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Photo by Dominika Roseclay
In 2023, as economies ramp down and budgets tighten, you might be like millions of others looking for ways to supplement your income. You might have considered online marketing but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Let me tell you, you need to start Affiliate Marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a global business. Your internet traffic can literally come from anywhere. Global sales from affiliate marketing continue to number in the billions of dollars and the affiliates out there are the ones reaping the benefits. Affiliate marketing is a performance-based business and the better you understand your traffic and its needs the more money you can make. More and more affiliate marketing is becoming popular for driving sales to big corporates with the trust the affiliates have built up from their audience. Corporations love this because it increases their sales, and the affiliates love this because they’re making bank.
Don’t you agree that it’s time for you to get into affiliate marketing?
Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing
Great! You stuck around and you are intrigued. That’s smart. To get started, you’re going to need to establish for yourself a source of traffic. At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter if you build your own website, make youtube videos, or build an audience on Twitter or TikTok. It doesn’t matter at all where your traffic is coming from. What matters are two things:
- You understand why your traffic is finding its way to you, and you provide them with quality content.
- You work with affiliate programs offering products or services that your audience will actually like and want to purchase.
That’s it, those are the two secrets to success. Aren’t you glad you stopped by?
But wait, how do you get to the point of having both one and two? Well, you’ve got to start with some form of content creation because at the end that’s what affiliate marketing is based upon. You need to produce content for the world to see and consume. That’s not where it ends though, because content that is never seen will never be consumed and will lead to no conversions from your affiliate programs.
The methods you use to build up a source of traffic are going to vary based on the medium you’ve decided to build with, but whether you’re building a website or a social media following, the principles are often similar.
Paid Advertising: You can always pay to get some traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and umpteen other million places. This traffic is often targeted and if you know the type of person who will buy your program’s products, then you can get as many as you can afford. This is a high-risk option because if you misunderstand your key demographic, or you overestimate your product’s desirability, you may be out your advertising dollars with nothing to show for it.
Organic Search Traffic: This, at least in my experience, has been the bread and butter of my efforts with affiliate marketing. Working with the principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), producing quality content, and making content that is likely to be shared by others, you can convince Google to drop visitors on your website’s doorstep for free. This is similar for social media as well, in which case you’re going to produce content that keywords and hashtags drive users to, again for free. All that free traffic, even if it takes a month or more, is potential profit with much less risk. I can’t say any risk because obviously, your time invested is at risk, but you’ve risked no, or very few dollars.
Networking: Work with other affiliates out there. Write guest posts for each other. Reach out and see who is willing to work with you. Links from other sites are one of the things that Google is looking for when deciding whether or not your website is worthy of the traffic that it is handing out. Being part of a group of websites that it already deems worthy is one way for Google to give you a shot.
Choose products wisely: This goes without saying I’m sure, but if you just willy-nilly promote absolutely everything on your website or social media, your users are much less likely to engage with it. Choose products that are in the same niche as the content you’re creating, and make sure to try and use your best judgement when deciding if a product is a good fit for you. You don’t want your readers or viewers to develop a negative attitude toward you because of a product they purchased after visiting your website.
Why Companies Use Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a win/win for both companies and affiliates. The companies get a low-cost way of bringing awareness of their products to as many people as their affiliates can manage. Even though some of the commissions may seem massive, it’s low cost in the sense that these companies don’t have to pay anything for affiliates who aren’t making sales. That’s simply not the case for billboards and TV ads. These are risk-free payments for the companies because if they’re paying you, you’ve already made the sale.
For affiliates, the ones who have put in the time to develop traffic-building strategies, the win is that if you can guide your traffic to a product, those sales are bound to happen if the product or service is decent. However you decide to build your traffic, the desired result is usually the same. You want your traffic to convert to sales, and once they do, profit is your reward.
More and more, affiliate marketing is becoming a science. You can measure so many different aspects of the decision-making of your traffic that you’re able to use longstanding sales techniques to guide your traffic through the decision-making process. More and more, affiliate marketing is data-driven, and there are thousands of ways to interpret that data. As your traffic grows, you’ll be able to better understand your traffic, and understanding leads to sales.
Affiliate Marketing is as Busy as Ever
Every few days, you see another article about how affiliate marketing has capped, or is even dying. That kind of clickbaity article is just the kind of thing that’s going to get your attention. What do you mean affiliate marketing is dying!? Fortunately, there’s just no logic to that conclusion. Consumers, now more than ever, are consuming user-generated content (UGC). UGC is created and produced by users at their expense, usually for the purpose of building traffic. What do you think they want to do to that traffic? Monetize it. What do you think companies want them to do with that traffic? Monetize it in their direction. The end result? Affiliate marketing is growing, it’s alive and well, and while it may not grow at an exponential rate, there’s no reason to believe its growth will slow down. There’s room for you, me, and many others in the affiliate marketing world.
As affiliate marketing matures, industry standards are definitely changing. Data is definitely being used more heavily now to monitor, manipulate, and understand the decision-making process of the consumer. Where once we might have worked out what we believed to be the best banner for making conversions, now we might produce twenty, and then let our users decide which one is best for making conversions. The ability to monitor your traffic analytics will make it easier to understand which ads are going to best convert.
The game is maturing, but the goal is the same. Profit for the companies, and profit for you.
Affiliate marketing is absolutely huge business, and that business is still growing. There are companies around the world looking to work with people who are great at producing user-generated content and websites. If you have a creative knack, or if you have a creative knack, or if you just want to build something because you think it’s cool, you need to start affiliate marketing.
