Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Affiliate Marketing 101: Know Your Audience

One of the secrets to successful affiliate marketing is knowing your audience so well that you can instinctively predict what products they’ll like and what they’ll avoid. To get to this stage, will require some effort and research on your part.

In fact, it’s crucial that you do it before you even start marketing to your niche. One reason so many affiliates struggle to convert readers into buyers is because they don’t know their audience.

Follow the pointers below and you will be better prepared.

Do You Have A Customer Avatar?

When targeting a niche, whom will you be speaking to? If you’re targeting the women’s weight loss niche, how old will your reader be? Is she a mother or single? How much time do you think she’ll have a day to exercise? Is she a career woman or a stay-at-home mom?

There are so many questions that you need to ask yourself so that you have a clear picture of whom you’re targeting. If you’re writing for a woman who is in her fifties, she may be a career woman or a housewife. In most cases, she’ll not be trying to lose weight after a pregnancy.

Generally, she’ll be trying to lose weight with gentler exercise programs like Pilates or Yoga. So, you can leave out hardcore interval training programs and focus more on promoting yoga DVDs, yoga mats, etc.

While some questions will overlap and you don’t need to get too specific, you must have a general idea of whom you’re speaking to. This will enable you to tailor your message accordingly.

Where Do They Hang Out?

Finding your target audience will be your next task.

Just by scanning the forums they hang out in, you’ll be able to learn a lot about the niche and where there are gaps that are not being filled by the market.

You can then target these areas with your marketing.

Over and above that, knowing where your audience hangs out will be helpful when it comes to traffic generation later on.

What Are Their Problems?

The forums, Facebook groups and other places where your audience congregates will often have questions and problems being mentioned by those in need of help. This is a goldmine of information.

Find out what common problems your market has and address them effectively. You’ll get a lot more sales and a very loyal audience.

Very often, during your research you’ll see similar products being mentioned that have helped people with their issues, and some other products will not be looked upon favorably.

Take notes here and promote the popular products and avoid the stinkers.

Are There Any Other Issues That They May Have?

Some niches can be related without you even realizing it. For example, the man who wishes to lose weight and get ripped, may also be doing it to attract more women. He’ll probably also be interested in guides that show him how to pick up women, etc.

This is actually a very popular industry online with tons of sales. You may wish to experiment and try promoting a pickup artist guide and see how that works for you. If it’s well-received, you know that you can start planning to market it more frequently. If it falls flat, you can ditch it and move on.

By following the tips above, you’ll become a better affiliate marketer and your content will be devoured by your readers. You’ll be the Pied Piper in your niche and your loyal readers will follow you wherever you lead them. Once you get to this stage, you’ll be an excellent affiliate marketer.

But it doesn’t end there! In affiliate marketing there are many skills you need to master to be effective and once you have found and know your audience, you will need to try to sell them on your affiliate offers but you need to be careful and not turn them away and this is where subtlety comes in…

How to Be Subtle In Affiliate Marketing

There’s a marketing saying that goes, “People hate being sold to, but they love to buy.”

This maxim pretty much hits the nail on the head. Many marketers fail to realize that you say more when you say less. When a blog post hypes up a product or you send an email that praises a product in a way that’s over the top, you actually repel potential buyers.

It’s obvious that you have a vested interest in getting them to buy the product just so that you earn an affiliate commission. One the reader detects that you have an ulterior motive, they’ll feel that you’re biased towards the product because you’re affiliated with it.

Your motives become suspect and you lose credibility and trust. Once those go, getting the sale can be very difficult. That’s exactly why you must be subtle in your marketing.

One of the best ways to do that will be to show how the product helped you and how you benefitted from it. While it may not be possible to do this for all the products you’re promoting, you can still be subtle in other ways.

For example, if you have a site showing how to build chicken coops, casually mentioning that ‘circular saws are much better than miter saws because they’re easy to use’ will get you more sales. You just need to hyperlink the words circular saws to the product you’re promoting.

Curious visitors will click on the link. After all, everyone wants to make things faster and easier for themselves.

However, if you say, ‘you need to buy a circular saw model XXX to do this job effectively. It is the best saw that we found for the job and only costs $YYY’, you’ve probably set off the reader’s Spidey senses. They can sense that you’re pushing the saw on to them because you were too obvious.

The goal is to use curiosity and strategically placed anchor text to get the clicks. They must feel like it was their choice. That is the key. When the reader is doing things on his or her own volition, they’ll not be in a guarded state and will be much more receptive to the sales copy, etc.

As an affiliate, your job is to get the click. The sales page should do the selling. While your content can gently pre-sell the reader, it should mostly be ‘benefits oriented’. You want to sell the solution to the problem and not the product. The best way to do this is by showing how the product solves the most common problems that your audience faces.

You’ll not even need to mention where the product is sold or the positive reviews it has. If your content convinces the reader that the product is the solution that they’ve been looking for – without blatantly telling them, the reader WILL click on the links to see how they can solve their problems.

Everybody is looking for solutions. You’re just the middleman who gently guides them down the right path. That’s all there is to it. Be subtle.

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2 Questions You Need To Answer As An Affiliate Marketer

As you are reading this post, you must already realise that affiliate marketing is a great way to start an online business quickly.

But it isn’t always as straightforward as it seems and you may have some questions such as “Do I need to build an email list as an affiliate marketer?” or Do I need my own website to do affiliate marketing?”

In this article we are going to take a look at these two important questions.

Firstly, we’ll take a look at whether you do need to build your own email list when affiliate marketing and then we’ll look at whether you really do need your own website to really succeed as an affiliate marketer.

Ready? Let’s get started…

Do Affiliate Marketers Need To Build A List?

When embarking on an affiliate marketing career, you’ll need to determine if you want to build a list of emails from customers. Whether or not to build a list depends on the type of affiliate marketing you plan to pursue.

If you want to sell to the same people again and again in your niche, then building a list is essential to your business model. This allows you to have communication to share information about new products and specials.

Building a list works well for products in specific niches. For example, the weight loss, health, and parenting niches offer opportunities for you to promote multiple products over a period of time. You’ll find a wide variety of products that fit different needs of your customer base.

When you have a list, you can capture the names and email addresses of potential customers so that when a new product is available, you can share it quickly and easily. You’ll need a program specifically designed for email marketing – such as Active Campaign or Aweber.

Using Active Campaign or Aweber, you can create sign up forms that you can add to your blog and squeeze page where people can enter their name and email address. You can also add special categories to help you get to know your customer better, such as the top weight loss problem or parenting concern they have.

Once you’ve captured emails, you can use the program to send different types of messages. Broadcast messages are often used to announce specials or just generally communicate with your list. They’re sent one time to the current subscribers.

You can also set up automatic follow up messages that are delivered at a regular time interval with information that goes out to all new subscribers. A follow up email might give a tip on using a product or good informative news about the niche in general.

Building a list doesn’t happen instantly – it’s another area in affiliate marketing where you will grow over time. You’ll start with no one on your list and gradually begin to see it increase. The larger your list, the more people you can reach to promote products.

It’s important to treat your list with care and respect so that people will want to hear what you have to share with them. You’ll want to make sure not to share any of the information you gather or submit your list to constant spam type messages.

Another question you may have is about having your own website as an affiliate marketer; is it required?

Well, let’s take a look at that now 😊

Do You Need A Website To Be An Affiliate Marketer?

As an affiliate marketer, you may wonder if you need to have your own website in order to succeed in the business. While it’s certainly a good idea to have your own website, there are many options that don’t require you to do that.

For example, you can use third party platforms that allow you to promote products. Examples include HubPages and InfoBarrel. These sites are relatively easy to use and can help you make a profit in affiliate marketing. You can write articles with affiliate links in them and you can generate income from the links and from the articles themselves as these sites operate a revenue share scheme. You can also do a similar thing with Medium too.

You can also get hosting for a free blog. For example, BlogSpot allows you to create a free blog where you can promote products. The one thing you need to be aware of, though, before you use third party platforms – is that you’re subject to their rules.

At any time, the rules may change and your blog might disappear or your pages may become obsolete. You just don’t have much control over your business when you choose these options. In fact, you can have the business you’ve worked hard to build that gets deleted in an instant.

The best way to guarantee that you have control over your business is to have your own website. You can purchase a domain and hosting inexpensively and know that you’ll have control over your own blog.

If you are looking to buy a domain name Namecheap is a great place to look and if you are looking for hosting you won’t go wrong with either A2 or Siteground.

It’s very simple to set up a blog on your own site and you don’t have to worry about conforming to anyone else’s rules about what can and can’t be done on it. Then you can use third party platforms as a support mechanism and even to drive traffic to your blog.

These platforms can help supplement what you’re doing while allowing you to have more control over your business. If the bulk of your income comes from your own website, you won’t have to worry about what happens if the rules change on another site.

You’ll find that it doesn’t cost as much as you might think to have your own site in your chosen niche and truly be the master of your own affiliate marketing business. This small investment (of about $10 a year for a domain and less than $10 a month in hosting) can bring big payoffs and is worth your efforts.

As an affiliate marketer, you don’t have to have your own website. But depending on third party platforms alone can be a risky decision. The best option is to have your own website and take advantage of third party platforms to supplement what you’re doing on your own site.

This way you get the best of both worlds and have multiple streams of income to support your affiliate marketing career.

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Becoming A More Effective Affiliate Marketer

If you are reading this post, you must already realise that affiliate marketing is one of the quickest and most lucrative ways to start an online business.

But it isn’t always as straightforward as it seems and we’re going to look at a couple of affiliate marketing strategies that you can use to boost your effectiveness as an affiliate marketer and these are based around the concept of SEO (search engine optimisation).

Firstly, we’ll take a look at keyword research to help you rank in Google and then we’ll look at best practices to set up your site so it can be easily found.

This may sound like affiliate marketing for beginners, but I reckon most would benefit from these 2 tips.

Sound good? Let’s dive right in…

Basic Keyword Research For Affiliate Marketers

As an affiliate marketer, you want to learn the best ways to use keywords to help build your business. But if you don’t have any experience working with keywords, it can be a little confusing.

These helpful tips should assist you in being able to learn the best keywords and how to use them. First, you need the right tools to help you gather the best keywords.

These are called keyword tools and their purpose is to show you which keywords people are using to search for things.

If you’re just starting out, there are some great free and paid keyword tools you can use. One of the good free ones is Google AdWords. You can also use tools like Wordtracker, SEMrush, SpyFu, Ubersuggest, Wordze or Keyword Discovery.

Some of these have all free access, some free but limited usage offers and others are paid.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is very easy to use. When you pull up the screen, type the word or phrase you’re thinking of using on your website or blog. For example, if you’re selling acne products, you’d type the word acne in the box where you list the word or phrase.

When the words come up, you’ll see: acne, cystic acne treatment, adult acne treatment, best acne treatment, etc. The tool will show you if the competition is high, medium or low and what the volume of global and local monthly searches is.

One helpful tip is that you also want to cover other terms people would use to search for acne. To get other words people might be using, you can pull up an online thesaurus and type in acne.

You’ll get a response of: blemishes, pimple, skin inflammation etc. – and you can put those words in the keyword tool and see how they rank.

You want to make sure that you’re looking for both broad and longtail keywords. A broad keyword has the potential to bring more views to your site if you’re able to rank high for it.

These are words that people use when they’re looking for something but aren’t completely sure what they want. For example, someone might type in the keyword ‘shoes.’

When you’re doing keyword research, you also want to look for exact matches. An exact match is how it sounds. Your keyword or keywords exactly match what someone has typed into the search engine.

For example, if someone types in ‘black lamp’ and you have that as your keyword, it will lead them to your website or blog or ad.

You want to make sure that you use longtail keywords. A longtail keyword is a set of 3-5 words that are better targeted toward someone’s search because they’re more specific.

While ‘play guitar’ is an example of a keyword phrase, an example using longtail keywords would be ‘learn how to play guitar’ or ‘how to play guitar notes’ or ‘how to play guitar for kids’ etc.

Longtail keywords are important because you can get more traffic because you rank well – and you’ll end up with higher conversions.

OK, now let’s look at some ways to optimise your site with some basic SEO settings and we’ll assume that you are using WordPress to build your blog or website.

Basic Search Engine Optimisation For Affiliate Blogs

Some affiliates set up a blog and create lots of content – without ever learning the ins and outs of search engine optimisation. As a site owner, whether you have your own products or promote someone else’s, it’s important that you know SEO.

Make sure the settings allow search engines to index you. Inside the dashboard, you have the option to block access to your site by the search engines. This is under Settings and Privacy, so do a quick check to see if it’s set up correctly.

Give your site a title and tagline. Under the Settings tab again, you want to go into the General section. Here it says Site Title and Tag Line, you want to fill these spots in with relevant, keyword-based content that tells people what your site is all about.

In the Writing category under Settings, go to the bottom where it says Update Services. Find a good up-to-date Ping list and paste those URLs into this area. That helps other sites know when you have new content.

Categorize your blogs and deliver a good navigation system. When a visitor lands on your website, you want it to be sticky. Sticky means they stay around for awhile, not clicking out after they read one blog post.

With good navigation, like a list of categories and recent or popular posts in your sidebar (all done with widgets), you can let the visitors know there’s more good content they might like.

Go to the Settings section again and click on Permalinks. You want this option to be Post Name. This means that after your domain and the word blog, the URL will have the name of the post, like this: yourdomain.com/blog/keyword-relevant-blog-title.

Use both broad and longtail keywords in your posts and pages. Some affiliates make the mistake of trying to rank for the broadest keywords in their niche, like “health” or “diet.” It’s much easier to rank well in search engines when you use longtail keywords.

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A longtail keyword phrase would be something like this: “the best diet after pregnancy.” Over time, as your blog becomes an authority figure, you may find that you’re also ranking for the broad terms as well.

Use a Google sitemap plugin. This plugin helps Google have quick access to a sitemap, rather than you having to manually create a sitemap that helps guide their robots or spiders around your domain.

Consider an SEO optimiser plugin to give your blog a boost. There are many plugins that help you maximize your blog posts on autopilot. Do some research and see what works best for your needs.

Affiliate Marketing: Which Niche?

If you are just starting online, then one of the quickest ways to start making money is to get into affiliate marketing.

This business model doesn’t rely on you having your own products to sell, but rather you are promoting other people’s products and you get a commission for each sale made.

This way you can quickly send traffic to an affiliate offer and start making money.

Of course, the first thing you need to do is to decide on the niche that you are wanting to operate in.

The Best Way For Affiliate Marketers To Choose A Niche

When it comes to affiliate marketing, there are many ways for affiliate marketers to choose a niche. It’s important that you put some thought and research into your niche before you put your time and effort into it.

The first thing you should consider is choosing a niche that you feel passionate about.

With affiliate marketing it’s best to be writing and working in an area daily. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, chances are slim that you’ll stick to it for very long.

If you choose something that isn’t going to make you happy to wake up and work each morning, then you’re in a bad position before you even get started. Over time, if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll get bored.

Eventually you may even feel depressed and hate what you’re doing. This is the exact opposite of what you want to experience in your work life. Make sure you have the ability to dig in to your niche forever.

Next, you need to look at the longevity of the niche. You’ll want to avoid something that’s considered a fad and will be obsolete before you start making any money.

With affiliate marketing, it will take some time to begin making substantial income, even though initial commissions can be seen right away.

Once you’ve built up a niche, you want to be able to keep it going for a long period of time. So, make sure your choice isn’t something that will be here today and gone tomorrow. You want your hard work to pay off long-term.

It’s also important to think about profitability. Is what you want to promote going to make money? After all, you’re turning to affiliate marketing to make a steady (and rising) income.

Do your homework and find out how many people will be interested in what you’re promoting.

You also need to consider promotion options. In your niche, what kinds of products can you promote? Can you promote a book that will sell in your niche? Can you promote tangible items or digital products?

A membership site related to your niche is also a possibility to consider. These are all things to think about as you’re choosing your niche before you put in a lot of time and energy.

When you choose a niche that interests you and has a wide variety of products that you can promote, you’ll have more success in the long run.

Now, once you’ve considered all the above and decided on a niche, there is another consideration to think about: do you decide to stay in a broad niche with a larger target audience or do you drill down into a sub-niche which will be narrower and have a smaller audience but thy will be much more targeted. There are pros and cons for both so let’s dive in…

Should Affiliate Marketers Choose A Broad Or Narrow Niche?

Whenever affiliates are just starting out, or questioning the direction they already took, they start wondering if a broad or narrow niche is the best way to go.

There’s actually no right or wrong answer, but you have to know how to tackle the two different strategies.

If you go with a broad niche, it means you have to have fantastic organization of the sub-niches. It’s very possible to do, but it will take time to rank well in the search engines for the broad spectrum of topics.

So, let’s say you decided to tackle the children’s toy niche. You could have a general toy site, but you’d still need to organize the content into things like toys based on age, gender, materials, brands, indoor versus outdoor, etc.

Or you could go with a narrow approach in your niche. This makes it really easy for you to rank quicker with an authority site.

For example, TopToysfor1YearOldGirls.com that was fully focused on toys for this age and gender would probably become an authority site rapidly for those searching for that topic.

Either way you choose – broad or narrow – you can work your way back over time. So, if you choose a broad niche, you can work over time to dig into the narrow levels and provide expertise there for your affiliate income.

If you choose a narrow niche, like the one listed above, you could branch out and create a bunch of narrow sites and then eventually link them to a main site.

For example, you could create a TopToysFor2YearOldGirls.com, 7-year olds, 13-year olds, etc. Once complete, you could then create a main “TopToysForGirls.com” site that linked them all together.

Don’t worry if you’ve started out the wrong way because eventually, your goal is to have complete domination in a niche. You have to look at this from a long-term perspective, not what will help you make the most amount of money in 30 days.

The great thing about both niches is that you can search for keywords that will help guide you in the type of content that you want to create.

Over time, you may want to move from free keyword tools to the paid versions that give you more information about the kind of edge you can expect to have over the competition if you rank well for them.

Pick whichever strategy you feel more comfortable with right now – broad or narrow – and then if you want to move into a new direction, you can do that without any problems down the road.