The Complete Guide to a Successful Affiliate Marketing

By Bradian Muliadi | May 15, 2020 04:23 (edited)

1. What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission from promoting another company’s product (or service) for every successful sale. In this process, an affiliate partner earns a percentage of the revenue or profit from successful transactions referred to the product or service.

2. How does Affiliate Marketing work?

To become an affiliate, you simply have to choose a product or service that you enjoy, preferably one that matches your internet branding such as the topics you discuss on your blog or social media.

3. Why should you become an Affiliate Marketer?

So now comes the question, why should you become an affiliate marketer?

3.1 Passive Income

If you are marketing effectively, affiliate marketing could be a reliable source of passive income, this means that it allows you to earn money while not making a continuous, active effort. In a way, it is similar to an investment, except you do not have to pay a sum of money in advance. Instead, you are investing in your content and platform to gain income. However, the reason why it is called a passive income is that you can still stream your income while you’re not making any significant effort. You simply need to continue making great content as usual and as long as your internet presence is maintained, your affiliate product can still sell. If you are looking for Affiliate Marketing Jobs, you can find out on any job websites.

After setting up an affiliate partnership you typically will receive an affiliate link that allows you to advertise a product or a brand within your blog, website, or in some cases, social media account. A purchase done through this link will be recorded and used to calculate your commission as an affiliate partner.

3.2 Doable anytime and anywhere

Affiliate marketing allows you to start anytime and anywhere. As the process is completely online, you are also able to do affiliate marketing from anywhere in the world and connect to a vast range of products and brands from different places.

3.3 Convenient and flexible

Affiliate marketing doesn’t tie you with any organization. Aside from possible requirements, there are no restrictions. Aside from flexible time and place, you are also fully in charge of your site’s content management and you can personalize your work method to improve tractions in the best way you think is possible and convenient for you.

3.4 Performance-based commission

Affiliate marketing allows you to get paid based on your marketing skills, the better you are at attracting online consumers, the more income you will receive. You won't be stuck with the same amount of salary or paid hourly. Instead you'll get the benefit of marketing skill improvement while also receiving more income!

4. How to do Affiliate Marketing

Now that we’ve shown you the benefits of affiliate marketing, let’s look into some tips on how to be a successful affiliate marketer! Here are 7 simple steps to start your journey as an affiliate marketer.

4.1 Have a website or a blog

A website or blog is the main channel of affiliate marketing. This is where you create content and provide a link to the affiliate product. A website allows you to get discovered by people who are using search engines to find the product or information relating to the product. The chances to be discovered via website or blog are endless and even better as you are able to do your own promotion. Beside of that, finding a quality web hosting service and website builder to ensure your website is working properly is very well to do.

4.2 Do not focus solely on commission

Sustainable affiliate marketing requires building a relationship with your audience. You need to be able to understand your audience and their pain points to increase the probability of purchase. This relationship does not happen if you’re building your website or blog around advertising the product. You need to be a reliable source of information in order to persuade buying.

4.3 Create unique reviews

The best way to instill trust in your relationship with your audience is by providing authentic information, often in the form of reviews. Reviews give your audience an assurance that you are using the product yourself, as well as being able to promote the product from a user’s perspective. However, since there are hundreds of reviews available online, try to create a review as unique or specific as possible. Provide details that you think people would want to know but aren’t widely available already, give a unique picture, or interact with the audience in a way that builds an image of trustworthiness.

4.4 Pay attention to your SEO strategy

Attracting consumers is the ultimate goal in affiliate marketing, and when it comes to leading people into your website or blog, SEO is the number one solution for most marketers. SEO allows you to maximize the potential of your site to appear in strategic keywords in search engines and get discovered easily without paying for Ads. Therefore, when creating good content for your website or blog, pay attention to your SEO performance and improve it to get better results.

4.5 Understand your target audience

As mentioned earlier, you need to understand the pain points of your audience. Not only to persuade them better, but this often helps potential consumers to understand why your product is needed in their lives. Other than that, you should also understand what your audience prefers and seeks in terms of content, so you’ll have an idea of how to increase and retain the audience.

4.6 Focus on one niche

It is tempting to try grabbing multiple target markets, especially since affiliate marketing allows you to reach out to different brands at once. However, it's not the best strategy if you want sustainable growth for your website or blog and your affiliate marketing. This is because it's difficult to appear authentic or reliable when you are talking about multiple things at the same time. Despite the smaller size, it's more beneficial for you to focus on a niche instead of a wide market. This helps you focus your content while also giving a higher probability of conversion.

4.7 Provide a call to action

Reviews and authentic information are at the heart of your affiliate marketing efforts, however, it's the Call to Action that completes the job by delivering audiences to conversions. Provide a direction in your content on what your audience should do next, which is clicking on your link. This helps your audience take the next step of their information search journey and helps you make the sale you need.