If you’ve recently developed a product that you’d like to sell online or you’re just looking for a way to make money, you may have come across a unique form of advertising called affiliate marketing. Under this arrangement, businesses offer marketers a percentage of their profits in exchange for targeted advertising on their blogs and social media pages. The arrangement can be lucrative for everyone involved, and both parties can earn a relatively large income without investing much money in capital or other startup costs.
Monetizing Your Blog
If you want to get involved in associate marketing, the first step is to sign up for an affiliate account at a marketplace like ClickBank or Amazon. You’ll be able to browse the listings of affiliate products for offers that you would want to promote on your website. It helps to have a high-traffic site already in place, and many of the higher-paying offers require affiliates to have strong traffic before promoting their products.
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If your website has been online for under two years and you don’t have any pages ranking in the top 10 entries of Google search results, then you’ll most likely need to promote your affiliate products on social media. This technique is one of the most common ways of drumming up traffic for a blog because it enables marketers and bloggers to circumvent the Google ranking algorithm by directly drawing visitors to a website. As with organic search ranking, however, social marketing can be highly competitive, and a haphazard effort will most likely be ineffective.
How to Choose a Profitable Niche
Your approach requires some strategy before you get started, and you should choose a niche market that you’ll be able to easily get a foothold in. For example, signing up to promote a DVD set on how to make money will put you in direct competition with hundreds of thousands of other marketers, and unless you already have a high-traffic website with some authority on the subject of making money, your landing pages may never get to the top of Google search results. As a marketer just starting out, it’s much easier and more efficient to choose a less competitive niche like dog training, jewelry making, wilderness survival, gardening or Taekwondo.
The biggest requirement for this type of marketing is that the product must fulfill a need or solve a problem for the visitors to your site. If you have an arts and crafts blog with 10,000 visitors per month, you can simply look in the arts and crafts section of an affiliate marketplace for offers that require Web traffic of 10,000 visitors or fewer per month. As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to promote products that you would personally use and endorse because your reputation and rapport with your site visitors is the most important selling angle you have to promote products. If you come across as inauthentic or dishonest, you won’t have much success as a marketer.
The Internet provides many opportunities to generate passive streams of income, and advertising books, products and videos on a blog is one of the most popular and time-tested ways to go about doing it. Whether you’re a seller or an advertiser, affiliate marketing can be an efficient and effective way to promote a product.
