The Ultimate Guide to Successful Affiliate Marketing

There are so many ways to make money online, but Affiliate marketing remains one of the best ways that anyone can leverage to make a full income online. You can also make money online by:

• Creating your own product and selling it to your audience i.e. digital products.
• Displaying ads like Media net and Google AdSense
• Publishing Sponsored Posts on your blog

You can read more on how to monetize your Blog here.

In this article we are going to discuss simple steps to successful affiliate marketing.

Getting started is always the hardest part, but once you start reading the blogs on this site and all over the internet, you should have a solid foundation to get started. Lots of people write books, such as Abraham Hicks on attracting money, picking up those books would be another great start for your affiliate marketing journey.

So before we go further, we need to know what Affiliate marketing means? In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is getting paid commission for promoting products and services that you don’t own.

Also read: Mechanics Behind Getting Paid for Promoting Affiliate Products

Steps to Successful Affiliate Marketing

Successful Affiliate marketers employ these 4 simple steps. We can look at them in details as follows:

1. Choose a topic or niche that you are passionate About

Choosing something you are passionate about is very important as this is what keeps you going everyday even when things aren’t working. But note, you have to put your idea to a ”business test”. This is to ensure that what you choose has a commercial value that can profit you. Simple ways to test out your idea is to find out, if many people share your passion. Having a big audience passionate about a given idea puts you in the right track to monetizing it. You also need to find out, if people can spend money on your topic. The information you share has to be valuable enough to your target audience that they will be willing to pull out their credit cards for it. The final test you can put your idea to, is competition. Going to a market without competition makes things difficulty for you. If your idea has a competition then that is great. This means they have validated the market, hence you can make a profit.

Here are some topics/niches that are profitable

• Health & Fitness (Weight loss, healthy eating etc.)
• Relationships (Marriage, Dating advice, Parenting)
• Finding a job
• Electronics/Gadgets
• Career advice
• Making money online
• Business (Real Estate, Investing, Wealth)

The above are just but few of topics, that can drive a large audience and bring in profits.

So you have picked a topic the next step, is to build a website.

2. Build a Website/Blog

Anyone can start a website; you don’t need any prior experience. In fact when I started this site, I had zero experience on website building. Nowadays with few clicks and in a matter of minutes you can have your website up &  running and start publishing posts. If you don’t have a website or Blog yet, you can create one here.  As soon as you have your site set up, you need to put up content, you can choose to write say 5 posts, set up social media accounts for the website then you can publish them at once.

3. Attract Visitors to your Site

Writing quality content is not a guarantee that people will read it. Successful online content creators promote their content more than they write it. Ensure every post you publish is promoted in the right places to reach the desired audience. Note, that without traffic, then you have no potential customers for the products you are promoting on your site. You can drive free traffic from Social media networks, Forums and Search engines or drive paid traffic using Google AdWords, Facebook ads, Bing ads etc. To drive traffic from Search engines, you need to optimize content on your site, we call this Search Engine Optimization. This ensures your site Ranks well high in say Google.

You can also read:

• The Ultimate Guide to Content SEO for Bloggers
• How to Generate Free traffic to your Blog
• 18 Free ways to Promote your Blog
• 8 Reasons your Blog Traffic is very low

4. Start Making Money

Lastly after setting up your site, putting up enough content and being able to build an audience base, you can now start promoting affiliate products. We have several affiliate networks you can work with: Admitad has hundreds of affiliate programs you can promote, and they are open to any one from any part of the world to join.  Amazon Associates Program is one best network for affiliate marketing for Niche Websites. They have almost everything you need for any of your niche topics. Others include:  Sovrn Commerce,  ShareAsale, etc.