How to start an Affiliate Marketing Business

What Niche? Matter of fact what is a Niche?

A niche is a segment of a larger market that can be defined by its own unique needs, preferences, or identity that makes it different from the larger market.

Well, that is how Shopify defines a niche. It’s not clear enough for beginners. Here’s how I define a niche.

A niche is a simple a category business category. It’s that simple. Examples of niches include the Fashion Niche, the Make Money Online or Side Hustle Niche, the Gaming Niche, etc.

It’s now up to you to choose a niche you want.
 
I see many bloggers saying you should choose a niche you are passionate about. I’d say go where the money is mate, being passionate about physics ain’t gonna get you bucks in affiliate marketing. You have to choose a niche that is having an uptrend and has a lot of content you can write about. 

A common mistake I see early affiliate marketers make is to pigeonhole themselves into this tiny micro-niche, that has limited content to write about. Definitely avoid that. It’s for pigeons😂.

When going where the money is, make sure you are at least interested in learning about that niche. Because you are going to be constantly learning and if you chose the fitness niche just because that’s where all the money is, you are gonna burn out if you don’t learn to like the niche you write content about.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be your passion but at least have some appreciation of the niche and be willing to learn more about it(some little interest wouldn’t hurt).

This will later help when you are now being invited to podcasts and people are gonna ask questions and you will have to answer the public.

Here’s an article about the top 5 profitable niches you must know.
Besides people can learn to be passionate about something. An easier way to quickly get passionate about your affiliate marketing business is to
“Treat your affiliate marketing business as a startup, and definitely that startup will eventually become your passion”
Everyone loves to own something and being a founder of a business – a successful business (it will be successful after following this guide) makes you passionate about your startup.

To cut the long story short here are the top 10 niches you can consider before starting your affiliate marketing business.

– Make Money Online
– Finance
– Health and Fitness
– Personal Development
– Travel
– Relationships
– Lifestyle
– Gaming
– Gadgets and Tech
– Real Estate

Choose from here, you can also research more on the Internet.

The only thing left to do after selecting a niche is to build a channel to distribute your content. A website is the most popular platform used by affiliate marketers. On Bluehost, you can get a great offer for less than $5/month, which is less expensive than your daily meals.

You can also use social media platforms, of which there are many: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Finally, you have a choice between Rumble and YouTube. 
What I recommend is to use all of these platforms to get the maximum traffic out of the Matrix. 

Start with a website, and with Bluehost, it is very easy to setup due to Bluehost’s beginner-friendly admin panel. After getting hosting from Bluehost, pick a good theme, Astra/Divi/Kadence/OceanWP all these are great themes, and then add some essential plugins required for your blog to run smoothly. If you need more detailed steps, learn how to start a profitable blog here!

After creating a website, optimize it for SEO and start writing killer blog content. In the first 90 days, I recommend you only focus on writing content and marketing that content on social media. If you do it right, you should be getting thousands of visitors per month by the end of your first 90 days.

If you have the gear you can also start creating Youtube and TikTok videos and all you’ll be doing is re-phrasing your content for a different platform. Turn all you articles into videos, summarize the articles into TikTok videos, and boom!! That’s it, you will start noticing some traffic baby-boom.

After those three months of hard work and brand building, it’s time to monetize your content.

All you need is to sign up to an Affiliate Network and start getting affiliate links to use on your different platforms. Once you have been accepted into affiliate programs, you can use your tracked affiliate links in your content. Swap out the old links with your affiliate links, sit back and relax.

The top affiliate networks to join are:
 
– Impact Radius
– ShareASale
– Cj affiliates
– ClickBank
– PartnersStack
– PayKickStart

And some companies host their own affiliate programs, you just have to find them on the affiliates page on that company’s website

To start earning money and get your affiliate links, you have to be accepted into their affiliate program first, assuming you have been writing content full-time for 3 months it shouldn’t be a problem getting accepted. 

These companies choose carefully who they accept into their affiliate program and you have to make sure you have at least 500+ pageviews per month. A safe number is upward of 5000 pageviews.

Have your Paypal or Payoneer account ready, those are the two most common payouts used by affiliate networks.
By the way, there is nothing to look for when joining an affiliate program, don’t search about commission structure and all that crap, and here is why.

You should only consider the product you are promoting not just look for a good affiliate program. I recommend you to even go to the extent of checking the product and giving an actual real review.

If you give a nice paradise review about a product you never tried for the sake of the recurring commission, you’ll create a negative snowball effect. People will lose trust in you and it’s hard to recover from that trust me.

The last thing people need is to get scammed twice.

Don’t stop there, write more and more content on your website and keep posting on your social media accounts. The goal is to grow your community, get your name out there, and build brand awareness. Become a brand. People should know you are the go-to guy for the niche you are in. 

Having an active community can create a snowball effect on your website traffic. When people start to share your amazing content (your content will be amazing right?) traffic will grow exponentially. Kinda like mitosis in biology when a cell splits and the daughter cells split again – you can imagine the multiplication.

Killer content won’t just get you shares, it will build backlinks organically which is every blogger and affiliate marketer’s dream.

Add facts to your content – custom infographics, anything worth linking to. Do some case studies, conduct some surveys, and all that kinda stuff. I know it’s a lot of work but trust me it will all pay out sooner than later. It is good to have something that is only on your website, it’s also good for your SEO.

Don’t abandon your old blog posts, keep updating them, and keep them relevant and the good thing about a blog, you don’t need to redo the whole video. You just go and change 2022 to 2023 and add more data and update the statistics, and that’s it. Your very first blog post will drive traffic to your website for years, it’s important to keep the articles updated.

Our first post which is on how to start a blog has been driving massive traffic for some time now it keeps ranking in the top 5 in the most popular blog posts on this website. At least as of now. We have some cool content coming up and we’d like to see it challenge our old posts on traffic.

This is probably the hardest part of this whole process of building a successful affiliate marketing business. 

How to get people to read your content and convert that traffic into affiliate sales?

How?

Well, how am I supposed to know?

I am kidding here’s how! Its pretty simple actually.

You have to talk about your niche a lot on social media till people notice you are on to something and the way to do that is through posting consistently non-stop, I don’t mean overposting – just keep your social media active. If you tweet or post a lot about the latest trends in your niche, promote your blog content, giving out short tips and tricks to solve some of the problems in your niche, eventually people will start to follow you.

If people comment on your stuff, give a warm reply, nothing gives joy to a fan more than reacting to his/her comments. 

Another good way to drive traffic to your website is to answer questions on forum websites. And I mean a lot of questions. When you answer the questions make sure to link back to your content that either answers the question or provides additional information on the question.

That is why it is important to have content first before starting the hunt for traffic using this method. I recommend you try to reach 30 blog posts during your blog’s first 90 days. Publish 10 posts a month and that’s not that hard actually. You can do it. 

The reason you should publish content regularly is that sometimes your niche will be competing with big giants like Forbes, for example, those guys publish like, every 5 hours or something so you know – you have to keep up. 

The good thing is people don’t like reading articles from Forbes, we carried out a little survey and we discovered people like to read content from bloggers as they tend to be more realistic and honest about what they write compared to people who are paid to do so and usually use AI tools which create boring content.

So

Besides Quora there is also Reddit, there is….. More you guys find out but those two are undoubetably the best. There is also stack overflow if you trust your code to be worth the eyes of the public😅

It’s time to drive even more traffic and expand your community. It’s time to promote what you have been writing.

Here are the best ways to do so.

First of all, you are going to need to create a Canva account. Canva is a design tool that is used to create awesome-looking social media posts, logos, infographics, posters, flyers, etc. All the pictures you see here are Canva Designs we don’t have a Photoshop Guy. The fact that Canva is so easy, all the writers we have can create info-graphics themselves no worries.

Canva is very easy to use and also has a free plan you can try their free plan and see how good the whole product is. With the pro version there is no limit on what you can create. All the post we publish on our social media accounts were made with Canva. HEY!! follow us @lyncteck

So get a Canva account set up and start creating the following. 
– Infographics with a summary of your how-to posts
– Some short content extracted from an article into a post
– Instagram carousel(using Canva premade templates – very easy)
– Pinterest Pins

With Canva anything that has to do with design is possible. If you don’t want to create yourself you can always outsource the content management to some on Fiverr or Upwork.
Publish a least once every day across all your social media accounts and don’t forget to add hashtags – they increase the reach of your posts.

It’s time to track your affiliate links and see if you made any money yet. I recommend you check every month, that way you will reduce your chances of getting disappointed when you don’t see good results by checking every morning – save that for later will you.

Bookmark all your affiliate dashboards and that way they will be easier to manage.  Affiliate links are usually clumsy and long, you can use a tool like pretty links to modify your links to look more clean and more professional.

Repeat steps 5 to 8