How to be an affiliate marketer

This post will go through in detail on how to be an affiliate marketer.

Does affiliate marketing appeal to you? I’m not surprised because as a home business affiliate marketing is a low cost way to make money from recommending products and services that you don’t have to stock or offer customer support.

Literally you have an opportunity to start your own affiliate marketing business working from home where you are the only employee.

Hold on, if it’s that simple why isn’t everyone doing affiliate marketing? too many people start off thinking that all they have to do is get a website up and running add a few affiliate links and the money will just flow into their bank account.

From my experience that just isn’t the case, to be successful at affiliate marketing you need training, expertise, passion and a real desire to build something that will give you an unlimited income for years to come.

Learn how to be an affiliate marketer

Affiliate marketing is a skill that you can learn, your age or background doesn’t come into it, if you can communicate with other human beings through writing a blog or a website post then you stand a good chance of making a living online.

You see affiliate marketing is in a way solving people’s problems by providing answers to their questions, I know what you’re thinking, how do I do that?

Let’s start at the beginning, I want to make sure that you have the right approach by getting you started on the right path as you go about the business of how to be an affiliate marketer.

I can only teach you so much in this post , to get a good grounding in affiliate marketing I suggest that you take the time and complete the online Entrepreneur certification course, it’s a free course the one that has made me successful at affiliate marketing.

Start by finding a niche

According to Wikipedia a niche is a section of a market on which a particular product is focused, so as an affiliate marketer your job is to write content that drives traffic to your site and satisfies that niche in terms of information and product details.

Finding a niche to get started in should take up a bit of time but its time well spent, trust me do your research to find your desired niche, you don’t want to waste precious time starting your affiliate marketing career working in the wrong niche. How do you work out which is the best niche for you.?

Take a good look at yourself

As a person you have gotten this far in life, you have been educated, worked and had some life experience, well now is the time to use all that knowledge that you have gained to find a niche that you can be passionate about and make money from., start by posing questions like these to yourself:

• What do I know?
• What am I passionate about?
• What are my hobbies?
• What would I like to write about?
• Will others want to read what I write?
• Are there products that I can recommend to my readers?
• Is there competition in my niche?

Get your brain moving

Questions like those will help to get your brain moving in the right direction, write down some ideas then go to Google trends to find out if there is a demand for your chosen niche, you could also use this keyword tool as part of your research. I could give you some broad ideas for a niche like these:

• Dog grooming
• Flower arranging
• Vintage cars
• Fishing
• Religion
• Insurance
• Parenting

These are broad niche subjects, they will give you ideas for your website or blog, however within each niche are what we call sub niches, focus on a sub niche find more keywords in this keyword tool.

For example, I used the keyword tool to type “flower arranging” you can see the results below,

 

Flower arranging as a seed keyword gave these results, 925 monthly searches, if you could make it to page one in the search engine results expect 158 people to visit a page with “flower arranging” as the main keyword.

In this case there are over 230 competing websites and the SEO difficulty (look for a SEO of 90 +) is 71, this would be a difficult keyword to rank for.

Found your niche?

Hopefully by now you have found your niche by doing keyword research, competition and market research, you have your niche idea now you need to think of a domain name.

A domain name is like your business name, try to use a memorable domain name, don’t use hyphens or asterisks in the title, go for a .com domain name, go here to find out if that domain name is available, domain names should only cost around $13.00.

How to build your first website

If you are just starting out I suggest that you use as many free services as possible until you get a handle on how to be an affiliate marketer to a point where you are making money, to build your first website and turn your passion into a thriving business go to this site and register your first website.

That’s great now let’s walk you through the process of building out your very first website, I recommend that you use WordPress because I use WordPress to build all of my sites, in fact nearly 45% of websites on the internet are made by WordPress.

I find them so easy to use, you don’t need any technical knowledge at all, if you would like a free tutorial on how to start a new website my friend Kyle has an excellent training for you here.

Your website is the very foundation of your affiliate marketing business it is the place where all of your content and blogs will be, it’s where all the traffic will be going to, and it’s where ultimately you are going to make money from affiliate products and services.

The first task to create your website one you have your niche sorted out, my friend Kyle has a video training on how to set up your website, follow the Video training below, I will talk to you after that.

Creating website content

How to create content

To create engaging content that people will read you need to start with keyword research, I find that Jaxxy the premium keyword tool is perfect for finding keywords, go ahead and enter a “seed keyword” for example you are in the affiliate marketing niche so type “affiliate marketing” into the search bar, let’s look at the results

You get a long list of keywords to work with, which should you choose first, let’s look at what each symbol means AVG, Traffic, QSR, KQI and SEO.

1.AVG: Is the average monthly amount of internet queries for that search term

2.Traffic: Is the number of monthly visitors to your site on page

3.QSR: Is the number of sites that you must compete against

4.KQI: Keyword quality indicator

5. SEO: The degree of difficulty to rank for this keyword

The best advice that I can give you in relation to keywords is aim for a keyword that has a monthly search volume of less than 60 and a low number of competing sites under 30.

The reason for this is large internet companies with deep pockets will pay to get above your site if you make it to the first page on google search results for that keyword.

Target lower search volume keywords or long tail keywords where the competition is less tough, a long tail keyword is a keyword with four or more words.

Long tail keywords

This type of keyword is specific to the topic on the page that you want to write, a long tail keyword is a combination of words usually four that state exactly what the website searcher is looking for.

If you can rank for a long tail keyword chances are the person that used that search term is nearly ready to purchase as opposed to a search for a more generic search term that means they are only looking for information before making a purchasing decision.

To show you how this might work in reality let’s look at how a potential customer turns into a purchasing customer:

• Customer reads about a product
• Customer searches for more information on that product
• Customer looks at the pros and cons of the product
• Customer compares product
• Customer makes a purchase decision
• Customer searches on the internet to buy the product

Customer purchase pattern

In this instance, the customer has already gone through the information and evaluating process and they are ready to buy, typically they would type in the product name for example ” Wealthy affiliate marketing website” to be taken straight to a shopping cart to make their purchase.

Write content for your site

Now that you know how keywords work the next step is to start writing content for your site or blog, start with a template as shown below.

Article Template

Article Title (with keyword)

The introduction

First sentence contains the keyword and must be in H1, then write the topic introduction in 3-5 sentences

The article Body
Use H2 one paragraph for each individual topic or point. – 3 – 5 sentences, use images to break text up

Conclusion.

Write a concise summary about the post, try not to repeat any point already covered.

Write in your own style, make your points always reference any scientific articles at the bottom of the page, don’t forget to check your work over, always do a spell check. Your work will need to be unique to find that out use this free plagiarism tool.

Page linking

Page linking is important in the eyes of the search engines, they feel that if your pages are linked to a another relevant page on your site that the user experience is enhanced, so link to other pages like this.

Highlight the word or worse that you want to link another page to and go to the top of your WordPress dashboard click on the inset/edit link enter the URL of the page that you want to link to and press save.

The importance of content

Content is the lifeblood of your site, by creating the best content for your readers will ensure that you will get a high placement in the serps (search engine rankings) meaning more and more opportunities to make money as you learn how to be an affiliate marketer.

Not only will you need to write great content but you will need to know about the skills of SEO, in the next lesson I’m going to cover everything there is to know about SEO because when SEO is applied to your article writing the chances of ranking high for increase by 200%.

The best SEO strategy

SEO is a vital part of your success as you learn how to be an affiliate marketer, I’m going to break SEO down into bite sized pieces so that you will be able to implement SEO into your online strategy:

• What is SEO?

SEO is the one strategy that needs to be implemented into each and every page of your website so that you the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others can fully understand what your page or blog means.

In other words what is the keyword, what do the images mean, how easy is the page to read, what other pages on the site are relevant, how valuable is the content to the reader and so on.

SEO is the hardest part of looking after your website mainly because of algorithm changes that the search engines keep implementing on a regular basis, that means that you must educate yourself on these changes and what they mean for your business.

Having said that if you practise the seo techniques that I’m going to show you your site stands a good chance of a high ranking and making money.

The first step in SEO

SEO is like any other job you need a set of tools to do it to your best ability, fortunately there are a lot of free tools that can help you with this:

• Google search console

Google is by far the biggest search engine on the planet, however they do offer many free tools that can help with SEO, one of my favourites is Google search console, you will need a Gmail account to access this free service.

This service can tell you what keywords your site ranks for, how many click throughs did you have, what position your site is overall in the rankings, tips on what you can do to make your site more seo friendly on mobile for example.

• Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a free plug-in from inside your WordPress site, I love this plug-in because it gives me instant tips on my keyword density, alt description in the images, word count, sentence count, paragraph count, headings, readability and so much more,.

It’s free but for the small fee of just under $100 for the year I think the professional version is worth it. To add Yoast SEO just log in to your dashboard in WordPress add new plug-in activate and you are good to go.

• HubSpot website grader

HubSpot website grader is a very handy and fast website analyser, all you have to do is place your website address and email in the search bar press ok let the free tool do its job seconds later it will give you a detailed report on how good your site is

• OVERALL
• PERFORMANCE
• MOBILE
• SEO
• SECURITY

Check out the results and make any necessary changes to improve your website’s SEO.

SEO images

Use high quality images to break up endless lines of text, make them look engaging and relevant to your content, don’t forget to use the alt description, this is the little box to the right of the image, put your keyword in there if the image was given freely give credit to the person that took provided it.

Affiliate programs

When you start learning how to be an affiliate marketer the first six months will be hardest because it will seem like you are putting in a lot of hard work to build your site out without any reward, this is the case for every aspiring affiliate marketer.

Don’t be too downhearted, keep writing unique engaging content until you have at least 100 pages done, remember to add google analytics code to each page that you write. There is no difficulty in sourcing affiliate programs once you have established a flow of traffic to your site, I have written an article on what is the best affiliate program here.

Website Promotion

Every website has content, good quality engaging informative content will be found organically by the search engines, traffic to a site will grow and grow over time providing new content is added every week, each week aim to write at least 4-5 new articles of at least 2,000 words each and publish them.

Organic rankings take time to build, don’t expect to see results until you have at least 100 pages written and published, to boost your website visitors you can use social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others.

Social media promotion

I have found that by posting regularly on social media creates a following that drives more traffic to a website, open a business account with these platforms, post regularly, follow my guide on how to use Facebook and YouTube to promote your business.

Making money from your site

It will take time and patience until you are making money from your site, stick with the online Entrepreneur certification training, put what you have learned into practise in everything that you do add affiliate links as you go along and before you know it your site will start to make money for you.

Conclusion

I hope that you have gained some knowledge on how to be an affiliate marketer, it all starts with ideas that need to be researched until you find a niche that you feel is right for you.

From there use the keyword tool, Google trends and websites to see if there is a demand for those keywords, pick a memorable short domain name register it, pick a wordpress theme and set up your website.

Use your keyword list starr to write content using the format above, put your keyword within your content about 6 times use amazing graphics, add the alt description, write in your own unique style, make each post at least 2,000 words long, try to publish 4-5 posts a week. Use social media to drive traffic to your posts, be consistent, be persistent.

All the best,

Fintan