Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online. Instead of creating your own product, dealing with your own customers, you can sell other people's products and services and make money. But how do you get started? How can you start to see results fast? Today I'm going to share with you some crucial steps to get started in affiliate marketing.
Get Started in Affiliate Marketing – Step 1: Define Your Traffic Source
What are you good at, in other words? Are you good at SEO? Do you excel with paid ads? Are you better at JVs? Which are joint ventures if you're not familiar with that. In other words that's another form of partnerships.
What version of marketing are you good at? Because based on that, that's going to vary how you do affiliate marketing. For example, if you do SEO you got to pick one niche.
If you do paid ads, you can do any niche out there as long as the payouts are high enough because you got to buy that traffic. Once you figure that out, that'll help you with Step 2.
Get Started in Affiliate Marketing – Step 2: Defining Your Target Audience
What is the niche you want to work in? Now, most people are like, “I want to be in the niche that pays me the most money.” You don't do well as an affiliate marketer doing that.
Why? Because after a while you give up, you hate what you're doing. You're just like “I don't want to spend a ton of time and energy doing this.”
You want to focus your efforts on what you love, because what you love is what you're going to create better content on. The results from this will be better marketing campaigns, better ad traffic, and you'll get more creative. You'll be the expert.
Whether you are just getting started, have some experience, or are an ultra-successful affiliate marketer, this 4 step formula is made for you!
By doing this, you'll also notice that you make a huge increase in revenue when you do something you know versus something you have to learn from scratch.
Simply because when you don't know that industry, you don't understand a niche. You're going to make a lot of mistakes, waste a lot of time and lose money compared to focusing on something that you know.
Now that you've done that, you can move on to the next step.
Get Started in Affiliate Marketing – Step 3: Find Products that are a Good Fit for Your Audience
Now, most people do this by just googling. That's a really inefficient way. There's actually already affiliate sites out there that showcase products. The products they showcase are the ones that tend to be the best performers not only for the publisher but also the advertiser.
So, by looking at these affiliate sites, you'll know what tends to work because their top offers tend to be the ones that make the most money. Now, some of these sites are JVZoo, CJ Affiliate, OfferVault, ShareASale, FlexOffers, Warrior Plus and Clickbank.
Checking out those sites will give you a good understanding of what works and what doesn't work in your space. I would recommend going after the products that are popular on these sites cause that means affiliates are making a lot of money.
If you pick the products that aren't that popular on those sites, that usually means affiliates aren't willing to promote them because they don't generate them enough income.
Get Started in Affiliate Marketing – Step 4: Build Your Sales Funnel
So, let's say you have SEO going good, and you have this traffic. Start with content, then you want to collect to emails. Collect emails through email autoresponder forms or any tool out there.
After this, you want to create a lead magnet. You can't just use these tools. You've got to actually have an offer. Offers like, an email address in exchange for an eBook, or a valuable online course. Then, once you have their email, drive them to a webinar. That webinar allows you to sell that product or service to those people.
You can also, follow up through an email sequence to all the people who don't convert in the webinar. By doing this you can convert them to sales using email newsletters. By combining a webinar with text-based newsletters, you should start getting sales from your SEO traffic.
Utilize a Landing Page
Now let's say you're leveraging paid ads, it's hard to convert through a straight sell so what you want to do is first create a landing page that educates and really provides a ton of value. That landing page is not only providing value, you're also talking about the product. You're also driving people to that product page where they can buy.
Ideally, you should have some testimonials and case studies within that educational piece of content. If you don't, you'll find that you won't generate as many sales.
Now, you could also create an exit pop-up for those who go to exit your offer. By doing this you will be able to collect their email and utilize your email newsletter. This will also drive them through an email sequence that can convert to sales.
JVs and Partnerships
Now, if you're monetizing through JVs and partnerships, the best way to convert is to host a webinar. Get other people who are influencers in your space along with you being on a webinar, selling a product or a service converts extremely well. The easiest way through JVs and partnerships is to just focus almost all your effort on the webinars.
Step 5: Increase the Lifetime Value
Most affiliates, they drive conversions, they collect their money and they're like, “Woo-hoo, that's it.” Well, you already have that list. Why aren't you continually selling to those people campaign after campaign?
Why aren't you continually adding value to them and not always selling?
That way when you have the next product to sell they're more likely to buy cause you've helped them out. If you just sell to them every single week, eventually they're going to drop off your list. But if you help them out majority of the time and then sell to them one-tenth of the time, they're much more likely to convert.
Upsells and Down-sells
The other thing that I would recommend is to add upsells and down-sells. Once they buy one product, upon checkout, why can't there be upsells and down-sells?
It's an easy way to generate more revenue. If the website that you're pushing doesn't have upsells and downsells, force them to have it or let them buy from your website that product or service that other people are fulfilling and then add in your own upsells and downsells. It's a great way for you to make more money.
So now you can see the exact outlined steps you should use to build an affiliate marketing business. It may seem daunting at first, but I assure you, once you start putting these steps in motion, then everything will come together.
An Easy Solution
These steps I outlined are some of the basic actions as an affiliate marketer. However, there is so much more that you must learn to implement these steps and set yourself up for profit. So, how can you gain this knowledge?
Well, you could go through articles and videos that will you some direction, but this self teaching way; really doesn't get you anywhere. Trust me. I learnt that the hard way.
There is an easy solution. Check out my #1 Recommended Free Affiliate Training Platform that will show you everything you need to know to start a profitable online business. You will have access to Training Courses, Weekly Classes, a free website, free hosting, a whole community of successful online entrepreneurs and tons of tools to use.
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