How do you earn money with affiliate marketing? It’s not as easy as it sounds, especially when you have to compete with the big brands that already have thousands of affiliates. But by being smart and strategic, you can carve out your own space in the market and earn good money from your efforts. In this article, we look at different ways to make money as an affiliate and how to best approach each approach in order to succeed.
What are affiliate programs?
To use affiliate marketing, you need to be able to find a product or service that you can sell in order to market it and make commissions. In order to promote these products or services, you will often receive free or discounted versions of them through an affiliate program. The best way to make money with affiliate marketing is simply by promoting other people’s products! Think about what products and services are most likely to sell well.
Benefits of affiliate marketing
One of affiliate marketing’s most appealing benefits is that it doesn’t require a large investment in order to make money. You simply need to place some ads, drive traffic, and earn sales. In other words, affiliate marketing allows you to be a business owner even if you don’t have your own product or service to sell. All you need is your traffic-driving capability, which can be easy to achieve with platforms like Facebook and Google AdWords.
Ways to make money
There are many ways you can make money with affiliate marketing. The easiest is to add links to other people’s products on your website, and then every time a customer purchases through those links, you earn a commission. You can also set up a pay-per-click program where you’re paid for any visitor that clicks through from your site to your product.
Landing page examples
If you’re still new to affiliate marketing, landing pages can help you get a better sense of how affiliates are trying to sell products and services. Before you start building your own, take a look at some of these examples for inspiration. They do a good job of demonstrating how sites focus on very specific benefits, like saving money or increasing security.
Tools
The following are a few of my favorite affiliate marketing tools CJ, Share-A-Sale, LinkShare, ClickBank, and eBay Partner Network. You can use these to register for any of the available programs and monitor your campaign’s performance. In addition, they can be linked to MailChimp or AWeber for lead capture purposes. There are plenty of other tools out there that I haven’t mentioned yet; if you know of any, please tell me!
Mapping out your blog for better results
There are two approaches to creating a successful affiliate site: you can create a microsite that focuses on a single product or service, or you can create a content site that offers multiple items for sale. For example, in her book Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, Jamie Turner says when she started out she used both approaches. But after trying both methods and finding better success with microsites (because they get more repeat traffic) she went that route from then on.
Examples of affiliate sites
Self-help, money, and time management sites are hugely popular for affiliate marketers. These sites tend to be operated by one or two people, who often prefer to focus on affiliate marketing rather than running a full site. This keeps their websites fast and clean, which is ideal for promoting products from other sites. Think about starting a website related to time management or personal productivity—or any topic that you could tangentially link to your product or service.
Tips for getting higher conversions
While you can promote any kind of product or service, it’s important to tailor your approach based on what your audience is looking for. If they’re business owners themselves, they may want advice on improving their existing strategy. Or maybe they’re more interested in learning how affiliate marketing can help boost sales. For a healthy balance of earnings and customer satisfaction, find a niche that makes sense for your audience and type of content you plan to create.
