In this post we’ll be discussing several affiliate marketing strategies beginners can use to market their site.
What is affiliate marketing
When you promote products and services that others created and pocket a commission for them that’s called affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing can be a set it and forget model. I have started sites that give me money month after month and I don’t do any work on them for years together.
There are quite a few different ways in which you can do to make money online
The first one is cpc
The second cpa
And the third participating in programs that pay a commission per sale.
CPC Programs pay you for the clicks you generate to their page. A set amount is selected and the payout is usually the lowest compared to all other types of affiliate marketing since you are paid on for clicks rather than getting an action.
CPA is for cost per action. Here if the click converts to a lead or customer you get the commission. This is far more elusive but has a higher decent payout comparatively.
How to make money with affiliate marketing
The golden rule to succeed with affiliate marketing is to drive clicks and sales to relevant products on your site or whatever promotion channel you’re using.
A good high converting product
Whatever niche you’re in, there’s always a chance that you will find a good and relevant product you can promote.
How to arrive at the best products to promote?
Research
Run a Google search on your niche + products to find out the coolest products and services that are going around. One of the best places to search for products is Clickbank. It has a vast repository of digital products available across hundreds of mini and micro niches.
First browse by the categories on Clickbank. What’s interesting is if you click on any of these categories, it reveals more subcategories for you to choose from.
With so many options available for you to choose from, it’s far easy for you to zero down on an option. The more interested you are the more keen you will be to do the work.
As an example category if you choose Health and fitness, you can drill down to fitness/sports, indoor exercises and so on. You will get a few products that are selling really well. These have a high rate of conversion and might perform well on your site as well.
Do competitor research and analysis
Go to your competitor’s websites. Conduct a search on their blogs. Type for common keywords based on what you got from Clickbank. If you’re doing it manually you will have to go and read through several blog posts to find a list of products they’re promoting.
Why not directly arrive at the most profitable products?
Plug the competitor url on to SEMRush. It’s a competitor intelligence suite that uncovers keywords a competitor site ranks for. You see the estimated visits to the site from this. You also get a list of top ranking pages for the site owner.
What to do before deciding a niche for affiliate marketing
Before you decide on a product there are several things to keep in mind. A good niche reveals itself in the data available around it.
Here are the questions you must ask yourself before you decide on a niche.
A) Is it an evergreen niche?
It’s key to think of the future. Will this product still be relevant 5 years from now?
iPhones sell like hot cakes only until the next model shows up on the horizon. Some products are guided by trends.
There are also products that are hugely seasonal. Coronavirus masks are selling because its the flu and virus season. Also, people are scared out of their socks.
So goes winter wear and clothing for christmas. There’s no sustained demand throughout the year.
To make it something to live up to its efforts, the product has to show potential throughout the year and not something that resurrects into popularity a few months of the year or worse a few weeks.
Run the products you selected through Google trends. If the chart shows an even line throughout the year that means there’s sustained interest present through the year.
This consistent interest is what you’re looking for if you want to sell all year.
b) Is there enough volume to justify the content marketing investment
Other than aspects like not being seasonal, the niche you select must also have enough volume. A long time ago I created a niche site for something called ueleke pipes. It ranked immediately but the volume and commissions were woefully low. I hardly made a dollar a month with that site.
So it’s important to know how many people are searching for the said keyword on Google.
If the demand is high it won’t be any easier to do SEO but you can still drive traffic and get sales.
How to do keyword research?
I recommend using SEMRush because the tool is not just limited to keyword research but can also do competitor research, find their ads, and improve your content. There are over 60 different tools you can use.
WIth semrush on the dashboard enter your keyword. Once you do and hit enter, SEMrush will present a big list of ideas relevant to the keyword you typed. You will get generic phrases, exact matches, variations and long tails. You also get to see their cpc, organic keyword difficulty. Most importantly, you see the monthly search volumes.
If you get several terms that routinely go 1000 plus searches a month, it’s a clear sign that you need to be in the niche.
Find 10 to 20 search terms with volume and begin your site around it.
c)Do You Like this Niche?
Another important criteria when zeroing down on a niche is deciding if you love the niche or not. A niche might show good traffic potential. The keywords may be easy to rank. However, starting a website and ranking requires loads of work. Only after consistent efforts do you see at least some form of revenue growth with the site. So to be patient throughout you need to like and love the niche. The thing is if you like the niche, you will coast through content creation and promotion. It makes it easy.
If your niche is boring you, that is a clear sign that you need external motivation to finish up your site and rank it well.
The kinds of affiliate marketing sites you can start
One of the best kinds of sites you can create to power affiliate marketing is a coupon affiliate site.
Every business wants sales. And to that end they use coupons to convert people. When a software or tool becomes a bit more popular, we can use coupon marketing terms to rank or promote the said software/tool and get more people to our sites.
As an affiliate marketer this is a chance to get people to purchase from you as the rebate or discount you offer makes it a win-win deal for both parties involved.
Your target prospects are able to save some money and they will form part of the traffic that comes back.
Almost with all cases of coupon marketing, the final sales price is a bit lower than what would have been otherwise. That doesn’t mean your affiliate commissions are in any manner dented.
You gain the reader’s trust and in the long term the same buyer may come back time and again. Think and take a deliberate action that confirms this.
another item. You ought to think deliberately here and think of promoting coupons on products.
That’s not all. You could start off a completely coupons-based site that lists just coupons. Say coupons for web hosting, or coupons for tools around WordPress. I’ve seen lots of such sites and they tend to do well over time.
You could send the coupons you have to external sites and make an income.
If you have unique coupons and they’re spread far and wide that’s an incentive for people to use coupons. And you will get commissions no matter where you are.
- There are a few different ways in which you can promote coupons and make some money. There’s always the potential of sharing these coupons on forums and community websites as well.
Start a review blog
Another cool way to make affiliate commissions is by starting an entirely review based blog. You can think of several products relevant in a niche and come up with ideas and topics you can talk about. Even though review blogs target the bottom of the funnel prospects, talking about reviews in entirety can help the blog rank because of the contextual relevance you’re baking to your blog.
The simple way is to start a blog and talk about products you love and like the most. For example I promote Pat Flynn’s podcast player because I like him as a person and have used the product. There’s two things going for me. That’s a starting point from where you can branch out to several ideas and techniques to use.
- The review should be helpful and shouldn’t talk about only benefits in a bid to get more sales. A good review is strategic about flaws and misplaced activism. Use your reviews to provide in-depth product insights that take people closer to purchase.
- In addition, a good site implements SEO in the form of building links and writing out content that brings traffic in the long term.
Webinar based affiliate marketing
Webinars are immersive and that’s why they make it hard for people to say no to.
With webinars, you can reach your audience in the most targeted ways. Combine affiliate marketing strategies and tools.
Webinars involve people with regards to using a product and share details about the product. People can participate and clear their doubts.
Webinars are a great point of education that relay the benefit of a product and user cases.