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.

How to Improve your Small Business Online Presence with Listings

You can improve online presence for your small business by listing it on popular directories. Even though there are thousands of online directories out there on the internet, if you create listings for your business on the most popular directories, it helps the business to show up in many more places online. In addition, links to your website from popular directories do serve as valuable citations for your business. Google takes these links into consideration when ranking your site and that helps your online presence a great deal.

Here is what you can do if you want to use listings to improve online presence for your small business.

Get Your Business on the Heavy Hitters

It is always advisable for small business owners to target the most popular directories right from the outset. These are the “heavy hitters.” They tend to dominate the top 10 on the SERPs of most search engines. For this reason, many of the smaller directories out there usually aggregate information from these big directories. The big directories get tens of millions of visits per month and your business can benefit from this huge traffic to improve its online presence. Just try out big hitters like, Google-My-Business, GMB (the star-boy of the lot), Facebook, Yelp and Bing. You may also consider Foursquare if you want to take advantage of being included in thousands of local apps and services.
 
Maintain and Monitor your Listings

Thousands of directories across the web do pull information from one another. That can lead to inconsistencies or inaccuracies over time on your listings. You must take deliberate steps to check this because it spells a very bad omen for your online presence. You know why? Most consumers easily lose trust in local businesses if they find out incorrect or inconsistent information in their listings. And you know why? Every business thrives on trust. As much as practicable, you must make out valuable time to maintain and monitor all your listings from time to me. Alternatively, you can use the services of a listing service provider to help you out.

Populate Every Listing Field with Accurate Information

You must be very meticulous about this for obvious reasons. Just like social media feeds and search engine results pages, listing results are determined by algorithms. This means that the quality and consistency of your listing matters a great deal for you to get noticed. All vital information about your business must be listed accurately in the correct boxes or spaces provided. Vital information like your website, business niche/category, hours of business, business address, and contact info and so on are hugely important in your listings. As much as possible, make sure the information you provide is identical across all the listing sites you are using.
 
Make your Review Strategy Proactive

Strategically, reviews have perhaps the most powerful influence over how high you show up in directory results. That is in addition to the fact that they are one of the top ranking factors for Google local search. These are hugely important factors for your online presence. For this reason, there is a need for you to have a proactive strategy in place to keep a steady stream of reviews coming in. The more reviews you get, the higher your business is ranked by search engines and the stronger your online presence becomes. Constantly monitoring your reviews is very crucial because of how important the reviews are for your online presence.

Random Tips to Manage your Business' Reputation on Social Media

If you want to quickly build a reputation for your business, get it on social media. Social media aside from being a very suitable place for your business to post ads and promotions, just as the name applies, it is also one great place to socialize. Because of the huge popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, you can get to quickly build a large community of followers/friends. That becomes a great social media asset for your business. Through it, your followers/friends easily interact and engage with your brand by way of comments, reviews, feedback and asking questions. That helps to enhance your business reputation in no small measure. If you take positive proactive steps to manage your business’ reputation on social media, you can easily build a stronger relationship with your customers through whom you can generate positive word-of-mouth promo for your brand. Here's what you can do. 

Highlight and Promote Positive Reviews

If you market on social media, always keep an eye on reviews and testimonials from any of the platforms you have an account on. What you do with these reviews/testimonials (even if negative), can go a long way to help your online reputation management efforts. You can respond directly to reviews or you use them as user-generated content to build trust and your business reputation. This is because user-generated content is by far more persuasive to potential customers and as a result, does more to establish your reputation better than most other promotional activities. This gets better when you factor in that you can easily share reviews and testimonials very widely on social media platforms. Most digital marketers are aware that a very large percentage of consumers rely on online reviews to make their buy decisions. It is smart social media marketing therefore to always take a proactive approach to reputation management to ensure that you’re making the right impression on these prospective customers. With quality reputation management, business owners take control of the narrative surrounding their brands. Doing so helps them to post such great results that ensure positive actual growths in their businesses.

Respond Promptly to Comments and Reviews

On social media, when brands respond promptly to customer reviews, they send a positive message which demonstrates their commitment to customer service. That helps brands to create a positive image, more so when such responses relate to negative reviews. A positive, personalized response to reviews goes a long way to shape a positive narrative for the brand. This is more so when you factor in that social platforms are often where customers go to share their experiences with brands. If these customers leave reviews, a prompt response is imperative, to enhance your business reputation. As a business owner, if you give a positive response that adequately addresses your customer’s concern or complaints, it clearly demonstrates to others who might read the review that your brand takes customer service seriously. Doing so helps your business reputation positively thereby avoiding losing good customers unnecessarily in the bargain.

Diligently Track all Conversations about Your Brand

Every second, every hour, every day, countless conversations are taking place on social media. It is always a very huge challenge for most businesses to decipher which of these conversations relate directly to their brands. How then can you find the conversations that relate to your brand? Simple, through diligent tracking! Doing this manually however is a very daunting task. Online social listening tools help businesses to solve this problem. By using these tools effectively, it is pretty difficult for businesses to miss out on any online conversation involving their brands. Online social listening tools like HootSuite help businesses to track branded keywords even if such brands are not tagged by name. With these tools, business owners do not need to search through social media manually (even if that is feasible), since the tools provide direct notifications when a conversation about your brand is taking place on social media platforms. This allows business owners to easily gauge the overall sentiment surrounding their brands on social media. It provides them great opportunities to step up and engage directly with customers. A move that no doubt helps their business’ reputations a great deal!

Effective Ecommerce Website Marketing Tactics

If you have an Ecommerce website, you must promote it to get good business. First is to decide on credible and effective ways to promote the website. This requires the use of the right digital techniques/tactics to drive sales. The effectiveness of these techniques/tactics depends on how well you are able to use them and for what purpose. For these techniques/tactics to be of help to your business, below is what they must be able to do and do affectively well to drive more sales to your Ecommerce shop. They must be able to:

• Nurture your website visitors into subscribers and the subscribers into Customers
• Get prospects back to your website through remarketing
• Grow your Email list
• Create a series of style or how-to Videos
• Capture abandoned shopping carts with an exit-intent pop-up
• Send shopping cart abandonment Emails
• Work with Influencers in your Niche
• Create highly valuable and informative blog Posts
• Create downloadable Offers
• Host giveaway Events
• Create Pinterest-specific Images
• Upsell and Downsell with every opportunity
• Send Wishlist reminders
• Ask customers for Reviews  
• Place such reviews strategically
• Generously share user-generated Content
• Create great power posts for the benefit of onsite SEO

Doing these things well and consistently will not only make your Ecommerce store highly visible, the site will as a direct consequence also benefit from good traffic, leads and sales. Why not get your hands on the plough now and give them a try?

5 Business-Boosting Digital Marketing Tips

No matter how experienced you are in digital marketing business, you still need digital marketing tips to boost your business. Digital marketing is an ever-evolving business in tandem with the deepening of the internet and the advancement in digital technologies. Some new strategies and tactics still emerge from time to time that serious digital marketers must keep abreast with. Digital marketers always look for great opportunities to boost their businesses. Some of these ways include changing their business models, marketing strategies, and adapting their businesses to the changes in consumer-behavior and shopping.

These here, digital marketing tips and tricks, are very handy in all these.

1. Have a Marketing Plan

You cannot have a good traction in digital marketing without a plan. Without a good plan, you may end up expending valuable time and money into marketing strategies that may not deliver good results. First, you must spare time to draft a detailed marketing plan to drive your business forward. This plan will emanate from a thorough market research of your business niche, your competition, challenges, opportunities, environmental threats, and changing technologies particularly Artificial Intelligence, AI, the economy and consumer behavior. The comprehensive insights gleaned from these sources will help you to design and build a strategic plan to meet your marketing goals.

2. Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing may be “old school” marketing strategy but it is still hugely effective. To derive maximum benefit from email marketing, you must first build a credible email list over time. With the list in place, you can begin to send regular emails to the segmented list to boost your business. Doing so allows a marketer to target specific subscribers with communication they’ll find valuable. Such messages elicit better responses/results from the email subscribers. Even if you are looking to promote a new product/service or you are running a promo/competition, or even if you are just creating useful content for your customers, an email campaign helps you to reach your goals better and faster than many other digital marketing methods.

3. Create a Captivating Landing Page

The landing page of your website is the first port of call where online surfers first come in contact with your business. That is why it must be attractive and captivating enough to arrest their attention. What your landing page looks like is usually a key element of your digital marketing strategy. For this reason, marketers must ensure the landing pages of their websites contain very strong headlines, interesting GIFs, attractive products photos, a CTA, Call-To-Action button and a content body that strongly motivates visitors to make a purchase. It is with such an engaging and enticing landing page that allows the marketer to make better impact and sell well online.

4. Invite Testimonials/Reviews

Many digital marketers now know that there is a very strong correlation between the number of positive reviews and sales. The reason they can no longer afford to underestimate the power of recommendations to boost business. Reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers act in many ways to support the quality and suitability of products on sale to prospective buyers. Many buyers even make their buy decisions based on product reviews. It is smart marketing therefore, to if convenient, directly invite reviews after making a sale. Doing so helps marketers in very many beneficial ways to boost their businesses because products with positive reviews usually outperform products lacking reviews. Good reviews must however not be forced out of, or coerced from customers. It should always be a voluntary and free will thing.

5. Take Advantage of Social Media

Because of the huge popularity of social media, it has become a very effective tool for marketing businesses no matter the size of the business. Social media marketing is cheap, affordable, and easy to use for most digital marketers. You can directly target specific demographics with promos and campaigns on social media. Marketing info on social media can easily go viral within a very short while.  If you effectively combine social media and other digital strategies in your marketing plan, the results can be very quick and hugely encouraging. What matters most however if you want to market on social media is to be sure to always create valuable content for sharing on a consistent basis. If posting valuable content on social media frequently is too demanding on your time, you can take advantage of automation tools to help save time. These tools can release your posts at programmed scheduled intervals. Some of these automation tools can also provide key marketing metrics that help you to improve on the performance of your promotional efforts.

Best Content Types for Affiliate Marketing

Content marketing and affiliate marketing are gradually becoming completely interwoven. They depend heavily on each other to get the desired results online even though not all types of content go well with affiliate marketing. Experience has shown that news website and gossip blogs do struggle to succeed with affiliate marketing. The reason for that is simple to discern. It is only targeted content that gets the best results in attracting the right visitors. When such content is evergreen, it becomes an icing on the cake. Everyone wants information on how to get things done. If you have a content which deals with that effectively, you get better results with it.


 
Here now are 4 main issues your content should address to make it useful for Affiliate Marketing:

01. Product Reviews

When reviewing a product, what you must try to do for your readers is to share the features of the product or service with them as best you can. This you can do by writing about the good qualities of a product you use and how useful it is to solve your problems. You can balance that by highlighting what you like and hate about the product or service, not forgetting to include links to your affiliate marketing partners where interested visitors can buy the product or service if they so decide.

02. Useful Tips

Everyone wants information on how a particular product or service can help solve their problems. Useful tips in that direction are always loved by visitors to your site. If your content shows knowledge and expertise, people will get to appreciate your tips and recommendations about a product or service. When authority speaks, people generally listen and appreciate.

03. How Tos

The main task before you as an affiliate marketer is to identify the best products offered by your affiliate marketing partners which you have enough knowledge about to promote. With that knowledge, you can craft your content in such a way as to show how such products really help in solving certain problems then recommend the products with your content. Show how the product can be used and how it can help out in solving identified problems. This is best done by identifying a problem in your niche and providing a detailed solution on how to solve it. To solve the problem, you then recommend certain products and services that may be required.

04. Comparison

Buyers always rely on their inalienable right to decide on their own choices. A good comparison of two or more problems gives the information they need to help their decisions. A good content must include such information. If such content is really able to highlight the pros and cons of each product or service, adding links of the products or services from your affiliate marketing partners where the products and service can be obtained is good for the business of affiliate marketing.