How to Become an Affiliate Marketer in 3 Simple Steps

how to become an affiliate marketer

So you’re dying to learn how to become an affiliate marketer? Well, first of all, if you want to start your own online business, there are many options available to you.

The most popular online business models available are:

Selling your own product
Offering B2B services
Advertising monetization on your own blog
Affiliate marketing business

Depending on your skills and the time you are willing to put in, you will decide which online business to get started in.

An affiliate marketing business is the most suitable model for a person who:

Wants to work part-time on his online business (no product development, customer support required)
Doesn’t have much technical knowledge (web design, programming and copywriting)
Doesn’t have a big budget to hire people and to set up more budget-demanding business models
Is willing to work hard on promoting and marketing his affiliate products online

If any of these apply to you then, with the help of this guide, you will learn how to become an affiliate marketer and get your first affiliate marketing business finally started.

Setup Your Affiliate Marketing Blog

A blog is a very good example of an affiliate marketing business for many reasons.

Having a blog allows you to combine both an informational website and a product-selling one without the need to set them both up differently.

You can create informative and problem-solving content while at the same time posting product reviews from which you can sell and recommend your affiliate products.

With your affiliate blog, you can connect easier with other niche-related blogs and build a relationship with them.

You can exchange content, ideas and comment on each other’s blogs to attract visitors to your website.

Setting up a blog from scratch is also the easiest type of website that you can build. All you need to do is:

Get a niche relevant domain name for $10 a year
Buy a web hosting account for about $50 a year, give or take
Install the WordPress blogging software. This is free and easy to install

So it takes around $60 to build your affiliate business, which is very low when compared with creating your own product, for example.

You also need to create a Gravatar account if you are installing a WordPress blog.

Gravatar accounts allow you to add your head-shot picture. Then when you write posts on your blog, WordPress will automatically add your picture as an author picture.

Plus, when you leave a comment using the same email as your Gravatar’s email, then your picture gets added next to your comment as well.

This will help you show people that you are a real person and you will connect with them much better.

How to Become an Affiliate Marketer: Find Your Niche and Segment It

There are two main reasons why affiliate marketers fail with their own venture: 1) failing to generate enough traffic and 2) failing to target the right niche.

Traffic is something you can keep improving but failing to target a profitable niche that you can contribute uniquely to is something that is harder to recover from.

Pick a niche you are really passionate about. Maybe it is a hobby of yours, like fishing or playing guitar or it is a life experience like losing weight.

Once you pinpoint what you are really good at and how you can help others overcome problems, then the next step is to further segment your niche.

Segmenting your niche will allow your affiliate website to become more targeted, which will help you sell your affiliate products better.

For example, a blogger whose niche is “weight loss” and tries to target weight loss pills, exercise equipment and diets all at the same time will not convert as well as a blogger who targets “weight loss equipment” only.

Because when a person visits your website and finds that you are talking about things he is not interested in, he doesn’t look at your website as an authority source that specializes in solving his problems.

But when the same person visits your segmented affiliate website and sees a variety of content on his main issue, he then knows you are an expert on his problem and he can then trust your product recommendations.

Niche segmentation is really easy to do. You can use Google search to find what segments your niche offers.

Let’s say your niche is “weight loss”, Google “weight loss a” (you can replace A with b and c,…etc for more segments):

niche segmentation

Find out which segment really excites you and that you have enough experience in.

And from there you can move on to finding profitable affiliate products to promote.

Finding Profitable Affiliate Products with Ease

Your affiliate marketing business thrives on products that offer the best affiliate commissions.

When a product owner compensates you generously for the sales you make, you can choose to promote it and even spend your own money on paid advertising campaigns.

From a business sense, you are looking for a high ROI (return on investment).

That means that if you spend, say, $100 to land 2 sales, then you need at least a profit of over $100 to break even and to eventually make extra profit.

When your affiliate product starts to make you a good net profit, you will be able to spin the wheel and reinvest your profits to make even more money.

Learning how to become an affiliate marketer with this concept in mind will help you achieve success much faster.

When it comes to finding affiliate products, you can use the marketplace of popular affiliate networks like:

ShareASale
Clickbank
Amazon
Plimus

When picking a niche-relevant product to promote, most of these affiliate networks will give you data, like how well the product sells. You can use this data when you are judging the profitability of the product.

These affiliate networks are free to sign up to and accessing their products marketplace is easy once you log into your account.

Another way to find affiliate products regardless of the affiliate network is to use Google.

Do a simple search for “YourSegment site:.com/affiliates”

finding affiliate products

This will return to you many affiliate programs for products in your niche segment.

By browsing these affiliate programs you can find out your affiliate commission, the product’s price and the affiliate network of the product. So sign up there and create your affiliate link.

Conclusion

Learning how to become an affiliate marketer becomes easy only when you follow a proven marketing strategy.

Acquiring knowledge about many affiliate marketing skills will help you take your business to the next level and quickly make it a success story.

There are many affiliate marketing courses like affset.com that can help you with more challenging areas, like traffic and designing your affiliate website.

Also, reading posts on top affiliate marketing blogs can help you further because many tricks and new strategies are being written about there.

Go ahead and tell me in the comments below what areas you are struggling in. I will be glad to answer all of your questions about how to become an affiliate marketer. J

About the Author

Ibrahim Dahy is a passionate Internet Marketer with 9 years experience gained from working with top IM gurus. He uses his background as a software programmer to try to solve internet marketing problems in his own unique way.

His latest affiliate marketing project can be seen over here at affset.com