Research Outline

Making money by affiliate marketing and ads

Goals

Affiliate marketing is like starting a completely new business. No matter what approach you take, whether writing blog posts or running ads on your website, there are certain steps you need to do to become an affiliate marketer.

Early Findings

  • Choosing the right market niche: The first step is finding out which affiliate products to sell, which means you need to find a niche in which you will influence your audience. Covering too many niches could risk making your efforts ineffective. To find out which niche is the best one for you, you can try to answer questions such as what topics are you passionate about?; do people search for my chosen niche?; is there a lot of competition for my niche?; are there any affiliate programs within my chosen niche?. Your chosen niche is fundamental for how profitable your affiliate marketing efforts are gonna be.
  • Affiliate Programs: the second step is to find out which program/s can help you to promote products in your niche. Affiliate marketing programs are platforms that connect merchants to affiliates. Since it can be really hard for merchants and affiliates to find each other, these sites act as a third party for the affiliate relationship. To choose the right affiliate program, there are several questions you should answer such as what merchants are using the affiliate program you are looking at?; how much commission are you likely to make from your program?; what kind of support does the program provide you with?. The two most popular ways to launch your new affiliate marketer job include: making websites like blogs or marketplaces, and running paid Google ads. Building a blog you can be as easy as using free blog platforms such as blogger, or you can do all by yourself from scratch either for free like Wix, Jimdo or WordPress, or if you know basic HTML and CSS code you can use a hosting service and run it by yourself. Alternatively, you can try other specialized blog and marketplace platforms such as WordPress.org or Jimdo, giving you the ability to install the theme of your choice with just a few clicks.
  • Creating and publish crack Content: same as choosing the right niche, creating a very attractive content is probably the most important step of your affiliate marketing journey. Even if you’ve got the right niche and an amazing website, you need something to build your audience, and that is content. When considering what type of content to create, you have a lot of options. a) Product Reviews: One of the most common strategies marketers use is to write reviews for different products and services in their niche. E-commerce sites are always looking for product reviews that convert customers, so this can be a profitable place to start. When is done well, it can be a great way to generate traffic and income; b) Blog Posts: blog posts are another way that you can start driving traffic into your chosen niche. More importantly, blog posts can help you boost sales over time. By addressing common questions or problems in your target market, you will be positioning yourself as a master to make recommendations. The big key for writing blog posts is consistency. You need to keep a single voice that provides high-quality ideas and tips to your reader network. A great affiliate brand that’s done an excellent job of developing an innovative blogging approach is Top Ten Reviews. By creating and delivering unique content, they have developed an engaged audience and dominate their niche. All of this is done as an affiliate too. So if you don’t want to do product reviews, go into blogging, offer solutions, and share your tips as much as possible; c) Guides: The final type of content you can focus on creating is helpful guides. This can be an e-book, email series, webinar, or any other type of extensive, in-depth look at a particular topic. As long as it is accurate and helpful, you most likely will gain trust in your niche. You can also use this technique to help your audience build interest in the affiliate product that you are trying to sell. A good simple example is PC Part Picker. They offer a wide variety of guides that help newcomers and veterans build a computer that meets their needs. This provides constant engagement with their audience with high-value content.
  • Create an Ad account: Ads are a great marketing method that can help you be successful, especially for high commission affiliate programs. So what if you only want to use paid ads to push people to your merchant partner’s site? In that case, you do not need a website. Instead, you will need to set up an account to create ads such as Google ads or Facebook ads depending on your audience. There are different ways you can approach creating an ad. Just to give you an example, let's have a look to two of the options Google has to offer. 1) Google Shopping Ads: These are the options you see at the top of the search engine results page when you’re looking for a certain product. This type of ad content can help you stand out and tap into your audience’s desire for visual content. While the type of ad you create and promote is largely dependent on your niche, the key takeaway is that you need to create something compelling; 2) Google Adsense: Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google.

Summary

You have to leverage the best strategies to attract an audience and build relationships with them. This can be done by creating a website to refer products and services to people or by running a paid ad campaign to reach relevant target groups. No matter what your approach you chose, the steps in this article will help make your journey as an affiliate marketer much easier in the long run.