Affiliate Marketing Step By Step Guide
Affiliate marketing is the simple process of earning commissions for promoting other peoples or other companies products. Find a product you like, one that fits in with your brand or products you like or use and promote them to an audience. Then receive a share of the revenue that the owner of the product makes. The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you do not require to hold any stock or oversee any product support as the owner will take care of all this and more. Your only concern is getting the product seen by people that will buy it. Depending on the product you can earn as much as up to 100% of the product price as a commission, so it's worth looking for not only the best products but ones with great affiliate programs. A successful affiliate marketing campaign requires you to undertake a few simple steps and below we outline them for you.
Build an Email list
'The money is in the list' is often mentioned when discussing affiliate marketing. This is because it is the most direct and effective form of communication a marketer can utilise. The reason being it has been proven that people are more likely to read emails than any other form of modern communication. So if you can form a great relationship with people that join your list the potential for sales is incredibly high. Typically it is thought that on average each email subscriber should generate approximately $1 per month on a well maintained list. We use Aweber for our lists due to the simplicity of the interface. It allows us to create lists and integrate them with any of our pages so that new subscribers are automatically added. It then allows us to automatically send out pre written emails to any new subscribers. Also as you would expect we can send emails any time we feel the need to communicate with audience for other promotions.
Related: Build Your ListEasy Traffic
Once you have your campaigns set up you will require what is referred to online as traffic. This is essentially the act of attracting people to see your promotions and visiting your sites. The easiest free traffic is obtained using video via the YouTube platform. This is because YouTube is open to everyone and anyone can rank a video that can be found via the search unlike with traditional websites and google's search engine where you are heavily reliant up search engine optimisation which can prove to me difficult. These days video that people want to engage with is very easy to create, whether you're on camera, you record your screen or create something more fancy with video editing and creation software. However there is an element that must be on point with every video and that is sound. This is because believe it or not, people will persist with even a poor video if they believe the content to be good, but if the sound is poor nine times out ten they will look elsewhere. We use the Blue Yeti USB microphone which records crystal clear sound quality which to the untrained ear is as professional as you can get.
Related: Get TrafficBuild a Site
All successful campaigns start and end with some form of website. Whether that is an article, a review, an advertisement, a blog, a store or a capture page to get email subscribers. You need a website because this is where you will drive people to. Having an website allows you to do three important things. Firstly you get to further presell the product which further increases conversions and removes time wasters. Secondly it provides you to opportunity to position an email opt-in between the visitor and the product. Likewise and third, having a site enables you to create pixel audiences so that you can market to these people through retargetting advertising later on as they fullfill the requirement of a targeted audience. We build our sites using clickfunnels as their system is an easy drag and drop interface and allows us to incorporate all the tracking we need.
Related: Build Your SiteTrack Everything
Regardless of what form of traffic you use, whether its paid advertising or free social engagement you need to be on top of tracking who is clicking on your links. Firstly you want and need to know whether the campaigns you are creating are generating clicks. This very immediate metric tells you whether to cut your losses and or make changes to your campaigns. Making tweaks to your campaigns can be the difference between success and failure and without tracking you wouldn't know why. Likewise by tracking you can gain an insight to a wide base of information regarding your audience such as location which is incredibly important if you want your campaigns seen by people who are able to read your message and have the ability to spend cold hard cash. We use Click Magick to create links that store and track lots of data for us to analyse. That being said Click Magick also allows us to split test all links, meaning we can send people to one link but Click Magick rotates the visitors to various different links and then give us the data on which pages were higher converting.
Related: Start Tracking NowTraffic In Multiple Forms
To increase your chances of success you will need to obtain traffic from multiple areas. Another awesome way to drive people towards your offers is using social media platforms that have high visual engagement. One of our favourites is Instagram. This platform is highly engaged with its user base and steals their time like no other. Again it's free to join and simple to create an engaged fan base that craves your content and cannot wait to strike the heart button. We use the Crowdfire app to schedule lots of content to our accounts every week which heavily reduces the time we spend managing social media but allows us to have content going out multiple times per day every single day. Crowdfire also helps us curate content for other social media platforms that are more text based meaning we constantly have social pages that are engaging with potential customers.
Related: Manage Traffic