While there are many tasks to perform for you to become successful at affiliate marketing, they can be grouped into two main steps.
If you’re a retiree, stay-at-home parent, unemployed, or just want to make money online part-time, you really need to try affiliate marketing.
With the affiliate marketing business model, there is no product creation, no support, no direct selling, and no hassles.
Here’s how to get started…
Step 1: Find Your Niche
Many people start their affiliate marketing journey by looking for products to promote. That’s a mistake. Instead, step back and focus on a niche to promote to instead.
The secret is to find a niche that you want to work in and a niche that will be profitable and then find the audience for that niche.
Why does it make sense to focus on an audience for your niche, instead of a product?
Here are a couple of reasons why:
1. Products will always come and go, but a niche audience can be virtually permanent. That’s why a popular product only lasts so long, and then people start to anticipate the next big thing. It’s the audience you should be focusing on, not the product.
2. When you take the time to really understand the deep-seated needs of a certain audience, you’ll make the transition from trying to find ideas for products to immediately knowing what kinds of products you should promote to your audience. That’s a game-changer.
It is really quite simple: Know your audience and give them what they need. Period.
When searching for a niche, there are several things to consider. One of the main keys to successful affiliate marketing is to find an evergreen niche. By that, I mean a niche that will have a long life so that all the work you put in will keep providing you with income for years to come.
For example, the dating niche has been here for eons (think matchmakers) and will be around as long as humans exist. Even if one product disappears, there are others to take its place.
In addition to the longevity of the niche, here are some tips to help you decide.
Niche Brainstorming Tips:
- Pick an audience that you are drawn to; people who you can relate to
- Consider a niche you would categorize yourself in. For example: solo entrepreneur, or senior male or female golfer
- Pick an audience by first choosing a niche topic you’re interested in or somewhat passionate about. This could be anything from “cure golf putting yips” to “how to get more dates”
- Recognize the problems of the people in this niche — research their pain, desires, problems, and aspirations. There are endless places you can discover this information online including blogs, niche forums, and even at Amazon.com
- Focus on the profitable problems. Not every problem is created equally. Your audience will be more than willing to pay to have some of their problems solved, while others not so much. It’s your job to understand the difference. You can use these filters to help you figure it out:
- How many monthly searches are there for the problem?
- How many searches suggest a desire to solve the problem?
- How much quality information is on the Internet relative to the problem? (The more the better!)
- Learn to speak the language of your audience on their terms to effectively communicate with them.
This might sound like a lot of work, but once you choose your niche audience, understand their needs and problems, learn about them intensely, and then offer them a product that will solve that problem, you can be on the road to an online income.
Step 2: Find Your Products and Start (Pre)Selling
Now that you know how to pick a profitable topic for your successful affiliate marketing efforts, you need to find products to promote and a way to promote them.
The three main places where I find products to promote as an affiliate are…
Clickbank.com
WarriorPlus.com
JVZoo.com
Signing up at any of these sites to promote products is free.
All three sites offer a search function where you can enter a niche-specific term and find related products.
Clickbank offers a “Marketplace” where you can research products and find top sellers in your niche.
JVZoo offers a search tool at their “Affiliate Dashboard” where you can select your niche category.
WarriorPlus lets you search through offers and sort by date or any other parameter.
The key to these sites is to find stuff that is selling well.
Clickbank shows you a gravity score for each product that indicates the affiliate activity.
JVZoo goes into more detail showing you the number of sales each product has made, along with EPC and more.
WarriorPlus lets you search through offers to see what’s converting best.
Don’t just stop at one product. In order to create a substantial amount of money and really bank some cash, you’ll need to promote a steady stream of related products.
Once you have some initial products picked out, the final step is to build an audience…
You can start building an audience via Facebook or with a blog like the one you’re reading right now. I also recommend you add a dash of email marketing by starting an email list.
I know what you’re thinking, this whole thing is starting to sound like a lot of work!
Well, anything great takes work. It doesn’t happen overnight, but if you stay active and use all the shortcuts at your disposal, the clicks and sales can really start to add up.
Remember, there’s much more to successful affiliate marketing than simply writing content, inserting a link, and waiting for the profits to roll in. As I mentioned earlier, you must understand who you are marketing to based on their needs and desires. Then offer solutions to their problem.
“Pre-selling” products is the best strategy online. You write about the problems and the solutions. You infuse your audience with enthusiasm and anticipation before they even land on the sales page. This significantly increases your chances of making a sale.
But the most important aspect of affiliate marketing is to successfully build a solid relationship with your audience based on trust and ethics. Once they know they can trust you, your sales will increase exponentially as long as you are solving real problems for them.
That’s why you need to be choosy about which products you pick so you’ll be viewed as a trusted authority in the eyes of your buyers. Test products and use them before recommending them. This allows you to speak with authority.
