SEO-Optimized Article: Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

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Meta description: Learn the most important tips for starting your affiliate marketing business.

Keywords: Affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing business, make your own online business, affiliate marketing products, affiliate software, affiliate marketing websites, affiliate marketing strategy, cpa network, what is cpa marketing, set your own hours, work from home, be your own boss, how to start an online business.

<H1>Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: A Step by Step Guide

Do you dream of owning an online business, or supplementing your day job with a profitable side hustle? 

What if there was a way to …

• Work from anywhere?

• Make a good income?

• Set your own hours?

Without having to ...

• Work for someone else?

• Sacrifice your values?

• Invent a new product?
  

If this sounds appealing and you have a natural talent for writing or you shine in front of a camera, affiliate marketing might be a great career move for you. 

<H2> What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is promoting other companies’ products. 

As an affiliate marketer, you get paid to connect brands to leads and sales by promoting their products and services to your online audience using your own digital marketing tactics. 

By getting paid to create engaging blog posts or video content or run effective ads on the appropriate platforms, you can build a viable affiliate marketing business. 

<H2> How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketers make money by using a unique affiliate link provided by the company whose product or service they are promoting. 

For example, say you write a blog about the best beauty products on the market. One of your readers clicks on your affiliate link, it brings them to a moisturizing cream product on Amazon and they buy it. Cha-ching! You get credit for the sale and earn a commission.

Another example: you post a YouTube video reviewing the best kitchen gadgets one can buy. You include an affiliate link in the description, one of your viewers clicks it and buys a potato peeler. 

Bingo! You just earned a commission on that sale because the customer used your link to get there. See how it works?

There are several platforms and niches to consider when becoming an affiliate marketer. 

Are you a world traveler looking to blog about your adventures? 

Do you love keeping up with the newest tech products on the market? 

Your affiliate marketing niche will depend on your preferences and areas of expertise. 

So, does affiliate marketing sound like something you’re interested in? Dreaming about quitting your day job to do something more fulfilling and rewarding? 

Here’s a step-by-step guide that will show you how to start an online business as an affiliate marketer:

<H2> How to Become an Affiliate Marketer in 3 Steps

1. Choose Your Affiliate Marketing Industry

2. Do Research to Find Your Affiliate Marketing Niche

3. Create Compelling, Optimized Content

There’s your recipe for success! Now let’s break it down.

<H3>1. How to Choose Your Affiliate Marketing Industry

First things first: as a beginner in affiliate marketing, you need to choose one industry where there is current and future demand and further specialize from there.

You may be the type of person who is interested in a variety of different topics and the idea of choosing just one seems unappealing. But to be successful, it’s important to narrow your focus and find your niche, especially at the beginning. First master one market area, then you can branch out to other areas.

Choose an area that you know. You should have a solid understanding of the industry you choose. For example, let’s say you are passionate about gardening. You follow the directions from seed packets and plant labels well, but you don’t have any real expertise. If you lack basic knowledge of your topic to begin with, your audience will catch on sooner or later. 

[Pull text/call out] If you lack basic knowledge of your topic to begin with, your audience will catch on sooner or later.

Narrow it down. This can be a balancing act. Pick an industry or topic area that’s too broad and you will face a lot of competition when it comes to ranking in online search results. Pick too specific a niche and you won’t be able to attract the amount of traffic necessary to make enough sales. Here’s an example of how online research can help you narrow down to your industry niche:

Say you like sports and think you could create some decent content on the topic. First, check out how many average monthly searches for “sports” you get when plugging that term into Google Ads’ Keyword Planner. There’s up to a million! That’s a lot of competition!

 

So “sports” is too generic. Too broad a term. What if we try something more specific, like “most popular American water sports”?

 

Hmm, there’s only ten searches. Looks like we narrowed it down too much. If you want to increase traffic to your website and convert sales, you’re generally going to need more than 10 people searching for your keywords each month.

So how do you find a niche that’s right in that sweet spot between too much competition and not enough traffic? Easy! Find your niche!

<H3>2. How to Find Your Affiliate Marketing Niche

Picking your affiliate niche based on ‘instinct’ or ‘gut feelings’ is never a good practice for starting a business. It’s much smarter to do some research first.

Research is such an important step in finding your market niche and launching your career. It can mean the difference between a successful affiliate marketing campaign that converts sales and one that fails to bring in a single customer. 

When it comes to doing your research, remember the 3 P’s: 

<H4>The 3 P’s of Affiliate Marketing

• Products - What affiliate marketing products or services are you going to target?

• Programs - Which affiliate software will you use?

• Platforms - Which affiliate marketing websites or platforms will you use to launch your business?

Nail down these three elements in your research to establish a niche so you can start creating your content. Let’s start with products.

Products

First, you want to decide on the particular products or services you want to promote. But how will you know how to choose the right ones? One way is to understand what the popular online search queries are in relation to the industry you’re interested in.

Taking a page out of Neil Patel’s affiliate marketing handbook, we can head over to a Q&A website called Quora. Once there, search your topic of choice in the search bar at the top of the page. For this example we can use the ‘sports’ search term from earlier.

On the next page, select the ‘Questions’ filter to see what questions the Quora community is asking related to your search term.

This will filter the results to show the most popular questions about your search term that the members of the Quora community are asking.

Your next task is to identify a smaller subtopic or subtopics of your search term by reading through the questions on the results page. Think of it as an affiliate business Easter egg hunt!

As you can see, ‘sports betting’ was a common subtopic of ‘sports’ in this example.

If we head back to Google Adwords Keyword Planner, 'sports betting' averages 10k-100k monthly searches, compared to the million we had with 'sports'. Much better!

This is still a pretty broad term but this is the idea of niching down to a more specific topic. You can repeat this process as many times as you need until you feel you have found a niche you can rank and provide value for with your content!

Programs

There are so many software programs and online resources at your disposal and finding the right ones for the specific needs of your affiliate business is essential.

Here are a few marketing tools and resources that can be very useful for developing content:

Hemingway

Hemingway is an extremely useful, free-to-use editor that can help you improve your writing. It’s a great tool for improving free traffic results and it can help train you to write more engaging content so you can keep the attention of your audience and persuade them to click on your link and buy a product.

Google Ads

Google Ads is something you will want to become very familiar with as an affiliate marketer going the paid traffic route, especially if you want to go for the high commission stuff.

With Google Ads, you’ll have all the tools you need to set up ad campaigns, target specific locations to run your ads, define goals, and much, much more. 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is an invaluable SEO resource that can help with anything from keyword research to seeing what your competitors are ranking for. 

The great thing about the site is that Neil Patel and the Ubersuggest team are constantly adding new features and toolsets, making it a one-stop shop for all your SEO finding needs.

Use tools like Ubersuggest, Google Ads’ Keyword Planner and other SEO tools for best results.

Platforms

Your niche and level of experience are the most important factors to consider when choosing affiliate marketing platforms. It comes down to two things:

Commission levels - how much you will get paid for each customer you refer.

Volume - how many customers generally visit the site you are promoting and how many products the site offers.

Click here for a few of the best affiliate programs for beginners. Their varying levels of commissions and volume can help you determine where you should focus your efforts.

 

<H3>3. Create Compelling, Search Optimized Content

People engage with good content that shows them exactly what they are looking for, period. Good content provides helpful, actionable information in a complete and compelling way. If you fail to provide the best answers to their specific queries, you’ll lose their attention and they’ll end up on someone else’s web page searching for content that serves their needs, meaning you’re losing potential conversions and sales to your competition. 

You could have the perfect niche and do research until the cows come home, but if you don’t put out awesome content on a regular basis that gets people to buy the thing you’re offering, your efforts will be for nothing.

Applying content creation and SEO best practices will help drive more traffic to your site and help you show up higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Like Google teaches using their EAT acronym, good web content demonstrates expertise, authority and trustworthiness. 

For more on creating good content, check out these 7 tips for creating content that sells.

<H2> How Much Money Can You Earn Doing Affiliate Marketing?

That is entirely up to you. 

How much you make depends on:

• The type of product or service you choose to promote

• How much traffic you generate to your site

• How well you market yourself as someone who knows what they are talking about

Pat Flynn, a well-known top earner in affiliate marketing, made well over $160,000 in December 2017. Neil Patel, another master affiliate marketer, says that today one of his blogs earns $381,772 per month. 

It’s important to keep in mind that these guys have spent years building their brands and perfecting their crafts. You won’t be making monster commissions like theirs right out of the gate. But if you keep at it, find your niche, and take notes from the pros in the industry, then you too can make some serious money from affiliate marketing.

Now it’s your turn. Remember, choose your industry wisely and find a viable niche where you can thrive. Do your homework, create the content your audience is looking for, and optimize it before and after you publish it.

 

 

From there, it’s about monitoring and analyzing what works and what can be improved upon. Set business goals and as you reach them, set new ones. Be learning and improving constantly. Learn your trade. Then, relearn it. Perfect your process. Analyze problems. Fix them. Look at what your competitors are doing. Do it better. Stay current.

 

 

Be patient. If you’ve followed the steps and your content is good, the results will come, maybe not as soon as you want, but they will come.

 

 

So there you have it, a beginner’s cheat sheet on how to break into affiliate marketing. Only one thing left to do: get to it!

 

 

If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, don’t let this be the only article you read.

 

 

To learn more about affiliate marketing visit [website name/link].