Affiliate marketing is a big sector.
In fact, it is about to hit over $7 billion in revenue and it keeps growing every year. The problem for many ‘newbies’ to affiliate marketing is that they don’t know where to start. What do you begin with? How do you even get into affiliate marketing?
We have a short informative guide to show you how to start affiliate marketing.
How to start an affiliate marketing business
There are 3 main steps that you can follow which will get your affiliate marketing career off to a great start.
#1 Choose your niche
How will you be able to pick the right offers and promote your affiliate products if you haven’t even picked your niche? You can’t!
Choosing your niche has to be the first thing that you do if you want to know how to get started in affiliate marketing. If you can find a niche that you have a genuine passion for then this makes everything a lot easier. This stage also involves identifying problems you can solve with your potential affiliate offers, researching your competition and working out how profitable it will be.
The more specific you can be the better. For example, the acne niche is huge and vague however targeting the ‘acne in men between 30-40’ is a much more specific market and will help bring in more targeted traffic for your offers.
#2 Pick your offers
The next step after you have chosen which niche you want to operate in is to actually choose the offers you are going to promote.
There are many variables that you should consider when deciding on which affiliate program or program’s to work with. Some are niche specific and others have a much wider audience with products that cater for several different markets.
Once you have your niche set you and your offers chosen then it is time to start promoting your affiliate products.
#3 Promote your affiliate products
There are many ways in which you can do this.
Some people solely target social media, others have a website and direct people to landing pages and others set up blogs – some people do all of these and more!
The point is that there are numerous ways in which you can push your affiliate products and landing pages. This includes long term strategies such as SEO, shorter strategies like ads and evergreen plans like email marketing. Your affiliate business won’t succeed if you fail to get this stage right. You can have a great niche and fantastic offers but if the way in which you approach the marketing of these products isn’t effective then you won’t make any money.
Finding success with an affiliate marketing business
Even if you follow a tried and tested blueprint for affiliate marketing there are still no guarantees that you will be successful.
Only around 5% of new affiliate marketers find any success with their new venture. Many give up after a few months when they haven’t made as much as they expected. Affiliate marketing is a long term strategy – not something that you can make money from overnight.
If you follow these steps and take the right advice from industry experts then you give yourself the best chance of success.