What is Affiliate Marketing?

Step 1: Creating a Website

Our sites are created on and hosted by Wealthy Affiliate, which has been around 2005 and the founders are still around now and actively involved in the community. It’s a good platform with very good beginner online marketing training and other features but I currently just use Wealthy Affiliate to host my sites and buy new domains when I want to try out a new niche.

With Wealthy Affiliate you can create a free new website and try it for as long as you like before upgrading. This is particularly important as you may find Affiliate Marketing is not for you, and you’re better suited trying something else. Better to try it before it costs you anything!

With most of the internet being on WordPress, buying your domain and hosting on WP is perfectly fine, too.

If you want to jump in and try a free site, feel free to enter a name for your potential website and get building!

Steps 2 & 3: Choosing a Niche and Keyword Research:

This can be the easiest and hardest aspect of affiliate marketing for the following reasons…

Your niche should be something you know about, you’re passionate about or at least interested in.

This gives you a head start as you already know things on the subject that others may not necessarily know and in turn you’re solving a problem or educating others in a niche people are searching for.

You will need to create a lot of content around your niche. This could mean it gets boring (for you to research and create) if you build an entire site around it.

There are ways around this, such as diversifying your niches across two or three, so you can switch to another when fed up with looking at the same subject or outsource your content creation and editing to somewhere like Fiverr.

When you think of a niche, you will need to do some Keyword Research. This is included with Wealthy Affiliate as it gives you access to Jaaxy.

You can also use tools for free, such as simply using the Google search box and suggested words and phrases the search engine helpfully suggests.

There are also free extensions on Chrome such as Keywords Everywhere, and WordPress Everywhere.

There is a sweet spot between the average amount of searches per month for a specific Keyword or phrase and the amount of competing websites. Most Keyword tools seem to take an average of all the data and give an indication of how easy it should be to rank on first page on Google (and naturally other search engines).

You need a good amount of searches each month but not too much competition. Jaaxy gives a good, easy to read estimate of which Keywords and phrases:

As you can see, I searched “best board games for grown ups” and it’s showing fewer than 10 searches per month. Yet there are 13 websites competing for this Keyword phrase so there are related Keywords and phrases around it.

But it also shows related Keywords below what I searched for.

There are related Keywords that get an average search anywhere between 64 and 1256, all with competing websites between 52 and 100. So there is some competition but the KQI (Keyword Quality Indicator) is green all the way.

You may have noticed that “what’re the best board games for 2 year olds” and “best board games for the adults” have 0 competing web sites. So you could build some content around this and rank for two Keyword phrases quickly. One of these has 48 searches per month and the other has a whopping 1256 per month, so you can see there is plenty of space for new websites with new niches!

You can try Jaaxy for free by looking for Keywords below:

Step 4: Content:

Content can mean many things, from a blog post to posting on social media.

You can also mix it up by using, let’s say a blog post with your YouTube videos embedded on the page. This can become a self-fulfilling cycle by sending traffic from your YouTube following and new followers to your website and traffic from your website to your YouTube channel. Also, watching videos on your web pages should mean your audience stays on the page for longer, giving the search engines a clue that your site is good quality and informative.

The easiest content to create is from a subject you’re knowledgeable about and have a passion for. Even with this being said, it can get repetitive and boring when you spend hours looking into many aspects of the same thing.

You don’t need to do it all yourself though!

You can outsource with services and freelancers from the likes of Fiverr. There are many article writers of all abilities and most of them offer varying packages to suit your budget and needs.

You can also take care of your logos, graphics, videos and any other media you need for your site.

A common theme from content creators across the web (the good ones) who showcase what they do, is that content is the key.

No matter where you publish or post it, what you use to make it, the more the better. Just make sure it’s useful, solves a problem or is entertaining. Or a combination of all.

Step 5: Monetise Your Site:

There is no wrong stage to monetise your site, but some advise to create the site and content first.

However, it’s quite likely that your planned revenue stream is integral to your content so there is no harm in building it in from the start.

Monetising your Site with Amazon Associates

The most common affiliate site these days is Amazon Associates. This is easy to sign up to and you have several months to make a sale to stay in the program.

Once in, you simply promote products on Amazon through your site and get a commission for each sale. The commissions aren’t great, in fact there are many affiliate programs that offer better rates.

But, it’s Amazon, and most of your audience will know them and quite likely have an account so it’s an easy conversion to make.

There are some important things to consider though:

• You must declare that you’re an Amazon Affiliate seller. This is laid out when you sign up and shouldn’t put people off, it’s pretty common to see across the web now.

• Amazon are very strict with their Terms & Conditions and will terminate you from the their program if they feel you’ve breached them.

• There is a lot of competition both online and specifically with niche affiliate sites, and then there’s a fat load of competition with sites promoting high end products on Amazon (as this is where the perceived money is). This doesn’t mean you can’t make it work, just do your research and pick a niche make great content.

There are of course, many other options:

ClickBank

ClickBank can be a dirty word to some. There are so many shady sites that want to make a quick buck and they always seem to be pushing ClickBank links.

ClickBank is a vendor though, not a direct seller. There are as many genuine companies selling through CB as there are shady ones. All this means is that when you sign up and learn your way through it, you need to make sure to pick companies and products to promote with a good reputation, ideally inside and out of ClickBank.

As an affiliate platform, ClickBank has been around for a long time and many affiliate marketers have made good income from promoting all it offers.

Other Affiliate Platforms

Many, many companies offer an affiliate program of some sort. It could be that you’ve made a site around trading stock markets: your favourite broker will likely have an affiliate or bonus referral program. This is usually a high end product with small sales but high commission.

Or you may be promoting electronic or hobby products: On a drone site I’m working on, I have both Amazon Associates and DJI as affiliate partners. This way people who know and trust Amazon can head that way, but others may wish to purchase direct from the supplier, so the rest of my audience can go to DJI. This is a higher commission but also the purchaser will likely get a better warranty and care products.