Are you interested in a business selling other people’s or companies’ products for a commission. Great, in this article I will dwell on 6 tips for beginners who wish to start an affiliate marketing business.

Affiliate marketing business is where you promote a company’s products or offers. You can promote a product on your site so that when your visitors leave for the vendor’s website and transact on the website, you get commission.

In most cases, most digital products pay commissions 50% and over and physical product affiliate programs typically pay 5-15% commissions. Clickbank and Digiresults are some of the top digital affiliate networks you can join. For physical products, Amazon is a top physical products affiliate program you can join. To understand the beauty of affiliate marketing, let’s begin by thrashing out the advantages of it.

The plus side of affiliate marketing

Starting an affiliate marketing business saves you a whole lot of time and trouble trying to put together a wonderful product.

If you had to create a product on your own, it would take you a lot of hours creating the perfect product, designing a sales page, finding affiliates to join your affiliate program and the list goes on.

With affiliate marketing, on the other hand, you don’t have to deal with all that, you can set up a business and get it up and running in no time at all. You add a few relevant links on your site linking back to the vendor’s website, then you get paid a certain percentage of the amount of sales the vendor did through you. It’s something very easy and simple to setup, and that’s the beauty of affiliate marketing.

6 Affiliate marketing tips

1. Set a goal

Setting a goal in the early hours is key if you want to reach your goals much faster and achieve success more easily. Setting a goal alone isn’t all that important though. The goals that you set should be specific and attainable. Identify your own skills and know what you are good at, and make sure that you like what you are doing. If you don’t like what you are doing, staying passionate is not going to be easy for you, so figure this out early on.

2. Cloak your links

Affiliate links by default look long and ugly with a bunch of characters and numbers in them. And posting a bunch of ugly-looking links on your website might not be a wise move. They can look confusing and that could hurt your click-through rate (CTR). You can hide them by using a certain link cloaking plugins. I personally use Thirsty Affiliates to cloak my affiliate links. It’s the best affiliate plugin and I recommend it for all affiliates.

It is also easier managing a bunch of affiliate links this way especially if you’re promoting a lot of affiliate programs. Some cloaking software also come with tracking features that let you track your campaigns and keep track of your results for each campaign you are running, and that’s very good information.

3. Build a mailing list

Once your visitors go over to the vendor’s website, no matter whether they buy the product or not, they are no longer your customers.

But with a mailing list, you can capture the email of your visitors and communicate with them on a consistent basis, and offer them as many relevant affiliate products as you want down the line.

You could also lose all your traffic or wake up to find that your site has been hit by a Google penalty. But if you have your list, you don’t have much to worry about because you have a list of customers that you can contact, you can get them to visit your site or buy other affiliate offers.

4. Pick high converting offers

For example, on Clickbank, there’s such a thing called Gravity. Gravity is the number of affiliates who have sold a given product at least once in a given period of time.

That’s a sign that the offer is a high converting one and it is most likely to sell. Also check the refund rates to see if the products don’t have higher refund rates to avoid promoting a product that a lot of people are going to buy only to quickly ask for a refund.

5. Test your product first

You want to give your readers and customers the best of the best. It’s always a good idea to test or use the product you plan to promote, to see if it actually lives up to its promises. If the product is not as top quality as it had been hyped up to be, you will lose your repeat buyers, which’s certainly not something you want in your affiliate marketing business.

6. Bonuses

Offer bonuses whenever possible so as to make your offers stand out and more attractive, and that’s a key factor for your affiliate marketing business.

Doing that is a great way to add exclusivity to your offers in niches where a lot of people are pushing or promoting the same product. You need to make sure that your bonuses are relevant and strive to make them as top quality as you can make them. An effective offer should serve as a good addition that helps sell the product you are promoting as an affiliate.

Starting an affiliate marketing business using a Blog

There are so many ways to use affiliate marketing on your blog. You basically setup a WordPress blog and apply different strategies like email marketing, direct contextual linking and reviews among others.

Email marketing lets you to promote products to people over and over. You just need to provide valuable information in your emails and share valuable stuff. Whereas direct linking involves writing articles about a certain topic and adding affiliate links to relevant affiliate products and sprinkle relevant links inside your content.

Reviews are basically where you write a review on a product or service, detailing the pros and cons of the product and offering your thoughts on the product. Then add your affiliate links somewhere within those reviews.

What’s Your Feedback?

Are you into an affiliate marketing business? If so, what has been your experience selling products and services for merchants? Your inputs will go a long way in helping all those beginning to venture out in this field.