6 Ways to Make it Big in Affiliate Marketing

“There is nothing called Magic, it’s all about Sweat, Determination & Hard work”

How Can You Make Money Online?

When it comes to the online marketplace, people often relate it to how we can make easy money online, ways to make money online or affiliate marketing. If we see the Google trends data for past 12 month searches then the above two terms also show a considerable amount of searches from Indians, justifying the fact that people are very much eager to know How you can make money online? How much time is required how much dedication is required and what all things are required?

What is Affiliate Marketing and How Do I Start? 

“Starting Problem is the Biggest Problem”

Be it anything below the sky & above earth, starting problem has always been the greatest problem and so it is in getting started with Affiliate Marketing also. One should note that like the offline business you have an office space for inventory and operating your business, similarly, in an online business, you need an app or a website/blog to operate in the online business. Only a social media profile will not help you run an online business. Even though recent Facebook page features also equal to all the features available in a full-fledged website.

There are many ways to make money from online but we will only focus on affiliate marketing in this blog. 

What is Affiliate Marketing?

“Affiliate Marketing is a process of earning commissions by bringing traffic in the form of leads/conversions for any 3^rd party e-commerce site through affiliate’s online medium through the owner’s marketing efforts”

Out of the many ways to make money from online, Affiliate marketing is the easiest & fastest method which any Tom Dick & Harry can get started with if they have any particular online asset.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

• First of all, one needs register as an affiliate in the particular shopping based or e-commerce website.
• Then upload relevant documents for verification and authenticate your blog/website.
• Use widgets or affiliate tools of links & banners of the particular products you want to market and paste it into the backend of your blogging/website.
• Get traffic to your website and write relevant content so that people visit your blog/website and chances of clicking on the add increases.
• More the traffic more the chances of getting clicked
• Share it on Social Channels.

As a Digital Marketing Institute, we have included getting started with blogging and basic of affiliate marketing as one module in our Digital Marketing course and separate Make money online course for our students seeing the demand in the market.

Not always you have to make a sale happen to get commissions but at times you can also choose for traffic & leads to getting paid. Here are some of the different affiliate marketing programs to choose from:

• Pay Per Sale
• Pay Per Click
• Pay Per Leads
• Pay Per-App Install

Note: After starting a blogging/website of your own first make sure you integrate it with Google Analytics & verify your property with Google Webmaster.

Why be an Affiliate Marketer?

“In Simple terms, if we say Money actually matters & people might say money can’t give all happiness but it’s better to cry inside a Lamborghini then be homeless.”

Affiliate Marketing, an easy and quick way to make some passive income without leaving your current job and enjoy life like never before. In the 21^st century, even the school fees are in lakhs so any kind of passive income to make your ends meet is always a plus. The following points also justify why one needs to give a try to affiliate marketing:-

• Invest Your Time Not Money: You don’t need to hire any people for doing your work invest 2-3 hours per day and you can expect returns out of it. If you want a full-fledged website then invest in a domain, hosting & development else you can get it free from blogger.
• Reach Worldwide: Reach word-wide audience as online has no boundaries, unlike an offline business.
• No Inventory: You don’t have to worry about inventory when you choose to earn from affiliate marketing
• No Customer Support: Customer Support is not your headache it’s the duty of the e-commerce site you are promoting to provide customer support.
• Work from Anywhere & Anytime: No 10-6 job and timelines work based on your convenience & place.

Now let’s focus on some of the well-proven affiliate marketing strategies used by super affiliates to make it big.

#1: Choose a Theme

The biggest mistake most affiliate marketers do is that they try to promote almost all types of products in their blog/website which makes it difficult to market & very fewer chances of getting relevant traffic to your blogging site or website. Even if you are blogging on a generalized topic, promote only products related to a particular theme rather than trying to put legs in multiple positions.

Example: I have a travel blog and I try to promote only travel deals, travel gear, hiking gear, camera &equipment& all those things which a traveler will find it relevant. I do not promote TV & refrigerators on my blog. This strategy has helped me earn around 1300 INR in 1^st month itself even though a small amount but have managed to make it count.

#2: Use Analytics to Monitor Performance

Use Google analytics to check which particular page gets more traffic which has more bounce rate and average time spent by users. Accordingly, promote your banners & links in those pages based on audience behavior.

The affiliate program interface also has an interface which gives data about how the clicks and app install happen for which banner use this data to regularly change your ads.

#3: Do Some Research

Do some research about the demand for the product and then promote it on your website/Blog. Don’t just promote any product and also have an idea about the fast moving products from the particular e-commerce site. Have an overall idea about the seasonal & festive trends from the site.

#4: Have Patience

In online medium patience is the key to success so have ample of patience and accordingly plan out your events. In certain cases getting the affiliate commissions can be delayed so plan out your affiliate promotions in such a way that you have some money coming out from each merchant every month by completing the desired action.

#5: Write & Describe

This approach is used by most of the super affiliates to get more income from their affiliate marketing program. Most normal affiliates just write a blog and paste the code of the banner and leave it but it’s very important to make the reader feel connected to the ad.

Write a bit about the product you want to promote and just indirectly promote the same product with a link/banner below it so that readers might found it connected and may be interested to complete an action.

In eMarket Education, a leading Digital Marketing Institute, we also have a separate module on the content strategy where we teach students on how to plan out your content & blogs for your website around the year.

#6: Promote & Share

Everything is done right by you but if you don’t get the traffic then it’s of no use. The hard work done will be of complete waste.

• • SEO: For Search Engine Optimization ensure you choose the right keywords for your blog/website content before writing. Choose keywords with medium competition and also have a content strategy. Ensure all essential SEO related tasks are also done to help it rank organically.
  • Search Engine Marketing: Use PPC AdWords to promote your website and try to get some traffic into it. Try display marketing and create awareness about your blog amongst audience
  • Social Media Marketing: The most important channel to promote your blog/website where you can get a spike in traffic in very short time. The best part of Social media is that people spend a lot of time on this channel and you can get a readymade audience out of it. Create a Facebook page, Twitter profile, Pinterest profile, Google + profile, YouTube channel and keep sharing content as you make it live.

• Email Marketing: It’s like the final seasoning that you add to the food. All the email subscriber list you collect or people who contact you for any form of collaboration ensure you keep them connected to your blog through email marketing through weekly newsletters.

To begin with, if you follow all these 6 tips then surely with time you will figure out another 6 tips of your own from your own experience.

People have really made it big in Affiliate Marketing when the concept was just getting started but now with the number of affiliates increasing and readers aware of how it works earning from this channel is not that easy unless and until you have a creative approach to it and make yourself different from the lot.

Things might look easy but will not be easy if you are not passionate about it to be passionate and dedicated to making money online.