How to Start Affiliate Marketing?

Before getting started, Let’s understand what & why Affiliate Marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing?

As per Wikipedia, ‘Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.’

Simply put, Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products.

When someone purchases or takes action from your affiliate link, you earn a commission.

Why Affiliate Marketing?

You recommend other people’s or companies’ products, so you don’t need to worry about the support or logistics of the product.

The customer gets the product at no extra cost, and the company will give you a commission from the product cost.

You can build your own community by building trust and gaining authority.

The chance of scaling your affiliate business is high, depending on the product.

You will be able to create a long-lasting relationship with your community and create multiple passive income streams.

What are the most common mistakes made in Affiliate Marketing?

Selecting the wrong product for promotion without proper research or due diligence. 

Dull promotion, writing an article, and ignoring will not help. You need to have a promotion strategy to drive traffic to your affiliate links.

Jumping from one product to another for a commission without a long-term plan.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing?

You understood What affiliate marketing is, Why you should do affiliate marketing, and the common mistake made by most affiliate marketers.

Now let’s look at the steps to start affiliate marketing.

1. Find Your Niche (Micro/Macro Niche If possible)
2. Find The Right Product
3. Create a Content Plan
4. Drive Traffic To Your Content & Earn Commission

Find Your Niche

You might have knowledge of many topics, and you might be confused about what Niche to select. 

Don’t worry, there is a simple exercise to find your Niche with just a pen and paper. Click here to learn about the exercise.

Having a niche is good, but there will be so much competition. So I recommend you go deep into your Niche and find your Micro/Macro Niche. Click here to watch.

Niche is like a red ocean, but when you go deep and find your Micro/Macro Niche, you find your own blue ocean.

Find The Right Product

Once you have found your Micro/Macro Niche, now it’s time to find the right product.

The best way would be to do research with the primary keyword across search engines and social media.

Take a list of products that exist in your Niche or which are related to your Niche. 

If you had done the Niche finding exercise, you would have got the list of pain points you are trying to solve.

Now map the product list with your pain points, and see which are relevant to your Niche. 

Important Points to check while selecting a product

• Use the product personally and see if it’s really worth referring to.
• Check if the affiliate product delivers the promise properly.
• Check for social proof and payment proof inside the community.

Note: Never pick a product out of your Niche.

Create a Content Plan

To promote affiliate products and earn commissions, you need to create content.

Understand the audience in the Niche, where there are, and what type of content they prefer to consume.

Also, do not try to plan everything at once. If you are strong in video, then go with a YouTube channel, or if you are strong in writing content, then start a blog website. 

Since you are just starting, I would recommend playing with your strength initially and then slowly expanding your content to other formats.

If you want to create your own content bank click here. I used this technique to create my content bank with over 100+ ideas, which helped me in creating content for my website, YouTube, and social media.

Once you have your own content bank, start creating content. 

You are playing the expert role and helping the person make a decision on buying the product. 

So make sure your content is information and help solve the pain point of your audience.

Note: Product reviews, how-to, product demos, and problem-solving content are the best content model to drive sales and conversion. 

Drive Traffic To Your Content & Earn Commission

Share your content on all the social media platforms where your potential customer is available.

Based on the focus keyword for each content, do some basic SEO activities. It will help in driving organic traffic to your content.

Once the content drives decent traffic and you can measure the conversion, then start experimenting with paid ads.

Bonus: If you are interested to learn more, click here to check my Affiliate Marketing video course.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned what & why affiliate marketing, common mistakes by affiliate marketers, and steps to start affiliate marketing. 

Personally, I would recommend you to create a personal brand for yourself and infuse the affiliate product within your ecosystem. This help creates more authority for yourself, also gives more value to your community, and helps you in creating multiple income streams. 

If you are interested in building your own brand, I have a step-by-step video course where I teach how to build a personal brand by yourself. Click here to know more details about the course and join my inner circle.

Do let me know your thought and views on this article in the comment below.