Empowered Woman | Entrepreneurs

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I make a commission if you purchase through my link, thank you for your support.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

With affiliate marketing, a company pays you a percentage of the sales that you help them make.

For example, let’s say you’ve found a product that you think will benefit your blog’s readers. You can place an affiliate link for the product in your blog copy.

Then, your audience members can click on the link and be taken to a page on the affiliate’s website that can lead them to a sale. When someone buys the product through your link, you will receive part of the money from that sale.

The beauty is that you are able to provide links to products that could really help to improve your readers’ lives, and you are able to earn a profit in the process.

In this article, I’m going to discuss what affiliate marketing is, how it works and how you can get started with affiliate marketing as a beginner.

1. Find Your Niche

Before you can build an audience, you need to decide on a specific niche. If you choose something that is too broad, then you will have difficulty finding affiliate products that resonate with your followers.

Say you’re thinking of starting a blog about fitness. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of fitness blogs.

To reach passionate readers who will be more likely to engage with your blog, you need to narrow it down much further — say, to women over 40 who are just beginning fitness.

After you find your small niche, keep it in mind as you look into affiliate possibilities. You cannot market things that do not make sense for your audience.

For example, if you are building a healthy lifestyle site like Well Kept Body, then you would not choose to market a “magic diet pill” to your audience. Something like that would not fit into your niche.

Avoid pitching products to your audience that will not help them in some way.

2. Build An Audience

Without any followers, it will be impossible to earn any money through affiliate marketing because no one will buy the product through you. Without that connection, you will not be able to earn a commission.

If you do not already have an audience, don’t worry! It is completely possible to build an audience from scratch.

First, you need to choose where you want to build an audience. You can build a blog, create a social media following, record a podcast, start a YouTube channel and more.

You can also earn money with Instagram or other social media platforms by building a following that has the potential to be monetized through affiliate marketing.

It is important to build trust between you and your audience along the way. Choose to create quality content that will help your readers. You are more likely to gain a following if you put your audience first.

Be sure to solve their problems and provide information that matters to them.

Build the trust of your audience before moving on to the next step in your journey.

3. Work With Brands That Convert Well

A big part of generating sales through your affiliate links is to do with how you promote the products you choose.

However, you can only control what happens while your users are engaging with your channels and content. Yes, you can tell them how great a product is and get them excited about it. But once a user actually clicks on your link, you’re handing the baton to your partner brand. It’s up to them to seal the deal!

Of course, no brand’s ever going to have a 100% conversion rate. But if you’re getting paid based on a RevShare, you’ll want to try to work with brands that convert as many clicks into sales as possible.

If your partner brand has a terrible conversion rate, that’s going to be a real obstacle to making money through their affiliate program!

4. Find Products Your Audience Will Love

The key to affiliate marketing is to find products that resonate with your audience. In fact, if you promote useless products, then you may actually lose followers along the way.

Think about this from the audience’s perspective. Let’s say you find a blog about healthy living that you like and sign up for its email list.

For a few weeks, you enjoy their health-conscious weight loss advice until one day you receive an email about a fad diet and a link to purchase the latest weight loss pill.

Instead of buying the pill, you would likely close the email and unsubscribe from the list. If you were the blogger in this scenario, you would have lost followers and likely would not have earned much money.

However, if you find products that really resonate with your audience, then you will gain trust and your audience will be more likely to buy through your links. Your followers will get products that help them, and you will earn money.

5. Find Affiliate Marketing Programs

Once you have found some products to market to your audience, you will need to secure the affiliate links for the product or service. Luckily, there are several ways to find affiliate programs.

6. Affiliate Marketplaces

Affiliate marketplaces like ShareASale and ClickBank have hundreds (or thousands) of affiliate programs to choose from. Marketplaces make it fairly easy for you to find several affiliate programs to compare.

You can find affiliate programs for entire companies as well as individual products to share with your audience.

You simply have to sign up for the marketplace, then search for the specific program you are interested in. Once you find a program that fits your interests, you can sign up for the program directly on the marketplace.

Marketplaces allow for easy access to several affiliate programs under one umbrella. As you grow your affiliate income, you may appreciate having several affiliate links in one easy-to-access place.

7. Promote, Promote, Promote

There are lots of different ways that you can make money with affiliate links, from growing your followers on social media to leveraging the power of paid advertising, running a YouTube channel, conducting email marketing campaigns or even just sending links to your nearest and dearest via WhatsApp messages.

Although we’d recommend focusing on one channel for your affiliate marketing activities to start with, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use a secondary channel to promote your primary one.

Or, you could set up a social media account and promote new blog pieces on there, increasing the amount of traffic to your site.

When you’re choosing where you’d like to promote your primary channel, consider where your target audience is.

Conclusion

As you can see, making money with affiliate marketing takes time and commitment but it’s not rocket science. Ultimately, if you have to take away one thing from what you’ve read, we hope it’s that you need to consider your users’ needs just as much (if not more!) as your pocket’s.

As you start pursuing an affiliate marketing income, continue to learn as you go. Adjust your strategies and find ways to help your audience. By doing that, you can take your income to the next level.