Tips for Successful Affiliate Marketing Business

A lot of people join affiliate programs for no other reason than to earn an affiliate commission on a product(s) they buy. And this does work with my program, however like most affiliate programs we have a minimum payout threshold. Mine is $40. So yes you can earn a commission on your own purchase but you would first have to purchase over $100 total since our commission percentage is 40%.

Multiple researches have confirmed this fact that affiliate marketing is one of the top online business opportunities. There are a number of companies and webmasters who are already using the affiliate programs for boosting their online sales, with most of them free to join. The startup costs are low while the income generated is quite high and therefore the online population is so kicked about it always.

The catch is that you need to turn this into an actual business to remain profitable and live off of the wealth that can be accumulated with online internet marketing. Treat your online affiliate business as a real business and not just as a hobby or experimental stream of income. Let’s take a look at the basic steps required for starting a successful affiliate business.

The first prerequisite for starting as an affiliate marketer you need to have a website on which to place links to the products or services. If you are setting up your own blog take the help of cheap website building and hosting services such GoDaddy and HostGator. You can also setup a WordPress based site or blog.

Identify what you want to promote and how large you want to grow your business. Try to find out what you want to promote and decide how serious you are about building the business. Is this something you’re doing for extra income while you’re going through college or is this your new sole source of income? Outlining how large you want to shoot for will help set your goals and give you a better chance at succeeding.

Since you’re reading this I’m going to assume you agree with the phrase “the sky’s the limit.” Once you establish how your business will work and profit there’s really no limit on how large you can grow it. Do you want to promote weight loss products, internet marketing products, real estate courses or programs? Try to find out what you’re interested in selling and make sure there’s a market for it as well as decent commissions to be earned.

A lot of affiliates select their merchants on the basis of who pays the highest commission, but like to select based on who has the best reputation and quality product. The next factor I look at is the sell-through rate –which merchants convert better.

Although you might believe otherwise, but the role of an affiliate marketer is not to sell. Instead of filling your web pages with “Buy this” and “Buy that” put relevant information on the pages as to why they should have this product. Talk about an unbiased reviewer rather than a salesperson so as to win the trust of visitors and increase your earnings.

Promote products you can genuinely recommend, preferably because you’ve used it yourself, or because you can confidently promote it based on solid evidence that it’s a good product.

You can’t earn money with affiliate marketing if you can’t get traffic to your website or blog. Competition on the Internet is fierce. Someone –or many others cover almost any topic or specialized area you can think of. Some competition is OK. In fact if you pick a niche that has a few competitors, that tells you that the niche is probably viable. But you don’t want to pick a product or a niche that is dominated by large professional affiliate marketers. Some examples of this would include mortgages, credit cards, lawyers, cancer treatments and so on. These areas have affiliate deals that pay huge commissions, but therefore they attract much more competition.

When setting up an affiliate business, you can follow two models. Either you can work on resources sites which are focused on offering how-to articles and posts. This content can be followed with affiliate links to be clicked for more details. Your best chances of success are if you constantly update the website with fresh and relevant content. Adding fresh content will offer the visitors a reason to return resulting in greater chances of click on your affiliate links. The other alternative is to make a review site. Test products in your niche and rate them to help the visitors decide what to buy. For every product review, there is an adjoining link or banner ad that clicks through for sales on the merchant’s partner site.

Have you ever mentioned a product, perhaps in passing, that you use? Maybe you didn’t even think about it at the time, but is there an affiliate program for it? Find out (just google “affiliate program [product/company]“) and update those posts with your affiliate links.You are much better off with a smaller niche. So what’s a small niche? Well one of my in-laws has lived and traveled extensively to Spain. Whereas travel is a huge and highly competitive area, by narrowing it down to one country to write about you would have far less competition. If you really wanted to narrow it further, then you could even specialize in travel to the Costa del Sol region of Spain.

 If success at affiliate marketing could be achieved from throwing up pages of banners - then the world would have lots of millionaires. A site with pages of banners or rows banners stuffed under content has the opposite effect on people. It also has the added bonus of making your site look pretty ugly.

If there is a truly useful product that’s on the pricier side, it can still be worth the promotion even if only a few people buy it. If it’s a product of exceptional quality and a good investment (i.e. KitchenAid Mixer), or if it’s a product that’s unique, specialized or one-of-a-kind (and you’ve used it yourself), go for it.

There are a lot of article sites where you can get free content to use on your website or blog. There are free articles out there on almost any topic. But beware. Google looks for duplicate content. If they see an article on your website or blog that is identical to the content on others, they will penalize your site in the search results ranking. So always try for original content.

I see this all the time: an affiliate marketer is promoting a product in a post, but when I click on the images in that post, I’m taken to the upload pages of those images (read: a dead end). In the age of sites like Pinterest, users are accustomed to clicking images so make sure yours send them to the sales page and not a dead end!

When selecting affiliate merchants to recommend, think of your website or blog as very expensive real estate. You only have so much room for links and banners, so pick them very carefully and track your results at least monthly. If someone isn’t performing, take a minute to figure out why. Maybe its placement or maybe the merchant just does not do a good job of converting sales. If it’s the former you can experiment with placement. But if it’s the latter you should just move on to someone else.