What Is Affiliate Marketing – A Free Virtual Event 

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing that involves promoting products or services and earning a commission for each sale made through your unique referral link. This marketing model is commonly used by companies to drive sales and increase brand awareness.

Related: Amazon FBA Complete Course

How does Affiliate Marketing work?

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing model. This means that the affiliate is only paid when a specific action is taken. In most cases, this action is a sale that is generated through the affiliate’s unique referral link. When a customer clicks on the affiliate’s link and makes a purchase, the affiliate earns a commission.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing offers numerous benefits to both businesses and affiliates. Businesses can use affiliate marketing to increase sales and generate leads, while affiliates can earn passive income by promoting products they believe in. Affiliate marketing also helps to build brand awareness and strengthen relationships between businesses and their customers.

How to Start with Affiliate Marketing?

Starting with affiliate marketing is relatively easy. The first step is to identify a niche or industry that you are passionate about. Once you have identified your niche, you can then begin to research and identify affiliate programs that offer products or services related to your niche. You should then apply to become an affiliate and start promoting your chosen products or services.

Tips for Success in Affiliate Marketing

To be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to have a plan and a strategy. This means identifying your target audience and creating content that resonates with them. You should also focus on building trust with your audience and providing them with valuable information. It’s also important to track your progress and make adjustments to your strategy as needed.

Great Highly Paid Niches:

1. Aviation: ViroFLY, a private jet charter platform
2. Financial services
3. Real Estate
4. Legal
5. Tax
6. Compliance
7. & more..

Why Do Affiliates Use Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliates use affiliate marketing as a way to earn money online. By promoting products or services that are relevant to their audience, they can earn a commission for every sale that is made through their unique affiliate link. This can be a great way to earn passive income, and can even become a full-time business for some affiliates.

How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

Getting started with affiliate marketing is relatively simple. Here are the steps you can take to get started:

1. Choose a niche: Choose a niche that you are interested in and that has a potential audience.
2. Find affiliate programs: Find affiliate programs that offer products or services that are relevant to your niche.
3. Sign up for affiliate programs: Sign up for the affiliate programs that you are interested in and get your unique affiliate link.
4. Promote products or services: Promote the products or services to your audience using your unique affiliate link.
5. Earn commissions: Earn a commission for every sale that is made through your unique affiliate link. Just as a fair warning, some affiliate programs, at least the bigger ones have minimum limits before they pay you. For instance, Adsense will only pay if you have a balance of at least $100 generated in the month, Amazon has a weird payout system too. However, it is a lot easier to make sales and get commission through Amazon as Amazon is a trusted platform to millions of people. Just read the fine print.

Pitfalls of Affiliate Marketing

Well according to Jon McNeil about 95% of affiliate markets fail. Sheesh that is quite high, but the real question is that true?

Not to be a negative Nancy (sorry Nancy), but from personal experience, affiliate marketing can take time, money, and possibly more time to figuring out how it works and how to put it all together. I remember when I didn’t even know how to attach my domain to Godaddy hosting. Well, I’m here to tell you that I don’t believe 95% of people fail from affiliate marketing. No offense Jon.

The beauty about affiliate marketing is there are a wealth of videos on youtube where you can practically learn anything and everything. If I were to tell my young self where to invest my energy and time. This is what I would recommend:

If you have budget:

1. Pay a couple people on Fiverr or Upwork that are SEO specialists and have them allocate part of their time to teach you and use a site that you have/may purchase. Practical experience is the best. Also, I’d like to make a note that NOT everyone on Fiverr and Upwork are good. I would first chat with a bunch of people, ask for their portfolio, get an idea of what they are going to teach you. Most likely in the beginning, you will get burned and that is OK. You will end up figuring out what is what. I can tell you it took me sometime to get the idea.
2. Purchase a course, I wanted a little in-depth course so I took James Camp full program sitting around $3k and you have access to chat with him on Circle, continuous live calls with industry operators and a wealth of information
3. SEMrush: SEMrush is a good platform, I like it, I’m still learning more about how to fully use the platform and better yet what they display as the charge is what you pay for.
4. Ahrefs: I’ve used Ahrefs and I do love their platform. HOWEVER, they are sneaky and annoying on how they setup their system. Every click counts against you and so the bill just racks up at the end of the month. Sorry Ahrefs had to cancel ya.
5. Ads: Yes there are immense opportunities to run ad spend on certain keywords that could potentially convert to sales, but why risk it for a biscuit? Just kidding. I wouldn’t jump into ads or else you could lose your shirt. So if someone is pushing you that direction, I would…run.
6. Acquire an aged domain OR an affiliate blog: Ok, so this one is serious. There is a big secondary market for purchasing aged domains at Godaddy Auction or Spamzilla or MotionInvest or if your a baller then FE International, Flippa and the likes. Do I recommend this route? Right off the bat, probably not unless your like me and you didn’t listen to the advice and went ahead to buy some stuff that seemed cool, then that is on you. Did I learn a lot from the process and what to ask? ABSOLUTELY. I’m just giving a safe warning that it can be an expensive mistake or learning curve.
7. Today I was offered a 2 year old blog that has great traffic, 5 million impressions in the past 12 months, decent click through rate on the gaming niche (not a big fan of writing articles about games like the SIMS). However, it is monetized by Adsense, Amazon for affiliate products and just got approved for Ezoic. What I noticed on the Amazon affiliate dashboard screenshot he sent me and the Adsense chart is that income dipped heavily. So if I don’t touch the site, then it would be generating $200 per month. He wanted $3,500 for it. Site design meh, loaded with a billion ads, that is a big red flag of desperation to try to make any buck. I said listen, you have the traffic but I’m afraid I will not be able to recoup my investment. It either needs to be gutted ie the design of site and or reduce the posts c. 119 or change the content. It just felt very spammy. Clearly he knows how to drive traffic. Anyways, I just want to share that you need to ask the right questions and understand what the answers mean for you. Sadly, had to pass.

Related: What Is The Primary Purpose Of Using A Domain-Specific Checklist

If no budget:

1. Youtube: I will say this every time and again, Youtube has A LOT of information. What I’ve noticed are the videos that are not in Native English, mainly in Hindi, Malay, Urdu run by developers/programmers sharing some insightful knowledge on tips & tricks. No, I don’t speak those languages. But you can get lucky by trying to add subtitles from Youtube settings and watching the videos to figure out what they are doing. Trust me its great. Don’t be fooled by the little views.
2. Twitter: Ok, there are PLENTY of twitter folks that really know what they are doing. They do a great job of sharing some cool insights here and there. But as a reminder, never ever ask for their domain and I don’t think you should ever share yours. You’ll understand why sometime in the future.
3. DIY: DIY is cool once you get a handle from some Twitter posts and Youtube videos you watched, including podcasts like Niche Pursuits. A new episode I quite liked below for reference:

Conclusion

Alright hopefully you get a tad idea of what’s going on. It is quite a big marketplace. More and more sites and programs are popping up. Patience is key, knowledge is golden and practical experience is the way in. I highly highly recommend to anyone interested in this endeavor to go in and experiment. It is truly incredible and a lot can be discovered.

Related: How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers

I have this image as my background wallpaper as a reminder: