights to enable marketers compare how well their social posts are performing in comparison to those of their competitors.

Trello

Trello is one very useful tool to track milestones and facilitate project collaboration. Digital marketers can also use it to remind themselves of deadlines in order to stay on top of their digital marketing campaigns, objectives and schedules.

These digital marketing tools can only be of help to your business if you know what you are doing and what your targets are. Granted it is a matter of trial and error before you discover which tools work best for you, such tools that help to drive engagement, build web traffic and hit your targeted Key Performance Indicators, KPIs, are the tools you really need. By taking A/B test of every campaign and changing the tools for each campaign, you can determine what works and what doesn’t. If the results you are getting from free tools are not satisfactory, you can try paid tools if you have the resources but, with a note of caution. Avoid paid tools that do not allow you to try out their full applications first before purchase.

7 Affiliate Marketing Tips for Aggressive Marketers

There are very many advantages in affiliate marketing for persons who want to make money online. Apart from the real opportunity to make money part time or even full time, there are thousands of job possibilities and products to promote. Affiliate marketing typically has several challenges faced by marketers, such as increasing competition and frequent changes in the digital environment. It is a worthwhile venture if like any other job, it is approached with knowledge, dedication, some bit of aggression and sustained research and studies. That is what allows marketers to stay attuned to the latest market trends and understanding the profiles of their target audiences which enables such marketers to get good results.

Like everyone else irrespective of whether you are just starting out or you are already a pro, everyone needs tips to go along with affiliate marketing business. Here are 7 tips which tend to be common with marketers who stand out in this hugely competitive business.


 
#1: Study and Understand Your Chosen Product

Every good marketer will tell you that it is pretty difficult to market a product you neither know well nor even understand. Because the diversity of digital products is usually very large, many Affiliates find it difficult and hugely challenging to identify which option is best suited to the needs of their target audience. As a result, many of such affiliates encounter very huge difficulties deciding on a good product to join and market. A background check and full understanding about what it entails to market such a product including anticipated commissions becomes imperative. A detailed knowledge about available promotional materials for the product, affiliate links, sales pages, buyers’ testimonials and product support services are very important information affiliate marketers must have about a product before they decide on it. Such information helps the Affiliate marketer to evaluate whether or not the product will deliver the promised offer and whether it matches the needs of his target audience.

# 2: Be Well Informed About Your Market

On the internet, information is real power. With adequate information, it is easy to anticipate market changes and to quickly make adjustments in your marketing campaigns. Affiliate marketers who manage to anticipate changes better tend to do better in the business. Therefore, information is not only key, timely information is a better key. The internet is awash with information but you must know how to search for it and to find it. You can rely on major Search Engines like Google to get relevant information about niche markets, keywords searches and audience behaviour. YouTube comes in very handy when marketing videos are at issue.

# 3: Study and Research Your Niche Market

No marketer can afford to serve all audiences. Success largely depends on how closely you can target an audience niche market. The snag here is that many marketers still face huge challenges defining a niche correctly. A conscientious study and research helps to reduce this problem drastically. This requires diligent hard work anyway! Armed with such information, it is possible to accurately profile the audience you are targeting. With that profile, you can then design much more efficient marketing and sales strategies which will have the desired impact on the audience. Therefore, the choice of a niche is best done when you base your decision on market research, competition analysis, demand and trends of the niche market.

# 4: Acquire Professional Tools

Tools, tools, effective online tools are very important in affiliate marketing. Even though there are very many free online tools to aid the business, some are not as efficient as paid tools for obvious reasons. It is therefore advisable to make some investment in more robust and paid tools for better results. Paid professional tools perform much better and you get faster results. That is what justifies the little investment in them.

# 5: Gather Detailed Information about Your Target Audience

Any product an Affiliate chooses to sell must help provide a solution to some problem people face. The only way to know about peoples’ problems is to gather enough information about them to find out. Next is to find products that provide solutions for such problems. It is such products that are more likely to attract real patronage from the target audience. If you do content marketing as a publisher, getting to know your target audience well is the best way to generate valuable content which they will appreciate. As a problem solver, an affiliate succeeds if he/she is able to provide answers to questions and solutions to problems. Only the knowledge of detailed information about the target audience makes that possible.


 
# 6: Learn from Your First Sales

Your first sale is really where your affiliate business actually takes off. Typically, it may be very little but it helps your marketing efforts if you study and understand how and why it came about. Having that information enables you to work better on what works well for your ads campaigns and to discard what doesn’t. Your first sales hugely depend on the potency of your campaign ads and the value your offer delivers. These are the indices you can juggle around with a bit to improve on your results. Thus, when your target audience realizes that as an Affiliate, you have authority and manages to deliver real solutions to their problems, it is only then they are more likely to close a deal with you on your offers.

# 7: Incorporate Video Marketing Early

Videos characteristically guarantee higher click-through rates on most ads, the reason smart marketers incorporate them early enough in their campaigns. Affiliate marketers rely on online videos for well over 80% of their inbound traffic because videos appear to be favorite content of most internet users. Incorporating them early enough in affiliate marketing efforts tends to yield very good results. Online marketing videos are easy to make, short, direct and tend to deliver marketing messages with huge impacts. You can’t afford to ignore them if you want to make real impact in affiliate marketing.