For quite a few very legitimate reasons, people who seek to earn their living online look towards affiliate marketing. It’s a great place to start and if done right, it could even go on to be the last stop you ever make on your journey to figuring out how to generate a full-time income online which you can actually live off of quite comfortably. So here’s a step-by-step guide to get you started, but remember that the process will entail a lot of testing and trial-and-error until you find something that works for you, after which time you will focus on consolidation and scaling.
- Pick a Niche
A common mistake newbie affiliate marketers make is that of trying to sell everything they can market as an affiliate. It’s very easy to head on over to the likes of Amazon and try to pick out the highest rated products to sell, but that’s a recipe for disaster. Okay, actually there’s a way to do it that way, but if you want to succeed you’d still need to focus on a specific niche. One niche at a time.
Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Pick a niche you have an interest in – it doesn’t have to be something you’re passionate about and in fact it probably shouldn’t be something you’re passionate about. Pick a niche – any niche and see that niche as an opportunity to learn about something new.
I’ll go with the example of wine for example – that’s a great niche to choose if you want to make some good money as an affiliate marketer.
- Solve Problems in Your Selected Niche
Once you’ve picked your niche, what then naturally follows is some in-depth research. Read, read, read and watch some videos discussing that niche. Sticking with the wine example, there’s a lot you’ll learn about wine, such as how it should be stored, how much it costs, how it’s made, how it’s prepared (decanted), etc.
In conducting this research you will very quickly start to identify sales opportunities, such as how wine needs to be stored within specific temperature ranges, which means that a special fridge is required – boom, you can sell wine coolers as an affiliate marketer!
So that’s what’s meant by solving problems within your selected niche – you provide solutions to specific challenges or problems in that niche. This is done by perhaps putting together a blog which discusses everything related to your niche and then you simply link to your affiliate products as the solution. E.g. wine lovers of both the red and white variety might want to buy a high-quality, double door wine cooler with independent cooling compartments for both varieties. Point them to some of the best of these via your Amazon affiliate link, for example.
- Market Your Solutions
All that’s left to do then is just send traffic to your content and the more targeted your traffic the better. The sources of traffic are beyond the scope of this particular post, but the likes of Google AdWords comes to mind, so too Facebook ads, etc.
