6 Affiliate Marketing Tips For Beginners

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5 years ago

In this article I will define what Affiliate Marketing truly is and cover 6 tips for beginner that will drasticly increase success and income.

Affiliate Marketing defined

I googled affiliate marketing and have chosen 3 definitions.

Dictionary - "a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays a commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals."
Entrepreneur dot com - "a way for a company to sell products by signing up individuals or companies ('affiliates') who make the company's products for a commission."
Shopify - "Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic that lets a product owner increase sales by allowing others targeting the same audience - 'affiliates' - to earn a commission by recommending the product to others. making it possible for affiliates to earn money on product sales without creating products of their own."

So, affiliate marketing is a selling game however, it is a soft sell game. No Spam Allowed! Wikipedia defines Spam as "...unsolicited or undesired electronic messages, Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages. Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging(IM) services, sms, or private massages with websites."

Bombarding Social media with unwanted or unsolicited promotion of products or services is considered Spam. Shameless plugging your website, blog or affiliate link on social media, forums and blog comments is also spam.

Okay now that we have Affiliate Marketing and Spam defined your maybe asking "What can I do to promote my affiliate link and earn commissions?"

I have 6 Tips that will show you how to build your affiliate marketing efforts on solid ground.

Tip number 1- Avoid Distractions and "Shiny Odject Syndrome.

Just a word to the wise, you will never become a successful affiliate marketer if you spend days, months, and years chasing the latest, greatest and loudest Marketing Guru. Having said that, you must educate yourself on many aspects of marketing, a minimum of technical experience and developing your writing skills. All of which requires patience and the self-control to avoid distractions and the ability to motivate yourself to work on building skills and expertise in your chosen niche.

I have learned this lesson the hard way. I have spent thousands of dollars and countless years chasing all the self-appointed Internet Gurus. Most not experts, most are not earning the outrageous money that they say they are. They are simply promoting over priced products that are light on new and up to date information. Take the time to compare Wealthy Affiliate vs the Guru. You will discover that at Wealthy Affiliate you can receive your education, domain name, website and hosting all in one place and for a very reasonable price.

A word to the wise, if you are under the misconception that affiliate marketing is a "get-rich-quick" thing that will solve all your financial problems within a few days or a month, stop reading now. Affiliate Marketing is a long term situation, built upon a step by step process. It will require patience and time to build your expertise and customer base.

Here is the cold hard truth: in order to have any sort of chance of making money as an affiliate marketer, you need at least $500 or more to invest in education, domain name, website, hosting etc. The good news is, here at Wealthy Affiliate you can get started for free and work on your education and website blog until you are able to raise the additional capital through offline sources.

Bear in mind that it will take many months if not a year or so before you will start to generate enough traffic to your blog and start to earn commissions.

Tip number 2 - Focus on building an audience

You must build an audience that knows, likes and trusts you before they will buy. Your goal is to help people not to be a salesperson.

When you help people for free, you build an audience.

My research and experience proves that there are 3 avenues that you will use to build your audience.

Website blog
Social Media (Facebook Page, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Linkedin)
You Tube Channel

Start with your website blog. When you have published approximately 100,000 word of top quality, value packed niche content, you can move to mastering one Social Media account. Once social media is mastered, it is time to build your You Tube channel.

Tip number 3 - Know your audience

Who are the people in your audience?
What problems do they want to solve?
What do they want or need. ( it is easier to sell what they want vs what they need.)
Encourage question and comments on your blog, host a survey, ask people to email you with questions. Respond quickly to all comments and questions.

Tip number 4 - Start building your Email List

After you have mastered blogging, social media and YouTube it is time to build your email list. Building an Email List is an advanced technique so do not rush into it. Build your audience first.

Tip number 5 - Communicate with your audience once per week of more often

Use a combination of all the above mentioned techniques to stay in touch with your audience. You must never quit providing helpful quality content for your audience. Once a week is the bare minimum, more often is even better, daily is ideal.

Tip number 6 - When appropriate promote your affiliate offer as a solution,

Keep in mind, Affiliate Marketing is a "soft sell" method. Softly and gently mention your affiliate offer during your process of helping and communicating with you audience.