Are you are new to affiliate marketing, and are wondering if it’s possible make a career out of it? Would you like to work for yourself, and have your own hours rather than working in an office for someone?
Affiliate marketing can be a really great way to make money online, because you don’t have to worry about deliveries to customers, or have to worry about customer product support. Your main job is to make sure that you drive online traffic to your vendors, who will pay you a commission for the sales that you’ve referred.
If you want to create your own digital product to promote that’s another great way to create passive income.
If you put in the work to learn how to efficiently drive traffic to your blog then the answer is yes, affiliate marketing can definitely be a career choice for you. There are some great educational resources like Wealthy Affiliate, where you can learn how to do this.
Is Affiliate Marketing Profitable? – How Profitable?
This is an important question, because in any business its important to make sure that your (ROI) Return On Investment is worth the effort that you put in.
In 2022 the affiliate marketing industry is expecting to be worth $8.2 billion in the US alone, and seems to be growing steadily year by year, producing massive opportunities to take advantage of.
Take a look at the Graph below from 2010 to 2022. Source: Statista.com
As affiliate marketers we’re in the business of helping companies sell their products and services, and in turn we are rewarded by getting a commission for our efforts.
At the same time we’re also helping people that are searching on Google for more information on a product or service that they may be interested in. This is where the job of the affiliate marketer comes in, to make sure that the person Googling finds the information that they are looking for.
If written well and you have made the best effort to make sure that your article is optimized for SEO, then the answer is your article will hopefully be at the top of the first page in the search engine. This is where you will want your article to show up because the number 1 spot on Google, or any other search engine will get the most traffic.
It’s also important that your article has a catchy title that stands out, so that its enticing of people to click on your post. There will be many people looking on the internet for more information about the things that they want to buy. If someone finds your article that you have written, makes an educated decision, they may buy the product or service that you are promoting and recommending.
If done with the right way affiliate marketing can be very profitable, and very scalable. There’s no limit to what you can earn with affiliate marketing. There are millions of products and services that you can promote by writing in depth articles about them. It’s all about helping people understand what they are buying, and what is out there to buy!
So How Does It Work?
To get started you can sign up either with individual companies or affiliate networks(which has a basket of companies in one place), where you can look through and choose programs based on your niche that you’re interested in.
Shareasale.com, is an example of an affiliate marketing network and has hundrededs of affiliate partners that you can market for. There will be an approval waiting period just after you apply, but after you are approved then the answer is you are ready to start promoting your affiliate links on your website, on email, social media or many other ways.
Each affiliate marketer gets a unique link assigned to them from which clicks can be tracked. For this they usually use cookies. What the cookie does is it tracks the user to see if they make a purchase.
Depending on the affiliate program that you’re signed up to you will have a limited cookie life. An example would be if a cookie has a 30-day life then the answer is your referral will need to make a purchase within the 30-day period for you to get paid. If the referral is out of the 30-day period then the answer is you don’t qualify for the commission.
Once you have made a certain number of sales then the answer is you can set a minimum payment threshold where you can be paid out by the company that you’re promoting via PayPal, Bank transfers, and checks for example.
Where Do I Need To Start?
When you start your affiliate marketing journey, you will need a few things like a place to host your website, and if you come into problems a great community support system will help a lot.
If you’re not sure where to get started, then the answer is here are important aspects of affiliate marketing, that if you break them down into smaller bit size bits you will on your way much faster.
Choosing A Niche
A niche is something that you can focus on. It’s something that you’re passionate about and may know a lot about it, or want to know more about. Your goal is to become an expert in this area, and become an authority within this niche.
Here are some great niche examples!
Health – Nutrition, Weight loss, Yoga, Fitness, vegetarian
Money – Personal Finance, Crypto currencies, Investing
Hobbies – Travel, outdoors, golf, photography, cycling
Lifestyle – Cars, Private Jets, Houses, Fashion, Jewelry
Home – Furniture, Plants, Security, Home Technology
Tech – Gaming, Web Hosting, Software, Smart Phones, Laptops
By choosing a niche that you become an expert in, shows people reading your articles that you know what you’re talking about. It’s very difficult to be in an expert in many fields, so if you focus on one specific niche you will gain a lot of experience within that field.
This also helps a lot with SEO(Search Engine Optimization) because it shows Google for example that you should know what you’re talking about.
Choose An Affiliate Program
When choosing an affiliate program, you will want them to align with the niche that you have chosen.
You can either sign up for affiliate programs individually by searching Google, or you can sign up to an affiliate network where you can browse through thousands of programs and sign up to them there.
What’s really nice about affiliate networks, is that they will make sure that all the programs within are the best around and have a good reputation.
Share a Sale, Clickbank, Amazon Associates and CJ, are some nice ones to start off with.
Take note of the EPC(Earnings Per Click), and also the commission that is paid out on every successful referral.
At Wealthy Affiliate for example successful referrals could earn you close to 50 percent recurring commissions which is very impressive!
Where Do You Want Your Traffic To Come From?
Your traffic can come from many sources. If you have a website, then the answer is a lot of your traffic will be coming from SEO within Search Engines like Google. You could use Social Media Platforms like FaceBook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn to drive even more traffic to your website!
The most important thing is to reach your target audience, the better you become at this the more profitable your blogging will become.
Creating Regular Quality Content Builds Trust
It’s very important that you make a special effort to create quality content otherwise your readers will probably go somewhere else. It’s also good practice to keep to a schedule because then the answer is viewers of your content will be anticipating your next article, especially when you’re consistent on social media platforms.
Do some research and gauge your competition within a search engine like Google, or any other search engine, to see why their website has ranked on the 1st page of Google.
Grow An Email List
By growing your email list you don’t have to rely on any other social media platforms to contact your readers. You can also add links to emails of posts you have written, so that you don’t have to wait for your article to be indexed. You can simply send out an email to all your contacts and they can access your post immediately.
Communicate And Be Active With Your Audience
It’s all about making your followers and subscribers feel heard, and if you can help them in some way they will keep coming back. It creates trust not only for them, but new people who have never seen your site before will see all the responses and have more trust in your website.
It’s also great for algorithms to determine how to rank your content. When people engage in conversation it will be a positive signal to show your content to more people.
Summary
Affiliate marketing can be a great long term career. It takes a lot of work in the beginning to gain traction, but if done with the right strategy it will take off and you will never look back!
If you are interested in the best all in one training and state of the art hosting platform, where I host all my sites, check out my Wealthy Affiliate Review.
Let me know if you have any further questions.
All the best
Luciano, AdventurousWealth.com