Best Practices to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

For most digital marketers, the commonest way to make money online is affiliate marketing. The strategy is really quite popular amongst online marketers. However, for most people who really want to make money online, numerous suggestions and recommendations available out there about the business tend to be overwhelming. Depending on who is behind the content, every blog post you read, every forum you visit gives you different ideas and methods for affiliate marketing that supposedly work. You can even get distracted or scammed online if you are not careful. If you are interested in the business and you don’t have an idea how to start, find below some simplified information and steps that can help you get started.

 
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.

5 Easy Steps to Make Money Online Working from Home

These days, most people like to work at home but not many get to make real money doing so. Affiliate programs are the real attractions for those who like to work at home. Many even give up their 9-5 jobs to become full time affiliates because of the convenience and ease of making money in affiliate marketing. Even though there are many affiliate programs on the internet, deciding on which to join requires due diligence and recommendations from successful affiliate marketers. The reputation of every affiliate program matters a lot because there are also many scam businesses online masquerading as affiliate programs. If you join any good one, such as Strong Future International, SFI, ClickBank, Amazon, eBay and the likes, they help you start off pretty quickly and you start making money almost immediately. However, it is good to know that affiliate programs are not get-rich-quick programs. Making money from affiliate programs requires careful consideration, due diligence and hard work. By taking the following steps to get involved in a good affiliate program, you can make money and turn a good profit with time if you work hard at it.

1. Design a Website: For most affiliate marketers, designing a website is usually the first step in affiliate marketing. A well designed website is a great business window on the internet. Marketing the website is where the real hard work begins and the internet is the market place. For effective marketing on the internet therefore, your well-designed website needs to be search engine optimized. That is what makes it to become highly visible to internet traffic. Habitually, internet users search for information through search engines. If your website is well optimized, it makes it easy for internet searchers to find it since optimization has made it visible to internet visitors. Online searchers who rely heavily on search engines to get what they are looking for constitute the organic traffic coming over to the website. That is the real traffic that benefits and enhances your affiliate marketing business.

2. Promote the Website: You promote a website to attract traffic to the website. As an affiliate, you need specialized knowledge about SEO to get it done. The overall aim is to ensure the site is ranked high in the SERPs of search engines. If the ranking is high, it gets more and better organic traffic which is good for your affiliate marketing business. Ranking high on SERPs requires varied marketing strategies to achieve. If you have the technical knowledge, you can undertake SEO on your website yourself through the deft use of special keywords on your content. If not, you can hire the services of professional webmasters to get it done. If properly done, it can help online searchers to locate your website and what you are selling much more easily. Any advertisement you place on the website should entice online visitors to click and reach the product page you are advertising. If the webpage has enough information about the product, it serves as a great incentive for the visitor to take positive action and even to return to the page later.

3. Join a Reputable Affiliate Program: Care and due diligence is required here because there are very many scam affiliate programs on the internet. The choice of a good affiliate program in the mold of Strong Future International, SFI, ClickBank, Amazon and eBay is the next very important consideration if you want to make money from your affiliate business. The advantage of joining popular and reputable affiliate programs is to hit the ground running real quick. These programs help you to start seamlessly, provide you a sound support system, good training and in-house marketing tools to promote your business. Some even provide you your own customized website to enhance your marketing efforts, all at no cost. Above all, they arrange to have all your commissions accurately calculated and paid to you as and when due.

4. Read and Understand the Affiliate Policy: To make it easy for you to start quickly, make marketing easier for you, some affiliate programs make customized websites available to their affiliates at no cost. These websites are ready-to-use websites that are plugged into a network to enable the affiliate commence marketing activities as soon as they join the program. This is as a result of some intricate business relationship and policy requirements. So, you must make sure you read and understand the affiliate policy of any affiliate program before joining. It is important you do so because most of these huge affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI for instance usually have duplicate standard websites for all their affiliates who may be in their hundreds of thousands. A good affiliate policy is what helps to keep these large numbers of affiliates in line and well provided for.

5. Check out the Commission Payment Policy: If you are in affiliate marketing to make money, you cannot afford to ignore the commission payment policy of any affiliate program. Commission payment is a very vital consideration for joining any affiliate program. Therefore, before becoming an affiliate, it is of paramount importance to know the payment policies of the affiliate program. You can easily find out if the commission they pay can give you a good income as an affiliate. Find out the pay-out intervals and at what percentages. Usually, most affiliate programs have a pay policy of weekly or monthly on a percentage of 5-50% of sales generated depending on the products. Make sure there is a sound tracking system in place to track sales accurately. If there is no sound tracking system in place, there is always the possibility that the affiliate may not get the deserved commission since there will be no sound accounting system for the accurate numbers of customers referred. The better the tracking and accounting system, the better the affiliate program is. Since you are in the business to make money, poor tracking and accounting can jeopardize that desire.