How To Profit From Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the chance to earn money selling products for reputable companies and 
websites in exchange for a commission. Top sites like Amazon and eBay offer huge variety in terms of high-demand products.
One of the biggest benefits of the affiliate marketing business model is that you don’t have to create your own product. There’s no need to do the research, develop the product, write the sales letter, set up the sales funnel for customers to purchase the item, and so forth. It’s all been done for you. So how can you make sales and profit from affiliate marketing?
FREE Checklist: Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
How To Start Affiliate Marketing
Your first task is to join an affiliate marketplace. This is where you can choose which products or services you want to sell. You’ll also be given your own unique affiliate link. This is the link that your prospective customers will click to take them to the product sales page and, when they make a purchase, the sale will be tracked back to you.
The more people who click on your unique affiliate link, the more potential sales you’ll make. This is how you make a profit from affiliate marketing and here are 7 ways you can get prospective customers to click on your affiliate links.
1. Targeting Traffic
One of the most important aspects of modern affiliate marketing is having your own website or blog where you produce content related to the products you wish to sell. Choosing a topic, or niche, helps you focus your efforts and enables you to connect with people who are genuinely interested in the affiliate products you’re trying to sell.
If you’re already selling digital or physical products, chances are you don’t have a product line so extensive that you can cater to every customer who visits your site. Affiliate marketing programs can help you fill in the gaps, with products you already know are in high demand because they come from reputable companies.
2. Choosing Your Niche
Your first step is to choose your niche if you don’t already have an existing business. Think of topics you enjoy and would like to learn more about. For example, two of the most profitable affiliate marketing niches for physical products are golf and pets. Each are worth around $70 billion per year and growing. Health, wealth and relationships are the most profitable niches in the digital products sector.
The key factor for success is that you have a genuine interest in your chosen niche. If you’re trying to profit from affiliate marketing in a niche that you find boring or too complicated, you’ll have little motivation to succeed and it will show through in your website content, articles and reviews.
3. Content as Context
In order to make an affiliate income these days, the best method is to have your own website where you create content related to your chosen niche. You can write general articles and provide links to suggested products at the end of the content.
You can also create your own content about each product. Reviews are very popular, as are product comparisons. The most important things to remember are that everything you write should have a ring of truth. This helps position you as an expert worth paying attention to.
4. Creating Pre-Sell Pages
Smart affiliate marketers will also often create what is called a pre-sell page. This has become a common practice for a number of reasons. Your own pre-sell page is a chance to fill in any blanks that might be missing from the vendor page. It’s also a chance to capture more information about your website visitor before they click over to the vendor site and you never see them again. A pre-sell page is often used as a lead generation page, in which you capture the prospective customer’s name and email address before they click over to the vendor site.
FREE Checklist: Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
5.Building an Email Marketing List
It can be difficult to build an email marketing list these days because people have such crammed inboxes and free newsletters are no longer the great lure that they once were. Having said that, knowing your niche and your target audience are two of the best ways to come up with an incentive they will be so eager to get that they would be willing to give you their contact information.
Good incentives would be a checklist, an eCourse or even a challenge or competition on a hot topic related to your niche. Think of the kinds of problems people have in your niche and create an information product which offers real solutions. A checklist or eBook is a good option because you can create a PDF and they can download it easily.
With an eCourse or challenge you can line up a number of emails in your email marketing platform’s follow-up area (autoresponder). Each of these emails can help you build a relationship with your prospective customers, positioning you as an authority. Each of the emails can also provide a context for a link to an affiliate product you wish to sell, giving you multiple chances to earn commission without seeming like a pushy spammer.
6. Being Discerning about What You Sell
You should not promote anything you would not use yourself or are not impressed by. You don’t want to get the reputation of being an affiliate who will literally sell any old rubbish just to get a commission. Rather, you want to show you are in the know, with great deals on products that really work.
If at all possible, make sure you do actually try the products you are promoting. You can usually ask for a free item (remember, you are promoting the product for the vendor and they only pay you if you sell their product). If the vendor turns you down, purchase the item if you think it will be something you will use regularly. Keep the receipt to write off the expense on your taxes in relation to your affiliate income. Once you start using the product, write an honest review. Consider creating a video review to show the item in action. This will give your opinion a lot of credibility, because seeing is believing.
7. Keywording Your Content
Keywords related to your niche will help drive free traffic to your website via the search engines. This is a marketing technique known as search engine optimization (SEO). Google and the other main search engines each have their own algorithm, or formula, for ranking sites and pages on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
All of the keywords should be related to your topic or niche and should be words that an ordinary person interested in your niche would search for. Keyword all media files such as images and videos as well. They can also be discovered by Google, which would give you the chance to get more than one of the top slots on the SERPs.
Free Checklist: How To Profit From Affiliate Marketing
Companies are happy to pay commissions to people just like you, in return for selling their products and services. Success comes from choosing the right niche, staying committed and understand your audience. One thing to keep in mind when you start to sell products for companies online is that success isn’t going to happen overnight. You can make unlimited profits, but it will take time. For more information on how to start affiliate marketing, download my free checklist, Affiliate Marketing For Beginners.
