Building your Own Affiliate Marketing Business is Easy, Yes it is! Many affiliate marketers have been doing it over the years and succeeding in making affiliate sales each month.
But how easy it is to build your affiliate marketing business will depend on how committed you are and how hard you are willing to work on your affiliate website.
People with a high level of honesty and work ethics are more bound to succeed in affiliate marketing than those who look at it as a way to make a quick buck.
It doesn’t cost much to start your own affiliate marketing website in terms of setup, but the cost can be more of an advertising one if you choose to do so.
Start My Affiliate Business With or Without a Website
That’s a question many beginner affiliates face when they start looking at affiliate marketing for a way to make money online.
In essence, you can start your affiliate marketing business without even owning a website of your own.
This works by promoting your affiliate links across channels that allow you to do so such as:
- Social media websites
- Paid advertising
- On other blogs
Some social media websites like Twitter and Facebook will allow you to insert your affiliate link in your posts or tweets and generate affiliate sales when someone clicks the affiliate link and buys the product.
Paid advertising campaigns like banner ads and PPC (pay per click) on Facebook and Twitter, allow you to insert your affiliate link in your ad copy.
This can be very profitable for affiliates who know what they are doing and how to sell affiliate products with advertising campaigns.
It is not recommended for beginners to follow this path because you could lose money while you are still testing various ad copies and techniques.
Blogs that are relevant to your niche sometimes allow other affiliate marketers to write a guest post for them and insert their affiliate link in the article.
While there are a limited amount of blogs that allow affiliate links in the article, some of them do accept it.
You have to contact the blogger beforehand and clearly state your intention of adding your affiliate link in the article if he approves then go ahead and write your best article.
But don’t make it a product review article that is promotional in nature, it needs to be informative in its core and only give reference to your affiliate product at the end of the article with your affiliate link.
On the other hand, for more beginner affiliate marketers it is better to create an affiliate website and sell your affiliate products from there.
The benefits of running your own affiliate website are tremendous, especially if it is a blog.
You can do so much with a blog; you can really express yourself and your expertise through your insightful blog posts.
You can easily connect with like-minded bloggers in your niche and exchange content with each other.
Not to mention that you could combine an information website with a product selling one.
You can keep writing blog posts that solve the most challenging problems in your niche and go through the solution in-depth, and at the same time write a product review post every once in a while.
It costs around $60 to start your affiliate marketing blog ($10 for a domain name, $50 for web hosting) on a yearly basis.
Pick the Most Profitable Affiliate Niche
Niche finding is something you shouldn’t overlook in your affiliate marketing business.
Understand that there are niches that don’t fit well with affiliates because they either provide low commissions or they have a high number of affiliates involved in it.
Take for example niches for physical products and niches for ebook products.
Physical products are usually priced very highly with an average of $1000 price tag (some are more and some are less).
Ebook products on the other hand average $20 per copy and an affiliate commission on it no matter how high it is will not be as much profitable as other types of products.
After you decide which product type you want to promote, the next step is to find the actual niches themselves.
Usually, an affiliate marketer starts by recognizing his talents and areas of expertise and make that his niche.
If you know how to play guitar for example, then you can teach others about it on your affiliate website and at the same time recommend your guitar-related products to your readers.
If however, you are the kind of person that can adapt to any niche and a quick learner, then you can pick any niche and learn about it and then focus on that niche on your affiliate blog.
To find different variety of niches that you can browse through, head over to Clickbank’s affiliates marketplace and look at their products categories:
With the different categories you see, you will have a vast amount of niche options to choose from.
When you are looking at each category, take a look at the average affiliate commission you can make:
This helps you determine the profitability of the niche before deciding to target it on your affiliate website.
Click bank is just one place to look for affiliate products on; there is also Amazon’s marketplace of products that you can browse as well.
Getting Traffic to Your Affiliate Website
Without much traffic, it will be hard to sell any of your affiliate products.
But affiliate marketers are offered a wide range of traffic sources that could bring targeted traffic to your affiliate website.
Some of these traffic sources will take a longer time to perfect and start seeing traffic from (like SEO), and some provide more immediate traffic flow.
In general, you should start doing SEO for a couple of months and at the same time be active on social media websites (Facebook, Twitter…etc) that will bring you daily traffic.
Commenting on other blogs in your niche is also a great way to get niche targeted traffic to your affiliate blog.
Try to leave an insightful comment after carefully reading the blog post and leave a comment with your real name and your affiliate website.
Video content is also very effective in affiliate marketing.
When you create videos that focus on certain problems in your niche and try to solve them in a clear manner, then some of those watchers will eventually land on your affiliate website.
My Final Advice
Never give up on your affiliate marketing business, only patience combined with hard work will lead you to success.
Learn as much as you can about affiliate marketing, either from an affiliate marketing course or from any blog that provides genuine help.
And if you are committed enough and work smartly then after a realistic 6 month period you could start seeing your first affiliate sale, which would be a huge confidence boost for you.
