How great would it be if you had a source of Passive Income? You would feel less worried about meeting your financial needs wouldn’t you? If that’s the case Affiliate Marketing might be the best option for you. Big News portal i.e. Huffington Post, Endgadget and Moz earn in Millions on Affiliate Sales each month. Yes you can earn a 6-digit passive income, but first you need to put in the effort.
What is Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing refers to the practice of promoting other people’s products/services via your online platform. An Affiliate Marketer makes money on the affiliates sales commission. The more sales they manage to refer the higher the affiliate earning.
Choosing a Platform for Affiliate Marketing
If you are serious about Affiliate Marketing, you want to have your own online platform for publishing affiliate content. Also you can use the same platform to make Affiliate Sales. There are many platforms out there that will help you get started with Affiliate Marketing. But among all the other options WordPress is the best. Why?
Because if you are using WordPress it means you own all your content and every other thing on the website. In comparison, other alternatives like WordPress.com and Medium own your content and can shut down your account without any prior notice.
Another reason we prefer WordPress.org over other alternatives is, it lets users completely customize their website to their requirements. Users can add plugins to extend the functionality of the core WordPress Website.
Affiliate Marketing V Other Sources of Revenue
There are a handful of ways you can make money from your WordPress Website. Apart from owning an Online Store, where you make revenue from directly selling products, you can also make money from WordPress Blogging Site. You can allow Ads on your Website. By allowing Ads, you can make money using the Pay-per-Click mechanism. But the disadvantage with displaying Ads on your site is, it takes up too much space on your Website.
If you have a healthy traffic count to your website, you might feel like picking Ad Revenue over other alternatives for monetizing your WordPress Website. But in reality, Ad Display is enough to annoy your visitors and even make them hate your WordPress Website.
Another way you can monetize your WordPress Website is via charging your site visitors for Premium Content. But that can only be done if you have established authority for your brand or in a certain domain. No one will pay money for your content, if they don’t consider you as an expert on that field. Moreover no one will pay for something that they can get for FREE. Which means you need to have something exclusive to offer, otherwise no one will buy your Premium Content Subscription.
Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing
According to Forbes, many of the popular Websites on the internet earn Millions per month in affiliate sales. Huffington Post earns in the ballpark of 41.6 Million USD per month in Affiliate Sales, followed by Endgadget with a USD 3.95 Million and Moz with a USD 3.74 Million of Affiliate Revenue.
Pick What you want to promote
Before you even start your first WordPress Website, it’s important to pick what you want to promote with your WordPress Website. You can promote digital products i.e. ebooks, online courses, SAAS products. Or you can even promote physical products i.e. apparels, consumer electronics. After you know what you want to sell, it will get easier for you to pick your target market.
But picking what you want to promote is only the first step. The second step involves making sure there are Affiliate Marketing opportunities in your selected niche. If products/services in your selected niche do not have Affiliate Programs, there is no scope for you to earn money on Affiliate Commission.
And the last thing you want to make sure is whether or not there is room for you in your selected niche. If you have picked a niche that hosts a lot of Influencers and Affiliate Marketers, chances are you are going to find it very hard to make your first sale.
Pick the right WordPress Theme and Plugins
If you already have a WordPress Website, you can skip this part to the next segment. But we recommend you don’t.
Before you start Affiliate Marketing it’s important to have a WordPress Website that appeals to your target niche. How do you do that? You tweak the appearance of the core WordPress Platform that best appeals to your readers. Along with that, you also need to expand the core functionality of the Core WordPress Platform to make it capable of handling you and your users. And you can do that by installing WordPress Plugins.
If you are serious about Affiliate Marketing, there is one plugin that is a must for you- ThristyAffiliates. This plugin helps Affiliate Marketers shorten their Affiliate Links. Moreover, this plugin will help you manage all your Affiliate links from one place.
Post Sharp and Regular Content
Now the entire purpose of Affiliate Marketing is to drive a certain group of people towards a certain product or service. There are two ways you can do that. First you can drive your readers crazy about the product/service you are promoting with frequent and boring content. And secondly, you can do it via regular and meaningful content. We advice you pick the second one.
Recommended Reading: How to Remove Spam Comments From Your WordPress Website
We advice you pick a niche that covers topics you feel passionate about. If you feel passionate about the niche you have picked, you can easily write 100+ content on it. And that is what matters, how much can you write on a given topic in the least amount of time possible.
While writing content, we suggest you try to cover some Ever Green content as well. Ever Green content refers to those contents that will stay relevant no matter what. For example, the What to look for in a Fishing Rods and Reels is an ever green content, although you might need to update it every once in a while.
Build an E-Mail List
If you are serious with Affiliate Marketing, you will need to be serious about E-Mail Marketing as well. Building your email list can be significantly enhanced by utilizing a LinkedIn email finder to find and connect with potential subscribers in your professional network.
But before you build an Email list you need to have a good follower-base. When you start writing you might not have any generic reader apart from your close friends and family, but to be a successful Affiliate Marketer, you need to build a generic user-base.
Recommended Reading: Hacks To Grow Your Email Subscription List On WordPress Website
The first thing you should do sincerely is conduct through key-word research. That way you can reach out to your target users. Secondly, you should put in the effort to build a strong online presence. Promote your Affiliate Content on Social Media. Then you can also do Guest Post on other popular blog platforms, that way you can present your expertise in front of a new reader-base.
After you have started growing a regular reader base, it’s time to build an Email-List. You can do it by using any of the Lead Generation WordPress Plugins. However, it is not a good practice to bombard your readers inbox with promotional material all the time. See acquiring a good Email list might come easy, but maintaining it needs regular effort.
Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs
Now once you have your WordPress Website running, you are all set to start signing up to affiliate programs. Now while you are signing up, do make sure to sign up to the ones that are in your niche. Go through the Affiliate Terms and Conditions Page carefully. Always use the Affiliate Link or also referred to as the Referral Link. That way the original produced of the product/service can track which sales are coming from your website.
And lastly, it is important that you use proper media files i.e. banner images. Most Affiliate Programs provide you with a gallery of Media files. If you can’t find it, do make sure to reach out to the Affiliate Manager.
Wrap Up!
If you are determined to start Affiliate Marketing in 2020 and have already set-up your own WordPress Website, here is a content idea for you. If you are new to Content Marketing, you should know Reviews are the most popular form of Affiliate Content.
Take the “Follow your Users” approach to understand how users will interact with the product/service you are trying to promote, and then write an article in your own words. So there you go. Sign-up for Affiliate Programs and stat earning passive money. You don’t have to look far for Affiliate Programs, Amazon has a great Affiliate Program, also we here at WPDeveloper have a great Affiliate Program too. Best of luck with Affiliate Marketing!
