AFFILIATE MARKETING COURSE
People have given up their 9 to 5 jobs and jumped into affiliate marketing. If you've dreamed of making a decent living through passive income, then an affiliate marketing course is an avenue you should consider.The idea behind affiliate marketing is that you promote other people's products, many times through an affiliate network, and earn commissions when people buy those products as a result of your marketing efforts. Pretty easy, right?
Unfortunately, there is a bit more to the process and it will require some initial work on your part.
Before starting affiliate marketing, it is essential that you understand that there are four different parties involved in the process and how each fits into the system.
When it comes to the actual marketing part of the affiliate marketing system, there are two sides to the equation: the creator and seller of the product and the affiliate marketer. What does it mean?
You can look at affiliate marketing as a process of spreading product creation and marketing between different parties, where each party receives a share of the profits according to their individual contribution to the marketing effort.
This, simply put, means that you can be a creator as well as a marketer and still make money from the basic idea of revenue sharing.
The four sides of the affiliate marketing system
BOOK OUR FREE WEBINARMarketer: A marketer is known as a product creator, product seller, brand, seller, or retailer. This is the one who creates the product. It could be a large company like Dell that makes personal computers or an individual.
Anyone can be a marketer behind an affiliate marketing program, from sole proprietors to startups to giant Fortune 500 companies. It can be anyone with a product to sell.
Affiliate:
Marketing takes place in this part of the system. An affiliate promotes one or more of the merchant's products and tries to attract and convince potential customers of the product's value in the hope that they will eventually buy it.
This can be done through a merchant's product review blog or through an entire website dedicated to finding products related to a specific topic and promoting affiliate products.
Consumer:
Affiliate sells products to consumers through channels they see fit. This can be through digital billboards, social media, or search engines using a blog and content marketing.
Network:
When it comes to the affiliate marketing system, you can choose to become a marketer and let others sell your products in exchange for a commission on completed sales, or you can become an affiliate marketer who promotes products to earn money.
While most people choose to go down the affiliate marketing route, building enough traffic to make an income that makes it worthwhile isn't easy or quick.
Become an affiliate marketer in 4 steps
There are four steps you need to take to become an affiliate marketer.
Step 1: Review the products in your niche
The first step to building an affiliate marketing business is deciding on your niche. Don't skip this stage; it's important to your success.When starting out as an affiliate marketer, don't try to find the "secret niche" that no one else is promoting. Instead, start with what you know and what has the most offers.
Make sure to conduct a study before deciding on your niche. Here are three things you can do to find your place.
1. Check out popular affiliate networks like JVZoo, ClickBank, or Commission Junction.
2. Head to YouTube and search for keywords that can be used for the area you are considering.
3. Use Google to do the same keyword search.
Keep in mind that if you can't find any other affiliates in that niche, there's a good chance you're probably targeting the wrong place.
Step 2: Choose your approach
After you have decided on the niche you want to promote as an affiliate marketer, you next need to determine the kind of affiliate marketer you want to be. There are three approaches that you can choose from, but as a beginner affiliate marketer, it is important that you only choose one of these ways to focus on.
After you've been doing this for a while, you can decide if you want to branch out into other approaches.
Reviewer:
As a reviewer, you would buy products to review. After thoroughly testing the product, you publish a review on your blog, YouTube channel or social networks.
It is important that you form your own opinions about the product and provide honest, ethical reviews in the form of video or written content. To do this effectively, you need to go through the product and get an idea of the pros and cons and give authentic feedback from one user to another.
This way, you can better reach potential visitors and provide good recommendations for the products you review.
When inspecting a product, you should have or have access to the following tools:
- A laptop with a webcam and a microphone
- PowerPoint or equivalent product
- Website
- Software for automating social networking, such as Hoot suite or Social Oomph
- Set aside money for new product purchases.
- A way to track the movement of your visitors
- A way to track every click
E-mailer:
One of the most successful ways to start affiliate marketing is with an email list. The idea behind this affiliate marketing method is to grow your email list by providing a small offer to get people to join your list.
Once you've added them to your contact list, you can start using the auto-responder feature to promote products that you think will help your contacts.
As an email sender, you should have or have access to the following tools:
• A platform or autoresponder for email marketing, such as SendLane
• A product like a PLR you wrote or a video you created to pitch to a consumer
• A landing page that attracts visitors
• A great eCover that will attract interest
• A link tracking tool like ClickPerfect
Social media personality
As social media grows in popularity, social media fan pages are exploding, providing fans with a great combination of promotion and value.
If you decide to use social media to promote products for your affiliate marketing business, it's important to make sure it stays classy and is not a place to post spam.
To be a successful social media personality, you need to create solid images and content when promoting your affiliate products.
The following tools are essential for social media personalities to own or have access to:
• How to create images on social networks
• Posting tool so you can automate your posts
• A way to track each link
Step 3: Discover your affiliate network
Once you've discovered your niche and the style of marketing you want to do as an affiliate, the next step in the process is to determine which affiliate network to start with.Your choice will depend on the niche you have chosen and will require you to do some research. Here are just some of the affiliate networks you can use.
• Clickbank offers a wide range of digital marketing products.
• JVZoo is mostly internet marketing products and other related products for making money online.
• There are several products available on CJ Affiliate by Conversant.
One of the biggest affiliate networks is Amazon.
• RevenueWire is a global network with a great selection.
When you're starting out, you should only sign up for one network based on the research you've done.
As you become more familiar with how the network works, you can start using multiple interfaces or even use a private program.
Step 4: Find and attract traffic
Now that you've completed the simple steps to determine your niche, the style of marketing you want to do, and the affiliate network you want to use, the final step Finding and generating traffic is necessary to succeed as an affiliate marketer.For new affiliate marketers, finding traffic can be a difficult prospect and many new affiliates get stuck at this step. However, traffic can be detected in a number of ways. Here are some forms of traffic that are easy to get started with as a new marketer.
Social media or forum traffic
Using social media and forums is a great and free way to generate traffic. You can visit popular forums that focus on your specialty and offer free advice to participants. Link back to your website, landing page, social media, or YouTube channel in your signature.It is essential that you offer accurate and practical advice on the subject. This can also be done using your social media pages by placing links to your personal or fan page and offering information to different groups.
The fastest way to derail your efforts is to move from group to group and simply post your links or contact each person in the group via private message with your link. This is called spamming and it will not help your affiliate marketing.
Optimization for search engines
This is another free way to get traffic for your affiliate marketing. It is one of the oldest forms of traffic acquisition and is based on keywords and search rankings. With search-engine-optimized content, you can harness the power of search engines and get free traffic.This approach takes a lot of work and can be tedious and time-consuming, but if done right, it can result in a lot of visitors to your site without spending a dime.
Paid standalone ads
Standalone ads are easy to use if you do your research and use them correctly. To put it simply, you are purchasing traffic from a person who already has an email list.Standalone ads work by paying someone with a targeted email list to send their contacts referrals to your website and send you targeted traffic. Your job then becomes to convince these people to buy your product or service or sign up for your email list.
Paid Facebook and Google Ads
The fastest way to increase traffic is through paid Google and Facebook ads. However, this option will cost you significantly more and has a higher learning curve than the other methods.The intricacies of this process are too vast to cover in this article, but you can find many resources online to help you if you want to go down this path
Conclusion
It may seem overwhelming to complete all the necessary steps to become an affiliate marketer, but the time you spend building your reputation will be well worth it when you make your first sale.Making your first affiliate commission will take a lot of hard work from you, but if you break it down into easy-to-follow steps, it won't feel so overwhelming.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, there is a proven strategy that will keep you reaping the rewards of your hard work after you make your first commission.