7 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Beginners

Many people are turning to affiliate marketing in the hope of making it big. However, this route is not for the faint of heart. Your success depends on a variety of factors including your niche, the quality of your content, and the skill of your promotion techniques. This article offers 7 proven tips for affiliate marketing beginners.

By following these 7 actionable affiliate tips, you can quickly and easily learn the basics of affiliate marketing.

1. Set a Goal

When you start affiliate marketing it is always a good idea to set a goal. You may want to get to $5,000 in revenue per month or sign up 50 new clients. It can be good to keep track of these goals and progress so you know when you are on the right track.

Don’t give up too soon. It takes time to make affiliate marketing work for you. Don’t expect huge results in the first few months.

Just give yourself a goal for traffic, or earnings, or content published each month, or week, or day, and work towards it to keep yourself motivated.

2. Avoid the Common Pitfalls in Affiliate Marketing

In order to avoid common pitfalls in affiliate marketing, beginners should take the time to do their research. It’s important to figure out who the target audience is and what type of products they want. Once these two pieces of information are known, it’s much easier to find the right products and start earning a profit.

3. Choose Affiliate Programs Wisely

With affiliate marketing being so popular, there are a lot of choices when it comes to choosing an affiliate program to promote. The first step in the process is understanding your target market.

You need to make sure you’re marketing something that they will be interested in.

This is where you choose your affiliate program wisely. Understanding what the market wants is the key to developing your marketing strategies and messaging and to your success.

4. Use a Blog

You can use a blog to share information about different affiliate offers. One of the most important things to do is to have a blog for affiliate marketing.

Blogs are what will build credibility and help others trust you. If you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, start by blogging.

Many want to jump into affiliate marketing with paid advertising and social media, but here’s the thing, paid advertising is expensive, especially when you’re just starting out and haven’t yet learned the nuances of creating marketing messages.

With social media, ultimately it’s “easy traffic” but also crap traffic that rarely converts to sales and revenues. Think about it, when you’re on Facebook or Twitter or any other social media platform are you in “buying mode”? Of course not, you’re relaxing, following friends, catching up on current events, so marketing to people on these platforms isn’t just disruptive (which is sometimes good and sometimes bad with marketing), but it’s intrusive and annoying to the end-user.

With a blog, you’re building an asset. Something you (or your company) owns. You control it.

5. Forget Everything About Keyword Research, it’s 2021

If you want your website to rank on Google in 2021, forget everything you’ve ever read or heard about keyword research. Without a doubt, there’s a lot of confusion over keywords and keyword research, the good thing today is that it’s mostly all useless.

A trend with Google, and other search engines, in recent times, has been to move beyond just keyword-to-content matching for their users, and instead, they’ve developed huge technologies around discerning the searcher’s intent in the form of a question, assuming if you’re searching then you’re seeking answers, so the results displayed today are more focused to answers around whatever term the searcher used.

Why is this such a good thing? Well, it demystifies the whole “keyword” thing for content creators and provides a very clear path of ideas on what type of content to create.

The bottom line, if you want to build real traffic from organic searches today, then focus your content creation efforts on answering very specific questions people in your niche ask, not on keywords.

6. Write to Market, Not to Wordcounts

Building on what I said in #5 above about creating content based on questions your target audience is asking rather than keywords, keep your content pieces narrowly focused on the specific question you’re answering and only write as much as you need to fully answer it for them.

This flies in the face of what’s been the trend over the past few years of “just write a little longer piece than your competitors have to outrank them in the SERPs”, but that too is a good thing.

For a few years, marketers and bloggers have been on this “build taller skyscrapers” content creation kick, resulting in the top results for many search terms being blog posts of 8,000 words and more. This was literally a race to the bottom by racing to the top.

Who in their right mind really wants to read an 8,000-word blog post on “how to get rid of ants”?

Nobody. Now I’m not judging the quality of these massive pieces of content, but at a certain point, the quality ceases to matter because the length means it’s running off on tons of tangents and not actually focusing on the question the user was looking to have answered, and that means it’s a poor user experience.

Fortunately, search engines have caught onto this, and today I almost never see these uber-long content pieces ranking near the top. Instead, reasonable length pieces that are ultra-focused on the specific term or question are ranking.

For a content creator today, this is good and bad. It’s good because it means you don’t have to sweat out trying to come up with 4,000-word posts on something that can be fully covered in-depth with a few hundred words. The bad thing is even a few hundred words can be tough to come by for some creators on a small or simple question, and if you veer off-focus even a little it’s going to be an obstacle to ranking for the question you’re answering.

The key takeaway here though is that your postings should be tightly written to focus solely on one topic and not roll off on tangents that are even semi-related just to up the word counts.

7. Give People Multiple Opportunities to Click Your Affiliate Links

When creating your content you don’t want it to be a long list of links, but having too few links can severely lessen your affiliate earnings.

There’s a lot of ways to increase the opportunities for visitors to your pages to click on your affiliate links. Personally, I like to use a “3 times” approach and have found it to boost sales or conversions significantly.

• Place the affiliate link into the text of your content naturally
• include an image or illustration graphic that links to your affiliate offer
• Create a summary or synopsis at the end of your content where you can include or reference the affiliate link for a 3rd and final time

BONUS: Step Up Your Marketing Game

The best way to ensure that your marketing works is to make sure that you are constantly working on a plan of action.

Make sure to have your marketing plan outlined before you start an affiliate marketing campaign. This includes how you will reach potential customers, your marketing message, and the different channels you will use.

My Favorite Tools & Services

The tools and services below, some I’m affiliated with and some I am not, are exactly what I recommend to paying clients based on value and quality.

WordPress & Web Hosting: BanProNET – Fast, secure, reliable web hosting for personal sites, small businesses, and national organizations since 2002.

Domain Names: NameSilo – I’ve had accounts with just about every domain registrar on the planet over the years, NameSilo by far is my favorite for simplicity and pricing, hands down.

Email Marketing: Hands-down I’ve found Aweber to be the easiest and most economical solution for the email marketing needs of my business, and believe me I’ve tried everyone over the last 20+ years.