This post is all about generating passive income through affiliate marketing. Those who are new or want to start affiliate marketing can learn a lot from this post. Those who are already doing it, but are unable to get the desired results – in short anyone looking to find ways Making Money Through Affiliate Marketing will find this post helpful, because:

• They may not be doing the basics right.
• They might be needing a few more tools in their arsenal.

So, let’s get started with the concept.

Affiliate Marketing Process – The Basics

When an online retailer, merchant or seller pays you, an affiliate marketer, a commission for increasing sales or traffic by referring to their website.

To put it simply, we segregate the process into these stages:

1. Online seller, merchant or retailer already got their product on their website.
2. You are promoting one product (or a product line) on your website.
3. Some of your visitors learned about these products from your website and clicked on the links to land on the retailer’s site.
4. On the seller’s website, they made purchases.

According to the above definition, an affiliate marketer gets his compensation:

• Either, at step 3 – when the visitor lands through your affiliate link on the seller’s website
• Or, Step 4 – when all the above steps are followed.

How you promote the products and get paid are different topics altogether. We will be focusing on the former in this post.

7 Steps to Successful Affiliate Marketing

Most of the time, affiliate marketers know what the process is all about, but what they don’t really consider is how they should effectively plan. Most of the time, they sign up with different networks or programs and overload themselves.

Don’t Burden Yourself: Affiliate marketing is not about taking a burden on your shoulder. Unless you’re able to earn while sleeping, you’re not doing it rightly (remember; affiliate marketing is about earning passive income).

Before we move on, we strictly recommend:

• You should go through all the steps and apply each of them one by one.
• Don’t even think about promoting any product unless you’re done with the 5^th step.

Step 1 – Find Your Niche

People often ask, is it “Nitch” or “Neesh”? Well, it depends if you want to pronounce it correctly or not… ????

It doesn’t really matter how you pronounce it, you have to choose the right niche to converge all your attention to create helpful content. Plus, your business gets the direction it needed, because you can then plan targeted campaigns.

• Choose the niche your passionate about
• That niche should be broad enough to give you at least 100 content creation ideas
• It’s better to find a niche that’s not oversaturated. You have to dig deeper to find that.
• Most importantly, make sure that it’s a money-making niche

Checkout ClickBank to get deeper and deeper, and find the right niche for yourself.

Have you noticed a long list of categories on the left side? That’s the place where you should get started.

Step 2: Create a Website

Found your niche yet? If Yes, you’re good to go!

About building a website, WPBeginner offers a really helpful guide for choosing the best platform for blogging. The easier the platform is, the better and quicker it is for you to launch a website.

While a blog is your website’s primary focus, there should be a bunch of supporting pages (some of them are MUST-HAVES), like:

• About page; so that people get to know you
• Contact page; a Must-Have page for everyone to connect with you (especially potential partners and advertisers)
• Disclaimer page; if the website is monetized
• Terms of service; a legal page that limits your liability if any information or the service you offer is misused.
• Privacy policy; to satisfy your visitors that their information will be kept secret.
• Custom 404 page; to improve user experience
• Advertise page; gives valuable information to the advertisers where they can place their ads. Add important information like monthly views, daily visits, and audience demographics to help them place the right ads. Don’t forget to include a contact form.

Step 3: Create Content

With the website’s structure completed, it’s time to create high-quality content.

Those who are members of affiliate marketing networks would know that some of these networks and affiliate programs set different criteria for affiliate membership. Your website is supposed to have content, traffic, page views, and the likes. You need to meet those levels to qualify as an affiliate.

That means your website should have 5-10 compelling blog posts that have received a considerable number of page views, shares, likes, comments, etc.

Step 4: Utilize Good SEO Tactics

By practicing good SEO strategies to drive traffic you can get quality traffic – serious visitors, targeted audience. For instance, the Skyscraper technique introduced by James Dean is by far the best strategy to rank high and get high-quality traffic on your website.

This technique works best when you find something on the internet, then create your version of that piece, but it should be better than the original version. The key is to fill up the gaps that were left in the original piece of content. Highlight those areas to leave a lasting impression on the reader that you’re probably the best resource on such a topic.

Step 5: Email List

Email marketing has always been on top of all the communication channels of marketing. When it comes to affiliate marketing, building an email list of subscribers would help you generate easy money. Yes, email marketing has the potential to yield skyrocketing revenues on a pretty small investment.

eMarketer study says, email ROI is found to be 122% in 2019. Compared to other channels, this ROI is far greater, in fact, four times higher than any digital marketing channel.

To build an email list there are quite a few list building ideas, such as adding a popup on your website.

Step 6: Choose the Affiliate Product

Now, it’s time to get to the promotion part and the first step is to choose a product related to your niche and your website content. The question is, how can you find the products to promote? Actually, it’s quite simple. You can get product promotion ideas from literally anywhere.

Promote products that you are already using:

Create a list of all the products that you often use and find their affiliate programs with Google search. Start writing reviews and insert affiliate links.

For example;

• OptinMonster offers 20% commission on sales,
• WordPress.com offers up to $300 on every conversion through WordPress affiliate program

Promote solutions

There might be people who are interested in your niche but they may be unable to use the products. Listen to their problems and identify gaps in the available solutions. Find alternatives or find solutions to fill those gaps. If these solutions look viable, start promoting them or sell them directly.

Promote products that your audience like to buy

That’s pretty basic, isn’t it? But, you need to be honest and straightforward to recommend the products or tell them if there’s anything doubtful. You’ll either get a commission on sales or in case of bad reviews, you’ll get trust from your audience.

Promote products that others are promoting

To do this, you need to constantly check on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other channels, what your competitors are promoting.

Step 7: Join a Network

These affiliate networks are marketplaces for potential sellers and affiliates. Retailers list their products and affiliates search for products to promote. The good thing about an affiliate network is, you don’t have to pay anything to sing up since you’re an affiliate.

Of hundreds of affiliate networks, here is a list of some popular ones:

• Amazon Associates
• CJ Affiliate
• ClickBank
• ShareaSale

Step 8: Track Results

There are different tools and software to track the performance of affiliate products on your WordPress site. Moreover, you can use the affiliate marketing channel to track the performance of affiliate products. These are the key metrics that will help you track your results in a better way:

• Number of clicks
• Sales actions
• Conversion percentage
• Return on ad expenditure
• Incremental revenue
• Cost per click and per sale
• Percent of active affiliates
• Types of active affiliates
• Top affiliates and their sales
• Chargeback rate or reversed sale rate

Bonus Tips: What Else You Need to Do

With all the basic work done, you should get your focus on finding affiliate products and promoting them online. Apart from the email promotion, there are two techniques that we haven’t discussed above:

Upselling

Encourage expensive purchases by persuading people to get add-ons or an upgraded version with more benefits. Refer to this post from BluLeadz that features 10 upselling examples. For example, this page from Booking.com always presents with different upselling options.

Paid Traffic

While this technique is not the basic affiliate marketing strategy, but it’s quite effective. In fact, affiliate marketers have been using to promote their products on Google AdWords, Facebook, and other Advertising channels. Once you start earning from the basic techniques, it would be a good idea to pay for your traffic and increase your revenue.