Do you enjoy affiliate marketing? Want to be able to quit your job and focus on your passions? If so, you’ve come to the right place! In this article, we will teach you everything you need to know about the affiliate marketing of online products, including what it means, how to become a part of it, and how to make a profitable affiliate sales website.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
To answer this question, let’s first take a step back and recall how traditional affiliate marketing works. With that model, a company like Amazon promotes a product, service, or website through affiliate marketing by paying other businesses to promote their products. In return for some of that revenue, the affiliate business owner promotes the products or services of that company.
Nowadays, the lines between traditional and digital marketing have blurred, so much so that the terms affiliate marketing and digital marketing are often used interchangeably. For the purposes of this article, we will use the term affiliate marketing to refer to the practice of revenue sharing through digital marketing as well as other kinds of marketing, such as organic social media marketing and paid search marketing.
Why Amazon?
It would be remiss of us not to mention Amazon when talking about affiliate marketing. The platform is massive and boasts hundreds of millions of monthly active users, as well as a host of other valuable metrics. For the purposes of this article, we will be working with Amazon’s Advertise affiliate program. However, the rules and stipulations of the program are quite similar to those of other prominent affiliate marketing platforms, such as Clickbank.
What makes Amazon’s Advertise program so valuable is that it allows beginners to get started with affiliate marketing, regardless of their experience or knowledge base. If you can click, you can make money with Amazon’s Advertise program. Plus, with every new affiliate account, Amazon provides free specialized training to help you succeed as an affiliate marketer.
The Difference Between Affiliate Marketing and Retargeting
When users click a link, they are taken to a landing page. On this page, they are presented with product offers from that site’s merchants. If the product is relevant to their interests, they will likely stay on the site for longer and make a purchase or sign up for a trial. This is known as retargeting.
With retargeting, advertisers target web users who have already visited their sites or social media platforms. This is especially valuable when trying to acquire new customers, as retargeting allows businesses to target their ideal prospective customer, who is most likely to become an actual customer.
On the other hand, with affiliate marketing, businesses allow others to market their products or services for them and share in the associated revenue. In return for that sharing, the affiliate marketer promotes those products or services on their behalf. That is the defining difference between retargeting and affiliate marketing. While retargeting is when an advertiser shows up on your dashboard every time a user visits a site you’re affiliated with, affiliate marketing is when an advertiser pays you to show their advertisements to people who are about to make a purchase, join a community, or otherwise interact with a product or service.
How Do I Get Started As An Affiliate Marketer?
If you’re looking to get started with affiliate marketing, you’ve come to the right place! In this section, we will teach you everything you need to know about making money online with a product you love. We’ll cover topics like
- setting up your Amazon affiliate account
- choosing your niche
- building a profitable sales funnel
- creating unique content to engage your audience
- and much more!
Step 1: Create An Amazon Affiliate Account
To get started with Amazon’s Advertise program, you will need to create an Amazon account. You can use this account to purchase products online or through an iOS or Android app, as long as you have an active Amazon Payments account. You can find more information about creating an account here.
Once you have an account, you will be taken to the dashboard, where you can monitor your account’s performance. Alternatively, you can log in to your account and access your performance from here. Amazon provides more detailed information about your account in the form of statistics and reports. To generate more sales, you can engage with your audience through blogs, social media platforms, and more.
Step 2: Find Your Niche
Once you have an Amazon account, you can begin taking steps to make money online with a product you love. The first step is to find your niche, which you can best describe as the type of products you will promote on your blog or website. Once you have your niche, you can begin specializing in the products associated with that niche. For example, if you are an apparel niche blogger, you may want to create content on style tips or the latest fashion trends. If you are a foodie, you may want to create content about recipes or kitchen hacks.
When choosing your niche, be sure to keep your audience in mind. If you are writing content for a global audience, make sure that the information you provide will be beneficial to your target audience. In today’s world, everyone is incredibly mobile, so make sure that any information you provide is accessible on any device. When selecting your niche, also consider the amount of money you’re willing to spend on products or services related to that niche. The more you put into marketing your affiliate site, the more you will get back. So, don’t underestimate the power of spending money on products related to what you’re promoting!
Choosing a niche that you’re passionate about is essential to being able to succeed as an affiliate marketer. If you can’t connect with the content you’re creating, you’re going to struggle to attract and retain an audience, as well as generate income.
Step 3: Decide How Much You Are Willing To Spend On Marketing
The next step is to determine how much you are willing to spend on marketing. In general, the better your niche, the cheaper your traffic will be. So, if you are able to attract and retain an audience, you can quickly generate income from blogging or creating informational websites, as opposed to spending large amounts of money on expensive ads that may or may not work.
The amount of money you’re willing to spend on marketing will depend on a number of factors, including
- your income
- how skilled you are
- your experience
- and much more!
Step 4: Choose Products You Can Affiliate With
You’re now ready to choose products you can affiliate with. To do this, simply log in to your Amazon affiliate dashboard and click on the Products tab. Here, you will see a long list of products related to your chosen niche. When choosing products you can affiliate with, make sure to keep your readers in mind. Your audience may already have a preference for certain product lines and will most likely have an opinion on which products are the best.
To help you make the right choice, Amazon provides detailed information about each product, including its reviews, how much it costs, and more. If possible, you should opt for products with positive reviews and low prices. This will make it easier to make a profit, as you won’t end up competing with many other vendors for customers’ wallets.
Step 5: Create Simple Yet Effective Marketing Materials
The last step in building a successful Amazon affiliate site is to create simple yet effective marketing materials. For the purposes of this article, we will be using the Amazon Affiliate Marketing Dashboard to create a marketing plan. From here, you can easily download all the materials you’ll need to successfully market a product.
To begin with, you will want to create an attractive header for your website. For this purpose, you will need to log in to your Amazon dashboard and click on the Website icon. On the right-hand side of the page, you will see a section called Headers and Footers . Click on that and you’ll see a form where you can upload an image or choose a pre-made template. For the purposes of this article, we will choose an image.