Has news of the benefits of affiliate marketing caught your attention, and you want to learn more about it? More importantly, how can you make additional income or streaming revenue using market affiliates? This article will help teach you how to build a profitable affiliate marketing business by selling various products. However, first things first, let’s go with the introductory guide to affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

The basic answer is that affiliate marketing is a business model where you sell products from other businesses, in this case, a client, and you will receive a commission for the sales of said product. An average for commissions is around 10% to 20% depending on the product, but sometimes it can pay up to 50%. Basically, the process is as follows: Using a sales funnel and paid ads, you promote the client’s products, and those companies, in return, will pay you a set percentage of revenue for the products you sell with your promotion.

To start, you will need to sign up for a few affiliate programs like ClickFunnels or even Amazon’s affiliate program! As soon as you sign up, it is time to start selling your company’s products with some strategies that we’ll discuss later in this guide. What’s great about this is that you don’t need to test, create or even ship the merchandise. What do you have to do to sell it and get paid? Share your link to others who will click on it and buy the product on the page.

6 Steps to Start Affiliate Marketing

Now that you know the basics let us learn how to get the ropes.

1. Choose the Right Affiliate Program and Product

Learning how to pick the right products to sell is a must. A good tip is to find something that you have an interest in. When you try to market something you have no interest in, it can be difficult and hard to do an excellent job of selling it to others. So, choosing a product you feel you can get behind will help immensely. Another great tip is to find something with a commission above 20%, which will give you the liberty to spend more money on advertisements and keep your business afloat.

Finally, discover something easy to sell, but it’s impressive and effective for the target market. If the product is effective, the sales will arrive faster, and your job will be easier.

2. Find the Right Platform to Promote Your Product

You will need to do one crucial thing if you want your affiliate marketing business to be a long-term success: create good content consistently. There is a plethora of ways to post your content along with platforms to choose from. Some ideas include creating a YouTube channel, Facebook page, Instagram account, or WordPress blog.

Start small with just one platform that you can consistently post content. Just creating posts a few times per week will be enough to start growing.

Here are tips to follow for affiliate marketing:

• You can post pretty much anything on YouTube; remember to set how consistent you want to be and stick with it. Try to be realistic, depending on your schedule.
• Instagram is perfect if you want to sell visual products, especially about health, fitness, or traveling. Posting at least once per day will help you achieve your goals.
• Pinterest is the perfect place for affiliate marketing, especially if a female audience is your target. Try to post at least three pins per day.
• Even if it’s a new platform, TikTok is taking the affiliate market by storm! Being a new social media app can give you many options, and it’s a great place to experiment with the market.
• Blogging is great, especially if you focus on SEO and bring some paid traffic to your blog post to get some hits. Posting at least once per month is ideal.

3. Learn Your Audience

Knowing your target audience is the primary key to understanding what type of strategy you need to follow. There are some questions to ask yourself which will help you find the answer:

• What are they thinking of most of the time?
• How old are they? How much money do they make? Where do they live?
• What are they passionate about?
• Where can you find them online?
• What are they searching for?

4. Make a Sales Funnel

Seeing that the competition is way bigger than what it used to, you need to find ways to get your target’s attention. You have a few moments to get someone’s attention, so you need to keep their eyes on you for as long as you can. Therefore, having a sales funnel is an effective way and a great tool to have.

There are different funnels available depending on various things. There are pages like Tripwire Funnel, which is great for selling products, or Squeeze Page Funnel, which is suitable for generating leads. You can have a page that will get email subscribers, another one to build trust, and lastly, a third one to make you money with an affiliate offer. As soon as you get the hang of producing sales funnels, you are ready to drive traffic.

5. Drive Traffic to Your Sales Funnel

Now that your sales funnel is ready, you need to drive traffic for it to generate money. There are two types of traffic that you need to learn: Long-term traffic and short-term traffic. Considering the quality of said traffic is also a vital part of it; knowing if you are driving the right people into your sales funnel — and if it’s your target market — is a big part of it.

A short-term traffic strategy is when you drive people to the sales funnel right away with a paid advertisement on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Amazon. Alternatively, you can do a Paid Promotion, where you go to influencers or websites that serve your target market, and you pay them to promote your product and share an affiliate link.

For long-term traffic, you should consider SEO or a Search Engine Optimization which is a process to rank your content with phrases in a search engine like google, which will start bringing traffic slower, but after a few months, you’ll earn big bucks. Alternatively, you can build relationships with influencers that will drive traffic to your sales funnel, but also you can do the same for them. Building that trust will last you many years.

6. Become a Pro Affiliate Marketer

Learning the ropes is the beginning; having people trust you to the point of going through you instead of going to the source is something that will separate you from the rest. Running paid ads smartly and targeting a new affiliate marketing niche to sell your product differently will bring you big profits.

Thinking outside of the box will make you the go-to person that people can trust. In turn, it will end with people buying the products that you recommend. Building your own affiliate marketing business takes a lot of time and learning. Establishing trust, building an audience, and being consistent will be the key for people to start arriving and getting the products you’re selling. To become an expert, be consistent, and build an audience that will make your business a success! Don’t forget to follow the best affiliate marketers, read influential books, and attend conferences, too.

Please share your thoughts in the comment section below about this simple guide to becoming an affiliate marketer.

Interested in becoming an affiliate marketer? Join Olavivo.