Building Your Audience 

Your audience is what matters most when it comes to growth and the stability of your website or blog. The goal is to acquire an audience that is large and full of repeatedly engaged users. So, whatever you’re creating, you want to ensure it will keep your audience hooked. With a hooked audience and regular traffic coming in, you can start looking to earn income from affiliate marketing. 

Getting started with your ideal audience requires you to decide who and what your target audience will be. Discover your target audience with extensive research of who competitors are targeting, as well as monitoring your traffic or talking directly to your subscribers to gain a better understanding. 

After you have established your target audience, you want to continue to reach out to people and provide them content they want to see. For example, you can create targeted content and emails. You always need to put yourself in the users’ shoes and give them something you can be confident they will find engaging. If they can trust your content, they’re more likely to trust your recommended products and complete a purchase. 

Find & Sign Up to an Affiliate Program 

Many professional affiliates will agree that the best way to get started with affiliate marketing is to sign up for an affiliate program with a top company like Amazon. Once you register for a program, you will receive a link that is your unique affiliate ID. This link can be used on your content and is how purchases get tracked back to you. It’s unlikely that an affiliate program provider will expect you to pay upfront costs. However, the varied ongoing costs will be affected by how you promote the products or services. 

If you choose to get content created by someone else or start running advertising campaigns, you will have to pay for these yourself. Affiliate program providers are not known to help financially towards marketing their products, and that is why building your audience and keeping content relevant is essential for your success. 

Promote Products of Your Choice 

You must select the right product for your affiliate venture, work with the right company and update your content if you plan on being successful. There are two rules you should follow when considering affiliate marketing: 

• Only promote products as an affiliate that you feel you are familiar to you. If you are not confident or educated in a product, do not recommend it to your audience. 
• Don’t tell people to buy a product. As an affiliate, you should always recommend products based on your experience and keep it within the context of what you have done. 

When deciding on the right products, you must consider these three elements when determining what you are going to promote: 

1. Audience: Will your chosen product relate to them, and will they be happy that you guided them to it? 
2. Quality & value: Is the product of a high enough standard that you would feel confident gifting it to a best friend? 
3. Profitability: Is the offer highly competitive with conversions & pay-outs?  

Have you got any products in mind after reading this segment? 

Create Optimised Content That Works 

Creating optimised content is essential for your success because genuine and tailored content helps to promote your product of choice and keep your audience engaged. Writing blogs is always a great way to start giving feedback on your favourite products. If you learn about SEO and optimise your content around a keyword, you will increase your chances of gaining extra traffic from Google Search. You can discover more about SEO with my training courses. 

No matter what type of content you go for, it is essential that you feature your affiliate products and include genuine reviews on them. Try to stay away from promoting products that you have no experience with yourself. 

Every time a new user visits your website, a browser cookie will be triggered, which will track their actions as they go from page to page. 

If any of the users make a purchase, the seller can see that the transaction came from your affiliate link which means, you get paid. 

Monitor your affiliate content so that you can gain a greater understanding of how things are performing. Consider connecting your website to Google Analytics since it is free and gives you much needed insight into your website’s performance and more. Learn how to set up and use Google Analytics here in The Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics. 

Start Earning Money 

Before you start earning, make sure you are aware of the different payment structures available. If you have a preferred form of payment, you should always check the payment details of an affiliate marketing program before signing up. 

Commission based earning is known to be paid out by the company every month. However, this can vary depending on the terms. 

Some affiliate programs will pay you every week, so you want to be aware of the payment structure given to you when joining. 

Your goals will determine what program you sign up for, the products you promote and how you promote them. You also want to consider how much time and resources you want to invest. 

If you were to promote your products on paid advertising platforms, you need to consider the cost of these services. If you’re running a website, you might need to pay for hosting too. So, make sure you have everything planned out, and then you can see the profits come pouring in. 

So, what’s stopping you now? 

Start earning passive income today!