Affiliate Marketing Explained In Simple Terms

bytomcaldwell2

126 followers

Updated 5 years ago

In this straight forward article you will learn how to earn money with affliliate marketing. Follow these instructions and your success will be guaranteed,

Affiliate marketing is a simple concept, there are only 3 components.

1. Build an audience.
2. Build a relationship with your audience
3. Sell helpful products and service to your audience.

Affiliate Marketing is a Selling Game

Don't be afraid of the thought of selling. When done correctly selling becomes a natural part of the process and does not feel uncomfortable for your audience or for you.

Build an Audience - First

Before you can earn commissions as an affiliate marketer, you must build an audience. Without an audience you're marketing efforts are similar to throughing spaghetti on the wall and seeing if any sticks, you will not make many sales.

The advantage of Building as Audience is that you are in control and not relying on SEO or any given Social Media platform for your potential customers. The search engines change the rules of SEO and you may lose all traffic which would put you out of business. Same goes with total reliance on social media, what if Facebook shuts down your account for some minor violation that you unknowing committed, Social media platforms may be bought out or might even go out of business.

I know of one affiliate marketer who had a million dollar per year businss that was built totally on the social platform of My Space, when My Space lost popularity seemingly over night, he lost his entire audience and was out of business.

Solution:: Build an Audience with a combination of these three methods.

• Build a email list
  
• Grow your social media follow
  
• Attract visitors to your website with SEO
  
• Bonus: paid advertising

Choose one master it, then do the same with the next, until you have mastered all three.

This way you don't have all your eggs in one basket.

Build a Relationship With Your Audience

In order to build a relationship with your audience you must build know, like and trust. This is done by providing valuable content that answers your audience's most pressing question, wants and needs. Your valuable content can be provided in three methods:

• The written word via a blog or website
• The spoken word via podcast
• The spoken word and visual contact via video
• or any combination of the three

Must Have Tools

1. Domain Name- preferably a dot com
2. WordPress website/blog or Funnel Builder
3. Email Autoresponder- so you can collect the email addresses of your audience.( the money/sells are in the email follow up).

Create or buy a Lead Magnet and Build your email list via a Lead Magnet.

Investopedia defines a Lead Magnet as follows:
"A lead magnet is a marketing term for a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details; for example, lead magnets can be trial subscriptions, samples, white papers, e-newsletters, and free consultations. Marketers use lead magnets to create sales leads".

Promote your Lead Magnet

"Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise." ~ The Provisioner, Vol 44 (June 1911)

This quote is the essence of Affiliate Marketing. Why? Because if no one is seeing your content and affiliate links, you will not make sells and you will not earn money.

I like to use the word Promotion rather than the work Advertise.

Promotion comes in to form: Free and Paid.

Free Promotion costs you time and lots of it.

Paid Promotion costs money and little time.

Ways to Promote your Lead Magnet (and website content)

Free Promotion:

• Video via your blog/website, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
• Social Media- proceed with caution. Do not spam your affiliate links on social media. Get some quality training that teaches the proper social media promotion. Hint: This involves you creating your own Facebook business page and Facebook groups.
• Blogging and SEO via your own WordPress website. You get blogging training here at Wealthy Affiliate.

Paid Promotion:

Paid Promotion requires a steep learning curve. Before you spend any money on Paid Promotion, I suggest you get some serious trainging. The best Paid Promotion training that I have found is available from a teacher named Miles Beckler. You can find this training by performing a Goggle search. Search "Miles Beckler paid advertising".

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is simple in theory. But, affiliate marketing requires WORK. If you are willing to sacrifice your time and effort, be patient, build your audience, engage your audience and sell to your audience, you will succeed at making sells and earning money. Now get out there and take ACTION, do the work and make your Dreams come true.