1. Decide on a Niche: A niche is where you can establish your marketing identity so you must carefully decide on it. The products you market must belong to a niche that you like yourself, making sure it is a place people like to spend their money. You can decide to market sports wears, vitamins and natural health supplements, travel and hospitality and such popular niches where people love to spend their money.
2. Do Diligent Research: With the help of keyword search tools such as WordTracker or SEObook, you can do some diligent research to find out the products people are actively searching for and with what keywords. You can find out how many people are searching using particular keywords. That is the information that allows you to know if what you are selling is on demand and from where. After identifying the right keywords/phrases, you can go to Google to search with the keywords/phrases. Google will throw up for you most of the sites using the same keywords/phrases and by direct implication, the sites you will be competing with when marketing your products. If the niche is not too crowded, your chances of making money from the niche are greatly enhanced. After identifying your competitors, you can “spy” on their marketing to know what ads they use and how they use them. If these sites display many Google ads, it is a sure sign that they are marketing in a money-making niche.
3. Start a Blog: Among digital marketers, the commonest content marketing strategy is blogging. Most marketers are into blogging to attract traffic to their blog sites. It is a direct way to lure internet users to notice the products they sell as well as the affiliate links in their content. If you don’t already have a blog, it is easy to set up a free blog on Blogger, Wix, WordPress and suchlike free blogging platforms. As you consistently create high quality and informative blog content, you attract more and more traffic to your blog and the blog audience grows as well. As the interest in your blog grows and starts to get more readers attention, your marketing begins when you add some affiliate links or banners to the products you are marketing.
4. Write and Submit Quality Articles: Articles marketing is another great way to put out your content in popular Article Directories to attract traffic to your website. If you are up to it, you can start writing quality articles related to your niche and submit to top Article Directories like EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com and the likes. These directories allow you an Author Resource Box where you can create a strong Call-to-Action, CTA and leave your affiliate links for readers. With that, you can manage to get some click-throughs to your site. That translates to good traffic.
Final Thoughts
Affiliate marketing is quite a simple business model, but you must know what you are doing and why you are doing what you are doing to make money from the business. Once you understand and get the hang of the basics, making money follows from there. You need diligence and a bit of hard work particularly at the outset. Once you get started and stay the course, you’ll make money too.
