Affiliate marketing is a proven method when it comes to making money online. If you choose the right niche, create content that encourages your audience to purchase your recommendations, and work on your site SEO, you can earn a decent income.
However, you will need to have a well-thought-out strategy for you to stand out since virtually all niches have stiff competition. What’s more, in addition to having a strategy, you will need to have a robust set of marketing tools that automates some of the everyday processes.
To help you get started with affiliate marketing 2020, we will share with you some of the tips you can use to stand out as well as affiliate tools you should use.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing
There are several steps to getting started with affiliate marketing;
Step 1- choose the right niche
Before you build a website, you should first pick a niche. Creating a site that promotes a wide range of products will not cut it. To succeed in affiliate marketing, you should narrow down your focus to a very specific target audience and products.
A good niche should have a significant amount of highly targeted organic traffic. By targeted organic traffic, we mean traffic from product-related searches or traffic from people looking for more information about the product you are promoting.
Generally, these are people who are using long-term search terms, such as ‘BISSELL PowerForce Helix Vacuum review.’ Traffic coming from such a long-tail keyword is highly-targeted as the searcher is looking for more information about the product in question before they buy it.
Another thing that qualifies a good niche is having high-priced products. In affiliate marketing, you earn commissions from the sale of the products you have recommended.
Therefore, it is important that you choose a niche that has high-priced products. However, you can also promote cheaper products, but ensure that their sales volume is substantial.
You may ask- how do I know the niche that suits me? Well, you can choose a niche based on your hobbies, or you can use keyword research tools to know niches with low competition yet has a substantial audience. We will talk about the tools you can use to know the level of competition in a niche as well as keyword research tools.
Step 2- Set up Your Affiliate Site
After selecting your niche and selecting your keywords, you need to create a website. Again, we insist that you should not skip the first step- you wouldn’t want to spend months working on a website only for you to find out that it is in a niche that is overly populated.
When it comes to setting an affiliate website, there are several options you can choose from, but the most popular one is by using WordPress.
To create an affiliate site, you should choose a domain name as well as web hosting. Your domain name is what enables people to access your site from their browsers while your hosting plan is what enables your website to run.
When it comes to domain names, you can choose any web URL you want as long as it is available. You may have one in mind, such as Affiliatemarketing101.com, but then find out that it is already taken.
Fortunately, there are plenty of combination domains you can take, and thus it will be easy to find the right domain. The right domain should be short, relate to your site, and have a common suffix such as .com.
Once you identify a domain, the next thing is to register it- buy the domain. You can buy a domain from different sources, including NameCheap, HostGator, etc.
After registering, the next thing is to host your site.
Step 3- Choose a Hosting
Your web host will store (host) all your web files and avail them to your visitors. When choosing a web host, there are several things you should keep in mind;
- Servers’ uptime- a good web host should not have less than 99.9% uptime reliability. You don’t want to host your site on servers that experience frequent downtimes or servers that cannot handle substantial traffic to your site, as this will have a negative impact on your site ranking and user experience.
- Regular backups. A good hosting should back up your files regularly.
- Support- your web host should have stellar customer support so that you can solve any issue that may arise.
Step 4- Install Your Web Structure
In this case, there are several options, but as we mentioned earlier, WordPress is the most common. Your hosting provider can have the option to install it for you, or you can install it for yourself.
After installing your website, you can now add your theme, content, and structure it the way you see fit, and this is where affiliate marketing tools come into play.
Must-Have Affiliate Marketing Tools
Yes, we have discussed the fundamental aspects of affiliate marketing, but that’s not all- you need tools as well. There are plenty of tools to choose from, and thus it is easy to get overwhelmed. We have simplified this for you and narrowed down your list to tools you need for your affiliate marketing journey;
- SEMrush
This is one of the go-to tools when it comes to keyword research, competitor analysis, and fixing SEO errors. It is trusted by renowned internet marketers and major brands around the world. As an affiliate marketer, it is important to analyze the content marketing strategy your competitors are using, and SEMrush can help you.
- Ahrefs
This is another keyword research and SEO tool you can use. Although it is used for other purposes such as keyword research, content analysis, on-page audits, etc. it is majorly used on backlink analysis.
This tool can give you an in-depth insight into the competitor’s backlink profile and help you analyze content gaps you can focus on.
- Plugins
Manually managing your affiliate marketing site is a tedious task, and this is where plugins come into play.
If you are using WordPress, there are many affiliate plugins for you, but here are the main ones to get you started;
- AzonPress- for Amazon associates, this is a great solution as it helps you manage your affiliate earning process.
- WooCommerce- this is a general-purpose plugin that will help you to automatically add a variety of 3rdparty products to your store.
- Pretty links- if you are running a blog, this is a great plugin to go for. It cloaks your lengthy affiliate links and makes it short.
- Yoast SEO- this is a must-have plugin for any WordPress site owner. With plenty of advanced inbuilt functionalities for URL redirects, page meta, XML sitemaps- this is an all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress users.
- Google analytics. This tool helps you to understand your audience. You can use it to know how many visitors are coming to your site, their location, and other crucial information. It allows you to analyze different behaviors, track conversions, links, and much more.
There are plenty of other affiliate tools you can use, but the above ones should get you started before adding more to your list.
We do hope our guide for affiliate marketing for beginners has helped you figure out how to get started with affiliate marketing and the tools you can use. If you have something to share or any other tool to add, please share it with us in the comment section!