Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to earn a commission by selling products or services offered by other companies. It's a great way to supplement your income from the convenience of your own home. Fortunately, it's also easy to become an affiliate for companies that are household names.
1. Sell what you know. To start, you should stick to selling products or services that you're familiar with. Online marketers call this process "picking your niche".
2. Start a website relevant to your niche. Before becoming an affiliate, many companies will want to know the URL of the website that you'll use to sell their products.
3. Research affiliate programs. Find an affiliate program that offers products or services in your niche.
4. Join an affiliate program. It's almost always free of charge to join an affiliate program.
5. Add affiliate links in your content. One great way to get paid a commission without appearing to sell anything is add affiliate links within your content.
6. Include visual ads in your sidebar. Your website, like most websites, probably has a sidebar. That's a great place to include visual ads for products relevant to your niche.
7. Continue producing content relevant to your niche. You want to keep people coming back to your website, don't you? If so, then you need to keep on producing original content that's of value to your visitors. That's called "content marketing" by digital marketers
8. Use analytics to measure your success. You can think of analytics as information about what you're selling, how you sold it, and to whom you sold it.
9. Prepare for taxes. If you make money via affiliate marketing, you can be sure that you're going to have to pay taxes on that income. At the beginning of each year, your partner companies should send you a 1099 tax form.
10. Expand your business. Your business is likely to do one of two things: expand or contact. That's why you should always be striving for growth, otherwise your business will shrink and provide you with diminishing returns.
11. Delegate routine tasks. Once your business takes off, it's time for you to focus on how to grow your business while delegating routine tasks to others. It will cost you some money in labor expense, but the investment is worth it if it allows you to come up with new ways to promote your affiliate marketing business and build it even further.
12. Automate what you can. There are plenty of digital marketing tools available. Again, some of them will require you to make an investment, but if it gives you more free time to build your business, then the return on investment should be positive.
