by Rahimah Sultan

What is affiliate marketing?


Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting the products or services of another person or company in exchange for a commission on the resulting sale. Affiliate marketers join affiliate programs, find trustworthy affiliate products or services to promote, and share them with their audiences.


This is not a new concept. It’s essentially, getting a commission on a sale. Affiliate marketing is a quick way to offer products and services without having to create your own.


An affiliate, also known as the publisher, can be a single individual or a company.

So, what are the 4 Steps to get Started in Affiliate Marketing?


First, let’s cover a few of the technical aspects that run in the background with the merchant’s affiliate program software.


When an affiliate joins the merchant’s program, s/he is given a unique ID and a specific URL to use to promote the product. The affiliate then includes this link in blog posts or other marketing efforts and invites readers to click it for more information.


When someone clicks the link to visit the affiliate partner’s site, a cookie identifying the affiliate is placed on their computer. This cookie confirms the publisher is credited with the referral sale even if it happens days or weeks later.


Whenever a buyer completes the sale process, the merchant checks the sales record for a cookie identifying the source of the referral. If the merchant finds a cookie with an affiliate ID, the affiliate is credited with the sale.


The merchant makes reports available so that the affiliates can see their referrals (clicks) and sales. Then, at the end of each payment period the merchant pays the affiliate commission (i.e. revenue sharing).


This flow works the same for any kind of product you’re promoting and for any affiliate marketer.


Now, the 4 Steps to get Started in Affiliate Marketing.

The number one thing to remember is that you’re getting paid a commission in exchange for offering readers information on products / services they’re already thinking about buying.


By using your blog and the Internet in a systematic process, you are providing valuable advice to thousands of people to help them make a smarter decision.


Following are four steps to help you get started:


Step 1. Choose a Product to Promote as an Affiliate

As a principled blogger you will always face two constraints
when choosing products you want to promote:


a) You’re either limited to products you’ve used and like that have an affiliate program and are a good fit for your audience, or


b) You’re limited to products you can get access to for evaluation by buying them or getting a free sample or free trial.


Of these two options the first one is the most common way to get started with affiliate offers.


Option #1: Promote Products You already Use and Love


You become an affiliate for a product or service you’ve used and tested and feel good about recommending. It could be a course or an ebook or something else.


Make a list of courses, products, and services you have experience with and choose the one you would be excited to promote. Cross off any that are not a good fit.


Then, check to see if the merchant has an affiliate program. Some will not, although many do.


You can do an online search using a search engine such as Google for:


“affiliate program” + [product name], (i.e. “affiliate program” + Pinterest Marketing Course, or other product)


or email the merchant and ask.


Use a check list for your other products that includes the following:


>> You’ve previewed the product so you know its quality.
>> They have a solid refund policy that you trust they’ll honor.
>> They provide good customer support (and you’ve tested it).
>> You have a good story to share about your experience with the product.
>> The offer fits your audience’s needs and won’t abuse the trust you’ve built with them.


The affiliate products that meet all these requirements are your best income opportunities. You can add as many of these products as you like in the future.


Now, you’ve found your first product! Apply using the merchant’s process and start promoting.


This option may be enough to get you started if you’re new to affiliate marketing channels.


However, as a blogger you’ll also want to try option #2.


If you don’t already have a product that you love and is a good fit for your audience and that offers an affiliate program, you’ll have to explore this second option.


Option #2: Find Products through an Affiliate Network


This option requires investing time into research and money into buying products to try, even more than the first option. So, be very careful.


That’s because you have no prior knowledge so there’s less trust. Do your due diligence, to protect your reputation and the trust you’ve built with your readers.


When you work through a network, your business relationship is with that network, and you normally won’t know the merchant ahead of time and won’t build a relationship with them.


Popular and reliable networks include Clickbank, CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction), the eBay Partner Network (EPN), ShareASale, and the Amazon Associates program.


Some networks will assign you an affiliate manager to show you the ropes.


Many new marketers begin by becoming an Amazon affiliate and then scaling to other types of more profitable affiliate offers.


Step 2. Get Set Up as an Affiliate


Whether you work through a network or directly with a merchant you have to apply, be approved, and provide specific information in order to be paid.


At the very least, you’ll need to furnish your personal/business contact information for tax and reporting purposes as well as your bank account where commissions will be deposited.


The merchant will provide you with a trackable affiliate link that you’ll use whenever you post about the product. It will have a long tag at the end with your affiliate ID.


Here’s what some typical affiliate text links look like:


LINK THAT DIRECT’S TO THE MERCHANT’S HOME PAGE


https://merchantsite.com/dap/a/?a=1199



LINK TO ANOTHER PAGE ON THE MERCHANT’S SITE


https://merchantsite.com/dap/a/?a=1199&p=merchantsite.com/page.html


You’ll usually get some tips and useful marketing resources that could include:


a) An affiliate guide as well as instructions on how to use the platform and summary of policies such as payouts.

b) Online marketing tools like banners and sidebar graphics.

c) Sample email/webpage swipe copy.

d) Ongoing communications from the merchant about promotions, new products, etc.


You’ll get a link for each product you promote, if you use a network like Amazon.


Do check your specific network’s help and support pages for more information.


For your global audience you can check out geniuslink for tracking overseas sales through Amazon, iTunes, and Microsoft Store.


No matter which method you use, expect to invest money and time into researching the best products for your audience.


Step 3. Start Promoting Your Affiliate Offers


In the end, your hard work of finding and evaluating products only pays off when someone takes your advice and makes a purchase.


So, you need to place your recommendation in front of your audience in a trustworthy manner.


Don’t make the affiliate-marketer mistake of haphazardly slapping some banners on your blog that link to affiliate products and think that’s all you have to do.


Your recommendations should line up with your blog categories and topics, not some random products that are probably of no use to your readers.


Example:


If your blog’s focus is travel related, don’t use affiliate links advertising educational products or some other unrelated merchandise.


Here are a couple of options:


Option #1: Create a Resource Page on Your Blog


You can create your own resource page on which you can promote lots of different products, and they’ll all be organized in one place for easy reference for different readers according to their needs. It can also contain explanations regarding the usefulness of the products.


The page is not just a sales pitch but educational, with quality content. It should be well optimized for SEO so it will also rank well in Google search results and get organic traffic that also leads to good conversion rates.


Option #2: Create and Promote Custom Content


The following strategies are for those who are already sending traffic to your latest content by emailing your list regularly (at least two to four times per month) about what’s new.


A) Write Reviews


You can write in depth reviews of products, books, courses, or software products you promote as an affiliate.


Your reviews can focus on one product or comparisons between two products side by side.


Comparing two products in this way builds more trust, but is distracting due to multiple recommendations.


For multiple product reviews you can set up a “one-stop shop” for your niche by creating a site containing only reviews and affiliate offers.


B) Write Authoritative Content on a Related Topic


Write an authoritative comprehensive post that educates your audience and do a “soft sell” for your products.


For example, set up a guide for writing blog posts and include your affiliate links to your hosting providers.


Make sure your topic, whatever it is, is evergreen content – information that will be useful for years.


Create blog posts, infographics, videos, and more. Just do not create a sales page. You want to focus on building trust and authority.


Pay particular attention to SEO. Be sure to optimize for the right keywords and build links to your content to get a constant flow of traffic from Google.


C) Create Valuable Bonus Content


Check your affiliate agreement to see if you’re allowed to create bonus content. If so, create content, especially for your readers, to help them get even more value from the affiliate product.


People love bonuses! Creating them is fairly quick and easy, and they will help you stand out from other bloggers promoting the same product.


Some example bonuses are:


Step-by-step checklists.
Quick-start guides.
Video overviews or demos.
Complementary or discounted services (e.g., coaching calls).


Step 4. Follow Legal Requirements and Best Practice


In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires that you let people know you’ll earn a commission.


But even if it isn’t required by law where you’re located, it is recommended. It’s just good business.


People will appreciate your transparency and honesty and want to support you and help you for improving their lives.


So, wherever you share a link – in blog posts, on web pages or in emails – let readers know you may make a small commission if they make a purchase through you.


Also, create a disclaimer page on your website.


There, you have it, the bottom line on affiliate marketing.


Your dream of making passive income is a completely achievable reality, although it’s not as simple as pushing a magic button. With a little knowledge and persistence you can do it and eventually turn it into an online business.


Affiliate marketing is one of the best business models for making an income from home, once you’ve gained a respectable following.


It’s very easy to get started. Just follow the steps covered in this post.


Find the one big thing everyone in your audience needs to reach their goals and start there.


Choose a great product you believe in. Share your success with it.


Deliver plenty of valuable content to educate your audience, without being too salesy.


Nurture the trust your audience places in you.


Be upfront, honest, transparent, and most of all, patient.



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by Rahimah Sultan

For a webmaster a traffic source is a platform (place) through which people find your website.

A media buyer’s platform is a place where you can purchase traffic.

There are certain aspects you should consider before selecting a traffic source.

You must first become familiar with each traffic source and look at the pros and cons. It is essential to understand the features and statistics of the source and which ones you’ll need to scrutinize the most.

The most important aspects to consider in a traffic source are:

The Niche or Target Audience
The Overall Quality Offered by the Traffic Source
Rules, Regulations, and Restrictions
The Cost of the Traffic Source
The Amount of Traffic Available from the Traffic Source
The Targeting Options that are Available


Read the article here



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by Rahimah Sultan

I’m sure that when you join affiliate programs your primary goal is to make lots of commissions by recommending products.


There are affiliate programs in many categories like web hosting, website builders, fitness, sports, music and many more.


If you don’t have a website, you can set up one with WordPress.


In his article, 105 Best Affiliate Programs of 2020, Adam Enfroy covers the best high-paying affiliate programs of 2020 for beginners.



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by Rahimah Sultan

Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing partnership as are influencer and affinity marketing.

The world of commerce is competitive. As a business owner, you often find yourself competing against other business owners — for exposure, for customers, and for money.

While competition will always be a part of business, you can partner with others to promote your product or service. With partnerships you can grow your audience and boost sales.

In this article, Affiliate, Influencer, and Affinity Marketing: Your Full Guide to Partnership Types, you’ll find an in-depth discussion of partnerships.




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by Rahimah Sultan

Most people know the definition of affiliate marketing which is selling something for a company or someone and receiving a commission for that sale. You’re independent and on your own, not just a salesperson working for a company. Although there are no limits that need to be met, the more you sell the more you earn.

You can effectively earn passive income with affiliate marketing by promoting for many companies at the same time. There are no limitations and you don’t need to create your own products or services to earn money selling anything in this format. Check out Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income for the definition of affiliate marketing.

Basically, there are two sides to affiliate marketing. You can become a merchant and have others promote your product or service, in exchange for giving them a commission from the sales that they make or you can be the affiliate marketer for one or several products or services that you’d like to promote and market those to consumers in order to make money.

In this article I shall cover only the affiliate side.

Most people start by taking the affiliate route which is easier, although building enough traffic to make a significant income just from affiliate sales isn’t quick or easy.

Sometimes to even be able to promote a product or service, affiliates have to go through an affiliate network, because the merchant only manages their affiliate program on that particular network.

Many times a network such as Clickbank or Amazon serves as an intermediary between the affiliate and the merchant. Then the affiliate network also serves as a database of lots of products from which you, the affiliate marketer, can choose to promote.



BECOMING AN ONLINE AFFILIATE MARKETER INVOLVES 4 STEPS

You can become an affiliate marketer by taking the following steps.



Step 1: Review products in your niche

Since you probably already use and like several products, all you have to do to begin is publicly speak about them. It can be any product, although it needs to be something with which you have first-hand experience.

Do you love to read? If so, you can do book reviews. If you use online marketing products and tools that you like, become an affiliate and promote them. You can become an affiliate for hair products, clothing, beauty products, travel companies, internet hosting, online courses, toys, and on and on and on. There are endless numbers of things for which you can become an affiliate marketer.



Step 2: Build an email list with your prospects

Here are three options you can use to collect email addresses from your website visitors:

Number 1: Hello Bar

Hello Bar puts a call to action on top of your website. Whenever someone visits your website, they’ll see this bar at the top. You can use it to offer visitors something for free for their email information.

Number 2: Exit Gate

You can also use Hello Bar to create an exit gate. This is a popup that will overlay the screen when visitors are about to leave your website. It is triggered by their mouse moving to the top area of the browser.

You can also redirect people to your lead magnet to get their email address.

Number 3: Sidebar Widget

Have only one call to action in your sidebar offering people something in exchange for their email address. If you have too many things for people to do, they will probably do nothing.

Once you have a few contacts on your email list, be sure to keep them engaged by sending regular updates with more information about your products or services. Once in a while, send them a specific call to action to purchase something, but don’t overdue the selling by offering a paid product every time you send an email.



Step 3: Educate your audience with live webinars

When you have a lot more contacts on your email list, you can host a live webinar and demonstrate a particular product. You can tell people your experience with the product, show them how it works, tell them the pros and cons of using it, etc.

If you can promise to get the product in front of a couple hundred people, you can probably get a deal from your merchant for a discount or a bundle to get people to buy.

You can point to your affiliate link at the end of the webinar as a soft sell which seems only natural since you just talked about the product for an hour.



Step 4: Grow your business with PPC advertising

Once you have a way of making back your money, you can start thinking about paid advertising. You can use PPC (pay-per-click) on Facebook and Google to get people to sign up for your webinar, grow your email list, and make more sales.

You can use keywords in ads related to your product or service. It’s best to improve your SEO (search engine optimization) and promote sign-ups to your email list.

Once people are on your email list you can contact them again, by setting up an autoresponder email sequence encouraging them to attend your webinar or encouraging them to buy.



In conclusion, affiliate marketing is based on revenue sharing. You can become a merchant and have others promote your product or service in exchange for giving them a commission from the sales they make or you can be the affiliate marketer.

The 4 steps you can employ are:

1. Reviewing products in your niche
2. Building an email list
3. Educating your audience and making sales by using live webinars
4. Using PPC advertising to grow your business


If you want to get started with online marketing, affiliate marketing is a good way.


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by Rahimah Sultan

• 

You can start a business or boost your current business using the internet and various platforms. A good place to begin is with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is not easy. It requires a substantial investment of money and/or time.

With affiliate marketing you have the freedom to work from anyplace in the world with a computer and an internet connection, or just from home, without a set schedule.

In order to be successful, you need the proper affiliate marketing tools. If you’re just starting out and using a WordPress.org blog or website, there are many WordPress plugins you can use.

These affiliate marketing tools include Flippa, CJ Affiliate, SEMRush, Duplichecker, Google Adsense, and more.

Read Affiliate Marketing Tools: The 17+ Tools Every Marketer Needs for details and the complete list.


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by Rahimah Sultan

If you’re a marketer looking for opportunities in affiliate marketing (Read ) you need to continually improve your strategies if you want success and profits.

Learn how to outrank your competition, select a profitable affiliate program, use low-cost tools for your campaigns, and stay away from bad links among other things.

There is constant demand for consumers’ attention so it’s important that marketers remain creative in order to set yourselves above your competitors.

Read more here…

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by Rahimah Sultan

 

You can start or boost your business using the internet and various platforms. A good place to begin is with affiliate marketing.

 

‘The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to invest the time and effort to create a product to sell. You can begin selling something as an affiliate as soon as you have a platform to sell it on.’

 

There are two important rules to use when promoting products that are not your own:

 

1. Only recommend products with which you are familiar.

 

2. Never tell anyone directly to buy a product.

 

You can read my source for Smart Strategies for Affiliate Marketing here.

 
 
 

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by Rahimah Sultan

 

 

Is this the year for you to start making money online? You probably know that people have made enormous amounts of money with this online business model. You can start making money from home with affiliate marketing.

 

If you aren’t sure that it still works (or how to make it work for you), check out this guide. It’s broken into the following chapters:

 

1) What is affiliate marketing?
2) Finding the right affiliate programs
3) How to choose your first affiliate product
4) Affiliate marketing tools
5) Affiliate marketing FAQs

 

Affiliate marketing allows you the freedom to work from home or any place in the world with Internet access.

 

Success in getting each step done will fuel your motivation to keep going until your first sale.

 

Seeing your first commissions come in will be all the motivation you need to achieve the affiliate marketing business of your dreams.

 

Click here to read the article

 
 

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by Rahimah Sultan

Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.

The rise of the internet has had a profound effect on all our lives, radically altering how we live and work. In our on-demand society, one of the single most important benefits has been the ability to work from any place in the world and digitally earn an income. This idea appeals to scores of people who are frustrated with the 9-to-5 life and are seeking ways to free themselves from corporate responsibility.


You can start or boost your business using the internet and various platforms. A good place to begin is with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing allows you the freedom to work from home.


What Is Affiliate Marketing? When you sell anything for anyone else and you receive a commission for it, you’re marketing as an affiliate. You’re independent and on your own, not just a salesperson working for that company. Although there are no limits that need to be met, the more you sell the more you earn. You can effectively earn money by marketing for many companies at one time. There are no limitations and you don’t need to create your own products or services to earn money selling anything in this format.


Affiliate marketing success isn’t easy. Unless you have a significant audience or a platform, selling anything will require a substantial investment of both your time and money. You can’t do it without traffic – someone to see your offers.


You have to get people to care about you. You have to get them emotionally invested in you before you can sell them anything. Don’t try to sell something right away, at least not until people become fully vested in you and your personal journey.


You need to create a diversified platform. If you have a blog, don’t focus solely on that. Build a Facebook Group, an online forum, and other ways that you can stay connected with people.


Once you’ve built your platforms, develop and nurture your audience. Connect with them on social media channels. Respond to their emails. Engage with them in comments. Make it easy for them to reach you. You need to connect with your audience and develop that relationship over time. They need to get to know and trust you.


When you’re ready, search for the right product or company that’s relevant to your audience.


If you’ve taken the time to build an email list, you can use that opportunity to survey your subscribers. Ask them, specifically, what they’re most interested in. The answers can allow you to laser-focus your affiliate offers in the right direction.


When building an email list, you need to offer something in return. Use email providers like InfusionSoft, MailChimp, Aweber, or any number of others, to send out the email to a survey. Survey Monkey is good for building your survey. Determine the best thing to offer and be sure to get clear on what your audience needs to do and what you’ll give them in exchange.

It can be a free cheatsheet, a downloadable how-to ebook, or some other useful item.


You then need to apply to related networks such as ClickBank, CommissionJunction, Rakuten’s LinkShare, and Impact Radius, which are some of the larger affiliate networks, or numerous others.


Just know that you must submit an application to most of these networks to be accepted. Once you’re accepted, you’re often required to apply directly to the merchant afterward. So there are two layers or gates that you need to bypass. That’s also why it’s important to build up your platform and create that emotional bridge between yourself and your audience before attempting to promote anything to them.


Now you need to build content to promote. You can use countless mediums of which your blog is the most important. Build content that delivers massive value and that is engaging.


Every single network or merchant will provide you with specific links that you can use to promote whatever it is you want to sell. Be sure to study the details of any offer that you decide to use. Then, build out your affiliate links and ensure that the sales and clicks are registering to your account. You can use URL shorteners like Bitly or one of these to make the links more manageable in terms of length.


Affiliate marketing allows you the freedom to work from home. So be persistent and don’t give up.

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