It is fairly easy to start an affiliate marketing business if you plan ahead and have a clear picture of your niche and the type of affiliate products you would like to promote.
Keyword research is a vital skill. The simplest way of describing it is that keywords are the words that people type into a search engine. And keyword research allows you to see data such as: How many times that keyword phrase is searched each month Similar keyword searches related to the keyword phrase How competitive that phrase is (i.e. how hard is it to get a blog post that targets that keyword phrase onto the first page of Google?) The SERP (search engine results page) list for each keyword phrase. This can be useful to analyze the competition your post would be up against. For example, by checking the word count for each of the top ten articles, you can get a good idea of how many words your article should be.
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This way when you do run ads, you are sending your potential customers to a solid foundation (your beautiful website) and not a shaky one-page splash page.
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You want to find a niche that has overlap between what you’re passionate about, and what can make you money.
If a specific affiliate program rejects you, find an email contact and ask for more details. They will often give you specific information for improving your website or content, for example.
When your audience read a breakdown of all the features and benefit of the products you want to sell in your affiliate program, they will be more inclined to make a purchase using your affiliate links.
Unless you have a ton of spare time or are willing to take years to get things started it can be helpful to elicit the help of others in the creation of your website. Allow guest bloggers to offer content to your website, hire someone to create the website layout, use a simple program for sending invoices – whatever saves you time without costing tons of money.
The lower the niche score, the wider the niche is. This means that the niche is really popular and a lot of products have been selling in the niche.
Even if you’re super passionate about a niche, there’s no point in starting an affiliate blog if you can’t monetize it.
Literally anyone – that being said, even though anyone can start with affiliate marketing, that doesn’t necessarily mean that just anyone can be successful. Although it’s a source of passive income, it’s not enough to just create great content and hope for the best – you need to put in a lot of work to not only develop amazing content but also to promote your content and build up your audience; that means investing in search engine optimization, building up your email list and your social media followers/viewers and consistently find ways to grow and evolve.
Not all of these are going to be a fit, but it’s reasonable to assume that if someone is looking for woodworking projects, they might be interested in building a shed or a boat too!
Avoid commodity products that your readers can buy anywhere — the commissions are so small you won’t make worthwhile money unless you can drive tremendous traffic to your site.
Establishing oneself as an affiliate marketer may take some time. But once you harness the basic best practices and fundamentals within this field of marketing, you can grow a passive income stream that could eventually generate a sizeable income.
Another thing you should definitely check is backlink history and overall backlink profile. For that, create a project in SEO SpyGlass and enter your website. To give you an example of how it works, I've run a sample check on a website currently available for sale for $15,000. Incredibly, the website has over 800K backlinks, almost all of which are dofollow:
Whenever you promote a product be upfront with your readers. Provide value and educate them. If you have personal experience with the product let them know that. But if you don’t, be honest with that too. Let them know the information they need based on research that you’ve done. Your audience will appreciate you being honest and will buy from you based on the trust that they have with you. Some of the links are affiliate links, meaning that I will make a small commission if you purchase a product or service by using the link. You get the same price whether you use our special link or not, and sometimes I’m able to get you an even better deal through my relationships! More info in my privacy policy.
Making your offer appealing, offering high incentives and rewarding your affiliates based on their sales is the key to a successful affiliate marketing plan.