How to Do Affiliate Marketing?
We’ve covered a bit of how to do affiliate marketing before, but this time we thought we’d give you a full breakdown from beginning to end of an affiliate marketing program in a useful step-by-step guide.
We’re not saying it’s a guarantee that if you follow this guide, you’ll find yourself in possession of a regular, tidy passive income, but it’s the formula that gives you the best chance.
1. Make Sure You Have Set-Up Time
There’s a belief amongst some that affiliate marketing gives an immediate source of passive income, but that’s far from the case. Once you’ve set-up, you might be able to make an income from your affiliate site(s) with only occasional updates, but before you get there, there’s a lot of preparation to take care of.
Your site will need content, and you’ll need to either produce that or delegate it somewhere, sites need creating, designing, and all that fun stuff. You’re going to need a good stack of time in the early going.
2. Pick a Good Niche
When most day niche, they’re referring to a particular industry, but it goes deeper than that. Say you choose CBD (a wise choice, if we do say so), that’s fine, but that’s an industry, not a niche. If you try and cover everything in that industry, your content will get diluted.
Instead, pick a niche within the industry, for example, you could focus on the latest news from the CBD industry, or a particular product, like dry flower. Whatever you choose, focus purely on that and your content can be substantially more detailed and will be far more appealing.
Whatever you choose, make sure it’s something that interests you when readers can feel the passion from the content on a site, they are more likely to connect to it.
3. Put Time into Researching Affiliate Programs
You’ll often find there are two schools of thought when it comes to setting up an affiliate marketing company. Either choose one affiliate program and stick with it, or get onto as many as you can.
We believe the gold lies somewhere in the middle of the two. Varying your options certainly adds potential revenue streams, and if you only have one company you promote, your customers will tend to notice. However, if you just pick up any affiliate program, that shows to your readers too.
Instead, put research into the best affiliate programs, and the companies they are attached to. Your aim here is to find trustworthy companies with rewarding affiliate programs, that way both you and your customer base can reap the benefits.
4. Content, content, content
While the name of this particular step may be a little misleading, it’s not all about quantity here. Yes, you want your site to be packed full of articles, but you also need them to be interesting and informative, quality is the name of the game.
Whether you are writing yourself or finding freelancers to do it for you, make sure every article is on a subject that will matter to your customers, and is well-written, without grammatical or spelling errors, and gives all of the information your readers may want on the topic in hand.
The more high-quality, SEO friendly articles you have on your site, the more hits you’ll get, the more repeat readers you’ll get, the more your trust will go, and the more income will come in.
If you can, make sure you have a good amount of evergreen content. Obviously, if you’re a news site, this is a problem, but in that case, supplement with guides or product reviews, something that stays within your niche, but gives you content that will never go out of date.
5. Build Your Audience
If you build it, they will come.
No, no they won’t.
Whatever industry and niche you’ve chosen, there’s going to be competition, and you need to make sure that not only do you stand out from the pack, but also that people know you’re there. SEO will do some of this for you, but a strong social media presence with regular updates is the best way to get people to know you exist.
On top of that, mailing lists aren’t quite a dead art yet, and if you can get some guest posts featured on high traffic websites, you’ll be away.
6. Watch it Grow, but Keep Updating
Once you’ve ticked everything off this list, you’re well on your way, and you can watch the passive income buildup. However, make sure you keep topping up your content, because people can lose interest quickly.
As long as you keep updating, and keep bringing fresh articles, your customer base will keep growing, and so will your income.
The CBD industry is one of the best opportunities for affiliate marketing in the modern world. If you want to get involved and see if you can benefit from this fast-growing industry, click here and become a Plant & Hemp affiliate today.
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