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Affiliate marketing is an online business that is making a wave on the internet of recent. A lot of people are actively involved in affiliate marketing and making a healthy living from it, whereas, a lot of people don’t know what affiliate marketing is all about.
It is said that when you are not informed, you are automatically at a disadvantage. While the few who are informed are making it big on the internet, those that are not informed are complaining that there is no way to make legitimate money online, hence they are at a disadvantage.
This post is going to cover affiliate marketing for beginners. I am going to reveal to you what you need to know about affiliate marketing as a beginner, as well as how to avoid mistakes some affiliate marketers make.
Let’s start with the affiliate marketing basics. This article is going to pay more attention to beginners.
WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?
Affiliating marketing has been in existence for a long time, it is one of the oldest forms of marketing. Affiliate Marketing is a process where the affiliate marketer refers someone to any online product and when that person buys the product, the affiliate marketer that referred the buyer will receive a commission for the product purchased.
The commission the affiliate marketer will receive depends on the owner of the product and the product you are promoting. The commission can vary from as low as $1 to as high as $10000. Affiliate marketing is one the easiest ways of monetizing a website.
Bloggers or website owners implement affiliate marketing into their site to monetize their website. Affiliate marketing is basically a means of promoting products online. It involves signing up with an affiliate marketing network and finding the products that are within your niche.
Once уоu find a product that іѕ wіthin your nісhе, you will get a link for that product with your unique ID built into it. Your job is to promote that link and when someone clicks on your link and buys the item you get a commission for the sale.
Although this sounds ѕіmрlе, there аrе a few things that уоu nееd to knоw bеfоrе уоu gеt ѕtаrtеd.
WHY AFFILIATE MARKETING?
Before we go into the basic guideline you need to follow as a beginner in the business, let us quickly answer the above question.
Affiliate marketing is simply the most lucrative business on the internet because of some of the advantages it carries. One of the biggest advantages that makes it unique is that you don’t have to own any product to promote and make money. You can make your money by selling other merchant’s product.
Another important fact about affiliate marketing is that the affiliate marketer does not need to maintain any stock or worry about the shipment after someone purchases. There is nothing else involved except setting up a professional affiliate marketing site and marketing other people’s products. Sounds great right? Keep reading.
SIMPLE GUIDELINES FOR BEGINNERS IN AFFILIATE MARKETING
As a beginner in affiliate marketing, there are some things you must not overlook. Below are some of the guidelines you need to follow in order to succeed in affiliate marketing.
Choosing Your Affiliate Network:
This category has to do with choosing your affiliate network. The affiliate network is very important in affiliate marketing as it determines the type of product you will be selling. Different affiliate networks have different items which they focus on.
There are affiliate networks that focus mainly on revenue sharing services such as Commission Junction. Some affiliate networks focus on digital products like eBooks and software packages. Example of such affiliate network is ClickBank.
You have to determine what affiliate network is going to fit best into your niche. For іnѕtаnсе, іf уоu’rе running a website that offers advice оn insurance, уоu can uѕе a lеаd based аffіlіаtе network to promote insurance quotes. Some аffіlіаtе networks are known for lаtе payments and other bаd buѕіnеѕѕ рrасtісеѕ ѕо dо your research bеfоrе hand.
Choosing Your Products:
The first challenge some beginners always face in affiliate marketing is choosing the right products to market / promote. Having chosen the affiliate marketing network you desire, the next thing is to research the product you want to promote. This part is very crucial. The product that worked for Mr. A may not work for Mr. B. Find out what your audience needs before you start marketing it.
Once you have a product to promote, the next thing is to find out what people type in the search bar when they are 
looking for the product.
This is called keyword research. Keyword research is very important as it helps your product to be easily ranked and exposed to the right audience to see it. The keyword research tool we use is called Jaaxy where you can research keyword ideas and you will get all the data including how much competition there is for your chosen keyword. You can test out Jaaxy for free!
Create A Website:
Although it is possible to promote your affiliate link online and make money without having a website, I highly recommend if you are serious about building an online business that you set up a website.
Setting up a website is not as hard as you may think. These days it is possible to set up a professional looking website without any technical knowledge. Many companies provide step by step instructions on how to build a website.
Here is our recommendation if you want to set up a website in 30 seconds and do it for FREE… Click Here
Drive Traffic:
Now that you have your website running perfectly well, you need to help people find it by driving traffic to it. There are many methods for driving traffic to your site including:
- Post valuable content on your site that gets ranked high in Google and other search engines
- Post articles to Social Media sites
- Post your articles on Google+
- Post your articles on Linkedin
- Repurpose your articles into audio, video, pdf’s and share on respective sites
- Paid advertising (this is the fastest way to reach a targeted audience, however, we don’t advise this to beginners as it is very easy to lose money unless you know what you are doing)
Above are just a few ways to promote your site and drive traffic to your site. These are many more ways to get traffic however as this article is aimed at beginners I will leave it as this.
Link Cloaking:
For various reasons, many people don’t like to click on affiliate links and prefer to go directly to the main website. Even Google is not too fond of affiliate links so it is better to cloak your affiliate link which also makes it more user-friendly.
For example here is an affiliate link from Amazon for a camera:
I think you will agree this does not look good and is difficult to remember. What you can do is create a more professional, easy to remember link like:
When someone clicks on this link they will be redirected to the Amazon affiliate link.
You can also create a word or sentence and hyperlink it to your affiliate link. For example – “Camera” and hyperlink this to your affiliate link and when someone clicks on “Camera” they will be taken to the product page.
I hope this makes sense and if you have any questions on this leave me a message in the comments section below.
Buy The Product:
There is no other way to reveal the real information about the product or service you are promoting if you have not bought and tested the product. People will definitely come to your website to purchase a particular product, but if you do not give them detailed information and everything they need to know about the product, they are going to leave your site and will probably not come back again.
It is only when you have used the product that you can know the ins and outs of it. Do not try to give broad information about a product or else you are going to be seen as a scammer.
I highly recommend, if possible, buy the product you want to promote and you will be glad that you bought it instead of trying to fake your way through a review to do online marketing for the product.
TERMS ASSOCIATED WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING
As a beginner in affiliate marketing, there are some common terms associated with affiliate marketing that you should know. This knowledge will help you understand affiliate marketing basics and how it works. Below are some of the terms:
Affiliates:
Affiliates are marketers like you, also known as publishers. They use affiliate program links to promote and make sales.
Affiliate Link:
This is a link created for the affiliate marketer by the company offering the affiliate program. The link is used to track the progress of your affiliate promotion.
Affiliate ID:
This is similar to the affiliate link. It is a unique ID created by affiliate programs which you can add to any page of the product site.
Affiliate Software:
This is a software used by companies to create affiliate programs for their products.
Affiliate Marketplace:
Affiliate marketplace is the central database for affiliate programs. Some of the more popular marketplaces include; Clickbank, Amazon, Ali Express, etc.
Affiliate marketing is not something you can start today and start making crazy bucks from it today. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It requires dedication and commitment to succeed as an affiliate marketer. There are a lot of things to learn about internet marketing which when broken down into simple steps, can be achieved with ease.
In this post, I have covered the basic things you need to know and apply as a beginner in order to achieve great success in affiliate marketing.
I hope you enjoyed this post and if you have any questions about Affiliate Marketing or want to leave your own personal review, leave a comment below. I would love to hear from you!
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