What is “Affiliate Marketing”?
Imagine you’ve been visiting your favourite theatre every weekend to catch (almost) every movie that screens there. And as you will know, there are various movie genres to appeal to all sorts of viewers. And because the theatre owner has seen you before, both of you become good friends (let’s entertain this analogy for a while) and one day he says this to you:
“How would you like, if you can get more of your friends and family members to visit our theatre, you get 20 percent commission for every ticket sale we make?”
Hence, if each ticket costs (say) $20 and you refer around 10 people at the end of the month, you’ll typically be getting a commission of $40 (do the math please) !
Ok, may be that won’t get you to financial freedom. But you get the idea. Imagine if this was done in a larger volume. What would that amount be?
Of course this site is not about how to make money promoting movies (but again, don’t discount this idea). But that gives you an idea what affiliate marketing should typically be about (meaning, you are the affiliate).
Where Should I Start?
One of the best places to start off in affiliate marketing is taking a look at “ClickBank“. It’s been around for years and many affiliates have been able to make a reasonable income through this marketing platform (and yes, there are affiliate millionaires there!). ClickBank can be viewed as the online store for digital products. The best way to find out more is to take a look at that site.
Succeeding as an Affiliate
It doesn’t really matter what you’re promoting and which platform/ vendor you choose to partner with. Listed below are the key steps you should follow (note that there are “sub-steps”, but let’s not get carried away for now):
Step 1: Choose your niche
It’s important to establish which niche interests you and more importantly, which niche would be more profitable. You will have to consider whether it may be too competitive should you decide to promote a niche (fret not, there’s a way to go about it). Rather than explain in details here, do take a look at the video (from ClickBank of course).
Step 2: Build your platform
A platform allows you to communicate with your intended audience. The video below explains how.
Step 3: Grow your audience
Attracting a larger audience means a larger pool of potential customers.
In the next video, we’ll share the steps you can take to start growing your audience and getting traffic to your platform. If you’re not sure how to get visitors to your site, this is the video for you! Just make sure you’ve watched Steps 1 and 2 first.
Step 4: Promote your products
Once you’ve created a platform and an audience, you can begin to promote products.
In the video below, we’ll talk about how you can promote products to your audience in a way that will get you the most sales and make your audience love you at the same time! There are lots of great strategies and tactics in this video, but your success hinges on having done the previous steps properly, so don’t jump straight into promoting products before spending time on the earlier steps.
What Else?
If you’ve looked through the videos above, you’ll realise there’s one other element that is the single greatest important ingredient to succeed. It’s called “Traffic”.
This “Traffic” we’re referring to, is getting people to visit the site or wherever you’re promoting your intended product (affiliate or otherwise). It’s let having customers visiting your “store” (in this case, 24 hours, 7 days a week non-stop) to check out what you have to offer. Without traffic, the best product will never get to see the light of day!
Check out the next page on getting Traffic.