Make Money in Affiliate Marketing for Beginners |

The landscape of customer shopping is evolving since the widespread use of internet. The growth in online spending has been breaking records year after year. Online shoppers established new records on 2019 Black Friday and Cyber Monday in US.

The Affiliate Marketing continues to evolve, grow, and change shape and makes significant contributions to the growth of online business, which provide golden opportunities to make money in affiliate marketing for beginners.

Here are some principles for people, who would like to start making money in affiliate marketing, need to know.

The Affiliate Marketing Growth Trends

Affiliate marketing is a rapidly changing industry, it is important that you have a good grasp as to where it currently is, where it was, and where it is headed.

I have been practicing affiliate marketing for more than 15 years. Back then, there were a lot of complexities starting an affiliate marketing business. Not only were there technical hurdles, there wasn’t a whole lot of information or resources out there to help a newcomer to the affiliate marketing space. The information that was available, was cryptic and missed out on the technical elements and knowledge needed to start. You were left to build and maintain your affiliate marketing business based on your own resourcefulness.

The most important asset for you to start your online business was a website, which required IT professional assistance and costed full-time employee to establish and maintain it.

In the past few years retail sales online have almost doubled, meaning that the opportunity for affiliate marketers has doubled during this same period. More online sales equate to more opportunity for affiliates to capture new audiences and potential customers through various forms of media online.

What is more important is that right now it is almost free for anyone who have desire to start affiliate marketing business. You can learn on how to start your own affiliate marketing business HERE, if you are not familiar with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Process

Below is a visual representation of the affiliate marketing flow.

In the process of affiliate marketing, there are three key elements, affiliate or publisher, merchant or advertiser, and customer. As an affiliate marketer, you connect a customer with a product/service from a merchant. If the customer buy from the merchant you suggest, you get certain percentage of the sale.

The Companies with Affiliate Marketing Program

Almost all the successful companies out there are taking their brands and online presence seriously through their affiliate marketing initiatives and focus on offering affiliate marketers the adequate tools and resources that they need to succeed.

The major retailers that have seen growth in the past year have been those with the largest affiliate marketing presence and that are continuing to invest in their affiliate programs and supporting channels. These networks include:

Amazon Associates Program
Walmart
Target
Homedepot
Awin
Nike
Wayfair
Overstock
Etsy

As we move forward, we are going to see more companies focusing in their online sales channels and affiliate programs. This will remain a persistent reality in the foreseeable future.

Right now, it is perfect time for you as a affiliate marketer to start your own affiliate business. Here are some success factors for you to become profitable affiliate marketer.

Affiliate Marketing Success Factor 1 – Goal

Your goal should be efficiency. Your goal should be creating goals to establish this efficiency. The reality of goal setting is that we are very bad at estimating the time it takes to achieve something. In fact, we typically “undershoot” the time required by 50%.

This means if we think something will take a month, it will usually take two. The problem takes place when we don’t achieve our goals when we anticipated or slated out to achieve them, and thus it demotivates us from moving forward in our businesses.

So, my first recommendation is to not worry about your deadlines, and be willing to move them if required. We aren’t perfect in our time assessments for certain jobs, and there are unknowns that will pop up within any business.

There are 3 types of goals that you should be setting with your affiliate marketing business activities.

Bite Size Daily Goals: These are daily goals typically, but can even be segmented into hourly if you have some microtasks you are working on. At the beginning of each day lay out the tasks that you aim to complete, and work to achieve thee. Typically these are not financial goals, they are actionable goals that relate to productivity in your business.
Weekly Goals: Weekly goals should be set, ideally at the beginning of what you determine as your work week. Naturally this could be on a Monday, but I tend to set my goals for the week on Sunday night along with my Monday’s tasks so I am ready to hit the ground running every Monday. Weekly goals can be ambitious and it is rare that you will complete every goal, but you should knock off as many of these that you can. It is OK to be ambitious with your weekly goals.
Loner Term, Yearly Goals: You should be setting long term goals, I typically recommend staying away from goals that are more than a year away. This can be part of your vision, but I recommend longer term goals to be monthly or for the year ahead. A lot can be accomplished in a year, but you never know what can happen in business and you want to be able to remain flexible with your affiliate marketing business. Your longer term goals will likely shift throughout the year, but it is an excellent idea to set yearly goals at least once per year… and revisit these several times throughout the year.

Affiliate Marketing Success Factor 2 – Work Ethic

The most important behavior that all successful affiliate marketers exhibit, and that those that are aspiring to go “full time” is work ethic. People are confused by what work ethic means, that is, those succeeding have a different perception of hard work and dedication to those that are consistently failing.

Work ethic means your ability to set goals, work hard, and persist in your efforts until you achieve those goals. Many people work hard, and stop short of achieving those goals because they have created some fictional deadline. Some things can be accomplished in 5 minutes, some will take 5 years, some may be a lifetime goal that are never achieved.

Your ability to keep your eye on the prize, and sustain a high level of effort will immediately put you in the top 20% of those that are succeeding simply because the 80% is not willing to do this. Let me repeat that, 80% of people that are failing in business are doing so because they are not sustaining their work ethic.

Closely associated with work ethic, is failure. Your ability to fail, with grace, is going to be a component of driving your business forward. Each year represents a new year of entirely new failures, and the impending result of this is going to be an education that cannot be obtained any other way.

The key is being able to learn from your failures, remaining flexible to change as a result of them, and then utilizing what you have learned to hash out a new path (which could or could not work). The only bad failures are ones that keep on happening because you refuse to change your thinking, or failures that prevent you from taking action in the future (out of fear of subsequent failure).

Affiliate Marketing Success Factor 3 – Focus

What does focus mean to you, and how long can you focus on one thing. Most of us have ADHD on the internet, in fact our day to day activities encourage the split second transition between focusing on one thing to the next. But this sort of behavior in the affiliate marketing world, is going to lead to mediocrity.

Let me make this clear. It only takes being GREAT at one thing to be very successful online. You don’t need to know it all, in fact it is better that you don’t. You need to know everything about ONE thing, and be really good at that. In terms of your approach to marketing, you don’t need to be an expert at SEO, PPC, email marketing, developing websites, etc.

Affiliate Marketing Success Factor 4 – Trust

Trust goes hand in hand with your ability to captivate your audience, and your ability to convert your audience. As the internet grows, the content grows. As people get better at research and expect quality content, and they also expect selfless and helpful information. If you cannot provide this, you are not going to retain their attention or get the sale.

How to establish trust as an affiliate marketer:

Offer valuable content (help people)
Don’t constantly pitch (which will hurt rankings)
Over-deliver
When you promote something, make a recommendation and give people choice
Always make yourself available to help
Transparency

Your website visitors often times won’t know of you or your brand prior to visiting your website. You need to consider that in order for someone to trust you, you first have to take the necessary steps to create that sense of comfort. The quickest way to do so is to relay your content in a communicative manner, be helpful and offer insightful content, and to be engaging with your content.

If you can do this, selling as an affiliate marketer will become much easier and much more seamless.

Affiliate Marketing Success Factor 5 – Customer First

What makes your customers tick? What takes them from a potential or prospective buyer to actually making the decision to buy something? Your understanding of your customers and how to move them through the The Customer Purchase Lifecycle is going to have significant bearing on your success as an affiliate.

Let me once again remind you of your ROLE as an affiliate. Your role is to connect a customer and a product/service. You are going to be doing this through your media channels (website content, social media, youtube/vimeo, email, etc) and through your ability to connect with your audience in trustworthy and selfless manner.

Marketing strategy aside, there are several customer relationship focal points that you should be focusing on. For the most part these are timeless, because there is very little about a customer’s behavior that changes other than the technology that they are exhibiting their purchasing habits within.

So here are some of the customer relationship strategies you should be implementing:

Encouraging Engagement. As you create your content, you want to encourage people to communicate within the areas on your website where this are applicable. This includes offer your help, suggestion others share their experiences/feedback, and in some cases opinionated or controversial discussions. When people see that you are willing to engage, and better yet, engaging within the comments on your website (replying to every comment), you are going to build a lot of trust in your content, your brand and your affiliate product/service recommendations.
Email Marketing. Email marketing will always be one of the best ways to establish long term and fruit relationships with your audience. Affiliate marketers that leverage affiliate marketing are going to see little in terms of changes to the technology they are using, but it should be a top priority for creating long term relationships with your audiences. One thing to consider is that as an email list matures, you are going to eventually see the open rate percentages dip below 15%, so be careful about sacrificing your “affiliate” commissions now, for the sake of building a list. If someone is on your website and is ready to buy, don’t sacrifice an instant commission for the sake of building a list.
Authority Content. If you offer quality content, you create trust with your audience which naturally leads to trust in your “recommendations”. That is the key process. Build trust, and once you have attained that trust, at that point you can offer customer recommendations. It is the “unknown” metric, but a powerful one. When you create sound relationships and you become a respected authority, there are going to be natural “word of mouth” RECOMMENDATIONS to your website.
Keep Current, Keep Engaged. It is important as an affiliate marketers that you stay on top of your industry, current events, and hot trends. You will want to establish an authority figure within your industry as this will create trust. Blog about what is currently taking place in your industry, offer your opinion and insights on current events, and publish industry-related content with consistency and regularity.

Relationships are becoming more and more critical to the affiliate marketing environment. If you can create relationships and trust among your audience, you can create repeat transactions and long term customers as an affiliate marketer. Remember, it is 5-6 times more likely to sell to an existing customer than it is to sell to someone that is visiting your website for the first time.

Affiliate Marketing Success Factor 6 – Relevance

Relevance converts. You can’t try to sell a cup of hot cocoa to someone on a sweltering hot day, the same way as you cannot sell ice cold lemonade to someone on a freezing cold winter day at the Ski Mountain. However, you can sell lemonade on a hot summer day, and hot cocoa is the drink of choice at the ski mountain during the winter.

It is important to build your particular niche and promote your niche products accordingly.

Affiliate Marketing Success Factor 7 – Niche

How often are you thinking about, talking about, forming opinions, and/or researching your niche? If your answer is not every day, you are going to have a much slower journey to achieving “expert” status (as defined by your industry), and you certainly going to achieve fractional success as to what you could have achieved if you were more committed to your niche. Immerse yourself in your niche, understand it, learn about it daily, and you will always be moving in the right direction.

Affiliate Marketing Success Factor 8 – Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers have a plethora of viable traffic sources, and it is difficult to measure which one an affiliate marketer can focus on. Convention has indicated that search traffic has converted the best.

There are many driving factors behind this, but one of the key factors is that search traffic is a much more engaged audience that is looking for information, versus social marketing which is a form of interrupt marketing.

Accounting for your mobile audience is critical to your traffic success in 2020 and beyond. If you are not taking your mobile user experience into consideration, your affiliate marketing efforts are going to be impacted in several ways, one of the key ones is with your search engine optimization (SEO traffic).

Google announced that it would be taking on a mobile first initiative, starting on July 1st of 2019. Conventionally, Google based all of their indexing and rankings based on the “desktop” version of the website, and that flipped over to the mobile version of a page this past July.

The mobile experience of the websites, the mobile speeds, and whether or not websites were easy to navigate are becoming more important than ever for the SEO.

This is going to continue to be a key and critical component to search rankings in Google (in particular) moving through 2020. Conventionally Bing and Yahoo (who own a shrinking market share of search) are slower to adopt the technologies that Google establishes. Websites that put MOBILE first, will rank first.

How to Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly:

Use a Responsive Theme. Most themes by default these days are “responsive”, meaning that they will automatically respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. This includes graphics, content, plugins, and navigation.
Avoid Cumbersome Themes and Plugins. There are many themes and plugins that can slow down your website performance, and this becomes very noticeable on mobile devices. There are tests that you can run to see how your overall speed and load performances are, but we suggest that you avoid using plugins on your website unless they are necessary for efficiency and design…and avoid themes that are bloated with unnecessary features, they will only slow down your website.
Cache Your Content. There are plugins you can use to help with caching. When you have caching in place you are serving your pages from “cache”, which is ultra fast memory storage. This improves the speed of your website significantly and decreases the load in which your website requires to serve content.
Use Google’s Free Testing Software. Google offers you a suite of testing tools that you can use to check your website speed and performance, in both mobile and desktop environments. It is suggested that you check your PageSpeed Insights to ensure your site is above the ideal 80/100 mark for mobile, the closer to 100 the better. You can also check your websites look in mobile using the Mobile Friendly testing tool.
Test Yourself for Design and Experience. An easy way to determine whether or not your website is working properly on mobile, is to test it out for yourself. This is something that you should do regularly, in particular if you typically work on your website development from a laptop/desktop. It is important that you have a good grasp of your mobile environment, and testing it out on your mobile is an easy way you can do this.

Social media usage continues to increase, but unlike search where Google owns the lion’s share of search, there are many different social platforms that people use, in fact the average person has 7 different social media accounts.

The key players in the social media world are going to remain the same in the year ahead. Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest growth had more or less flatlined in 2019.

Instagram was the only social media brand that grew in the USA in 2019. This is partly due to social media feed and people diversifying their time between social media accounts, but also do to interest fading in these networks because of the proliferation of ads.

Should social media be a big part of your game plan?

There is no right or wrong answer. There are close to 2.65 BILLION users on social media, that audience is close to equivalent in nature to the number of people that are on the Internet and using search. You can leverage social campaigns to create a full time affiliate business in any niche, but as social platforms put more emphasis on monetization (through ads), the value of a free profile and the related “reach” is becoming less and less value.

Paid advertising on social media will remain a viable way to obtain quality and high converting traffic in 2020.

Traffic is the basis of any successful onlinebusiness. Not just any traffic though. Relevant and qualified traffic is what you are after. It is very difficult to convert irrelevant traffic with affiliate marketing offers, so it is critical that you understand the idea of relevant traffic.

Relevance within the search engine space is much easier to determine. Since keywords or search phrases are the trigger points for your audience and they are the ones initiating these searches, you have an engaged and relevant audience if you target these folks correctly.

The formula for a successful search campaign, either through PPC or through SEO (in Google, Bing or Yahoo) is:

RELEVANT SEARCH TERM => RELEVANT AD => RELEVANT LANDING PAGE => RELEVANT OFFER

If you can understand that process, you can create high converting, high ROI campaigns. The traffic is not only predictable in terms of what people are after, it is easy to determine what your audience is after.

The key search traffic is going to come from The Big 3 again in the search traffic world: Google, Bing and Yahoo. Google’s lead in this space is continuing to grow with close to 89% overall market share (desktop and mobile) in 2019.

In terms of social media, the key players in 2019 are going to remain the same. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn are all going to remain viable sources of quality traffic in 2020.

Discussion platforms are also going to remain a prominent form of obtaining traffic and establishing brand exposure. These services include, but are not limited to Reddit, Quora, & Answers.com. Relevant forums and communities are also locations that can be leveraged by affiliate marketers to extend their industry reach and to obtain traffic.

Video traffic is going to remain a prominent force. Youtube in particular should remain a key focus with affiliate marketers. There are new legislation and policies that you should understand relating to YouTube content, you should understand the new Child Safety Policies that were launched on August 21st, 2019. It is wider reaching than many imagined, and is having a broad impact on the censorship within YouTube.

Building video into your daily business activities, regardless of the industry you are operating within, can lead to another viable and significant stream of traffic to your affiliate marketing business. The audience within Youtube is an engaged one, and also one that will convert at a very high level (because video content ticks off all the elements of trust).

Without traffic you are not going to have the ability to generate revenue. All successful affiliate marketing business start with an overall plan, but within that overall plan the initial focus is always traffic, not what you are going to sell. The continued growth of the Internet and the usage among users, is going to lead to growth in traffic opportunities through 2020.

Final Thought

It is perfect time to start your affiliate marketing business, as the startup cost is insanely low, large corporations are constantly optimized their affiliate programs, and customers routinely purchase online.

Every step in the affiliate marketing process is maturing. If you have determination in this kind of business, take action now and you are going to generate a successful business in few months.