So you’ve heard about affiliate marketing: The art of making money by promoting other people’s products and services, normally getting about 50% of the profit of a sale that you refer. Although this percentage depends on the affiliate program. Sounds easy, right? Just submit an article or two and then sit back and watch the money roll in. But it’s not that simple, so don’t quit your day job yet. If it was, everyone would be doing it. So in this article I’ve listed some good tips and steps to get you started and hopefully eventually to the point where you can quit your day job.
1. Pick the right affiliate program.
This step is key and can determine success or failure, especially if you focus on just one. When starting, I’d recommend a program that hosts a lot of products like RevenueWire, ClickBank (though not suggested) and PayDotCom. Another recommendation is Amazon’s Associate program, which starts out giving only 5% of the profit through your links but is a very prestigious company that many people feel comfortable purchasing products from. As you progress and get the hang of promoting products, I’d suggest going directly to companies’ sites and checking if they have an affiliate program, which you can normally find a link to at the footer of the site if one is available. They’ll normally have higher earnings (most affiliate hosting programs take a small percentage off the top, money you could be earning) and the fact you’re dealing directly with the company makes you more likely to get paid. The downside is you’d have more accounts you’ll need to keep track of. My word is advice is to keep a written journal of all your accounts so that you never forget any of them. Moreover, for you to pick the right affiliate program, you must be able to watch some video reviews on different and several reliable websites and platforms.
2. Quantity is just as important as quality.
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that an article or two is all that’s required. Or they’ll do the opposite and have dozens of poorly written articles that they’ll devoted two minutes of research to and twenty minutes of writing. Think of it this way, for every hundred views your article gets, you may only get about ten clicks to your links, and maybe only one purchase. This is where quantity comes in. If you have twenty articles in circulation, each netting a hundred views a day, and then put my average formula into consideration, that will equal to twenty purchases a day. Keep in mind this is just a mental graph to give you an idea, your results could be way less, way more or around that number. So that’s why quantity is important. But it’s pointless if your articles are poorly written. So do your research and make your articles seem like they’re written by a real person instead of reading like an advertisement, but still with enough advertising terms to let everyone know you still are promoting a product. Keep both those things in mind and you should be able to write a plethora of quality articles in no time.
3. Get your own website to host your articles on alongside all of the article archive sites.
Most article sites like Ezine Articles don’t let you post affiliate links, but will allow you to place a link back to your own site where you can. When just starting, I’d recommend using Blogger seeing as it’s free, is easy to manage and it’s set up is very easy to integrate Amazon links (and of course Google’s Adsense program seeing as Blogger is Google’s blog hosting site, which can provide another flow of revenue for you). But once you start getting a steady flow of traffic and a couple consistent sales, the next step would be to get your own domain. GoDaddy.com is very good for this, being cheap and hosting a lot of features to enable you to integrate WordPress into as well as anything else you’d need to host all of your content, links and what have you.
Summary:
Use all of these tips, set a schedule and a goal and work at it until you see results. Don’t expect to make enough money to spend your days relaxing on a beach anytime soon, if at all. But is it impossible? Far from it, people are creating their own success story and making a consistent full-time income more often than you think. But due to the fact anyone can do it also means that competition is heavy. So just stay passionate, patient and don’t lose hope. It’s easier than you think, it just takes a little while to get started. So what are you waiting for? Your free time is precious. Good luck, all!