If you’re reading this, you likely want to start affiliate marketing. But where do you start?
There are a lot of steps to starting affiliate marketing, but we’ve got you covered. This step-by-step guide will show you how to start affiliate marketing for beginners.
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
The industry has four core players:
the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’), and the customer.Publishers can be either individuals or companies.
Affiliate marketing is most commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer.
However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales
1) Select a Niche
When starting out in affiliate marketing, it’s important to select a niche that you can easily work with and one that has a lot of potential buyers. A niche is simply a group of people with common interests.
For example, if you love shoes, your niche could be fashion, specifically shoes. If you love technology, your niche could be electronic devices or software products. When choosing a niche, it’s important to consider two things:
– How passionate are you about the topic? If you’re not interested in what you’re promoting, it will be difficult to make sales.
– Does this niche have potential buyers? Even if you’re passionate about a topic, if there’s no one interested in buying what you’re selling, it won’t work as an affiliate business.
Once you’ve selected your niche, it’s time to move on to step two!
2) Join an Affiliate Network
Now that you’ve selected your niche, it’s time to join an affiliate network! Joining an affiliate network is important because it gives you access to products that you can promote as an affiliate and also allows companies to track how many sales come from your promotions.
Some popular affiliate networks include:
– Amazon Associates
– Clickbank
– CJ Affiliate by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction)
Once you’ve joined an affiliate network, it’s time for step three!
3) Find Products to Promote
After joining an affiliate network like Amazon Associates or Clickbank, it’s time to find products that you can promote! There are two ways to do this: finding products on your own or being provided with products by companies looking for affiliates. We’ll go over both methods below:
Finding Products on Your Own: This method involves going through the product catalogues of various companies until you find something that fit well with your niche market and would be appealing to your target audience. Once you’ve found a few good products, all that’s left is reaching out to the company and asking if they’d like YOU to promote their product! Being Provided With Products by Companies: The second way of finding products to promote is by having companies approach YOU and ask if YOU’d like to promote their product! This generally happens after companies see that you have a large following in your niche market and believe that YOU could help them sell more units of their product. No matter which method YOU use to find products to promote, once you have a few good products in mind, it’s time for step four!
