Affiliate Marketing: The Most Profitable Way to Make Money Online

According to a source, there are more than 170 million blogs.

Most of these blogs get less than 1,000 visitors per month, and the harsh reality is, they fail to actually make a decent living from their blog. In the last few years, blogging has become more popular but the fact which is still unchanged is most bloggers never make money!

Internet is flooded with articles like “The secret to make $5000 per month easily with a blog” but people are still struggling and they never see the income that they were promised.

If you are a good writer and your blog has good traffic, you should try Affiliate Marketing. It’s the best and probably the easiest method to make money online. Through Affiliate Marketing, Bloggers like Zac Johnson and Harsh Agarwal have made more than a Million Dollars online. If you are new to Affiliate Marketing, this article is for you.

Before I start, I would like to make one thing clear:

Earning Money Online is not easy. It needs constant effort so you won’t find any magical tips in this article that will help you to get rich overnight. If you want to be a millionaire in just 1 day then this article is not for you.

This article covers the following topics:

  • What is Affiliate Marketing?
  • How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
  • Different Types of Affiliate Marketing
  • Why you should try Affiliate Marketing?
  • How to find Products to promote?
  • Strategies and Practices to become a good affiliate marketer

So many bloggers are using Affiliate Marketing but everyone is not making money. Some have failed while others have succeeded. So you can make money from it or not entirely depends on many factors like your Blog’s traffic, your promotional strategies, your content, your commitment, etc.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

According to the Definition of Wikipedia

Let’s try to understand Affiliate Marketing in simple words. Basically, you promote the products or services of any company on your blog either by posting a banner or by writing an article. You get a commission when the visitor sent by you makes a purchase.

Affiliate Marketing is the Quickest way to make money online because it doesn’t need any investment. You don’t have to create any product yourself to promote it. Your task is to link up a buyer with seller. If your referred user makes a purchase, you will earn a commission. Isn’t that interesting?

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

When you Sign Up as an Affiliate, you choose a product that you want to promote. Seller provides you a unique affiliate code that you can use to refer traffic to their site. Almost all affiliate programs offer ready-made links and banners. You just need to copy the code and paste it on your blog. When your visitors click on these links or banners, they are redirected to the seller’s site. If they purchase a product or subscribe to a paid service, you earn a commission.

It’s your unique affiliate ID through which a seller tracks your performance.

Different Types of Affiliate Marketing

It’s a misconception that you need to sell products all the time to make a commission. In affiliate marketing, you can also earn without selling a product. Let’s have a look at its different types:

• Cost Per Sale (CPA)

CPA stands for Cost Per Acquisition. In CPA marketing, you make a commission only when a visitor referred by you purchases goods and services from the Merchant.

• Cost Per Lead (CPL)

You make a commission when a visitor referred by you completes a form on the Merchant Web Site.

• Cost Per Click (CPC)

As the name suggests, you earn a commission when a visitor on your blog clicks on the Merchant’s banner or link and thus visits the Merchant’s Web site.

Why Every Blogger Should Try Affiliate Marketing?

I recommend Affiliate Marketing because it’s much better than Google Adsense for blogs which have a good amount of traffic. The reasons why I support Affiliate Marketing are listed below:

Passive Income

In any regular job, you get a fixed salary as long as you work. This is not the case with Affiliate Marketing. If your marketing skill is really good, you can earn even when you are away from your computer.

No Investment at All

The beauty of affiliate marketing is, it allow you to promote products which are developed by others. It means you don’t need to hire employees or open an office. Marketing on the internet is really cheap as compared to the offline world so investment is either null or very small.

Anyone can Join

The word “Free” always attract new bloggers. To join any affiliate program, you don’t need to pay anything so everyone can try it.

Global Reach

Internet gives you the opportunity to reach people all over the world which gives you the opportunity to earn big.

No Tension at All

When you develop your own product or start your own business, you need to work on many things such as customer support, delivery of product, etc. However, in Affiliate Marketing it’s the seller who does that for you.

List of Best Affiliate Marketing Networks

To get better results in Affiliate Marketing, you need to choose the best product to promote. Below given sites are considered best for affiliates:

  1. Commission Junction
  2. ShareASale
  3. Link Share
  4. One Network Direct
  5. Amazon Associates
  6. Flex Offers
  7. Click Bank
  8. Commission Soup

How to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate Marketing is an excellent way to make money online but it’s highly competitive as well. If you want to become a successful Affiliate Marketer, you will have to learn how to promote products, what works and what doesn’t, know the market needs, etc.

I am sharing some strategies which works best in Affiliate Marketing not only for me but also for other people.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #1 – Choose your Merchants Carefully

The first mistake a lot of affiliate marketers make is that they choose merchants on the basis of who pays the best commission. Remember, when you promote a product on your blog you also promote the company who is selling that product so it’s important to choose the merchant wisely. You never want your visitor to go and purchase a product on your advice and then come back with disappointment. If you do so, you will lose the trust of your visitors.

Before choosing any Merchant, try to know about its reputation, the quality of products, customer support, etc. The next factor which is important is the sell-through rate. If it’s good, it indirectly means the merchant converts better.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #2- Selection of Niche Also Matters

If you can’t drive traffic to your blog, you can’t earn money with affiliate marketing as well. Selection of Niche also matters a lot because competition on the internet is fierce. Normally a niche with few competitors works best. But if you have picked a niche which is already dominated by professional affiliate marketers, you won’t be able to make money with affiliate marketing. Some examples of such niches are mortgages, credit cards, lawyers and so on.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #3 – Always Promote Best Products only

Before recommending something to your readers, make sure that the product is the best and it has the quality to impress you. Never recommend anything that you wouldn’t buy yourself.

To be a successful affiliate marketer the product you are promoting should be relevant to the content of your blog. For example- If your blog is about blogging, you can’t promote health products.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #4- Don’t fill your Blog Only with Affiliate Links and Banners

I have seen many bloggers overcrowding their blogs with affiliate links and banners. That’s certainly a bad practice. By doing that, you can never get better results, especially in Affiliate Marketing. Neither Google nor visitors like a blog or website overcrowded with affiliate links and banners.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #5 – A Personal Recommendation Works Best

When it comes to sales, personal recommendation works better than banners or links. However, before writing any review or recommending any product to your readers, try it yourself and write your honest views.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #6 – Use Different Traffic Sources to Promote Products

Most affiliate marketers use very similar promotional approach. They either put ads on their blog or write a recommendation article. This approach works well but you can try another method to send traffic to sales pages. It will increase your chances of making money online.

One way to send traffic to sales pages is by using Google Adwords. Just make an Ad in your AdWords account and use your affiliate link in the target URL of your Ad. You can earn money through this method but you will have to measure the conversion regularly so that you can end your campaign in case, the campaign cost goes higher than the campaign profit.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #7 – Always Track your Affiliate Campaign

In order to know what is working and what is not, it’s quite important to track your affiliate campaign. You can do split testing to measure the performance of your campaign. Changing a few things can increase your profit. I will recommend you use your own conversion tracking software.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #8 – Promote the Product which is in Demand

You should only promote a product which is in Demand. If you are promoting a product that is low in demand you will never get any sales. So spend a few hours and do some research before promoting any product.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #9 – Keep Yourself Updated

Affiliate Marketing is a competitive filed so people always come up with new techniques. So it’s important to keep yourself updated with new techniques, methods and tools otherwise you will fall behind.

Affiliate Marketing Tip #10 – Make your Affiliate Link Look Natural

Normally, an Affiliate Link looks like “http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=530307&u=884521&m=50165&urllink=&afftrack=”. Visitors may not click on such kind of links because it doesn’t look like a natural link. If you want your users to click on your affiliate links, try to make them natural.

A natural-looking link of the same affiliate link is “http://www.geteverything.org/recommend/ininbox”. I bet people will now show more interest in clicking such links.

If you are a WordPress user, you can do this by using plugins. A free plugin for accomplishing the same task is Pretty Link Lite. If you are looking for a Paid Plugin, I will recommend you to use Affiliate Link Manager Pro.

From the Editor’s Desk

If you are not able to make money online through Google Adsense or any other Ad network even after driving lots of traffic to your blog, I will highly recommend you to try Affiliate Marketing. In this tutorial, I have provided complete information about Affiliate Marketing.

If you still have any doubts or issues, feel free to ask me through comments.

You might also like
Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published.