There are many ways you can make money online. And to make money online is more and more popular. One popular method is to make money with affiliate marketing and start an affiliate marketing business.
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What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is when you are recommending a product to other people, and you receive a commission for it.
You can recommend a product by using many methods, but this article will focus on niche websites.
Recommending products and services is something we do all the time. You probably have friends and family that have asked you for advice regarding the products they want to buy. You answer their questions, talk a bit about the product, what you like and don't like about the product.
So if you want to do affiliate marketing, you do it precisely like you recommending (or not recommending) something to a friend or family member. You have to give the information I provided in an example above. The more answers you give to the potential questions the viewer have, the bigger the change you have for you will earn a commission.
Why affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is most straightforward to start with and the method I recommended to begin with. You need none to little money, and you don't need to have a product. With most other make money online methods require you to sell something. With affiliate marketing, you don't need that, and you will learn how to do marketing. This is a skill you need regardless of what you are doing.
You can recommend products on the Internet to a lot of potential customers and make a nice side income. You can even make this your only income where you earn enough money to live a very comfortable life.
Affiliate marketing as a passive income
Affiliate marketing can be done as a passive income. You need to do research, build a website and write a lot of articles and put in a lot of initial work. After that, your site and generate a nice income for years if you picked an evergreen niche without you touching the website.
What you usually want to do is to monitor and tweak your site for optimal performance. You also want to add more articles to get more people to your website. You have worked hard on your website, so you want to maintain it. And this is minimal work.
The key to be successful with affiliate marketing
- That you pick a niche based on a hobby.
- That your niche is targeted enough to start with, but have the potential to be broader in the future.
- That you are passionate about this niche.
- That you know something about this niche or want to learn more about it.
- That you find some great affiliate offers.
How to find niches
You are not always required to choose a niche, but the most common and also recommended method is to pick one. Brainstorm some ideas, and the ideas should be something that you know something about and are a bit passionate about.
The niche can also be something you want to know more about. That's fine too, but remember you need to be a bit passionate about it. The reason is that it will definitely help when writing content becomes tedious, and you have not received a commission from your hard work. This is something everyone experience in the beginning. The biggest mistake people do is to become bored and stop what they are doing. If you like the niche, you will manage to continue until you are successful.
You need to validate your niche with a google search and youtube search. In this step, you will check that there is some great sites and videos out there for you to do some research on. You don’t want to pick a niche that is too small or be the first one. You can also check with Google Trends to see if your niche is not declining in interest. That is a sign that will make your niche hard to make money in a few years. If you want a steady income, you also have to check in Google Trends that your niche is not too seasonable for a steady income.
I will also mention that you should pick something that is evergreen, don’t choose a niche that will make your content outdated in a couple of years. Technology is a niche that is changing fast so try to avoid that.
Do your niche research
Before you create a website about your niche, you brainstorm topics you can write about. This should be approximately 30 topics that answer both small and big questions and problems people in that niche have. Try to get a good mix of:
- Short articles with 1000+ words that solve a specific question.
- Medium articles with 2500+ words that answer a bit more broad question.
- Long articles with 3500+ words that explain a major topic.
Do the proper research and google your topics so you know what you need to beat so you will get on page 1 on google and hopefully on position 1. Write down how hard or easy the competition are and how long your article probably needs to be. This will make it so much easier later in this process.
In the past, I had many good ideas and created websites without proper research. The results were usually that it took a long time to write and I struggled to find topics. After some articles I got bored, and the site went dead. So do the research, so you know what to do when you start.
Create a website
You need a site so people can find what you write. The most used platform to write your articles on is WordPress. WordPress is easy to use and easy to install on most hosting services. You can read my guide on how to do it here.
Don't focus on design and layout before you have written your initial 30 articles. Google don't understand layout and good design, so you need to write content, so Google knows what you are writing about before you are focusing on this.
How to write good content for your website?
After you have decided on your niche and made your website, you need to write. You have brainstormed topics so you can begin at once to write the 30 articles you researched as fast as possible. I will recommend you to answer the small and easy questions first and do the longer articles later. That way you will hopefully rank more quickly on google.
When you have written your 30 articles, you need to work on the design of your site. At this stage, Google will try to find out what your site is about. Use the time to make your website and articles look nicer for people that find your website. Add pictures and make the front page nice so people want to come back to find more information.
When you are happy with your website, both with the layout and design, you need to continue to write articles. Find more topics to write about, but now you are focusing on the bigger questions that will attract more people to your site.
How to earn money
When you receive people to your site, then it is probably the time for you to try to earn some money from your visitors. Never start with this step, you can be focused on making money instead of helping your visitors. This focus can destroy your site.
Find affiliate offers in your niche and begin to write reviews about the products. Answer questions people might have about the product and remove their objections.
Update your existing articles and put in both affiliate links and links to your reviews where it seems natural. Never overdo it! Let it looks natural and try not to sell. Remember you are giving advice.
The resource page
A resource page is great to have. This can be one page with all the products and paid information you are recommending and is an affiliate for.
You can group them in several pages, but keep the resource page as one page with several subpages where you put the offers where they fit.
You can also have one page , but you want to keep similar products together. So you want to have one section with the courses you have done and is recommending. Then have one section with books that you have read and recommend.
With this method, you can naturally link in articles to your resource page, and you put a link to your resource page in your website header.
The money is in the list
Another method to make an income with your site is to do email marketing. You can start an affiliate marketing business where you attract people through search engines and in addition to your affiliate links, you also try to build an email list.
With an email list, you will be able to send emails where you both teach and promote products. You can have pre-written emails and send them out regularly and automatically with an autoresponder.
Later you can expand with paid advertising to attract more people, but then this will not be a passive income that many people want to have.
I have made a review of an affiliate course I think you will like. You can read the review here.
