How to Make Money Online from Affiliate Marketing

With the emergence of more online businesses and creation of different products, companies are more focused on making sales more than anything else. Asides the different promotions, advertisements and marketing that eventually lead to sales; they are also cashing in affiliate marketing to generate more sales.

So they set up affiliate programs that will help individuals, companies, blogs, websites and other independent marketers to promote their companies and make money from a percentage of the sales they make.

It is a way of rewarding marketers and affiliates based on what they actually sell. It has in fact replaced the normal strategy employing marketers and placing them on wages. Now, they’re paying them on what revenues they are able to generate per time.

There are many platforms that offer affiliate marketing programs and you will most likely find them on websites or businesses that are selling products or services. These will include; e-commerce stores, online bookstores, marketing websites, e-book stores, and more. In this I will be focusing on the strategies you can use to make money from affiliate marketing.

Signing Up As an Affiliate Marketer

  • When you get to a website that you intend to enroll as an affiliate, you will need to find the menu for Affiliate Program or Become an Affiliate or Join Our Affiliate Programs.

 

  • You click on it to sign up and you will asked to put in your details; username, email or password.

 

  • You will then be required to confirm or activate your account in your email, which will redirect you to the activation to login.

 

  • When you sign into your account, you will then be required to update your profile which can include; personal details, contacts, payment details (bank accounts, swift code, bank code, IBAN number which are required for international transactions). Also some websites require that you reach a minimum revenue before putting your bank details but most pay at a particular minimum revenue ($10, $50, $100, 5000 naira, 10,000) at the end of each month.

 

  • When on your dashboard, you will be presented with various options for promoting the products depending on the website. There will tabs for campaigns which will have website codes, banners and most importantly a unique affiliate link for you as an affiliate.

After signing up, the ball will then be in your court to start generating leads and conversions using various strategies.

Some Strategies for Successful Affiliate Marketing

Using Your Website/Blog

The initial goal of having a website is to build an audience and readership of people who will eventually trust you as a brand. When this is achieved to a particular level, let’s say about a 10,000 visits a month and counting; you then can start using your blog to market products for others. This you can do through banners of various sizes whether square, headers, vertical or horizontal.

These banners will then be linked to the sellers websites, if it is clicked by any of your visitors redirects them to the sellers site where they have to choose whether to buy or not. In using these banners, one has to understand his/her audience and how they on your website and what will appeal to them. If you’re a fashion blogger then you will need to stick to marketing of fashion items, a business website will be better of marketing business services, books and e-books.

E-commerce Stores

E-commerce is a thriving side of online business and there is a no way they can survive if they don’t make sales; so one of their strategies is affiliate marketing. Among the many stores you can sign up for their affiliate programs are; Amazon, Jumia, Konga, Smash books, etc. Of utmost importance is to market what appeals to your audience of readers and visitors, and pitching it to them.

Email Marketing

One thing affiliate marketing entitles you to as an affiliate is to create a unique link for you. This link is what you use to link banners and images back to the sellers’ websites. Also, building a website will require one collecting emails of readers, visitors or what we now call subscribers to your blogs posts or newsletters which you send out weekly or monthly.

For the newsletters, you can maximize it by email marketing which involves basically promoting your blog and at the same you can promote the products of others. This you can by adding your unique affiliate links to the body of the mails you will be sending to your subscribers.

Social Media Marketing

This of course includes marketing that is done on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc. As it is well-known, you have to build followership on these platforms and in fact confidence for people to either retweet, like or engage with what you are posting. This takes time and a lot of proving that you can add value but when it is done, you can leverage on it to make some money.

How, you might ask? Simply by promoting the products of your affiliates and also attaching your unique affiliate link to the posts. The reason for the unique link is for any sales through that link to be directed back to you as the affiliate that made the sales. On posting social media sites, it might seem time consuming posting individually on Twitter or Facebook; so there are websites that can help with that e.g. Buffer, PostCron. All you need to do is to sign up and add the various social accounts you have to the platform and start posting to all platforms at once.

Finally on making money from affiliate marketing, one must understand that building online confidence takes time and a lot of efforts, consistency, value, and even more value. If you must convince people to buy something because you asked them to, then you have to offer something more in return. You will not always make the first sales after so many banners, posts on social media or even email marketing but eventually you will, if you do add value, build confidence and pitch right to prospective buyers.

 

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