Are you looking for easy affiliate marketing steps? Everyone wants to make money online and, most folks will tell you that affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to do it. Instead of creating products and dealing with customers, you can sell other people’s products and services.
How To Start Affiliate Marketing
The questions everyone is asking is, how do you get started? More importantly, how can you start seeing results fast? Neil Patel outlines the following easy affiliate marketing steps in his “The Easiest Way to Get Started With Affiliate Marketing | A Step-by-Step Guide” video. I repurposed that video with Content Gorilla and Grammarly so that you can study the affiliate marketing tactics at your leisure.
Easy Affiliate Marketing Steps One
Your first step is to define your traffic source, which is essential because, without a good traffic source, you won’t make any sales. Remember, traffic means potential customers! You need to know what you’re good at doing. Are you good at SEO? Are you good at paid ads? Are you better at JVs, or joint ventures which is a form of partnerships? Your affiliate marketing will vary depending on your expertise. For example, if you do SEO, you have to pick one niche which also applies to joint ventures and partnerships. In both cases a single niche is essential, and you need to focus all your energy there.
Paid ads, on the other hand, allows you to focus on any niche as long as the payouts are high enough because you have to buy that traffic. Once you figure that out, that’ll help you with the second step.
Second Step Of Affiliate Marketing
In the second step, you need to define your target audience. You need to choose which will be your best niche. That’s not necessarily the niche that has the potential to make you the most money. To explain this point, we will look at two affiliate marketers.
The first chose a niche that he assumes is the most profitable. He gives up after a short time because he doesn’t enjoy what he’s doing and because of that does not put in the time necessary to promote it. When the money doesn’t start rolling in as quickly as he thought he gives up.
The second affiliate marketer chooses a niche that he’s passionate about promoting. He knows a lot about the niche and loves writing content on it. People who read the content can sense his passion and are more likely to buy his product. Which affiliate marketer do you think has the better chance to succeed?
You want to focus your efforts on what you love because what you love is what you’re going to create better content on, better marketing campaigns, better ad traffic. You’ll get more creative. You’ll be the expert.
You’ll also notice that you make a massive increase in revenue when you do something you know versus something you have to learn from scratch. When you’re not knowledgeable about the industry, or you don’t understand a niche, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You will waste a lot of time, losing money compared to when you focus on something that you know.
Step Three: Finding Your Affiliate Products
So, how do you find the products that are the best fit for your audience? You could Google those products, but that’s highly inefficient. Your best bet is to check the many affiliate sites out there who showcase their products. What’s important is the products they showcase are the ones that tend to be the best performers not only for the publisher but also for the advertiser. So, by looking at these affiliate sites, you’ll know what tends to work because their top offers tend to be the ones that make the most money.
These sites include JVZoo, CJ Affiliate, OfferVault, Click2Sell, CommissionSoup, ShareASale and FlexOffers. Checking out those sites will give you a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t work in your space. I would recommend going after the products that are popular on these sites because that means affiliates are making a lot of money.
Picking products that aren’t popular on those sites usually means affiliates aren’t willing to promote them because they don’t generate them enough income.
Step Four: Build Your Funnel
Another crucial step in affiliate marketing is the building of a funnel. Let’s say you have SEO down pat, and it’s generating your traffic. You start with great content, then you want to collect their email address, and you can do that through Hello Bar or any tool out there. You will want to create a lead magnet, and you can’t just use these tools. You’ve got to have an offer. As an example, you offer them a free ebook in exchange for their email. Once you have their email, drive them to a webinar. That webinar allows you to sell those products or services to those people.
It’s essential to follow up via emails all the people you don’t convert in the webinar. Follow up emails are a great way to get extra sales. Combining all these methods on top of the traffic via your SEO should lead to way more sales than just relying on SEO traffic.
When leveraging paid ads, it’s hard to convert through a straight sell without first creating a landing page. Your landing page should educate and provide lots of value. Not only that, a landing page, apart from delivering value, you should also talk about the product complete with testimonials and case studies creating even more interest in your product. If you don’t, you’ll find that you won’t generate as many sales. You should also collect the emails of everyone who didn’t convert and are about to exit. By saving their emails, you can use tools like Hello Bar, offer them a free ebook or something like that, drive them in through a webinar sequence and convert them on products and services.
That way, you have another chance at converting the paid traffic that’s leaving without purchasing your product the first time around. Now, if you’re monetizing through JVs and partnerships, the best way to convert is to co-host a webinar. Getting other people who are influencers in your space to participate with you in your webinar works exceptionally well when selling a product or a service.
Final Easy Affiliate Marketing Steps: Increase The Lifetime Value
Don’t make the mistake that a lot of affiliate marketers do. They drive their conversions, they collect their money, and they’re like, “Woo-hoo, that’s it.” That is so short sited. You already have that list so you should continue to sell to those people campaign after campaign. The money is in the list so you should continue to offer them products but without overdoing it which could consider it as spam.
Your emails should provide value, so when you offer the next product to them, they’re more likely to buy because you’ve already helped them out. If you sell to them every single week, eventually they’re going to drop off your list. But if you help them out the majority of the time and then sell them one-tenth of the time, they’re much more likely to convert. And the other thing that I would recommend is to add upsells and downsells. Once they buy one product, upon checkout, why not offer them upsells and downsells? It’s an easy way to generate more revenue.
If the website that you’re pushing doesn’t have upsells and downsells, force them to have it or let them buy from your website that product or service that other people are fulfilling and then add in your own upsells and downsells. It’s an excellent way for you to make more money.