How to start affiliate marketing business.

Have you thought about making an extra income online but don’t know where to start, affiliate marketing is a relatively inexpensive way to build an online business?

Follow my step by step approach to affiliate marketing and you will learn how to start affiliate marketing business, how to SEO your business, how to promote your online business and how to make a living working from home.

About affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing has always been a way for the little guy to get started in an online business without a large capital outlay, all you really need is a niche website that you can build from the ground up using a simple WordPress theme.

Of course, there is a lot more to starting an affiliate marketing business so I’m going to help you get started to make money online by showing you how it all works.

What is affiliate marketing?

Think about affiliate marketing on the internet as being paid a commission by companies because you introduced a person to that company’s products or service when they came to your website looking for information.

As an affiliate marketer your main responsibility is to find good quality keywords, write authoritative and interesting content that will get ranked in the search engines.

You achieve this by using a good keyword tool like this one that I use, it will help you immensely in finding those long tail keywords that have enough monthly search volume and low competition.

You use those keywords to create engaging content that will be found when a person uses their web browser and searches for that content by entering your chosen keyword into a web search.

Google, Bing and other search engines are extremely clever at helping people who are searching on the internet for information to find exactly what they are looking for.

You will need to understand the business of website SEO in order to get your content onto page one of the search engines results.

Why you should do affiliate marketing?

There are a number of reasons why you should do affiliate marketing, when you join the affiliate community that I belong to you will have these benefits:

• Low start-up cost

• Low ongoing costs

• Easy to start

• Free website builder

• Join most affiliate programs free

• Community help

• Great affiliate platform

• Best affiliate training

• Best SEO training

• Best affiliate business training

Is it going to be easy?

Being successful at affiliate marketing takes learning, patience and time, I’m not going to lie to you and say it will be easy from the start.

It won’t be easy but with the right attitude and an ability to learn and implement what you learn there is no reason that you can’t be successful as an affiliate marketer. The failure rate for online business is very high, according to one survey as many as 90% of online business fail.

That’s a scary figure, I hope that you will follow my affiliate training so that you will be a part of the 10% of businesses that make a success of their online venture.

How to get started in affiliate marketing

Before you dive in can I give you a word of advice, please take the time to do research on the niche market that you want to focus on, trust me the time spent will be well worth it and could possible save you a lot of heartache. (I speak from experience).

A good example is one particular niche that I chose, it was in the natural health area I did some research into the competition and available keywords but I didn’t do enough, research is the key to online success.

The result was a full year and a half later having spent endless hours working on that site I reluctantly had no choice but to let it go because it just wasn’t going to make money for me.

I’m serious when I say, take the time to do your research into any niche market, make sure that you have a 50/50 chance of making money from your niche affiliate marketing business.

What is a niche market?

A niche market is like a specific piece of that market that you will focus on, for example let’s say that you know a lot about gardening and you want to start your affiliate marketing business around gardening.

The gardening area has so many niches that you can pick to focus your site on for example:

1. Apple trees

2. Vegetable gardening

3. Flower gardening

I hope that you see what I mean, you could for example pick apple tree gardening and write content on the types of apples to grow, when to grow them, apple disease etc.

You build out your site as you find more and more keywords relate to that niche market, in this way Google and other search engines will reward you with high rankings for those keywords.

Decide on your own niche

How do you decide on your own niche? when it comes to writing interesting content on any subject it makes a huge difference to the person writing if they already have an interest in that subject.

I’m talking here about not just a passing interest in that subject but a passion for it, the more passionate you are the more you will write, you will need this passion to keep you going as you go about starting an affiliate marketing business.

Pick your niche wisely, do your research on it by using this great keyword tool to find those keywords and domain names to get you started.

Get your domain name

A domain name should be relatively short and concise, that makes it easier to read and remember for people on the internet, people often ask what is the difference between a domain name, a url and a website.

• A domain is the registered name of your online business

• A url is a website address that people use to find your site

• A website is what people see when they click on your domain

Build your website

Before you build your website using this website builder you will have your domain name in place and you are now ready to pick a theme for your affiliate marketing business.

In today’s online world we are fortunate to have WordPress at our disposal, WordPress is used by more than 30% of websites over 75 million altogether.

WordPress has a theme for every conceivable affiliate business, you need to take a look at what is available find a theme that you like play around with it, make sure that it is mobile friendly, fast and easy to navigate.

Most themes on the WordPress platform are customizable meaning you can pick the colours that you like, the fonts and the way the site is laid out.

I suggest that you become a premium member of the Wealthy Affiliate community so you have access to the best affiliate marketing training on the internet.

Find the best keywords

As you go through the premium membership training you will notice how important keywords are in getting your affiliate marketing site ranked by the search engines.

Most of your time will be spent using the Jaxxy keyword tool to find keywords that you can work with to create that amazing content that the search engines will love.

If your niche is about growing apples, you should always be thinking of words that are associated with growing apples, try to identify some keywords before you begin searching on Jaxxy this will make the process more efficient.

Whether you find it easy to write or whether you don’t is key to start affiliate marketing business, if you find it difficult you have the option to hire people to write for you.

Write for humans not for the search engines, affiliate marketing is about selling other people’s products but don’t forget affiliate marketing is also about communicating with other human beings.

If you are a good communicator it will shine through in everything that you write, just be yourself and write about stuff that you have a passion for.

SEO your pages

I’m going to go through the process of how to write and also how to SEO your content, SEO is a term that means search engine optimization, it is the practice of making all of your website content including text, images, video, meta tags, headline fully optimized for the search engines.

Why should you learn SEO?

SEO is the only way that your content stands a chance of making it onto the first page of the search results for that keyword, if you are not on the first page it makes your chances of earning affiliate commissions an awful lot harder.

Will all of your content end up on the first page? No is the answer unless you are working on a niche that nobody else has thought of doing. As I said earlier pick your niche carefully and use those low competition high search volume keywords.

What is the best way to SEO your website?

Let’s start at the beginning, you have picked a keyword using the Jaxxy keyword tool, you have written at least 1,500 words or more, you have added relevant images to your article, you have added a maximum of five affiliate links within your content, now comes the business of SEO.

The keyword must be in the url (subject) in the very top section, next the keyword must be the first headline and it must be within the first three paragraphs, you could place the keyword one more time before the end.

Please be careful and don’t overstuff the keyword otherwise the search engines may penalise you and that will hurt your chances of making page one.

You want your content to be readable with a good flow, I normally write about three to four lines of content before I make a space and start on the next line, it’s called bite size chunks that’s how people like to read on the internet.

Lay your content out in order of importance, so your first paragraph or so will be built around your keyword so use the H1 tag for the headline, then normally I would use the H2 tag for all paragraph headlines after that.

Optimize your images

The search engines just see the image, they need to be told what the image is about so in the H1 tag write a short description about the image and include a keyword if you can, the same can be done with any YouTube videos that you have created and are on that page.

Use internal links

Internal linking has become more and more important in the eyes of the search engines, internal links are links to other content on your site, it makes it easier for your site visitor to find exactly they are looking for.

It also keeps them on your site for longer in the eyes of the search engines the user experience is enhanced by internal links, site loading speed, graphics and overall trust.

Get website comments

Website comments are a great way to get Interactions going on your site, for example if someone leaves a comment on your site you can reply to that comment, this is good in the search engine rankings.

How do you get website comments, Actually it’s easy enough once you are a member of the Wealthy affiliate community, there are over 2 million people in this online community just waiting to leave comments on your site, it’s a kind of you scratch my back and I will s scratch yours!

These actions are all designed to get your site off the ground so that it will be found by Google and other search engines, it’s part of promoting the work that you have done so that people will find your pages, stay to read them and click on the affiliate links that you have created.

Conclusion

I hope that by now you have a better understanding of how to start affiliate marketing business, do your initial research on your niche, keywords and the competition.

Pick a good domain name, find a suitable theme in WordPress, experiment with the theme make sure it is fast loading and mobile friendly.

Write your content for human beings in bite sized chunks, use the H1 and H2 to good effect, optimize all of your images and videos, use interlinking a lot, add your affiliate links and get website comments.

If you are ready to learn more on how to promote your website please go to this page.

All the best,

Fintan