What is affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a form of digital marketing. It involves promoting other people products and getting commissions from it. The products don’t have to be yours. You can find a digital or physical products and when you drive traffic that converts, you secure the bag.
Steps to start affiliate marketing
Niche Selection
This is the first step to take and one of the main mistakes that people make when getting started with affiliate marketing is their niche selection. I made this mistake myself where I was promoting higher commission niches out there such as weight loss and acne but these days I always try to promote products based around my own hobbies and interests and im getting good commissions so I would recommend that anyone wanting to try their hand at affiliate marketing should basically do the same.
Chasing the higher price niches usually means that the competition for these products are much higher than usual making it much harder to actually fit in especially if you are blogging and trying to get traffic to your blog. The higher price niches are not a realistic representation of the level of keyword difficulty for normal niches either so one of your hobbies may be wide open with low competition keywords making it a much better option.
Another problem with chasing the higher commissions if you don’t actually have any interest in them is that you will likely burn out on the content production side of things much quicker than you will with a regular niche based around your interests and hobbies. Google has changed a fair, bit over the years and the larger affiliate blogs with hundreds of pages tend to do better than the smaller blogs in my experience.
Due to this, going with a niche you are actually interested in can potentially save you hundreds of hours of research over your blogging journey as you already have the knowledge built up for your hobbies and interests anyway. I can usually knock a 2000–3000 word article out for one of my hobbies in about two hours due to knowing a bunch of the content off the top of my head but more on this later.
Affiliate Network Selection
Next up, we have the affiliate network selection that you are actually going to use when it comes to making your money with your affiliate blog. Similar to choosing your affiliate blog niche as covered above, so many people make mistakes based around choosing their actual affiliate network and essentially chase the commissions.
Networks such as Share-A-Sale or Clickbank may have a much higher commission payout potential and people often see these higher commissions for their niche and try to make these networks work. Unfortunately, in my experience at least, many of the landing pages for the programs on sites such as Share-A-Sale and Clickbank look really scammy and drive your conversion rate right down.
Personally, I use the Amazon Affiliate program and I am really happy with it although they did cut the commission rates in April 2020 with little notice, this also happens on networks such as Share-A-Sale and Clickbank too and is just one of the issues of being an affiliate marketer.
