What is Affiliate Marketing About? Yes, There Is Room For You

Every day, affiliate marketers claim to have found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. So the question is, if there are so many people earning a living this way, is there still room for you to get started? Yes, there is!

In this article, I will cover what affiliate marketing is, how it works, and how the support of a great marketing community platform can really make a difference in your success. So let’s not waste any time and get into it straight away.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an agreement between you and a merchant (retailer or company) to promote their product or service. When a customer buys the promotional product through your affiliate links, you earn a commission. Earning money via affiliate marketing is highly sought after.

Besides a sale, like the one mentioned above, there are other ways to earn income. Other methods include steering your visitors to a certain website or link, those signing up for free trials, or downloading a specific software or gaming app.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work? (Explained)

Step 1

The first step is to choose a topic you are interested in, are passionate about, or have first-hand experience.

Once you have researched and nailed down your topic, or niche, you will want to build a website around that niche.

Step 2

Next, building your website involves the following:

• buying a domain
• getting a hosting service for the website
• getting that website up & running and,
• building the content around the niche

Step 3

From there, you will want to attract visitors. There are a variety of ways to do this like:

• getting your content in the Search Engines
• creating YouTube videos
• sharing your website within social media
• using paid ads
  • Google Ads
  • Facebook Ads
  • Pinterest Ads
  • Instagram Ads
  • Twitter Ads
  • LinkedIn Ads
  • Youtube Ads

The above-mentioned ways are avenues to direct traffic to your website. They will read your content, click on your affiliate links that lead them to purchase. When they purchase, this is the point where you will earn revenue.

Step 4

Earning revenue is our final step of the 4-step process.

You will continue to repeat the process to continue your earning life cycle. Once you build the four-step cycle, steps 3 and 4 are the parts that continually repeat.

Let’s Break this 4-Step Process Down a Little More

Choosing an Interest

This can be anything at all, an interest, your passion, a topic with first-hand experience, or no experience at all. One piece of advice I would like to give you. You sound more authentic when you write about topics you are familiar with. However, that doesn’t count out topics you aren’t familiar with. You will have to conduct additional research.

To give you an example would, how hard would it be to tell your friend about a movie you have never seen? To give your friend the best details about the movie, you would have to conduct some research to see what the movie is all about.

Building a Website

• You will need a domain name, which is the website address
• Build the website where your content will be featured
• Get a web hosting service that enables your website to appear on the internet

Attract Visitors

• The primary traffic, steering visitors to your website, I focus on is FREE traffic. There is lots of free traffic around.
• Free traffic is mostly gained through Search Engines
• How that traffic gets to your website is through writing content

Earning Revenue

Once you have visitors/traffic coming to your site, you can earn revenue.

There are over 50 ways to earn revenue from your site. For example:

• through ads
• selling your own products or services
• through affiliate links

As an affiliate marketer, there is an unbelievable number of products and services you can promote. Would you believe me if I said there were close to 600 million products and services? Yes, that is the truth.

How to Make Money Online (Concept Explained)

This is the 4-Step “Life Cycle” to an Affiliate Program

1. The Customer has visited your site, possibly searching for your topic/niche or maybe via social media.
2. Once on your website, they read the content you wrote, like a product review.
3. The reader clicks on a link you’ve placed in your product review (content) that leads them to check out the product/price. This link can lead them to several companies like Amazon, Walmart, Target, eBay, Etsy, and many more, and they buy a product.
4. When the customer buys a product through your link, you make money by earning a commission from the product’s price.

Commissions vary depending on the agreement you signed with the company. For example, if your agreement is for a 25% commission per sale, and the product price is $100, you will earn a $25 commission.

Life Cycle Repetition

The cycle continues over and over. The way it works is that the more traffic you have coming to your website and reading your reviews and content, and clicking your affiliate links that lead them to buy something, the more money you will make.

There are an expected 2.14 billion people that will purchase goods and services online in 2021. That is a large increase from 1.66 billion in 2016.

There are almost 5 billion active internet users in 2021. That is almost 60% of the world’s population. People search for things online all the time. Their search may be for help, advice, product reviews, opinions, information, solutions, and so much more.

Your Website

Your website will offer information for what people are searching for. Let’s say you wrote a review, a “how to’s” or an opinion-based article on a product. For Example:

• The 3 Best Self-Cleaning Cat Litter Boxes
• Is the Litter-Robot the Best Self-Cleaning Cat Litter Box
• My ChillX Autoegg Self-Cleaning Litter Box Review
• How to Set-Up Your LitterMaid Self-Cleaning Litter Box
• How to Help Your Cat Transition From a Traditional to an Automatic Litter Box

You would include an affiliate link within the content, and you tell your reader to click on the link to check the price. The link takes them to Amazon or the company’s website. Now, the customer buys the product based on your opinion. The best part is you make a commission on that purchase.

Is Affiliate Marketing Worth Your Time?

Since the COVID-19 Pandemic, people’s shopping habits have changed drastically by increased purchasing habits of goods and services online. Google alone racks up to 5 billion searches every day! Those 5 billion searches don’t even include the traffic from Yahoo, Bing, or other search engines. The number is mind-boggling.

By the end of this year, in 2021, financial experts expect online sales to exceed $29 trillion worldwide. So you may now realize why I said there is still room for you to join affiliate marketing. Literally, you have to capture only a small fraction of shoppers to earn an incredible income.

So, when you read about people quitting their 9-5 job and earning many times what they use to earn, you can believe most of the stories are true.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?

There is a myth that affiliate marketing is effortless and the money will pour in from very little effort. That is not the case. Yes, you will have to work hard before you see profits, but if you stick with it, you will be glad that you did.

There is no doubt that affiliate marketing has proven over and over again to be fruitful. This business is not a get-rich-quick scheme, no matter what you think or what you’ve been told.

Can Affiliate Marketing Work For You? (Your Next Steps)

My success in affiliate marketing came from building a working relationship with my coach. My advice is to seek a marketing mentor or coach; You will want to seek out someone who has been in the industry, whether it be a mentor or a marketing coach.

I am a member of the best marketing community platform around. With the help of my coach, the support of the marketing community, and my work ethic, mindset, and continual learning of new skills are the reason for my success. There is no reason you can’t have the same kind of success.

I learned how to get started in an online business with Wealthy Affiliate. This platform is the only community that I trust for honest and first-class training to earn money online. I highly recommend Wealthy Affiliate for its training, tools, live support, and included web hosting. Tap the link below to learn more about this awesome marketing community.