What is Affiliate Marketing? A Guide for Beginners

Digital Marketing is a very vast field, with an enormous scope for career growth. No matter what field you are in, if you want to get in the digital marketing world- you can! There are a lot of things you can do, once you get into the sector. From web developing to graphic deigning to social media marketing, just name it. One of the most popular ways to earn money in real time is blogging and to be specific- Affiliated Marketing.  This is a guide that will brief you about Affiliated Marketing and would give some really helpful tips.

Before we jump on to the guide, we need to understand what exactly is Affiliated Marketing?

“Affiliated marketing is simply, promoting products of other companies on your blog, who would pay you a commission every time a sale is made through your link.” In affiliated marketing, you advertise products by simply jotting down their pros and cons and add links of the product on the page that redirects readers to the seller page of the product. Depending on the policies, for every click on the link and every sale made through that one particular link you get some amount.

Now that you know what Affiliated Marketing is, let’s get you started. The first step is to become an affiliated marketer. Usually, companies such as Amazon, E-bay, etc. require affiliated marketers to help them increase the sales and you can join these networks, but as the affiliate marketing is growing day by day, you need to understand what is your call. There are a lot of niches like fashion, home décor, furniture, automobile, electronics, etc. just name it. With all these niches out there and a lot of people turning to digital marketing, it’s only obvious that there is a lot of competition in almost every niche.

So, now the question arises How to choose your niche?

To simplify again, Niche is a subject you’ll be writing blogs on so, it is important to have interest in the subject and if you’re solely doing it to earn some extra pocket money, then you must develop your interest into it.

To find your own niche, figure out what excites you, quoting Rumi here ‘ Answer to every call, that excites your soul.’ With a platform as huge and vast as Affiliated Marketing, you can experiment as much as you want since there are a lot of options to explore. If you’re a newbie, it is advised for you to start with the niche you hold expertise in and once you have established yourself in the sector, move on to other niches. Also, note that only writing won’t help you in establishing yourself in any niche, to do that, you’ll need to have an interest in researching data as only the proper research will give you a list of keywords that will help you escalate further.

Now that you know how to figure out your Niche and start a blog, next task is to rank higher.

How can you Rank Higher

Well, to rank higher apart from using ethical SEO techniques, you’ll also have to create content that is unique and easy for people to understand and relate. For instance, if you are writing a review of a mobile phone emphasize on the battery life, storage space and camera quality, because that’s what people generally look for while buying a mobile phone. While writing a review of a product, instead of writing things from the description itself, make content out of the real review and feedbacks people have posted on the seller’s page. This will make your content more authentic and credible. It will simply open a lot of new angles for you to cover, if you have been using the product before reviewing it. It is recommended to take products with 4 star ratings or above.

Another trick to rank higher is to update your page every now and then. If you are writing about a product that keeps updating or there are several changes in it, it’s a good idea to update your article on the same, also make sure to update the date and time as well. This little trick will attract the crawl bots to read your content and rank your page higher as compared to those who haven’t updated. Another little trick that is commonly practiced is to add keywords in the URL.

Now that you know how to rank your high, let’s see How to increase the conversion rate?

Conversion rate could be calculated by simply dividing the number of customers who made sales using your link by the total visitors. To increase this rate, you need to show people that they can buy the product by highlighting the ‘buy’ button. These buttons are usually in the size of 200X400 pixels, so they are not too big or not too small for the page. You can also add the redirect link the text or can use image links to make it even easier. Adding link in the product name is a clever idea as it will not only highlight the text but might help with the conversion rate making it a lot easier for people to reach and get the product. Just make sure to not add a lot of advertisement links on the page as it may confuse the people.

The next step is to PROMOTE

You’ve put in a lot of efforts to establish something so don’t be afraid to promote it, showcase your work to the world. Create separate accounts on social platforms for your niche and post an update every time you write something new because even if you get nofollow backlinks from these platforms, it’ll help with your ranking.  Answer on Quora, help people solve their queries and slip in the links without making it too obvious. Find relevant niche forums and get in touch with like-minded people to promote the product.

Know that results won’t come out in a day so Be dedicated and keep trying.