You have to go through 4 basic steps to become an affiliate . It is a very lucrative business but it needs a lot of work and patience to be successful.
Step 1: Choose Your Niche
You choose your Niche or the field that covers your subject of search. There are plenty of Niches that are very popular nowadays .
Niches like Health and Fitness , sports , obesity, e-commerce, Internet marketing and so many others.
However to choose your niche you need to go through steps as well , you have to spend sometime on this in order to choose what is good for you and your business :
a- You have to answer three specific questions
1- What is your field of interest?
2- Are there products for sale in it?
3- Do people like it and pay for it?
To answer the first question you have to think of it in terms of hobbies , passions , social and individual problems, fashion and social behavior etc You can make your own research through the net to get better ideas about this. Remember it should be something you are going to know a lot about and become a sort of specialist in it . You will acquire an authority on the niche and people will come to you for that reason .
The second thing is to make a small research to know if there are products about your niche sold and promoted in the internet .
The last step here is know if people are buying these products .Look for any advertisement dealing with selling these products and which product is offered more than any other product etc.
While you’re making your research and answering these questions to decide about your Niche you can niche it down to be more specific and more successful . I mean you can choose a sub-niche of a niche . For example, you can deal with one specific sport rather than sports in general , or you can deal with losing weight in health and fitness etc.
Step 2: Get a Platform:
Now that you have a specific Niche ,you have to know where to promote this Niche. Are you going to use others’ platforms or your own? You certainly need a base for your promotion . However ,that base should be sound and reliable as if you rely on someone’s else platform what would happen if he failed you down at any moment? You would also build customers to that platform which is not yours. While if you build your own platform you will have:
1- Your own brand/name
2- Your own place or address where your customers will always come back to.
3- It gives you more trustworthiness and promotion for your own name or label.
Well ,does this mean you will rely totally on that platform ? and what sort of platform will that be?
Definitely not . Your platform which would be a blog or a website on your own will be tightly related to various other platforms all around. Each feeding the other .
So we agree that the first step here is to have your own blog/website.
Where can you go for that and what should you do? Remember you do not have a lot of funds . So how to start?
Well the best thing is :
1- Get a domain from a cheap domain provider like godaddy.com or I recommend Namecheap ( Click here) which is very cheap and you will always get assistance from their support team. Of course there are many other providers but I just pointed to these two bearing in mind a tight budget for an easy start.
2- Get hosting server . Here you can go to many like Hostgator or Bluehost or you can even go to Namecheap and let them also host your domain .That would be much better.
3- Create your blog . For this I recommend wordpress as it is the easiest to build a site or a blog for a beginner and it is available with the domain providers platform . You just click on a button and you are served.
4- The last thing you have to get is a mail list with one of the autoresponders available in the market like Aweber , getResponse or Icontact. Anyone will do Just check the best offer they give.
Step3: Get your visitors:
Here as well ,you have to make a personal research to have a better idea about:
a- Who your audience will be .
b- What things do they want to buy.
c- What quality do they opt for.
d- What products attract them more.
e- What language do they use and understand when dealing with your niche.
f- Visit sites that offer the same product and see how the visitors behave and what their comments are etc
All this will lead to a good preparation of your blog in term of content. So when you get to know what to feed your blog with ,you will have a clear answer to three very important questions here:
1- Why are these visitors coming to your blog specifically?
2- Why should they listen to you?
3- Why will they come back to you ?
The audience will always stick to the following qualities:
a- Quality of the content. That’s why you have to give them what is good and what they need.
b- Beauty of the content in order to appreciate what they see or listen to.
c- Trustworthy content and content provider .That’s why you have to make a better relationship with your visitors with a valuable content.
The better your content is the more visitors you will get and most important visitors that stay and comeback again . Visitors need value . Mediocrity will not keep them long.
Another point which is also very important is to make your blog opinionised .You have to give it your personal touch and brand . Build your brand with a logo .Put your own URL and photo or images that give bigger trust and reliability in your blog.
Furthermore , if you want to keep your audience you have to do two things:
1- Get connected with your visitors with a follow up list of e-mails or any kind of info newsletters or other.
2- Make sure your blog is open to others by sharing your opinion and why not referring visitors to valuable links that will make them come back to you for advice and recommendation.
But you have NOT to do one thing:
– Do not try to monetize your blog right from the start when no content is there for the visitors.
The secret to a successful affiliate business:
Be consistent . DO NOT QUIT
This is very important .Do not expect success from day 1 .Success needs consistency and determination .
Step 4: Products & How to promote them?
First of all try as much as possible to promote only products that you believe in .Products that bring value and good to your audience.
For this you can : Either try the product your self or ask a review of the product from the vendor himself.
Remember it is always much more successful to promote what you know.
How to promote:
1-Banner ads: This can be done on your blog or site .The banners ,you can get them from the vendor as most of them get them ready for affiliate marketing .Or you can prepare them yourself or through a graphic designer ..etc.
2-in-content referral:
Give a brief description of the content or use or benefits of the product.
3-promotion to your e-mail list or to the social media (facebook/twitter etc)
4-bonuses . Give bonus to any number of visitors who buy the product etc…
5-Reviews: give a presell review of the product .It should be an honest review.
6-Give some recommended resources to help visitors to understand the product or even to have more ideas about it.
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