How To Start Affiliate Marketing

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Affiliate marketing is when you promote or advertise the products or services of another company on your website, social media posts, blogs, etc. for a commission from the sale your reader or viewer brings them.

Affiliate marketing is getting popular and is wildly received by marketers, seeing as 83% of marketers use affiliate marketing to increase their brand awareness and 79% of them use affiliate marketing to engage their current customers.

If you want to get started on affiliate marketing, here are some steps that you need to follow to make a successful affiliate marketing campaign.

STEP 1 — Choose a Niche
A niche is a specific part or segment of a market that is united by a common interest or demographic. Choose a niche, which is the topic that you will become an authority on, a niche that you will build your marketing around. Examples of niches are:
- Travel and Tourism
- Health and Fitness
- Food
- Lifestyle
- Entertainment
- Technology, etc.
One of the reasons that you need a niche is that when you build your brand around a particular niche, people will find it easier to trust you and the products you promote as you have shown them that you know what you are doing and understands the niche very well.
You should choose a niche that you will enjoy and won’t drop in the future.

• STEP 2 — Select a Platform
  Next, you are to decide which platform you are going to use to publish content for your affiliate marketing. The two main channels mainly used for affiliate marketing are social media platforms and websites.
  Social media platforms are very good channels for affiliate marketing because there are more than 4.7 billion social media users around the globe. This gives an affiliate marketer a chance to interact with a large number of people, to who they can promote the products or services . And most affiliates have already established a follower base on their social media accounts, which means they already possess an audience who trusts them.
  Having your own website as an affiliate marketer makes you appear more professional and helps in drawing potential customers. Blogging is the main way that affiliates with websites use to generate traffic. Bloggers usually have an established audience or readers who trust them and will be willing to try recommended products or services.
• STEP 3 — Pick and Join an Affiliate Program
  When picking an affiliate program, you should pick one that is compatible with your niche and it should also interest your audience and appeal to them. There are 3 types of affiliate programs, they are:
  - Low commission, high volume: the commission in these programs is low, but you are offered a wide range of products. To generate revenue, you need to promote a lot of content. Amazon affiliate program is a good example.
  - High commission, low volume: In these kinds of programs you don’t need to generate a lot of sales to get revenue. The products are expensive for example, watches, jewelry, and designer clothing.
  - High commission, high volume: Programs like this are very profitable which makes it very competitive. An example is the credit card affiliate program.
• STEP 4 — Create Excellent and Engaging Content
  Bill Gates said, “Content is King”. This shows that as an affiliate marketer if you want to generate revenue, you will have to create engaging content that will engage your audience and attract people to your affiliate links which complement the content. Creating good content builds trust with your audience which will make your marketing easier in the long run.
• STEP 5 — Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate
  Now that you have created good and engaging content, the next step is to get more people to read, view, and engage with it so that you can generate revenue. There are a few ways to drive traffic to your affiliate website, they are:
  - Paid advertising: This is when you pay money to have your affiliate site advertised. For example, Pay-Per-View advertising.
  - Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is a set of practices designed to optimize your site to improve its ranking on the search engine result page. When your site ranks first for a specific target keyword, every time a customer searches the internet to buy something using that keyword, your site is shown to them as one of the top-ranking sites on the search engine result page. As long as your site ranks high you will get constant traffic.

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