How to Start Affiliate Marketing

#1

Pick Your Niche Market

The first step is to pick your Niche! 

This is the topic you will decide to focus on, and will be the subject around which you will create most of your content. 

So it's a good idea to choose a Niche that you enjoy, and that you have some knowledge about.

Don't worry if you pick something wrong, you can always create more websites of funnels later down the track.

Alternatively... you may decide to cover multiple topics, where your main business is to review products over different niche markets, rather than build a brand around one particular niche. 

In this case, you can set yourself up as a "General" topic review business - or simply as an affiliate who runs small campaigns promoting any kind of product that you find interesting.

#2

Get A Domain Name

Next you want to get a Unique Domain Name for your website or funnel.

This is a unique web address you will use for your affiliate promotions and will look something like, www.YourWebsite.com.

www.YourWebsiteName.com

You may be creating a website based around your niche topic, in which case your domain might be more general, like... ketofitness.com 

Or you might just be running affiliate promotions around one specific product or offer, in which case your domain might be more specific, like:  30DayFitnessBootcamp.com  

Either way... you want to have a domain name that is catchy, easy to remember... and represents your brand or your offer.

#3A

Building a Funnel

Building an affiliate marketing funnel really is quite simple. All you really need to 2 pages which perform very specific functions.

You want to have a way to capture people's names and email addresses, so you can build your list of email subscribers. This is usually done with an opt-in form, or what is otherwise known as a lead capture page. 

The other page you need to build is one where you can add value and bridge over to your affiliate offer. The purpose of a bridge page is to INCREASE the conversion rate of your offer, by adding additional value. 

Rather than sending your visitors directly to the product page, good marketers always provide added value in the way of a webinar, short video or advertorial... where they maybe show people how to use the product, how it can help them solve their problem, or just review the product or answer peoples questions to help people make better buying decisions.

FUNNEL BUILDING TOOLS

What You Will Need...

To build your marketing funnels, you will need a funnel building software. These are front-end drag & drop editors, that have a variety of template pages for you to choose from, and allow you to edit the look and feel of the pages super fast and in real time. More importantly, they are designed for funnel building, meaning that you can pick any kind of sales funnel you want, and the pages will already be connected in sequence and laid out for you ready to go.

Clickfunnels is a popular service, and their funnel builder it probably one of the best in the business. It's and great option for a beginners. The best thing about ClickFunnels is that it is designed specifically for building funnels, so the layout is streamlined, intuitive and easy to use. You would still require a 3rd party autoresponder (like GetResponse) to manage your emails.

Builderall is another good choice if you want a more cost effective option. While the page editor is a little less user friendly, it is the more cost effective option if budget is important. It also includes an email autoresponder service in it's package which is an advantage.

Unsure which is best for you? 

#3B

Building a WordPress Website or Blog

Building a full website or blog is a great way to help you build your brand and to build authority in your niche.

Although a website is not as conversion focused as a funnel, and there is a lot more work and time required to create a full website (rather than creating funnels and promotions), it's still a great way to show who you are, what you do, and what products and services you offer.

While you don't need a full website to do Affiliate Marketing - We definitely recommend getting a website eventually as a long term goal.

#4

Add Email Marketing

An Auto-Responder helps you manage your subscribers, and automate parts your business by being able to write pre-written emails that will go out to your leads automatically after they join through your opt-in page.

Your list of subscribers will become your greatest asset in your business, as it will be a source of completely warm, targeted source of traffic for you that you can tap into and engage with on an ongoing basis.

These are people who have already been in contact with your brand, and are familiar with you. Either they have already consumed your content, or perhaps even purchased from you before. This makes them highly qualified.

#5

Finding Products to Promote

There are really two main ways you can find good affiliate products to promote online.

1.) Join Affiliate Networks / Marketplaces - This is where you join a network that hosts thousands of affiliate products that you can choose from, over many different niche categories. These are a great option because you can search for products based on category and other criteria

2.) Join Individual Companies Directly - You can go directly to the website of an individual company, and scroll to the bottom of the page where they usually will have a link in the footer for "affiliates". Via this link you can apply to become an affiliate. ClickFunnels is an example of a great piece of software you can become an affiliate for. The benefit of this method, is you can find high ticket products this way, and easily sign up to become an affiliate.

#6

Get Your Branding Done

Now you want to create some branding so that you can be recognizable to people to see your content. You will definitely want a logo, and then depending what platform you will be working on you may need some other images created:

You can either create these yourself or you can hire a professional freelancer to designer to create one for you.

#7(A)

Figure Out Your Content Marketing Strategy

Next you want to plan out you content marketing strategy.

This is basically what kind of content you will be creating to get leads and visitors to your website. It may depend on your Niche, what audience you are creating for... or simply your personal preference.

So what kind of marketing do you want to be doing?

Once you know your Strategy, then you will need to determine "What things you will need to be doing daily"

"Figure out what do you need to be doing DAILY"

This will then give you direction and focus on what activities you should be prioritizing every day in order to consistently get traffic into your business - (i.e. to your funnel or website).

#7(B)

Getting Traffic to Your Website

There are 2 things every business needs in order to survive. Daily leads, and cashflow. To make the sales and get the cashflow, you need a constant stream of leads coming into your business every single day. And to get leads... you need to have daily traffic! - Traffic is just getting people ("eyeballs") to see your offer.

Traffic is the Life Blood of your Business!
All Success Online comes down to your ability to GET Traffic... and then your Ability to CONVERT That Traffic to Sales.

You can either pay for traffic, by placing and running ads, or you can use free traffic methods (usually by creating content or networking).

Traffic Getting Methods

#8

Add Tracking to Your Campaigns

Link Tracking is also an important component of running marketing campaigns. It's a way to track all your clicks, where your traffic is coming from, and gives you the ability to see which kind of traffic is generating most of your sales and which ones are converting the best.

Having useful data will help you optimize your funnels and ads, and to help you to test &  identify what pages, traffic sources, and content is profitable (and conversely, cut campaigns that are wasting money).