Successful Affiliate Marketing Strategy
If you’re considering becoming an affiliate marketer. You may have asked yourself many questions, here are some of those:
- Is affiliate marketing worth it? Read this article to know the answer to this question.
- What is the cost to start affiliate marketing? Read this article to know the answer to this question. Or check this video out.
- How to be a successful affiliate marketer?
- How much money can you earn?
To help you answer questions 3 and 4 and decide if affiliate marketing is for you, keep reading. So let’s dive in and start answering these questions:
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
You probably know what affiliate marketing is, but for those who don’t. Affiliate marketing is basically promoting a product or a service of another company and earning a commission for that.
How To Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer?
The sad truth is that anyone who wants to start affiliate marketing, in fact, any online business or any side hustle, wants to work minimum hours and earn a lot of money. That’s the standard way of thinking when it comes to working online.
But most of those same people will be happy going to college for 4 years. They learn only and do not earn and they know they will get a fixed salary at the end of year 4 if they get a job at all.
When it comes to starting and building a proper business online, they want shortcuts and expect to become rich fast.
Affiliate marketing like any other online business requires a lot of work and learning with little to no earning when you start. But if you keep working, learning, and applying what you have learned you will be rewarded. And the sky is the limit when it comes to earnings. So persistence is key.
The only way to be a successful affiliate marketer is first to put the right product or service in front of the right audience. If you get high, consistent, and ongoing traffic you will get sales and leads and get paid the commission.
There are tons of strategies to get traffic. Check ‘ The Best Free Traffic For Affiliate Marketing‘ and ‘How To Start Affiliate Marketing Without A Website‘ articles.
Traffic
Two types of traffic exist. Paid traffic usually with ads, shouts outs, and other forms that require you to pay to get people’s attention. The other best traffic is free traffic or called organic traffic. Organic traffic is slow to build but is worth it. Building organic traffic takes from 6 months in best cases to years.
You see, it’s either time or money in the equation. When you first start you may have one or the other. If you have no to very little budget to start with, you probably need to spare some time daily to build organic traffic. If on the other hand have money and very little time you can pay for ads and even pay freelancers or agencies to run them for you.
Or you can use both to maximize your chances of success.
Factors that play a role in your success as an affiliate marketer are:
What niche/industry you’re interested to promote online,
Your knowledge of internet promotion methods,
How much time you are willing to invest in learning the affiliate marketing industry.
Aside from these factors you have to follow some rules for long term success
1. Being Genuine
By genuine I mean only promote products and services you believe in and ideally tried yourself and you were happy with) you have to take your integrity seriously. If you promote low quality products or services people will know and you may get away with some sales but you can’t grow your income by scamming people. On ther hand if you promote a high quality product and provide value along with it you will be a returning customer and they may even share your links.
2. Provide Value
By providing a lot of value in advance to a particular audience for free. This method will help build trust, authority with your audience and some of those people become advocates of your brand or personality (if you are the brand).
3. Promote Products or Services Naturally
No one likes sales pitches or feels like pushed to buy ( or click your links in this case). If your followers, YouTube/ Email subscribers or visitors to your website feel that you care more about the sales than their queries, concerns or questions, they are likely to unfollow you or unsubscribe from your content.
Other Factors
It is hard to build an audience and build their trust that is getting high, consistent and ongoing traffic. It takes months, a year or years for some people. It all depends on the strategy you choose (physical or digital products, niche specific or multi niches approach (paid or free traffic, website blogging and, email marketing, podcasts, using youtube or social media with no website among other strategies).
Plus, the affiliate platforms you choose (amazon associates or other platforms) your personality and how quickly you can adopt successful strategies that work for successful markers and also how quickly you can learn from your own mistakes and others in affiliate marketing. That is if you have a very limited budget and you do all the work yourself and this is the case of most beginners.
If You Want Fast Results
Now, if you want to speed up the results when building the audience you can pay people who have expertise in content creation either writing blog articles, optimising your website, creating videos for you…etc.
In this case, you are using people’s time and expertise so the most important skill you need is hiring the right people. It is important to know how to do every task that leads to building your business that what a successful self made entrepreneur would do. But, then i think it is possible to be successful when you have the right team.
Beyond Affiliate Marketing
You may think why should I do all this work and waste so much time driving traffic to other people’s businesses.Well the idea is to make a name for yourself, make you/ your brand known.
And obviously you have to build a database like an email list. Engage those group of people on social media groups or your own forum to understand their needs and wants. This will allow you to create a product or service of your own that meets your audience needs and expectations.
If you do all the hard work of getting the audience, and creating the product that is right for them you don’t need much marketing to sell it. And that’s where the real money is. You can still be doing affiliate marketing along with selling your own product then expand your business by creating more products. That is ladies and gentlemen the fastlane to be a millionaire.
How Much Money Can You Make from Affiliate Marketing?
I will go through the factors that play a role in determining how much you will earn and the options you can choose from to supplement your affiliate income.
Let’s get started:
I am going to start by answering the question. You can either make no money or make a consistent 5 figures monthly if you are wondering what 5 figures look like. It starts from $10,000 all the way to $99,999.
You can even exceed this with the right mindset and how quickly you can learn skills and apply strategies. Obviously, you can make anything in between and it all depends on many factors, here I am going to talk about 3 main factors:
1. Real Business or Side Income
If you want some extra dollars from affiliate marketing and treat it as a side income. The earning may reach a certain level but it is hard to keep consistent and they rely a lot on paid ads so the profit is lower than if you use free traffic.
Organic traffic doesn’t work if you don’t have a presence somewhere on the internet. (website, youtube channel, instagram, tiktok, linkedin, twitter, pinterest,an email list…) So this method is not sustainable. Affiliate marketing can’t replace your regular income at least not at the start.
First if you take it seriously and build a long term business it will take time to start getting a decent income or any income (I say this because there are 1000s people who started a youtube channel with the goal to use it a medium for affiliate marketing along with adsense, but they give up, same for those who start affiliate websites who can’t rank them then give up. The bitter truth is that you need hard work and the reward will come.
2. Type/ Amount of Commission
There are two types of affiliate commissions I know of: a fixed commission that can be a fixed amount or a fixed percentage or recurring commission; this means you continue to get paid monthly for the sign-up for a premium package you got. Plus, it is obvious that high ticket products and services make you a higher income, it depends also on the commission percentage.
Let’s say product A costs $1000, the commission is 10%. You will earn a one-time commission of $100 for each sale. Product B is based on a monthly subscription of $100 a month. The commission is 20% a lifetime. In this case, you will get $20 each month; this means $240 a year for as long as the customer is subscribed. This gives you an idea of what types of products and services to go for.
3. Combined With Other Sources Of Income
On your way to building a real affiliate marketing business, you will inevitably build multiple streams of income. Usually, if you get to the point where you are making a decent consistent income from affiliate marketing chances are, you already monetized your social media account Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, monetized your YouTube channel, and/ or your affiliate website.
The 6 and 7 figures successful affiliates talk about are more commonly combined with google AdSense, YouTube AdSense, podcasts, and selling their own courses. Many successful affiliates at some point in their journey create their own products or services to increase their income even further. But remember to treat the journey the same as studying for a 3 or 4-year degree and don’t expect the results too soon.
