How to Make Money Online from Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’s constantly growing. There are more and more people who decide to become affiliate marketers to make money online from affiliate marketing. Some of them are successful and either make a lot of money or at least some extra money, and some completely fail at affiliate marketing.

I am one of those who has become successful at affiliate marketing thanks to Wealthy Affiliate, and in this article I’d like to explain what must be done to be successful at affiliate marketing, despite a lot of competition online.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

To make it simple, for the purpose of this article, I’ll define the affiliate marketing as making money online by promoting other companies or people’s products/services and getting a share of the profit.

There are actually two main parts of the affiliate marketing. They are the product creator (or service provider) and an affiliate marketer. The affiliate marketer is the one who promotes the products and makes money in this way. He gets paid by the product creator.

This article is meant for people who want to become successful affiliate marketers and make money online in this way.

Why Would Someone Become an Affiliate Marketer?

It’s simple – most people who start making money online, start with affiliate marketing. It’s the easiest way to learn and to make money online, because you don’t need your own product. Creating own product to sell is the biggest obstacle for most people. With affiliate marketing you promote other people’s products.

It’s also a very sustainable way of making money online. There are a lot of affiliate marketers who have been making money in such a way for many years. The affiliate marketing is growing all the time, because there are more and more people who buy online, and more and more companies realize that they need affiliates, if they want their businesses to grow.

Here’s some interesting info
about the current state and the future of the affiliate marketing industry.

There’s no doubt that affiliate marketing will stay and grow. Once you learn how to make money with affiliate marketing, you’ll have the skill to make money and to benefit from the freedom affiliate marketing brings.

With affiliate marketing, you can work whenever you want to work, and as much as you want to work. You can also work from any place in the world, where you can be connected to the internet.

Affiliate Marketing as a Business

If you want to become a successful affiliate marketer, you must from the beginning treat it as a business. You need to start and build your own online business.

When you want to start a new brick-and-mortar business, you must invest some money and time to build your business. It’s the same with online business. The difference with affiliate marketing is that you don’t need a lot of money to start. You can start with little money or even start for free, with no money, which I’ll explain later, how to do it.

But you must invest some time in the beginning to learn affiliate marketing and to build your business. It takes some time to learn it, especially in the beginning. By some time, I mean 2-3 hours a day, after your day job.

You must be serious about it, if you want to get free from your day job in the future, you must find some time for affiliate marketing. Maybe you need to sacrifice some of your entertainment time? We spend so much time on watching TV and surfing the internet. The easiest way to find time for online business is to watch less TV and use the time we spend online more constructively.

Online Marketing Scams

It’s important, right in the beginning to know that all the make money quick programs and offers are just scams. It takes time to build your online business. You should right from the beginning give yourself at least a year before you start making some significant money online.

Reject all make money quick online offers and programs right away. Only those who sell them make money on them. You’ll just waste your money and time. You should rather spend your time and money on building your online business.

It All Starts with a Niche

Affiliate marketing starts with choosing your niche. A niche in online marketing is a small group of interests, including related products and services.

For example Health is a niche, but it’s too broad niche. You might choose a part of this niche, like skin care, but even this could be too broad to start. Acne would be a smaller and better niche to start.

It’s always better to start with a small niche, and once you’re an established authority in your niche and you make some good money, then you can expand your niche. So, you can start with Acne, and then expand to include other Skin Care sub niches.

When you choose a niche, you should think about a niche that you’re interested in, or even better, that you’re passionate about. It’ll be easier to write about a niche you’re passionate about than to write only for money.

If money is your only motivation, it might become boring and tedious to write on the topics you’re not interested in.

Becoming the Authority in Your Niche

Choosing a smaller niche is better, because there will be less competition in a small niche. But, you should not worry too much about the competition. There will be some competition in every niche, but on the other hand, there is a lot of people on the internet, so you can always get enough visitors to make money, when you’re established in your niche.

With time, when you research, read and write about your niche, you’ll become the authority yourself in your niche, and you won’t need to worry about the competition.

When you’re the authority in your niche, people and the search engines will trust you more, and follow your recommendations.

How to Choose Products to Promote

It’s important that you don’t abuse your authority, and you don’t recommend the products or services just for the sake of making money. You should always recommend the best products and services that will be beneficial to your readers.

You should recommend the products/services that you either use yourself or you know from your research that they are good.

If you recommend people some crappy products or services (like make-money-quick programs, for example), you might make a few sales, but you’ll lose people’s trust, and they won’t visit your website.

When you see that some products/services are scams or are of little value, then you should not recommend them, but you should let people know about that, and recommend them some better alternatives.

How to Build a Website

After choosing a niche, you need to build a website. Don’t listen to people who tell you that you don’t need the website to make money from affiliate marketing. You must have the website to build your online business.

To have a website, you need to buy and register a domain. With time your domain will become your prime real estate online. Just your domain will have some value.

When you build your website on your domain, after a few years your domain and website will have even more value.

Do not worry if you’re not a technical person and you think it’s hard to build a website. Those days are gone. There are many website builders nowadays that make it very easy and fast to build a website.

You can try the tool below for free to see how easy it is to build a website with the Site Rubix software.

Once you have built your website, you’ll need to write articles to create the content for your website, that will rank in the search engines and bring visitors to your website.

Traffic Generation

Writing articles for your website is the best method of traffic generation. It’s a free method. There are also some paid methods, like pay-per-click, but they aren’t the best in the beginning, because you might lose some money if you start with them.

It’s better to start with the free methods, and the best is writing quality content for your website. You might not be a person that likes to write; I did not like to write either, but once I learned how to do it and how important it is for making money online, I developed a taste for writing.

If you decide to go with the paid-per-click methods to generate traffic, then it’s very important that you learn how to do it right from the beginning. Otherwise, you might lose money fast.

Here’s the review of some good training about paid traffic generation. I personally started with free traffic, which I learned about from the Wealthy Affiliate Community.

How to Learn Affiliate Marketing for Free

When it comes to affiliate marketing it’s easy to learn it when you have some good mentors. The affiliate marketing and online marketing changes quickly and evolve all the time. It’s not good enough to read an article online, to learn it well.

You need to have step by step lessons and belong to an online community to learn it and to improve your marketing skills continually.

You need people who will guide you. I have found such people in the Wealthy Affiliate community where I have learned how to make money online with affiliate marketing.

You can sign up for free to Wealthy Affiliate and learn all that you need to know about affiliate marketing. You’ll also find all the tools there, like domains, web hosting, keyword research software and more. You can learn and even start making money online with the free, starter membership. Once you have decided that affiliate marketing is what you want to do, you can consider upgrading to the premium membership.

Summary

It’s not hard to learn affiliate marketing and to start making money online when you know how. To know how you need some good teachers. It’s important to take affiliate marketing seriously as a business, not some make money quick opportunity.

If you’re looking for the best place to learn affiliate marketing, click here to read my review of Wealthy Affiliate.