A Beginner’s Guide To Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing allows people to sell a variety of products online through their blogs or website. If you are looking for an easy way to monetize your website, you can easily implement affiliate marketing into your site.
The basic concept is signing up for an affiliate marketing network and finding products that are within your niche. Once you find the product that is within your niche, you click on the hoplink to add your affiliate ID to the product link. When a reader clicks on your hoplink and buys the item, you get a commission for the sale. Although this sounds simple, there are a few things that you need to know before you get started.
Here is a simple guide for affiliate marketing beginners.

Choosing Your Affiliate Network

The affiliate network that you choose will have a lot to do with the type of products that you are selling. Different affiliate networks will focus on different items. Some affiliate networks like Commission Junction mainly focus on selling website subscriptions and services while ClickBank will focus on digital products like ebooks and software packages.
Determine what affiliate network is going to fit best into your niche. For instance, if you’re running a website that offers advice on insurance, you can use a lead based affiliate network to promote insurance quotes. Some affiliate networks are known for late payments and other bad business practices so do your research before hand.

Choosing Products

When you’re first starting out you’re going to be inundated with different products for marketing. There first thing that you need to do is research on the products that you’re going to promote. Unlike your niche where you are focusing on a small market, you can expand your product base and offer a wide variety of products or lead generating links when you’re marketing to readers.
Don’t go overboard, but have a couple of items that are relevant to your niche. Whether these are ebooks or software packages, your readers have broad based needs within your niche so you should appeal to every aspect of their need. Click on the “Gravity” or “Network Earnings” options on the affiliate network for stats on what products are selling the best.

Buy The Product

How are you going to give real information about a product if you have never used it? When somebody comes to your website they are looking for information on the product. If you don’t give them detailed information then they are going to leave the site and probably never come back.

Buy the item so you know the ins and outs of what you’re trying to sell. Never give broad information about a product or you’re going to come off as scammy. You will be glad that you bought the product instead of just trying to fake your way through a review to do online marketing for it.

Be Honest

Affiliate marketing is all about being honest with a product. If there are things that you don’t like about the product, tell your reader. This will differentiate you from the other marketers trying to sell them a product based on the features.
When you explain what you don’t like about the item you show that you actually know what it does and what it doesn’t do. You can easily build rapport with your readers and establish online trust. This will bring them back to your website when they need a new product or are wondering about different websites that you’ve tried out.

Cloaking

Almost everybody knows what a hoplink looks like. When you put hoplinks on your website, a reader is going to know that you’re trying to sell them something. These links are not only telltale signs of a sale; they are not aesthetically appealing to your websites. Cloaking your links is the best way to keep the website looking professional while not coming off as a hard sell.
You can use cloaking tools or you can use an anchor text link. This allows you to embed a link within a certain phrase. For instance, if you’re trying to sell an ebook on acne you can add your hoplink to “Acne Ebook” so that when the phrase is clicked the reader is taken to the product page.

Viral Media

Viral media is an easy way to drum up traffic to your site or blog. If you are going with a hosting plan then you will be able to easily host videos on your site. If you don’t have a hosting plan, head over to HostGator and buy one.
This is very cheap and will give you the freedom to upload and house your videos per your website or blog. Record yourself going over the product or take screenshots of the product to show the different features. Also talk about what you don’t like about the item to keep your readers informed. Video marketing is a great way to generate traffic.