Affiliate Marketing Basics For the Hungry But Confused

Affiliate marketing is a terrific way to make money online. The best part about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to be an expert to get started, and you certainly don’t have to be an expert to succeed. You can in fact see results, substantial ones, right away; if you play your cards right. If you’re a little confused as to how the whole affiliate marketing game is played, pull up a seat and prepare to sit a while. You’re about to learn the affiliate marketing basics the experts use to make money online in any niche and in record time.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

For those who are beginning from square one, let’s go over what affiliate marketing entails. Basically, in sales you have two choices. You can create and sell your own products or you can sell someone else’s products for a commission. The latter is called affiliate marketing where you are acting as an affiliate for that seller. With online affiliate marketing, you have an ‘affiliate link’ that you lead others to. Whenever someone buys from the seller using your affiliate link, you get a commission.

One of the most attractive aspects for new affiliate marketers is the fact that you don’t actually need a website to get started. You don’t need anything, really. Of course, the more materials you implement into your affiliate marketing campaigns the better results you’ll yield. However, affiliate marketing is one of those businesses that you can start with nothing and still rake in the big bucks. You just need know how and tenacity. This guide will provide the know-how. You have to be the tenacious one who puts the knowledge into action. You will start with your niche.

Which Niche Will You Choose?

Some people pronounce it Nich, some Neesh, but regardless you are going to have to pick one before you get started developing your first affiliate marketing campaign. Your choice of niche is an extremely important one. Your choice of niche is going to decide:

• Your Choice Of Products To Promote: You will want to choose a niche that always has a healthy supply of new products to promote. That means that it is a healthy and active niche, which can spell dollar signs for the right affiliate marketer.
• The Hunger Of Your Audience: You only want to choose the niche where there’s an audience hungry for what you’re offering. Consider the person searching desperately for an answer to weight loss. If you sell a weight loss product, this is a prime opportunity for you to make some cash if you choose the right product. Your niche must have an audience that desperately wants a problem solved if you are going to make any money at affiliate marketing.
• Your Commission: Some niches have higher priced products than others, such as the Forex niche. The higher the prices, the more commissions you’ll earn. Keep this in mind when choosing the niche you want to work with.

As long as there is immense interest in your subject matter and the various products you choose, the more money you will make as an affiliate marketer. In order to gauge the interest and the viability of various products, you need to engage in thorough market and product research.

More Research More Money

You can never do too much research when developing an affiliate marketing campaign. In fact, you should be constantly learning about your industry and the audience that you plan to target. In the past, marketers found it very difficult to find out what their audience was thinking. They had to spend money on focus groups and they had to rely on surveys to let them know what their audience wanted.

These days, we have tools like Facebook and Twitter and popular forums. Not only can these tools help you get into the minds of your prospects and customers, but they’re oftentimes free. Since most social networks and forums have handy search functions, use those to search for discussions that have to do with your niche. These are the individuals you will be targeting with your affiliate marketing products.

The key is to find questions within your niche that have to do with common, but incredibly serious problems. Yellow teeth, too fat, recently dumped and dog grooming are some examples. Pay attention to the language these individuals use, the questions they ask, the way they ask them and the problems they face. This is going to give you all the ammunition you need to create killer content later on. This content will of course be your automated salesperson in your affiliate marketing campaign, so this research is crucial.

Spend as much time as you need studying your audience until you feel as though you know them (and what they’re looking for) pretty well. Once you have that, you’ll need some products to promote.

ClickBank Marketplace

ClickBank is but one affiliate marketplace, but it’s the one we will use in this example. ClickBank is reputable, it’s easy to use and commission payments are always on time. First, go to the ClickBank marketplace and use the search box to search for your niche.

You will get a list of products that show up. If yours is a very competitive niche, you will likely have plenty of products to choose from. If yours is less competitive, you might have one or two. When looking at products to promote, you will want to pay attention to several things.

These include:

• Price: After your research, how much do you think your audience will pay for your products? If you don’t know the answer to this question, go back and do more research so that you are better armed to choose the correct products to promote.
• Commission: You should look for products that offer at least a 50% commission. Some products offer a 100% commission or more because they make more money on the back-end deals.
• Gravity: These are the amount of marketers that were paid out in the last pay period. If there is no gravity, that means that it’s not very hot and no sales were made in the last two weeks or so. If the gravity is too high, that means you have a lot of competition to deal with. If you can strike a balance between popularity and the competition, you might find that sweet spot in the middle that yields all the results.

You will be privy to more stats than the ones above, but these will give you a good idea right off the bat if promoting the product is worth it. After you’ve found the product you want, visit the sales page. This is where you will make your final recommendation.

Would You Buy The Product?

This is the primary question you want to ask yourself when choosing an affiliate marketing product. If the offer is good, the price point is competitive, the sales page is engaging, the offer substantive and if the entire deal seems like it’s a steal and a half, you might have yourself one lucrative product, Mr. or Mrs. Affiliate marketer.

Once you’ve decided on one or more products, click the button that will produce your affiliate link. You are now ready to promote your product and rake in commissions like an affiliate marketing pro.

Tips For Selling Affiliate Marketing Products

You do not need money to begin promoting your affiliate marketing product(s). However, throwing a little money into your affiliate marketing campaign never hurt anyone. The following tips are some paid and free ways of getting more out of your affiliate marketing efforts.

1. Start A Blog: You know what your audience wants. Now you can deliver the answers to their most pressing problems in a high-quality blog complete with affiliate products to help them solve their woes. You can start a free blog using Blogger or WordPress or you can purchase a domain and hosting and self-host your blog. Either way, blogging is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products, since you’re literally speaking, instructing and entertaining your audience. Why wouldn’t they buy the products you suggest?
2. Create A Website: Your audience would love if there was a website completely dedicated to their problem. This website will provide much-needed advice, tips and expert tricks. There should be high-quality multimedia like photos and videos to make your website pop and to keep your audience on each of your pages longer. Then, tell your audience that you have the cure for their woes with this new unbelievable product. If your website is valuable enough in the eyes of every prospect that visits it, you’ll see just how lucrative affiliate marketing can be.
3. Use Social Marketing: Don’t just use social networks and forums for research. You can also use social networks and popular forums for affiliate marketing purposes. Be careful. Nobody likes to be sold to these days. If you try making a sales pitch on Facebook or on a forum, you will be shunned and probably banned. You must be subtle. Give good advice and position yourself as an expert in the field. Soon, the audience will ask where they can go for more information. That’s when you can send them to your blog, your website or you can give them your affiliate link that leads directly to the product. Many people will be glad to click an affiliate link after you offered such valuable advice for free. As long as you don’t try to trick anyone into clicking your link, this method usually works best for getting dedicated, targeted customers to your affiliate offer.

Affiliate marketing is fun, it can be done on the tiniest of budgets and anyone can do it as long as they have a computer, an Internet connection, plenty of drive and this guide. Are you ready to show the competition in your niche how it’s done? You know what to do. Find your niche, research your audience and you’ll have the potential to make sick amounts of money, just like so many affiliate marketers before you.