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It’s time to get started building your own Affiliate Business!

Throughout this page, I’ll share with you advice I would give myself if I was starting again. I’ve wasted so many hours doing things that weren’t relevant, worthwhile or just bad. So let’s avoid all of that!

First up… mindset!

When it comes to starting any business whether online or not, the first thing you need to do is commit. If you only put in 50% of effort or determination for making it work, you’ll only get a 50% result. Knowing that if you stick with it and continue working towards goals, you will eventually get there. I’ll of course try show you the easiest way to get there too, but keep in mind these things can take time.

There are fast ways for doing things, and then there are free ways. Those are the 2x big commodities when it comes to building your online business and deciding which is more important in a task will depend on your personal situation. For example, if you wish to get Facebook visitors to your website, you could either a) pay for Facebook ads and instantly get traffic to your website, or b) organically post in groups and engage on peoples comments. They can both do the same result, one costs money, the other costs time. Think about this before tackling any task at hand, especially ones you don’t have experience to do. More on this later.

Choosing a niche

This is one of the most important things when it comes to building your affiliate marketing business, for a few reasons.

The first is finding out how profitable the niche actually is. While it might sound great that you have chosen a unique niche, there may be no money in it meaning you can’t find good products to affiliate with.
The second is seeing how competitive the niche is. If you choose the health niche and you are facing huge industry names that you will be a competitor of, you may be a small fish swimming with sharks. This doesn’t mean game over, instead just niche down into a sub section of that niche. Ie: health could go deeper into something like mens health for new parents.
Stick with one niche. One of the hardest things a lot of people face is trying to group together more than one niche. While this makes sense in their heads, it’s your audience that is most important. Think of how they see it, if it’s about mens health, don’t show them pictures of your cat or tell them about an online business they should join. Stick within the niche you choose.

Building Your Foundation

One of the most important things in my opinion, is looking the part. First impressions last, so you need to set yourself up to look as professional as possible, even though you may be just starting out. To complete this task, I suggest you first follow this article to build your hosting foundation, then build your website and create custom email addresses. Once that is completed, I’d recommend securing all social media handles to match your domain name. If some are unavailable, choose the closest you can find.

Once you have your website on a custom domain, custom email addresses and social media handles, it’s time to design your website. If you aren’t tech savvy, I’d recommend getting the Divi theme builder, as it has over 1300 templates for websites and within a few clicks of a button, you have a new website. Once you have a your website up and running, it’s time to get a logo. You can go to Fiverr and pay $5 for a custom logo to suit your new brand.

Now your website is up and ready to roll, it’s time to customise your Social Media channels to match your website brand and link your website on them.

Finding Affiliate Programs

This is where the fun starts. Now you have chosen a niche, it’s time to find some affiliate programs that align with your new brand. If you are having trouble finding good programs, check out this list of best affiliate programs that might give you some ideas.

In my mind, there’s a few things I look out for in an affiliate program for it to be worth while.

The commission structure (What is the commission %? is it one-off or recurring?)
Does the product work?
What are the reviews of the product like?
Is it from a reputable company?

You definitely want to know your numbers, this is a numbers game so finding a good commission structure is important and could be the difference between $100 per month and $10,000. (If you’d like a free list of recurring digital marketing affiliate programs, you can download it here). If you find a program that suits your numbers, you then check that the product serves it’s purpose, has good reviews and that it’s from a good company. Nothing worse than creating content for an affiliate offer that disappears not long after writing it. Think long term! Go ahead and make a list of potential affiliate programs you’d like to join in the download above, and get ready for the next step, application.

Applying for Affiliate Programs

This step is a step I see people struggling with all the time. While a lot of affiliate programs these days don’t require an application to join, some still do. For these, you may be asked questions like “how do you intend on promoting us” or “what is your audience size”. Basically if you put yourself in the shoes of the company asking the questions, all they want to know is “are you going to spam their links or not”.

So what you want to do, is reply with what a non-spamming person would say (because that’s what you are). Something like “I have a Youtube channel I wish to shoot a review about, I also have a review blog which I’d love to do a post about your company. Currently my audience is majority 25-54 years old living in United States (or whatever yours is) who are interested in your niche (replace with your niche).

You’ll be surprised by how little people actually fill out a form like this, most of the time the company just wants to know you’re a real person. Pro tip: add in your social media channels and website if you want a better chance of getting accepted!

Customising Your Links

Once you’ve finally been approved, it’s time to get hold of your links and customise them to suit your content. If you are using WordPress, you could use a plugin like Thirsty Affiliates to have branded links, or if you want global links, you could use RetargetKit and add your own domain to the links. One of the powerful benefits of using a provider like RetargetKit is being able to add in tracking pixels to your links as well as your custom domain. I use this mainly for Youtube videos as my goal is for people to buy directly.

Once you add in your links to one of the above services, you’ll now have a customised link that will be easy to remember for future content you create.

Creating Content

Once you get to this stage of creating content, you’ll now have the ability to be able to just create new content from now on as you’re all set up and good to go. When it comes to content, not all content types are the same. What I mean by this is Social Media vs Searchable content. Let me explain the differences.

Social Media: Social Media content is a powerful platform for quick results in any industry. If you post something to your account and you have a big audience, it could be a large traffic injection to your website or offer. However, Social Media content gets lost very quickly. Once you post something, it usually disappears off the feeds and when you post more, the older content is basically gone forever. Social Media’s include platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.
Searchable content: Searchable content is content that can be searched for on search engines. This means if you create content on a searchable platform, it may be searched over and over again for years to come. This is the most powerful type of traffic source as it’s ongoing and it’s free. Seachable content platforms include blogging, Pinterest, Youtube, etc.

I wish I spent more time on searchable content over the years, as it’s the most powerful by far.

Topics for content

From time to time you will be lost for topics for creating content, luckily these tips will help you out. When thinking about topics for creating content for affiliate offers, there are a few ways you could go about it. Feel free to try as many angles as you want, and once you see results or feel more comfortable in one type, create more similar to that.

Product or Service Reviews
Case Studies (how X was able to get X by using X)
Top 10 Lists
Product Comparisons (X vs X, which is best?)
How to tutorials

Just remember, when creating content your main job is to educate the person in answering the question they are stuck with. If it is a product they are thinking about getting, you get the product and do an honest review about the product. The more honest you are, the more the person will trust your opinion and most likely use your affiliate links.

Calls to Action

One of the most important factors when creating content is having calls to action. People love to be instructed, that’s in our DNA. Tell them where to click or what to click on. If you want to get even higher amounts of conversions, think of bonuses you can give people if they decide to use your link. You could always create a bonus stack of PLR content from IDPLR that you can give away as a bonus if you need to.

Creating bonuses to give away will if people use your affiliate link will give viewers a reason to use your link instead of using someone’s elsewhere. The best piece of advice I can recommend for this is to create bonuses or a bonus stack related to the product. For example, if it’s for an email marketing software, give them some email templates for free. Or if it’s for a Camera, give them some free presets. Anything that compliments the affiliate product will always be a winner!