affiliate marketing for beginners blue

In this very detailed article about affiliate marketing, I will be walking you through, step-by-step, how to start up a successful affiliate marketing career, even as a beginner.

I will first give a few definitions that will help you understand what affiliate marketing really means, because the first step to being good at any skill, is to first understand the meaning to a very large extent.

After understanding the meaning of affiliate marketing, you will have a very vivid idea of what it takes to be an affiliate marketer. 

I will also list out my ten most recommended affiliate marketing tools, alongside my ten most recommended affiliate marketing programs for beginners. But before I do so, I would like to briefly introduce myself, for the benefit of new visitors to my website.

My name is james hart kingsley, and I am a digital marketer with 4 years of experience in numerous forms of digital marketing. I am also a self-thought web developer with a degree in computer engineering. I blog about proven methods of making money online, I also write reviews and exposes based on products that I have tried out myself, and I share my working methods with whoever may find them useful, via my blog, and my youtube channel.

Please support me by subscribing to my youtube channel, and my newsletter. so without much ado, let's dive right into it.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

what is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is simply the selling of other people’s products, and getting a commission for doing so.

It can also be defined as simply providing a solution to problems in a particular niche with affiliate products, and getting a commission for doing payment is normally gotten from an affiliate marketing website like Clickbank or Nutriprofits.

and also, Affiliate marketing is the act of putting affiliate products in front of people that want to buy them.

Although by definition it sounds very simple and straightforward, Affiliate marketing on the contrary is very technical and requires some sets of skills in other to be profitable at it.

Matter of fact, a lot of individuals have tried to venture into affiliate marketing in the past but gave up when they understood what it takes to become an affiliate marketer.

Each of the skills that makes up a successful affiliate marketer demands determination and passion to master and apply properly. And in the next section, We will be discussing all those sets of skills.

Skills Required to become a successful Affiliate marketer

Communication

Communication is very important as long as affiliate marketing is concerned. If an affiliate marketer is not good at communication, he would struggle to express himself freely, and ultimately he will fail to pass the appropriate information to his target audience, this will ruin his chances of ever selling any product successfully.

You cannot bypass this if you are looking to become a successful affiliate marketer, so communication is not to be overlooked.

Below are some things you could do to improve your communication skills

Things that will improve your communication skills

  1. Practice public speaking: Public speaking is one of the very key skills that make up good communication. When you can comfortably speak on any topic, in front of a large audience, without losing your cool. you are good at public speaking. You must practice doing that during any small opportunity you get because you will be doing a lot of it during the course of pitching in front of an audience.
  2. Learn to Copywrite: Copywriting is the act of communicating the usefulness of any product to your target audience, with the primary aim of making them take a certain action, like buying it or trying it out for free.
  3. Practice active listening: Active Listening is of great importance, as long as communication goes. Active listening apart from letting you understand your audience. It gives your audience the impression that their opinions are taken seriously, and due to the reciprocating nature of human beings, they, in turn, will feel morally obligated to process the information coming from your own end, as best as they possibly can.
  4.  Think before you speak: The reason for Thinking Before speaking, is quite obvious. It prevents you from saying anything based on impulse or based on temporary feelings
  5. Learn the basics of nonverbal communication: Non-verbal communication has to do with your body language and facial expressions. At all times, your body language should agree with what you are saying. Some very intuitive people can read the slightest message sent by your body movements or position and from your facial expressions.
  6. Ask for honest feedback: Asking for honest feedback from your audience is a way of making them feel important, it is part of listening to them. Make sure to go through each comment or feedback sent, trying to view it from their own perspective while you go through the feedback.
  7. Start and end with key points: Some persons are very skeptical and analytical and would only believe you when you make valid points during your conversation with them so it is best practice to start and end with key points, this is because humans have a short attention span, and can easily lose interest in a particular topic very fast, this is why you must first capture their attention by saying the points as soon as the first three lines of your copy. They also need to have a vivid idea of the message you are trying to pass to them, which is why you need to repeat the key points also in the end.
  8. Use the PIP approach: PIP stands for PURPOSE>>IMPORTANCE>>PREVIEW. It is a communication framework commonly used by business experts in the marketing industry in general. Here you first state the purpose of your presentation, after which you point out why your information is very important and how it will be of benefit to them, and then you give them a preview of what to expect with your program, and the possible outcomes.
  9. Master the art of timing: Timing is very important as far as communication goes. You must watch your target audience very closely, to determine the best time to leave a call to action. If it comes too early, it will not get an optimal result, also if it comes too late, it will not yield the best result. So you must time your pitching.
  10. Get comfortable speaking extemporaneously: You must learn how to speak fluently and extensively on topics relating to your target audience without having to read from a script.
  11. Get to know your audience: Knowing your audience is very important. You need to research them to know if they are skeptical or emotional. You need to know how exposed they are to know the best approach to take.
  12. Engage your listeners or readers: Apart from dishing out content to your target audience, it is very important to give room for questions, and also suggestions.
  13. Maintain eye contact: Learn to communicate while maintaining eye contact. It doesn't necessarily mean that you must beam at them all day long with your eyeballs, it just helps them stay focussed on you while you talk and also helps them know who exactly you are referring to when you are talking. Also, it helps them know how honest and certain you are about the topic. There is a saying that the eyes don't lie.

Basically, communication plays a very crucial role in affiliate marketing and should not be taken lightly at all.

Marketing Psychology

marketing psychology

Marketing psychology is a state of mind that an ideal affiliate marketer should have in order to be successful in the affiliate marketing business. For you to maximize profit in the affiliate marketing business you must develop the mentality of a digital marketer, and apply your marketing knowledge in all your online endeavors.

You must strive to give value at all times and not always make it seem like it's all about the money. You must always put your audience first, and have their best interest at heart. Once they know that you have their best interest at heart, they won't mind buying through your affiliate links, at no extra cost, since what you are recommending to them will solve a pressing need.

The Give and Take mentality

You must have a give-and-take mentality in all your online marketing routines. Your efforts should not be poised towards just selling a product to anyone you come across, but they should be to solve any problem you come across through a relevant product. You must at all times give more value than expected. By doing this you are beyond every reasonable doubt, communicating your good intentions for your clients and by doing so you increase the trust they have in you and also your credibility.

If it doesn't have an affiliate program, don't promote

We have already established the fact that you must give value at all times and solve problems using products. But I want to further stress that it takes some time for you to start reaping the fruit of your labor, you must always and only promote products with affiliate programs.

If you are a content creator, you must always include relevant affiliate links to relevant products, under relevant topics in your channel. You must avoid promoting products for free. Since most of your content is very valuable, you deserve to be rewarded for your time and effort.

Traffic is everything

Traffic is the volume of people that visit your blog, website, landing page, YouTube channel, Tiktok, WhatsApp status, telegram channel, and other social media platforms. If you don't get enough traffic to your content scattered all over the internet you would have wasted your efforts. In the marketing world, traffic is everything. Traffic equals money, and what every affiliate marketer prays for every day is more traffic.

As a beginner in affiliate marketing, in the beginning, you would be very pumped up and excited to get started, but after creating a website, blog, or YouTube channel, you will naturally be discouraged at the initial volume of traffic that you would be receiving.

Some people are lucky, they manage to get huge traffic naturally, while others get very little. but the whole truth is that there is no such thing as luck here. traffic is based on interest, search terms, and followership the easiest to get is followership on social media.

The average Facebook user has over a thousand friends that would most likely follow their pages and show support, this comes in as an initial boost that would attract even more traffic to your Facebook page. This is because humans like to follow trends, they do what they see other people doing and if over a thousand people follow you, then others would follow as well. So what am I trying to say?

What I'm trying to say is that to be successful in affiliate marketing, you need a large volume of targeted traffic in your niche, and you can get them using the free method or the paid method. I will now state how I grow my audience with both free traffic and paid traffic, and if you do the same, you would have the same result as I do.

Free traffic sources for affiliate marketers
Free traffic sources for affiliate marketers
  1. SEO Traffic: SEO traffic is traffic that comes as a result of searches in search engines. It is also known as organic traffic because your audience discovered you based on their own interests. SEO traffic is the best form of free traffic and has the highest conversion rate so far.

    You get SEO traffic or search traffic by ranking your content for specific keywords or search terms that are peculiar to your desired audience. Seo traffic is highly competitive tho, since there many contents on the internet that is looking to rank for the same keywords and search terms as you.

    So basically people rank on search engines based on how relevant their contents are to the topic being searched. The most optimized contents come first on all search engines and the least optimized comes last on search engines.

    For you to know what your desired audience is searching for, you need to do keyword research and there are some keyword research tools that would help boost your targeting potential and help you to best optimize your content for maximum targeted traffic.
  2. Quora: Quora is the most popular questions-and-answer website with millions of monthly visitors I personally get most of my free traffic from answering questions related to my niche on quora.
  3. Facebook Groups: Even though Facebook groups are now filled with a lot of spammers, you can get good targeted traffic by befriending members of groups in your niche. In the long run, they get to see your updates and that is very targeted traffic.
  4. Instagram: You can easily grow an Instagram page to millions of followers, and then drive traffic to your affiliate links. By simply following people in your niche, who will tend to follow back, you can gradually grow a strong audience.

    As long as you remain consistent in posting relevant stuff, they will keep sharing your stuff and your audience will keep increasing. There are some tools that will grow your Instagram, page faster, and like I said people follow trends. so if you have a large following on Instagram, it will only attract even more followers.
  5. Whatsapp: Whatsapp is one traffic source that will give you the most consistent followership, this is because every now and then people check their WhatsApp. Whatsapp is the closest to their hearts and if they follow you on WhatsApp they won't have a problem following you anywhere else.
Paid traffic sources for affiliate marketers
paid traffic for affiliate marketing
  1. Google search ads: Google is the first place a lot of people look to find answers to questions and they do so through search terms.

    If you pay google to show your content when specific words are searched by your target audience, you will get massive traffic to your website instantly. You are sure to get the traffic you are looking for from the world's most popular search engine.
  2. Bing search ads: Bing is the second most popular search engine after google. It is a favorite to many of the US residents and you are sure to get massive high-quality traffic if you know how to target using search ads, you will have no problem growing a large audience.
  3. Facebook Ads: Facebook is one of the best traffic sources for driving targeted traffic based on demographics and user interests. Although facebook hates affiliate marketers, you can still run Facebook ads by not direct linking to your affiliate offers.
  4. Instagram Ads: Instagram is the best place for visual ads like banner ads and video ads after youtube. Instagram is owned by Facebook so they also use demographics and user interest for targeting.
  5. Youtube ads: People prefer to be shown how to do stuff through a video tutorial than to read a boring long article like mine.
    This has made youtube a very good traffic source to target your audience by running video ad campaigns.

    Youtube is like the google of videos and tutorials, so will not have any problem expressing yourself in a video ad, and targeting your audience based on keywords and search terms.
    There are other paid traffic sources out there but these are the best.

Research

affiliate marketing research

Research is very important if you want to make progress intentionally, and not by mere luck or chance. By now you must have already figured out that you must be a content creator if you want to make passive income from affiliate marketing.

And from the last section, I explained that traffic is very important. In this section about research, what I want you to take home is that the internet is a very competitive atmosphere and nothing stays at the top for long because my contents are being published every single day.

This article, for example, will outrank some other ones on google search, and so will mine be outranked if I don't keep on doing research on what my audience is interested in and what the trends of the moment are. This is why most successful affiliate marketers spend most of their time doing research. The type of resee=arch that am talking about is none other than the ones that I will list below.

Types of research for affiliate marketers

  1. Keyword research: keyword research is done in order to identify keywords with the highest search volume and lowest competition. When you identify them you must then optimize your content to rank for those keywords, so that you will get a fair share of all that organic traffic.
  2. Trends Research: This type of research is done mostly by blog or website owners in the lifestyle and gossip niche. They take them to research what's trending at the moment.
  3. Competitive Research: This type of research involves keeping a close eye on your competitors that are quite successful with the aim of doing what they do or even better. Youtube channel owners and blog owners do a lot of competitive research.

Consistency

Consistency is very important as long as digital marketing is concerned. Most people start off very well with great results, but they fade over time as a result of inconsistency in uploading content, in research, in learning new stuff, and in promoting their content. You must keep on doing things that gave you good results in your affiliate marketing business.

In fact, you could even automate your workflow by dividing the work amongst employees so that you don't wear yourself out. Consistency requires a lot of commitments and determination and discipline especially for those that are doing everything on their own.

Now that you know what is required of you as an affiliate marketer, you need to know some of the best affiliate programs, and affiliate products to promote and earn from. So without much ado, below are my list of most recommended affiliate offers to promote as a beginner.

Top 10 best Affiliate Marketing programs for beginners

In affiliate marketing, the kind of product you promote goes a long way to determine how your affiliate marketing career will go. If you promote high-quality products, you will make a high-quality commission, and if you promote shitty products, you will end up making a shitty commission. Below are very good platforms to find high-quality products to promote.

Best Affiliate Marketing Programs for BeginnersBest suited for?Join Now
1. ShareASaleAffiliate marketersSign Up Now
2. Fiverr Affiliates
BeginnersSign Up Now
3. NutriprofitsAffiliate marketersSign Up Now
4. ClickBankAffiliate marketersSign Up Now
5. AdWork MediaAffiliate marketers for CPASign Up Now
6. JVZooAffiliate marketers and beginnersSign Up Now
7. PeerFlyAffiliate marketersSign Up Now
8. Market HealthHealth-related affiliatesSign Up Now
9. MaxBountyAffiliate marketersSign Up Now
10. eBay AffiliatesBeginnersSign Up Now

The above affiliate programs are the best out there, for any beginner wondering how to start affiliate marketing. and the above sites will pay you well if you know what you are doing.

Don't fail to leave a question below, I love questions!

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