How to Start Affiliate Marketing

I managed to form almost $6500 in May 2020 from my Affiliate blogs so hopefully, this answer will help anyone who is looking to urge involved the affiliate blogging side of things and assist you get off to an honest start with a high chance of getting traffic and earning some money.

Niche Selection

In my opinion, one among the most mistakes that folks make when getting started with affiliate blogging is their niche selection. I made this error myself where I chased the upper commission niches out there like weight loss and acne but lately I always attempt to choose blogs based around my very own hobbies and interests then far, it's working alright so i might recommend that anyone eager to try their hand at affiliate blogging basically do an equivalent . i'm going into this in additional detail during this video on choosing the right niche for your affiliate blog but here is that the short version….

Chasing the upper price point niches like weight loss and acne usually means the competition for these keywords is far above usual making it much harder to truly rank in Google and obtain traffic to your blog. the upper price point niches aren't a sensible representation of the extent of keyword difficulty for normal niches either so one among your hobbies could also be wide open with low competition keywords making it a way better option.

Another problem with chasing the upper commissions if you do not even have any interest in them is that you simply will likley blow out on the content production side of things much quicker than you'll with a daily niche based around your interests and hobbies. Google has changed a good bit over the years and therefore the larger affiliate blogs with many pages tend to try to to better than the smaller blogs in my experience.

Due to this, going with a distinct segment you're actually curious about can potentially prevent many hours of research over your blogging journey as you have already got the knowledge built up for your hobbies and interests anyway. I can usually knock a 2000–3000 word article out for one among my hobbies in about two hours thanks to knowing a bunch of the content off the highest of my head but more on this later.

Affiliate Network Selection

Next up, we've the affiliate network selection that you simply are literally getting to use when it involves making your money together with your affiliate blog. almost like choosing your affiliate blog niche as covered above, numerous people make mistakes based around choosing their actual affiliate network and essentially chase the commissions.

Networks like Share-A-Sale or Clickbank may have a way higher commission payout potential and other people often see these higher commissions for his or her niche and check out to form these networks work. Unfortunately, in my experience a minimum of , many of the landing pages for the programs on sites like Share-A-Sale and Clickbank look really scammy and drive your conversion rate right down.

Personally, i exploit the Amazon Affiliate program and that i am really proud of it although they did cut the commission rates in April 2020 with little notice, this also happens on networks like Share-A-Sale and Clickbank too and is simply one among the problems of being an affiliate marketer.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing

The image above is from my Amazon One Link Affiliate Dashboard and shows my highest income day so far using the Amazon Affiliate Program. As you'll see, it's almost $350 in commissions earned during a single day so don't let the people saying that the lower commission rate of 3–4% on Amazon is bad, in my experience, their conversion rate quite makes up for it.

Amazon is one among the most important brands within the world and has an absolute ton of trust behind it. They even have their stock one click system also as Amazon Prime offering even more benefits to an affiliate because it is very easy for somebody to convert to truly purchase the item that you simply are promoting.

Additionally to the present , you furthermore may get a commission for all of the things that somebody purchases once they inspect on Amazon, not just the products that you simply are directly promoting.

Some of the random items that folks have purchased through my links that i do not actually promote include an $800 model battleship, $250 worth of cupcakes from Amazon Pantry, and a $2000 drone. Although these are rare, most of the people will usually devour a bunch of things on Amazon before finding out helping to extend your commissions.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is another area where many of us new affiliate blogging make mistakes right out of the gate and smash out an absolute ton of content that they never had an opportunity of truly ranking for. Unfortunately, this will find yourself costing these people many hours with little to point out for it then they find yourself abandoning as they were targeting keywords that they never stood an opportunity of truly ranking for anyway.

I personally use two main sorts of keyword research when it involves affiliate marketing that's based around two different program optimization strategies. the primary one is predicated around higher search volume, higher competition, higher commission keywords where i will be able to actually do some off-page backlinking to extend the probabilities of me having the ability to rank for the keyword and obtain traffic to earn money.

In all honesty, if you're fresh to affiliate blogging then i might not recommend this first method because it is more of an intermediate level strategy. backlinking your articles can take plenty of your time and energy or money if you select to outsource it and too many of us do this strategy before they need ever actually ranked a keyword and find yourself just dalliance and money.

If you're fresh to affiliate blogging then i might highly recommend this zero search volume keyword strategy. Although i'm going into it in additional detail with examples therein linked YouTube video, the fundamentals of the tactic is to focus on keywords that search volume prediction tools suggest get zero searches per month as most of the people tend to ignore these keywords numerous of them are going to be extremely low competition.

Although the search volume prediction tools say that these tools get zero searches, if you follow the tactic within the video, I usually get 50–75 hits per month to my blogs using that method. This traffic comes from keyword variants, extremely long-tail keywords, and just one occasion searches in Google. Although 50–75 organic hits per month might not sound like much, these keywords are relatively easy to seek out and typically only need a 1000–1500 word article that ought to not take long for your to supply . this enables you to scale into the tactic quickly and smash the content out for potentially many these articles all bringing in 50–75 keywords during a short period of your time .

I have an affiliate blog from 2018 that has some keywords thereon following the zero search volume strategy that runs at around $80 per 1000 hits thereto and another affiliate blog from 2019 with more zero search volume keywords thereon that runs at around $100 per 1000 hits thereto too. Provided you target higher price point items on Amazon on or on your affiliate network of choice, this enables you to urge some decent commissions with less effort than using the primary keyword research method that i discussed that needs backlinking to figure .

If you discover 20 of these keywords and obtain their articles online and begin pulling a minimum of 50 hits per keyword, that's 1000 organic, buyer intent hits to your affiliate blog per month. At the worth points of the things , I work with on Amazon that's $80-$100 or more per month from those articles. If you plan to publishing one among those articles each day then which will be 30–31 articles a month ending up pulling around 1500 organic hits or more per month earning $120-$150 then this compounds with each passing month that you simply keep it up publishing one article a day.

Content Generation

Content generation (creating and publishing your article) are often a complete pain and takes plenty of your time during this day and age. Although outsourcing your content creation to freelance writers are often a solid option and is one among the tactics that i'm currently using to scale quicker, if you're new affiliate blogging i might not recommend it.

I personally feel that you simply should be publishing the content for your first affiliate blog yourself to urge a pity how you wish to format your articles. I even have this video on YouTube where i'm going over how I format my very own affiliate articles with examples which will be helpful because the actual formatting of the articles is another area where I see numerous people make mistakes.

So many people miss out something as simple as adding a comparison table to their affiliate articles and in my experience, for 2 of my blogs targeting keywords based around multiple products, a comparison table is important . My analytics backs this up and suggest that the majority people only read the primary 200–300 words of the article, get to the comparison table then perform to Amazon too.

Although there are premium plugins out there that permit you build out some great looking comparison tables for Amazon products like AAWP, I even have this video on YouTube showing how you're ready to make your own comparison tables for free of charge that appears good too. If you're new affiliate blogging then using the free method to form your comparison tables can help keep your initial costs low while helping to extend your click-through rate to Amazon to potentially assist you earn extra money .

As I even have mentioned earlier within the article, the way Google works lately , it tends to prefer blogs with many articles on them because it sees them as more of an authoritative source. If you're getting to use the zero search volume keyword strategy that I covered earlier within the article, then you'll be needing many articles to earn any serious cash too.

Over the years of churning out many words of content for my very own affiliate blogs I even have picked up variety of tips and tricks which will drastically reduce the quantity of your time it takes to supply and affiliate blog article. i'm going over them during this video on YouTube and albeit you simply save 10 to fifteen minutes per article this quickly adds up over 100s of articles and allows you to churn your content out quicker to start out getting your traffic on your blog.

Backlinking

As i discussed earlier within the article, i might not recommend that you simply choose a technique where you'll need to backlink your affiliate blogs if you're new. Not only does this require longer and energy but it also can increase the initial costs of your blogs and if you're new and haven't any experience with backlinking your articles, you'll not see a return.

That said though, if you're more of an intermediate level affiliate marketer and are eager to try your hand at backlinking your affiliate blogs then I personally only use guest posts, niche edits, and manual forum posts immediately . All three of those link types are manual with a singular article that creates sense to the reader helping to urge you a enjoy the link.

I would not recommend that you simply accompany any automated tools for your backlinks or anything that uses spun or bot-generated articles. Although this did use to figure well back in 2010–2015, Google has evolved an entire bunch since then and it tends to not work also , if at all.

Please confine mind that there's always getting to be a risk of a penalty from Google if you are doing prefer to backlinks your affiliate blogs though because it may be a black hat tactic. On the flipside of this though, countless white hat affiliate bloggers are slapped by the Google updates in November 2019 and should 2020 also as variety of other updates too.