Affiliate marketing is definitely a great source of passive income. The thought behind affiliate marketing is to market other people’s products, often through an affiliate network, and earning a commission if people actually end up buying.
It’s based on revenue sharing.
In affiliate marketing, there are 4 different parties that are involved – The merchant, the network, the publisher, and the customer.
1. The merchant: they are also the creator, the seller, the brand, the retailer. The merchant creates the product.
2. The affiliate: There are known as publishers, they can be single individuals or an entire company.
3. The consumer: They are the customers, who buy the product.
4. The network: Not everyone considers the network to be a part of affiliate marketing. But networking is a very important part of affiliate marketing to distribute your product.
There are two sides from which you can choose to enter affiliate marketing.
You can either be a merchant and pay others to sell your products.
Or, you can be an affiliate marketer and can promote one or two products and earn commission through it.
How you can become a merchant in 4 steps
Here is a step-by-step guide you will need to know to become a merchant
Step 1: Coming up with a product idea.
Getting a product idea is easy, but if you want to stick with an idea that came from you then it’s hard. You need to look at what products and services are already out there and think of ideas on how you can improve them.
You can always choose an idea which you are interested in.
For example, if you wanna sell a product, so look at a similar product and check things in which it’s lacking. And then improve on those things and you have an idea for your product.
You can also search for what people are interested in and get ideas according to that as well.
Step 2: Validating your idea
In order to avoid loss, try to validate your idea. And it’s very easy, just ask people to way you for it.
And for that, you can use Buzzsumo and plug it into a tool called Topsy. It’ll show you all the people who have tweeted about that topic.
And then you can go ahead and ask them if they are willing to buy that product or not. And if they are interested then say that you are gonna create that product if a certain amount of people pay for it in advance.
Once you receive the payment start working on your product.
Step 3: Creating the product
Then you have to start creating your product, there are a lot of ways to create a product and you should know about yours.
You should know that creating a digital product is a lot easier.
And once you have your product ready and delivered to your initial buyers, it’s time to set up your affiliate network.
Step 4: Finding affiliate program partners
This step is straightforward, with tools like Gumroad or Digital Product Delivery, you’ll found out affiliate program partners which allows gathering commissions.
The hard part is to find a partner who actually has an audience that is interested in what you sell.
4 steps on How To become an online affiliate marketer
Here is a step-by-step guide on becoming an affiliate marketer.
Step 1: Review products in your niche
It’s much easier to be an affiliate as you’re skipping the ‘have an idea’ and ‘create an idea’ parts of becoming a merchant.
You already use a lot of products so now all you have to do is talk about it publicly.
You can do your research on the product specific to your niche and write a review about it, and tell people how it is, which will make them buy that product.
But if your review is fake then they’ll immediately know that you are trying to earn as an affiliate. When you write a review on a blog give your affiliate like as well.
Just sign up on Amazon Associates and get your affiliate link for any product. But you also need a ton of traffic.
Step 2: Build an email list with your prospects in it
There are 3 easy ways to collect emails-
1. Hello Bar – shows a bar on the top of the site, when someone visits your website.
2. Exit gate – It’s a pop-up that appears when someone is about to leave your website.
3. Sidebar Widget – You can have one call-to-action in your sidebar. Which should offer something in exchange for their email address.
Even with 500 emails, you can make a good amount of sales, just try to engage your audience.
Step 3: Educate your audience with live webinars
Webinars are awesome, suppose you want to buy something.
Then what will make you buy that fridge-
1. Reading a review on a blog.
2. Seeing a live presentation in action.
Create a landing page where users can apply for your webinars. Promote your webinars on social media for a week in advance.
In webinars, you can
– Present the product’s features
– Show different use cases of the product
– Talk about its benefits and drawbacks
– Tell them about your personal history with the product
Step 4: Grow your business with PPC advertising
Once you start earning with affiliate marketing, you can start with paid advertisements. You can go with Facebook ads or Google ads, conversions are all that matters.
You can use PPC advertising to:
– get people to sign up for your webinars
– grow your email lists
– make more sales
You can advertise about your webinars and after u get a result, and how many people are converting. Then you can re-invest in advertising based on your results.
