How to Start Affiliate Marketing With Zero Budget

Affiliate marketing is simply a great way to earn additional income stream online. It mainly entails actively promoting products from product merchants and earning a commission for your efforts. Affiliates do this by directing consumers through affiliate links to the websites of products merchants. They earn a commission when someone they refer purchases something or completes a desired action, such as joining a service or email list. The commission affiliates earn is directly related to the efforts they put in to promote products online. So, there are practically no limits to the commissions an affiliate can earn. The icing on the cake is that you can start affiliate marketing and do pretty well even with zero marketing budgets. For this reason, even if you are still skeptical at the moment, you can actually start affiliate marketing today with no money down if you diligently use the following strategies.

Carefully Choose an Affiliate Platform

In addition to promoting products from your own blog, you can apply to promote out of very popular and reputable affiliate networks. Aside from the fact that these platforms are free to join, many of the programs are always actively looking for publishers who can promote their products effectively. You can take quality time to diligently search for affiliate products on these top affiliate networks before you choose products to promote.
FlexOffers
Amazon Associates
Shopify
ClickBank
CJ Affiliate
ShareASale
There are many more affiliate programs available online besides the ones just listed above. You can research well and make your own choices bearing in mind your niche, the products you know and are passionate about and what your audience is likely to patronize. If you carefully choose a niche and products that appeal to you are your audience to market, you are in business.

Free Blogging

Blogging is a very viable content marketing strategy to market your affiliate products. But first, you must be able to post quality content regularly with a view to building a good following/audience. Next is to establish credibility for your blog by making its online presence strong. You can then follow up by positively engaging your blog readers to click on your affiliate links. You can even blog for free on free platforms like Blogger, Quora and Hubpages. However, irrespective of whatever blogging platform you decide to use, producing high-quality content within your niche is of utmost importance. If you focus your blog on product reviews, tutorials, how-tos, tips and tricks and Q&As, your blog will attract a lot of curiosity from your readers. That way, you can generate a lot of traffic to your affiliate links even if you blog on the free blogging platforms.

Carefully Choose Your Niche

If you want to succeed easily in affiliate marketing, you must first establish yourself firmly within a niche. It is all a matter of deliberate choices though. Expert marketers recommend that the best niche to work in is one that you are both passionate and knowledgeable about. After choosing a niche, you can easily determine which brands and products to promote. The niche you choose for your affiliate site directly ignites your passion to put in more efforts in your marketing up to a point where you begin to see good SEO results in terms of organic traffic. The trick is to deliberately choose a niche in untapped areas with less competition. Next is to learn who and what your audience likes with the use of affiliate marketing tools like social listening tools, website analytics, and social media insights as you post more quality content. Never lose sight of the fact that nobody pays you to create and post content. It is what the content you create and post does thereafter that helps you to earn commissions. The content you post directly influences your performance since every affiliate program is a performance-based marketing system. If you happen to know what products your audience wants and enjoys, you can recommend more of such affiliate products to them. That ultimately helps to bolster your earnings.

Join Your Audience’s Conversations

You can join the conversations of your audience organically and get to interact and know them better. The reason is simple. If you know your audience well enough, you can market to them more effectively. If you actively join these conversations by commenting with affiliate links you benefit from clicks on the links. So, you may want to leave these comments where your audience hangs out, whether on social media, message boards, or forums. These comments only work well when the audience is discussing topics related your niche, your content or the products you are promoting. They obviously won’t work as well when the discussions are unrelated. You must however avoid spam messages in such discussions. If you engage in spam techniques in your discussions, you risk getting kicked off most platforms for rules violations.

Leave Glowing Reviews

If you habitually appreciate others, they remember you. Reviewing a product or brand positively is at the heart of affiliate marketing and the product merchants never fail to notice that. You can always take advantage of that by leaving positive reviews on review platforms while not forgetting your affiliate links in the process. If you are consistent and positive in your reviewing process, readers will start to notice and trust your input the more. However, it is very important to always give honest reviews/feedback particularly on products you have personally experienced. Make sure to leave these reviews on review-style websites or the review section of a product website. If as you leave comments you promote your affiliate links as well, you can also steer other users to your original content, such as your blog or eCommerce store.
 
Final Words

As can be gleaned from the foregoing, it is possible to start affiliate marketing without making a huge investment to get started. What you really need most at the outset is your time, effort, and consistency. These can get you off the starting blocks but when you begin to earn income from the business, you may decide to reinvest some of your earnings to expand the business. It is about this time you can decide to use paid strategies like PPC ads and some investment in marketing software and tools. Until you start making money, you can depend on the foregoing strategies to start affiliate marketing even with no money down.

5 Tips to Optimize Your Affiliate Commissions

Technically, affiliate marketing involves procuring a commission by promoting the product of a product merchant. It is some sort of adaptation business model where an affiliate is compensated with a commission as pay-out for instigating a particular outcome to the products of a product merchant. In most cases, that outcome is a sale. So, any achievements made by affiliates usually come from the work they do which directly impacts the sale of products. Affiliate compensation is directly related to the work they put in to promote products for merchants. This compensation comes by way of commissions. Therefore, in affiliate marketing, affiliates can boost their earnings by boosting their promotional efforts.

 
Here are some great tips that can help you to achieve this.

1. Choose the Right Products

Unarguably, choosing the right product to market can help you to be a good affiliate and to boost your commissions. In choosing a product, never act on mere impulse. Consider the niche of the product, its relevance and the demand for it. Personal experience is a good guide here. Let your choices center on products you know and love, and are essential for your audience as well. The more pertinent the products are, the more relevant they are. It is almost a certainty that when the products you promote are relevant to your audience, they attract clicks on your links from the audience. More clicks can generate leads and eventual sales.
 
2. Market on Social Media

Social media with presently over 4.5 billion active users is one great place for affiliate marketing. The most popular of the platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest Instagram and others are particularly recommended. If you talk about any affiliate product on these social media platforms, you get a good response. You can for instance freely discuss why you love a product and link back utilizing your affiliate link. You can even make pins on Pinterest that link directly to the product utilizing your affiliate link. Good responses/reactions usually follow from there.

3. Always Provide the Right Info

Yes, it is info that sells products. The more relevant the info is to the product, the higher the chances of selling it. Part of this info is to provide solid data about the product. People need data that assists them with finding out about products. This data helps them to make informed decisions about the products. To provide the right info, many affiliates do give product reviews, guides, and correlations to assist their marketing efforts.

4. Add Affiliate Links to Email Bulletins

Your marketing efforts can get a boost if you add an affiliate ad to the regular bulletins you send to prospects by email. Depending on the product you are marketing and your bulletin type, you can decide for yourself the best parts of the bulletin to add your links. You need adequate care here because some affiliate programs usually don’t permit ads through email as it contravenes their in-house principles/rules.

5. Market with Videos

Videos are very effective affiliate marketing tools particularly when deployed in appropriate channels like YouTube. If you do the recordings yourself, and incorporate affiliate links, the results are great. Such videos can become an incredible method for advancing your brand/products in a useful and supportive manner for your audience. Relevance to the needs of your audience is what matters most in video marketing. You can for instance explore this relevance in the following ways.

1.    Making an instructional exercise for your product or its administration.
2.    Highlighting the product or its administration for users to get more information on a point you’re recording.
3.    Composing a review of the product or its administration.
4.    Showing in the background of the product or its administration.
5.    Making a general intro about the product.
6.    Making some sort of instructional manual on how to use the product.

Top Social Media Blunders to Avoid

These days, nearly everyone is on social media but not everyone does the right things with social media. You’ve got to do the right things on social media to get the right results. Those right things include social media planning. You’ve got to plan out your social media campaigns to avoid making avoidable mistakes on the platforms. With some patience and a willingness to learn, social media can take you a long way in your marketing campaigns.


 
To succeed on social media and make it real good, you’ve got to pay particular attention to the following common mistakes.

#1. Not engaging sufficiently with your readers
 
On social media, the people you interact are the key to your marketing success. If you are not sufficiently engaging with them, your business is the loser. Responding to comments and inquiries in a very prompt manner is highly effective at building engagement with your social media page.

#2. Demanding that your readers share your page

This is a no no! Your readers must have sufficient motivation to share your content on their own volition and not by your asking them to do so. Asking users to share your info without providing relevant motivation for them to do so does not work. If your users don’t have good reasons to share your content, they simply won’t.

#3. Not sufficiently luring engagement

It pays all parties to engage sufficiently on social media. Many users will not act unless you lure them to. You do need to lure users to engage with your profile by offering them incentives and asking them to participate. It is best to give them great ways to do so. Such ways must be motivating enough to wear down resistance.

#4. Not daring and experimenting enough

You may need to experiment a little to find out what works for you on your
profile. Be willing to do this often as you are not alone. Everyone is doing virtually the same things out there on social media. It is not how you do it that matters most. What matters is results and nothing else.

#5. Not attaching high value to your account

Many people do not realize that their social media accounts are very valuable assets for their marketing campaigns. Many see these accounts as mere play stations. If you want to be a great marketer, you must attach very high premiums to your social media accounts.  For good marketers, social media isn’t something to leave to chance or be done half-heartedly. It is best approached with all business seriousness. If you don’t, you lose out big time.

#6. Not detailing your profile

Your social media profile is your main front office attraction. It pays to fill it out in great and attractive details. Failing to do it adequately and professionally can hurt your campaigns. Experts recommend that you’ve got fill-out your profile with needed info about you, photos, keywords, and other posts because they help to get the best results. 


 
#7. Not posting often

Regular and fresh content is good for SEO in your social media accounts. Periodically updating your profile gives you better algorithm standing and helps users to find you online. The easier it is for them to find you, the better for your marketing campaigns.

#8. Relying only on ads to boost traffic

Experts advise the use of all available means to get traffic to your site not by just great ads alone. It is an error to rely on ads alone to get traffic since there are other traffic boosting methods which can even be much more efficient than ads to get traffic. You’ve got to focus on building better search engine optimization, SEO using the right SEO techniques and keywords to build organic traffic to your profile. That is more reliable on the long run than relying solely on ads to attract traffic.

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.

 

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.

 

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Spend More Time Promoting Content than Creating it

As most bloggers know, quality and consistency are more important than quantity when it comes to content. Such good content takes time and other valuable resources to create. Even if you spend time creating very good content and people don’t get to know about it, you are simply wasting valuable time and efforts. That is where content promotion comes into the mix. Many experts believe from practice and experience that it is best to “spend 20% of your time creating new content and 80% of your time promoting it.”

If you blog, no doubt you are aware that writing and publishing content is very time-consuming. It does not end there. You must explore credible ways to get your blog out there for readers to find fairly easily. It is imperative therefore for you to find the best outlets to share and promote all the content you worked so hard to create. That is a logical expectation but sadly, not many bloggers explore this strategy to the fullest. It helps to know what social media or content-sharing platforms your targeted audience can be found. Google search techniques come in very handy here.  With it, you can get to know your target buyers’ online habits. That information will enable you to develop a potent strategy to reach them on the social media platforms they can be found in record numbers. A focused content promotion strategy will help you work smarter, not harder. You get better results that way.
 

Best Marketing Methods Suitable for New PSAs

As a good Sponsor or Team Leader, you should always recommend to your new PSAs all the marketing methods you have been using and you know are effective in SFI business. Let them know that the marketing methods you are recommending are the ones you can vouch for from your own experience. That gives some measure of credibility which can easily sway your new PSAs to take your advice. 

 
Arising from the above and in my own experience, I at all times recommend to my new PSAs to endeavor to use SFI marketing tools as provided free for all affiliates in the following link:

https://www.sfimg.com/Resources/MarketingCenter?form=MarketingMethods

On this link, SFI is magnanimous enough to have made available about 94 marketing methods free for all affiliates to use as they deem fit. Some of these methods come by way of:

- Promoting the affiliate’s Gateway.
- Promoting TripleClicks URL.
- Promoting the URL of individual products.
- Text ads campaigns.
- Banner ads campaigns.
- Promoting products for sale in Social Media.
- Email blasts campaigns.
- SFI, TC Gift Cards.
- SFI TC X-Cards.
- And many others. 


 
Your new affiliates should be well advised to use these methods as they have proven over time to be very effective in SFI business. When the PSAs become experienced in the business, they can then be at liberty to modify some of these methods for their own exclusive use. They can also combine some of these methods for use to give maximum effects to their marketing efforts.

I hope this information helps? Best of luck in your marketing efforts!!!

What to Do on Daily Basis to Promote Your SFI Business

SFI business is a daily and continuous business. Once you take time to learn the fundamentals, everything becomes routine and easier on daily basis. For me, I do the following daily without fail to promote my business.

1. Post the links of items I am promoting for sale at TripleClicks in my Social Media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.
2. Check and review my advertising campaigns on Free ads and Paid ads.
3. Work on and post new articles on my blog and website.
4. Review and Revise my ads as necessary to increase performance.
5. Send out more E-cards and emails promoting my business.
6. Track and analyze my ad activities from my Hit Tracking results.
7. Read SFI daily tips, deploy immediately those tips relating to promotion.
8. Find out what is new at the forum and Ask Sc as related to business promotion.
9. Follow-up prospects I have been working on.
10. Help my downline to do these same things.
11. Do any other activities which may crop up to promote my business but may not necessarily be routine. 

Which is the Best SFI Gateway to Use?

From my own experience, all SFI Gateways if used as prescribed are very effective depending on where and how you are promoting your business. It is therefore very difficult to say categorically which is best. However, taking a very close look particularly as an affiliate for nearly two years now, the “first” Gateway on this link, http://www.sfi4.com/xxxxxxxx/first appears to have a lot going for it for the following reasons. 


 
1. It is highly Search Engine friendly and turns up easily in search results.
2. A click on it opens up a highly effective message right away.
3. Its address bar on your computer invites you to “start a second income with SFI.”
4. The main page tells you that SFI is a company which is “first” with Internet entrepreneurs.
5. It displays to the very second pictures and numbers updates about all new affiliates joining SFI all over the world.
6. Top left corner tells you that in SFI “we aim high, dream big.”
7. The color combination in the page is very attractive and captivating.
8. On same page, you see a brief historical update of SFI as a successful company.
9. The invitation to join FREE is simple, easy to use and irresistible.
10. The page layout is a masterpiece in web page building.
11. Above all, it is result-oriented and it actually yields good results.

These are some of the reasons why I tend to think that the “first” Gateway is best to use while promoting your SFI business.