If you have the skills to engage and influence people, you can become a pro in affiliate marketing. There are plenty of marketing channels to make a good affiliate income. In fact, brands allocate a specific budget for affiliate marketing. Statistics say the affiliate marketing industry is predicted to grow to a whopping $6.8 billion by the year 2020. Affiliate marketers are always on a look for a good affiliate program or networks to earn passive income. The earnings depend on both the price of the product and the rate of commission. After selecting a legit affiliate program, you wonder about the medium of promotion. As there are so many channels with a scattered audience,
Interestingly, you don’t need to create a website for working as an affiliate marketer. But it is essential to understand the mediums through which you can earn a decent affiliate income. First, let’s put some light on why affiliate marketers build a website when they have other alternatives.
Technically, you don’t need a website for earning a passive income through affiliate marketing. But if you want to become a full-time affiliate marketing, building a website can benefit you in the long run. While you can earn a decent affiliate income from other marketing channels, most affiliate programs require you to have a full-fledged website. Affiliate spammers are real and can hurt the business of many marketers. Moreover, the chances of duping customers via malicious links have increased manifold. Therefore, most affiliate programs make it mandatory to have a dedicated website. You may go for other promotional tools but having a blogging channel or dedicated website can be an efficient promotional tool and an excellent way to drive quality traffic. You may further leverage SEO to bring in the targeted audience to your website.
If you want to explore the domain of affiliate marketing, make sure you maintain transparency. Your affiliate links should not be in disguise. Be open about your commission and mention the same as a ‘key-note’. As I said earlier, earning affiliate income is possible without creating a website. But it is a good practice to have at least one dedicated landing page to carry out affiliate marketing. Here’s an example: Nowadays, you can build landing pages with a simple drag-and-drop feature. Thanks to technology, there are many email marketing software for affiliate marketers that come with the option to build landing pages. The reasons behind having a dedicated landing page are:
Email marketing can be deemed as an affordable way to earn affiliate income without creating a website. You’ll need two things: a good email service provider (ESP) and an excellent email copy. Robust email marketing software provides an option to leverage their domain to send legit emails to your email subscribers. Perform in-depth research and comparative analysis of different email marketing software before opting for any tool. You may start a series of newsletters on different valuable themes to engage your subscribers. In those emails, you may put your affiliate links so that people can make the purchase. The right approach is to maintain transparency of the earned commission just as Buzz-feed does. Here’s what Buzz-feed Shopping puts a note about its affiliate commission at the end of the email.
Your email lists help in driving conversion along with actively engaging your audience. Your subscribers voluntarily gave their data to hear exclusively from you. Hence, persuading them to buy from your suggested products becomes high. It is a more viable option than pay-per-click ads because of the affordability factor and the quality of leads. Therefore, emails come in handy for affiliate marketers. So if you are an affiliate marketer who has yet to test the option of emails, start collecting email contacts. For that, you may build a landing page with a lead generation form and a lead magnet. As mentioned above, it is not a tough ground to break. You may also go for A/B test emails to analyze what content works best for you.
Social Media is one such marketing channel that acts as a direct source of income for many affiliate marketers. One does not have to be a well-known personality or influence to make a good affiliate income. Here’s an affiliate promotional post on Facebook by ‘This is Why I’m Broke’: Social media platforms entail dedicated tools for affiliate marketers to share referral links to a specific built-in target audience. Let’s take an example here. Suppose there is a brand selling beauty products. To promote its products, it starts an affiliate program. They partner with fashion and beauty enthusiasts to become their affiliates. The selected affiliates create resonating content featuring these beauty products and put a link to the website for making a purchase. In the end, affiliates get paid for every sale through that link. Both the parties drive benefits from this partnership.
The brands drive profit from each sale and the affiliates get money for their content. In this way, brands can reach their dedicated audience through affiliates. B2C affiliate marketing follows a short sales cycle whereas, in a B2B environment, you have to put in more effort due to the involvement of more than one decision-maker. Deciding which social media platform works best in both scenarios is essential. For instance, Instagram or Pinterest is more favorable for B2C sales whereas LinkedIn or Facebook is a more viable option for B2B sales. YouTube videos can be used in both cases depending on the quality of content.
Joining online communities or forums is another option to earn a decent affiliate-income without having a website. This requires you to sign up at different online communities and post your referral links as a suggestion on the posts by other people. This might sound easy but in actual it requires in-depth research, knowledge, and expertise. People do not get convinced with a lousy piece of advice. They want proofs, actionable tips, and solutions to the queries. If you try posting generic content for the sake of posting your affiliate-link, the owners of the forums will simply not accept your reply. These communities have a strict check on affiliate-spammers. Yes, you read that right. Your content, referral product, and the online forum must be in sync with one another.
Being an active member of these communities is a good practice to gain the trust of its members instead of directly bombarding the members with your affiliate-links. To become an active member, you can suggest solutions to people’s queries, interact, network, provide actionable tips, and more. One such popular platform is Reddit. Another alternative is to join or make your Facebook group with a target-specific niche.
All affiliate marketers have their own preference for promoting products through different marketing channels. Which channel works best for you? Let me know your thoughts by commenting below.
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