Affiliate Marketing: 7 Proven Ways That Work

There is no doubt that everyone dreams to be involved in the billion-dollar business. Especially, if you will have an opportunity to make money working at home.

Fortunately, this type of business exists. It is called affiliate marketing.

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In this guide, you will get familiar with seven proven ways on how to run an affiliate marketing business and make money on a daily basis.

Let’s start!

A Few Words About the Basics of Affiliate Marketing

If you know nothing about affiliate marketing, you should understand the basics first.

Affiliate marketing is the activity that is built on promoting various services or products and getting money from the commissions. In other words, you become a salesperson for different companies and if some people buy the products with the help of your promotion, you will get money.

Affiliate marketing has a few benefits – you can work with different companies at the same time and there is no limit for your income.

How does it work?

For example, you have already found an affiliate program and made a deal with some company to promote the service or product it offers. A representative of this company gives you a unique link that aims to track all the sale operations using the cookies.

Furthermore, the “cookie” file helps the merchant to attribute the sale back to the right person + it holds an expiration date that means you can get a payment if there was some delay in purchasing.

Now, let’s see the exact steps on how to run your first affiliate marketing program.

7 Steps to Run Your First Affiliate Marketing Campaign

Let’s imagine that you have just decided to start your affiliate marketing business and you need to run your first campaign. Where to start?

Follow these seven tips that would be your guideline in this journey.

1. Platform

Any affiliate program could be run on different platforms – starting with social media channels ending with a blog. As you can see, this affiliate marketer has submitted an affiliate link on Instagram:

Nevertheless, the practice shows that most of the affiliate marketers prefer to do their business on private blogs or by having a YouTube channel.

Let’s review each of these platforms.

When you run your affiliate marketing campaigns on your blog, you must work hard on keeping the blog optimized. If your blog isn’t high-authoritative, you will have fewer chances that your content with affiliate links will be noticed by a target audience. Therefore, you must work on link-building and create high-quality content.

YouTube allows you to run your affiliate programs completely free. The only thing that you need to do is to create a channel and upload videos. Plus, add links to your video descriptions:

If you add affiliate links in your, you must never shy away from this fact. Elsewise, you will bend the rules of the Federal Trade Commission.

2. Niche

Before you start running any affiliate marketing campaign, you must choose a niche you want to move.

Don’t draw your attention to the niches that have a high level of competition. You should better start with some less-competitive niche and target the topics that belong to a specific category.

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For instance, if you decided to target the topic “sportswear” – it would be hard for you to compete in this area. However, if you narrow down your focus and stop on the “shoelaces” topic, you will have more chances to succeed.

Try to target the more specific topics and you’ll go far.

3. Choose Affiliate Program

Choosing a desirable affiliate program is conditioned by three categories:

• Low-paying, high-volume affiliate programs

The first category includes the products with a mass appeal but a low level of commissions. Amazon affiliate marketers prefer this program.

Let’s presume, you have a YouTube channel that suggests guitar reviews. When you’re reviewing a certain guitar, you can add an affiliate link that leads to Amazone where your target audience could purchase this guitar:

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This bass guitar costs $105.99. Since you are a part of an Amazon affiliate program, you will get 10% commissions. To sim up, your income will be $10.6 for selling this instrument.

• High-paying, low-volume affiliate programs

If your pockets are full of money, this category is for you. Keep in mind that you will deal with the products with the highest level of payouts but a limited number of buyers.

• High-paying, high-volume affiliate programs

This category is a cherry on the cake for every affiliate marketer with the experience. You should know that this program suggests products with a mass appeal and a high level of commissions. Consequently, any affiliate marketer wants to be a part of it.

4. Content

You need to create high-quality content and add affiliate links along the way. But keep in mind that these links shouldn’t have a sales intent.

The purpose of your content is to help your target audience find solutions to the problems people have. Therefore, if your affiliate link suggests the best solution to the existing problem, it will get the clicks for sure.

What’s more important, you must know the products or services you’re promoting personally. For instance, if you promote some haircare product – you must test it by yourself beforehand.

One of the best ways to do affiliate content marketing is by creating product reviews.

5. Traffic

If your content brings no traffic, it makes no sense at all. You must realize that if your blog doesn’t generate traffic, your affiliate links won’t be noticed by your target audience.

Consequently, you should use different techniques to drive traffic to your blog by creating content. There are three ways that will help you out:

• Optimize your content

When you optimize your content with the help of SEO, it increases the rankings of your pages in SERP. These high rankings will help you get free organic passive traffic.

Content optimization includes doing in-depth keyword research and understanding your audience’s needs.

• Pay for traffic

If you want to get high-quality and targeted traffic to your website quickly, you should use PPC ads. However, when you stop paying for PPC ads, the traffic starts to fade away drastically.

• Build an email list

It is strictly important to be in good relationships with your target audience. By building an email list, you will get a wonderful opportunity to share your content with your audience directly.

You can collect emails by adding a “sign-up” form on your blog:

6. Get More Link “Clicks”

Sometimes you can be surprised by the fact that nobody clicks on your affiliate links even if your content is awesome.

Likely, you can change the situation in a better way by following these three tips:

• Place links correctly

When you’re placing affiliate links in the post, you should understand that your piece of content might not be read from A to Z. Hence, don’t place the links at the end of the text – they might be not noticed at all. And don’t add them at the beginning of the post. It might look like spam. 

• Make sure the affiliate links align with the context

For example, you are running an affiliate program that deals with promoting some music equipment. You have your channel on YouTube and you’ve recorded a video on “top 3 bass guitars for metalheads”. In this video, you’re talking about these basses, about technical aspects, and demonstrate how they sound.

In your video description, you should include a brief outline of what your target audience will see in the video and you should add all the affiliate links.

• CTA

Call-to-action is an important element of your promotional strategy. It helps you force your target audience to click on your affiliate links. Therefore, it makes sense to create CTAs of different variations like buttons, boxes, etc.

7. Affiliate Links Must Be Converted Into Sales

The purpose of affiliate marketing is to do everything possible to make people click on your affiliate links and buy products. Basically, the whole idea behind any of your affiliate marketing campaigns is to make more conversions.

Conversion could be split into two stages – click on an affiliate link and a product purchasing.

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Your part of the game is only the first stage – make people click on a link. Whereas, a merchant is fully responsible for the conversion stage.

Remember that the level of your income depends on the exact affiliate program you have signed a contract. Hence, to find a good affiliate program, you should follow these pieces of advice:

• Review public income reports

Go to Google and search for an income report you would like to get information on. Let’s say, you’ve chosen an affiliate program that is connected with Amazon. Review the reports and find out how much money you will be able to make:

• Show your interest to this business

If you can’t find the reports you need, keep your chin up. You can always reach out to an affiliate program department of the company you are interested in and put your questions.

Conclusion

Doing affiliate marketing is a way of wealth accumulation. You can make lots of money with this type of business but you will have to work hard and invest your time.

Nobody says that you’ll hit the jackpot in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. It is a long-term game that doesn’t give you a guarantee that you’ll succeed.

Notwithstanding this fact, now you have a step-by-step guide on how to start your first affiliate marketing campaign.

Follow these tips and you’ll go far!

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