Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online and it has tons of benefits. One of the biggest benefits of affiliate marketing is the incredibly low barrier to entry. You could technically start selling any products for free as long as you have an internet connection. You may not even need to use the internet as some affiliate marketers use clever methods like print and SMS marketing to advertise affiliate products. Confused about getting started with affiliate marketing? Read on!
One thing you should know, however, is that making it as an affiliate marketer is not necessarily easy. Finding the right products to sell can be tough, and people are bombarded by marketing messages left and right these days. This has caused many of them to develop a blind spot for advertising. So, you will need to be creative and be ready for your first efforts to fall flat until you find something that works. Here are a few tips for getting started with affiliate marketing.
Learn the Basics of Web Design
The very first thing that we suggest you do is to learn how to build a basic website. Do not be intimidated by this. You can learn the basics of web design by watching YouTube videos and through free resources like W3schools.
If you can type, then there’s a strong chance that you can learn basic HTML at the very least. You could then learn about the core principles of CSS. This is all that you need to start building small affiliate websites.
You can always hire someone to create websites for you, but this could get expensive pretty quickly, especially if you make lots of misses at the beginning. Affiliate websites tend to be very simple too, so there’s no point in overpaying someone for something you could easily do yourself.
Choosing Between Digital or Physical Products
You can either sell physical or digital products through affiliate marketing. Both options have their pros and cons, and you need to know them before you decide to go in either direction. Nothing is stopping you from pushing both.
One of the best parts of advertising physical products is that they’re usually much easier to grasp. Beginners often prefer to sell physical products because they have a better understanding of who would be interested in them. Physical products can also be advertised through more outlets than digital ones.
One of the drawbacks of physical products, however, is that they tend to pay much lower commissions. That’s because margin has to be accounted for. A merchant cannot offer a 50% commission on a product if their margin is only 20%.
Amazon, for instance, only offers a 10% commission for bottom-tier affiliates. This is why you need to know if Amazon is right for your business before you assume that you’ll be able to make money there.
What’s More?
The trick when selling Amazon products as an affiliate is to aim for big-ticket products that people are likely to buy online. A 10% commission on a $50 product isn’t worth much of the effort, but things become interesting when you start looking at products over the $500 mark.
You have to focus on products that are expensive, but easy to ship. Electronics fall into that category, but also things like musical instruments and small appliances. So, consider these options and be open in your choice of products.
Being an affiliate for digital products is a little different and you will have to be a bit savvier to push them. Digital products offer much better commissions than physical products on average, and if you know how to market them properly, you could make a lot more money with them. They also have much lower return rates than physical products.
Don’t Send People Directly to Offers
One of the worst things you can do as an affiliate marketer is to send people directly to affiliate offers. A lot of people will try to do things like buying solo ads or PPC marketing to do this, but that is a huge mistake.
When you do this, you have absolutely no way to follow up with the people you send to the offers. You could do something as simple as setting up a squeeze page, capturing their information, and sending them to the offer after.
Few things are as valuable as an email subscriber list when you’re an affiliate. You even have affiliate marketers who only sell through email marketing.
A simple squeeze page might seem like nothing at first glance, but when you have tens of thousands of subscribers, you can make tons of sales just by sending a simple email. This is one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways to push affiliate products, as long as you offer value and aren’t too obvious in your efforts. Learn everything there is to learn about email marketing right now as this could be the single most powerful affiliate marketing tool there is.
Start a Review Site
Starting a review site is another very simple and very efficient way to push affiliate products. Here, we would suggest that you pick products that you at least have some sort of expertise in. You could also pick products you would be personally interested in. But make sure that you do your homework on them first.
The beauty of a review site is that you don’t need to actively sell products. Just put honest reviews and make sure that you are an affiliate of every product that is featured on the site. This way you’ll earn a commission any time someone decides to buy a product through one of your links, even if you bashed it.
This is all you need to know if you want to get started with affiliate marketing. It’s one of the most fun and stress-free ways to earn a living online, but it takes a lot of time and practice to get consistently good at it, so be patient and be ready to make a lot of mistakes at first.