How to Break into Affiliate Marketing
05-09-2017
Many people want to make money online but don’t think they have the time or the expertise to do so. It can be difficult to see how you can succeed in such a vastly saturated space, and yet, so many people still do. As saturated as the field of blogging is, there are still thousands of blogs being created each day. Amongst those thousands and thousands of blogs are content creators and aspiring digital marketers just like you, who took the leap of faith and created their own online platforms.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
If you’ve already created a website on your own, then here’s the great news: you can monetise the website through Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Marketing is a type of marketing that involves two or more parties: a merchant, a marketer, and sometimes a vendor. The merchant employs the marketer (or Affiliate) to drive traffic and gain good quality sales leads. The Affiliate can do this in several ways, including through SEO marketing, paid search, social referrals, and more. We’ll go into the details of each in a bit. The Affiliate earns a commission each time he or she drives a sale, or a conversion.
Affiliate Marketing is simple in nature but challenging in execution. Like we mentioned before, it can be daunting to face a saturated industry, but there is hope. If you’re ready to monetise your blog or website through Affiliate Marketing, these are the steps you’ll need to take:
How to Break into Affiliate Marketing Step 1: Determine Your Niche
First, you’ve got to determine your niche. A niche is simply an area of focus where you can optimise your website and find interested leads who will sign up for your service. One of the most lucrative niches on Google is the financial loans niche. This is because financial loans fill an ongoing need in society. Rather than having to drive around town looking for an loan, consumers can now go online from the comfort of their mobile device and sign up for a loan immediately. Affiliates who choose to capitalise on this niche are smart because they recognise that this industry is here to stay. T DOT UK is a financial loan leads Affiliate Network that welcomes digital marketers of all experiences and backgrounds. If you think this niche is right for you, sign up here!
How to Break into Affiliate Marketing Step 2: Research Your Target Audience
After you determine your niche, it is time for you to research your target audience. Knowing your target audience lays down the groundwork for the rest of your marketing efforts. You have to know your target leads well in order to attract them. Through critical research and monitoring your competitors, find out which platforms your target audience uses, how old they are, what ethnicity they are, etc. These important demographics will help you to determine where you should best invest your time in terms of advertising.
How to Break into Affiliate Marketing Step 3: Optimise Your Website
Next, optimise your website according to what you know about your target audience and basic SEO best practices. Website optimisation is the fun part because you’ll get to exercise your creativity while applying the technical things you learned whilst researching about online marketing. Don’t be afraid to conduct multiple A/B tests to find out what kinds of optimisations work best for you and your target niche. Some standard SEO best practices include:
- Using important keywords in your titles, headlines, and descriptions
- Optimising your meta descriptions to say exactly what your website offers
- Writing relevant, link-rich, and keyword-rich articles in your blog
- Keeping your blog updated frequently
- Pitching your content to other websites in order to gain backlinks
How to Break into Affiliate Marketing Step 4: Create a Marketing Schedule
Finally, you can create a working marketing schedule for you once you complete the previous steps. Your marketing schedule should always be tentative, as fluctuations in traffic and other unforeseen events might get in the way of what you’ve initially planned. Still, having a marketing schedule will keep you accountable to updating and promoting your website daily.
For more tips on how to break into Affiliate Marketing, check out the rest of our blog! If you think you’re ready for this profitable career, sign up now with T DOT UK
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