Affiliate marketing is one of those aspects of online marketing that allows you to begin right away with little to no experience. You don’t even need a web presence. You don’t need a product, a service or any money at all. What you do need is a desire to learn, a drive to succeed and the willingness to select the best affiliate networks, the highest-value products and the biggest commissions. If you have the desire and drive, here is everything else. What follows is are the tips and tricks to use if your goal is to make money affiliate marketing.
Three Affiliate Marketing Best Practices
Most Popular Networks: To stack your deck in affiliate marketing right out of the gate, choose networks that offer the most and most varied products and services. The inverse would be to select a network with a limited offering. If your prospects don’t like those offerings, you’re pretty much stuck on what to offer them; but not to worry. Below are several networks that have plenty of offerings to go around.
Best Offers with the Highest Commissions: When you’re accepted into a network, spend some time going through the various offerings and their accompanying commission scales. Only choose those products and services to promote that offer the least amount of work for the most substantial payouts.
Easiest to Convert: For best results, you should choose a network that includes products and services that make it easy for you to get paid. In other words, your prospects should only have to click a button to buy, or fill out a simple form. If your customers have to jump through hoops, they may choose not to act at all, and that will spell very bad news for your affiliate marketing business.
Most Popular Networks
If you’re ready to start applying to a few networks, start with the following to give yourself the biggest advantage.
ClickBank: This network is considered one of the largest affiliate networks online where your prospects can buy digital products to cure all that ails them. The platform has really been improving as of late to keep up with all the competition. Some improvements include one-click purchase, mobile checkout, custom order forms, subscription management, flexible refunds and call center upsells. Simply search the massive marketplace for your subject matter and you’ll likely find one or more products your audience will love.
CJ Affiliate by Conversant (Formerly Commission Junction): This leading affiliate network specializes in pay-per-performance programs. An example of a pay-per-performance program is having the prospect fill out a form. For every action your customers take, you’ll earn a commission. Your job is to entice your target audience to take that action. Like ClickBank, CJ has a wide variety of offerings to promote, and plenty of tools to make the offerings work for you.
Amazon Associates: Imagine being able to offer over a million products in dozens of categories to your audience and that you could do so on one of the largest ecommerce backbones known to man? Well now you can with the Amazon affiliate network. Just sign up, find the products you want to promote, get your link and you’re off. The next step is getting your customers to buy.
Get Help and Seek Out Examples
Once you’ve applied and been accepted to one or more affiliate networks, the next step is to learn all you can about the affiliate marketing process. This will allow you to start making money online quickly with super-high commissions constantly flowing in. Here are some effective ways to do just that.
Popular Forums
Digital Point: Sign up for this forum and you’ll get access to advice, tips and various techniques for taking your affiliate marketing campaign to the next level. There are 25,000 members, with more joining every day, so you should be able to find some good connections while you’re learning.
A Best Web: This self-described largest affiliate marketing forum online sports over 120,000 members and nearly 140,000 discussions. Whether you’re new to the affiliate marketing game or you’ve been involved for some time, this forum might be a good place to spend at least a few minutes per day.
The Warrior Forum: This forum is considered by many to be the top forum online for Internet marketing, but there’s also plenty of advice and tips related to affiliate marketing. Start reading, participating and become a member of the War Room to become an affiliate marketing master.
Schmooze With Industry Big Wigs
To further improve your chances of making money affiliate marketing, you might attend events like the Affiliate Summit, subscribe to the blogs of industry luminaries or follow some of the top affiliate marketers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
By learning from the best, you can avoid committing a slew of mistakes like many beginners are inclined to do. The experts will allow you to jump right to making money online, which is always a good thing.
However, you’ll want to avoid the trap that a lot of beginners get caught up in where they spend more time researching, learning and networking than they actually spend doing. Take action, even if it’s only a little bit every day and you will soon make money at affiliate marketing.
By now you have a better understanding of how to start, but how do you actually put affiliate marketing into action? Here is a sample affiliate marketing campaign that you can tailor to fit your own needs, and one that your target audience won’t be able to resist.
Affiliate Marketing with a Blog
It’s very easy to start a blog. You choose a platform like WordPress, Blogger or one of the many do-it-yourself sites out there, then fill it with content. Now let’s say that you have a blog post about a special dish you’re making for an upcoming party. If you have a following and you manage to get people interested in your dish, your audience might want to replicate your results. So when you’re describing the ingredients, you might also want to link to the accompanying Amazon sales pages. If your audience clicks-through and buys as a result, you will earn a commission on every sale you successfully recommend.
Build enough of a following and a single blog post done well could yield hundreds of dollars or even more. For right now, go through the links above and start absorbing all you can, then take action to start making the most money with affiliate marketing.
Image Source: Wes Schaeffer on Flickr
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