3 Simple Ways to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
The art of selling online in return for a commission is a tricky affair, I must admit. It is little wonder many aspiring marketers throw in the towel even before they have had the chance to fully understand the trade. Affiliate marketing is a very lucrative online business model for those who have mastered the business. You just need a bit of technical knowledge and a deeper understanding of human psychology to make headway.
If you have struggled in the past to make a decent income from this line of work, you’re not alone. Many prospective marketers fail because they make the whole process more complicated that it should be.
With that in mind, I’ll be revealing to you 3 simple ways to make money with affiliate marketing:
1. Blogging:
Are you an expert in a certain field? Perhaps you know how to do stuff most people can’t. Consider sharing such knowledge with your potential customers through blogging. To succeed at this, you’ll have to get a self hosted or free hosted blog. A self hosted is preferable for a more professional look.
To make this work, you’ll need to purchase a domain name and a hosting plan. Next, you install a content management system like WordPress or Blogger to help manage your blog content. As you share those tutorials, “how-to” articles etc. on your blog, you get to insert your affiliate links and banners into your post and encourage users to click on them.
For more effectiveness, you have to be very resourceful by blogging on common problems people are likely to encounter in your niche and offering affiliate products that are related as a solution to those problems.
2. Vlogging:
Say what? Yeah, you heard that right. Vlogging is short for video blogging which basically means sharing video content to your audience as opposed to use of worded content for blogging. There seems to be an explosion of video consumerism in recent times so it only makes sense for marketers to take advantage of this trend to further their business.
So instead of doing posts on a blog, you get to create a video that answers questions, instructs or entertains your audience and upload to a video hosting platform like YouTube or Vimeo. At the end of your video, you can ask your audience to use the links in the description box below the video and then you insert your affiliate links.
3. Email Marketing:
Email marketing is the most cost effective method of doing affiliate marketing if you know your onions. Go through the website of just about any business and the most prominent thing is the contact form requesting for your email in exchange for information in form of newsletters, pdf, video or audio file.
To make this method work, you’ll need to setup a landing or opt-in page with a contact form for collecting emails and any other data you like. You have to create a free giveaway for your customers to entice them into giving you their email address. Remember, your free giveaway should be relevant to your potential customers.
With their email addresses, you can reach your customers anytime using an autoresponder or email marketing applications like Getresponse, Sendlane etc.
In a nutshell, making money through affiliate marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. If you apply the strategies highlighted, you should be up and running in no time. Remember that the key to making sales is to be generally helpful and resourceful to your audience. They’ll like and trust you so the buying will come naturally.
Michael Jones