Is Affiliate Marketing Worth Doing?
Affiliate marketing remains one of the best and easiest ways of making an online income.
And it only gets better and better year by year.
There are two simple reasons for this:
- The population as a whole has moved to embrace online purchasing. This had a massive kick-along by the Covid-18 pandemic as many people were forced to stay at home and turned to the internet for their shopping and
- With advertising costs spiraling and advertising itself becoming less effective and less reliable, more and more vendors turned to affiliates as a better way of spending their advertising budget.
How Do I Get Started with Affiliate Marketing?
First up, there's absolutely no need to feel overwhelmed, no matter where you're starting from.
Anyone with reasonability and the desire to succeed can do this.
You can do this.
You answer the question "Is affiliate marketing worth doing?" for you personally by working through a small number of clearly defined steps.
- Choose a Niche
- Register a Domain Name
- Build a Website
- Get Your Affiliate Links
- Drive Traffic (Visitors) to Your Site.
Let's examine each of these in turn.
1. Choose a Niche
What is a Niche?
Simply put, it's the area of interest that you're going to build your affiliate marketing business around.
As such, it needs to have three qualities:
- Something you're interested in. You're going to be writing informative articles about this topic, so it helps to be interested in it. You don't have to be all that knowledgeable, though. The internet will allow you to research the topic for useful information.
- Something that other people are interested in as well. They will be your potential customers. You can judge this by doing Google and Bing searches on your niche and related topics. If you find other people selling products, then you can too.
- Something that has vendors with affiliate programs. You can find them simply by searching for [niche] affiliates.
An Example of a Niche
As illustrated by the above image, an example of a niche could be Sporting Equipment.
Or if that's too broad, Soccer, Golf or Tennis.
If you chose Golf, you would find affiliate vendors by searching "golf affiliates".
2. Register a Domain Name
You will need a domain name related to your niche.
It will become your website's address.
There are now a huge number of domain name extensions (these are called TLDs, which stands for Top Level Domains) but the one you want is .com. So your domain name will be something like myspiffydomain.com.
You will probably find getting a domain name that no one else has thought of to be quite frustrating.
Just persevere with variations of your niche name until you come up with one.
Then register it with Namecheap. This will cost around $10 for a full year and they will email you a reminder when it's time to renew.
3. Build a Website
The First Hurdle
This is the hurdle that may wannabee netrepreneurs stumble at.
Because it's, well, quite technical.
But what if you could get it done for $19 and get training on becoming an affiliate marketer as well?
That's the opportunity I'm about to offer you.
Go to Wealthy Affiliate and use the link there to sign up and then upgrade to Premium.
It will cost you just $19 for the first month's access to all of the affiliate marketing training that Wealthy Affiliate offers.
But in addition, as part of that deal, I will build your website for you!
What Happens Next?
Well, I believe that you'll be so blown away by the value offered by Wealthy Affiliate that you'll continue your Premium membership for $49 a month and use the training to springboard off the website I've built for you and create your own lucrative online business.
But if you don't...
Well, that's OK too. You will have paid just $19 for a website that you could have reasonably paid the best part of $1,000 for.
Either way, you end up a winner!
4. Get Your Affiliate Links
This Part Is Easy
Once you've got an attractive website in place, this part is easy.
What you are doing is approaching vendors with affiliate programs operating in your niche.
If they accept you as an affiliate, they will give you a link (a piece of html code) that you will place on your website, attached to an image or some text. When a visitor clicks on it, they will be taken to the vendor's website and if they buy the product, you will get paid the affiliate commission.
Finding Affiliate Vendors
There are broadly two ways to find vendors with affiliate programs:
- Affiliate gateways that host a large number of such vendors
- Individual vendors.
Affiliate Gateways
Some of the most popular ones are ClickBank, CJ (Commission Junction) JVZoo and Warrior Plus.
Do a Google Search on any of those to find their website.
You will need to open a (free) account and then search for vendors with products available in your niche.
Warning: There is generally no quality control applied to these products. Do your own due diligence. At the very least, search for [Product Name] reviews, but beware of fake reviews left by others who are themselves affiliates for the product.
Individual Vendors
You can find individual vendors by searching for [Niche] affiliates. This will find vendors with affiliate programs in your niche. These will normally require you to apply to become an affiliate. You are unlikely to be accepted if you don't have a professional looking website.
Vendors with their own affiliate programs will normally have good quality products.
Amazon
Amazon has its own affiliate program, called Amazon Associates. It's not difficult to get accepted but you must abide by their terms. Commission rates are relatively low.
Affiliate Links
Any vendor that you become an affiliate for will provide you with an affiliate link for you to put on your website. If a visitor clicks the link, they will be taken to the vendor's website and if they buy the product, you will get the commission. Inserting the link is easy if you have Thrive Architect, which comes as standard with the Thrive Suite.
Click here for Affiliate Marketing: Your Questions Answered and Affiliate Marketing Traffic Tips.
5. Drive Traffic (Visitors) to Your Site
Of course, affiliate marketing is worth doing only if you make sales.
And the first step to making sales is getting visitors to your site.
Visitors who are interested in your product and are likely to buy it.
How to Get Visitors to Your Affiliate Website
There are broadly two classes of traffic:
- Organic (Free) Traffic
- Paid Traffic
Organic (Free) traffic
You get organic traffic by writing blog posts that are both informative (so of value to visitors) and keyword rich (so that a search on that keyword is likely to find your blog post on the first page of results).
One of the best sources of training to teach you how to do this is Wealthy Affiliate.
The advantage of organic traffic is that it's free, at least in terms of money. It does, of course, take time.
The disadvantage is that you are dependent on the search engines' (Google and Bing) algorithms and an update can move you from page 1 to well, anywhere but page 1 is more or less invisible.
So under someone else's control, not yours. Which brings us to
Paid Traffic
You get paid traffic from running ppc ads. Ppc stands for pay per click and it means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. These ads usually appear high on the search engine pages and so have really good exposure.
So the idea is to craft attractive ads that people want to click on and really good offers that they see after they click.
If you can create a situation where you are making more in affiliate income than you're spending on ads, then you have a winner and can rapidly scale it up.
The big advantages of paid traffic is that it's totally under your control and that when you get a winning campaign, you can scale it up simply by increasing your ad spend.
The most popular paid advertising platforms are Facebook (but read their terms carefully; it's very easy to get banned by advertising something they don't like) Google Ads and Bing Ads.
So yes, affiliate marketing is worth doing - as long as you do it right.
