Affiliate Marketing is a massive online industry. It has transformed the lives of thousands of people and turned them into online entrepreneurs.
Through affiliate marketing, it is possible to earn a livable income working from anywhere, even from home.
If you are planning to start your affiliate marketing journey, you need to take the first step by figuring out what the best website for affiliate marketing is and how to take advantage of it. This article is a good introduction to that.
WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?
Put simply, Affiliate Marketing is a marketing process that allows you to earn a commission by promoting other people’s products.
For example, if I own a mango farm and run a business selling mangoes, and you sell my mangoes for me, if I pay you for that service, that is affiliate marketing. You will be earning a commission by promoting my products.
As an affiliate marketer, your job is finding a great product that you like, recommend it to your audience, and getting paid for every sale you refer.
There are many benefits of affiliate marketing. Some of these are:
1. Affiliate marketing minimizes risk. As an affiliate marketer, you have no inventory, no shipping costs, and you do not have to invest in customer service. Your business runs at minimum risk to you.
Plus, if a product is not making money, you are not tied down to it. You can simply move on to a different product at no cost to you.
2. It is simple and straightforward. Since you are getting paid by commission, the harder you work, the more you get paid. The business model is quite simple (not east!). This can make you more motivated to push your business to the limit.
3. Affiliate marketing is cheap. As a business venture, it has little to no start-up costs. Most affiliate sites are free to join. No experience is required, no inventory and no shipping costs need to be paid.
Plus, the merchant company will handle customer care support, and some companies will even print out and send you promotional materials.
As an affiliate marketer, there is almost zero cost to you, all you have to invest in your business is your time and effort.
4. Freedom. As long as you can find customers to purchase the products that you have researched and recommended, you can work from anywhere you want. This flexibility is what attracts most people to affiliate marketing.
The prospect of working from the comfort and convenience of your home and possibly earning more than you would at your normal day job is very attractive.
5. Uncapped Earning Potential. An uncapped earning potential means that there is no ceiling or maximum amount of money you can earn from commissions.
With Affiliate Marketing, there is no limit to how much you can earn in a given period. These uncapped commissions are what motivate affiliate marketers to perform at a higher level. The more you sell, the more money you make.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
When it comes to the world of Affiliate Marketing, there is one thing that matters more than anything else: traffic. This business is all about traffic. Without it, you are as good as done.
Regardless of the affiliate website you choose, if you want to be successful as an affiliate marketer, you need traffic.
Good traffic results in more loyal customers, as well as better search engine ranking. Having a huge following convinces search engines to trust you, and this is how you will get listed on the first page of the SERPS.
How do you get this traffic? There are many ways to bring customers to your site, but free organic traffic is the best method of all. After an initial investment in time and work, organic traffic truly is the epitome of passive income.
You will need to generate a lot of content in the first few months of your affiliate marketing business. This content can be in the form or article, videos, or preferably both.
Now let’s get to the websites!
CLICKBANK
Clickbank is an online retailer that has been around forever. They have a nice affiliate program that allows digital marketers to work with them and promote the products of their manufacturers.
It has a wide selection of digital products on a wide number of niches. They also have one of the best training programs of any affiliate marketing site.
However, the platform does have some scammy products. As an affiliate marketer, it is important to remember that quality matters. Do not offer your readers a bad or average product just to make a quick buck.
AMAZON
Amazon was the pioneers of online affiliate marketing in the world. They started implementing affiliate marketing in the mid-90s.
Today, Amazon is the largest online retailer, serving practically any and every niche imaginable. There is a huge catalog of products. Almost every retailer sells their product on Amazon too. As an Amazon affiliate, you can promote any of these products.
The secret to Amazon’s success is that they have worked hard to build the sort of high level of trust that most companies can only dream of. Customers trust them, and companies trust them. This has, in turn, led to high conversion rates.
While being arguably the best website for affiliate marketing, Amazon however has very low payouts of between 4 to 8%, so you need to choose your product wisely.
SHAREASALE
ShareASale is also another company that has been around forever.
As of 2018, they have been in business for over 18 years.
They are an affiliate marketing network for large retailers. They sell a healthy mix of digital and physical products that you can choose from, so there is something for everyone, but their catalog is not as wide as Amazon’s.
WEALTHY AFFILIATE
Wealthy affiliate is an online community that provides all the training and tools you need to launch and maintain a successful Affiliate marketing business.
If you want to learn how to select a proper niche, create a website (in 30 seconds) and build original content that will attract a ton of visitors daily, then this platform is for you.
The training is bar none the best o the net. With set-by-step videos, clear cut directions and the tools to apply the training.
You can access 20 free step by step videos as well as gain the ability to build to 2 free websites. You can do this for FREE.
CLICK HERE NOW TO LEARN HOW YOU WILL BENEFIT FROM WEALTHY AFFILIATE FOR FREE
WRAP UP
I hope that you found this article helpful. This article showed what the benefits of affiliate marketing are and what websites are available to start affiliate marketing.
If you got nothing else from this article, I hope that you remember that traffic will be the thing that makes of breaks your business.
Wealthy affiliate has been the vehicle for me to achieve online success when most people that try it don’t make a dime. The training there has allowed be to build a solid business with rising traffic.
Please place your questions or comments below! I would love to hear from you and to help where I can.
To your affiliate success,
Mike
Affiliate marketing sounds like an awesome way to stay a business with no money. I know you say I can create a website in 30 seconds, but I don’t have any technical expertise. Is that going to be a problem for me? You said I need traffic – does Wealthy Affiliate teach how to do that? Because I don’t know about traffic. Are there any costs at all with Wealthy Affiliate? Thanks in advance
Hi Melissa. Very good questions. Let me answer each question one by one. It is not a problem if you do not know how to build a site. Wealthy affiliate has the tools you will need. They have a website creation tool that is extremely simple to use. you just enter a few parameters and it will do all the hard, technical work for you. As far as traffic goes, Wealthy affiliate will walk you step-by-step on how to create the best content that will generate all the traffic you need. Lastly, you ask about the cost associated with Wealthy Affiliate. There are 2 membership levels. The Starter level is free. The other level is a Premium membership for $49/mo. While the premium membership gives you a ton of tools, training and support, the free starter membership will give you access to the 2 things we talked about earlier. You will be able to access the tools to build 2 free websites as well as the training needed to create pick a niche and create amazing content. I hope this helped!
Yes, I completely agree with you, the bottom line is to get traffic, I am just curious, you said that organic traffic is the best of all, is there a big difference with paid traffic?
Well explained for those who start their online business, worth reading this article.
Thanks!
Hi Daniel,
Organic traffic is really the best traffic because it is consistent, cumulative over time and best of all it is free. Paid traffic is a different beast all together. Let me preface my answer by saying that I have tried PPC before but failed miserably. Paid traffic works well for people that have a lot of experience and available income to test, test and test again. For most us, this is not in the budget. Having said that, I hear that most big affiliates used paid traffic as one of their sources.
Wow, quite summarized for any newbie affiliate marketer.
I wish I came across your site when I was thinking about being an affiliate marketer.
Thanks, I enjoyed reading your post.
Good to hear from you Vanessa. I am glad you found the post helpful.