The best method to make money from home using nothing but a laptop and internet connection is by far Affiliate Marketing.
You can be assured that process itself isn’t difficult – pretty much anyone can do affiliate marketing if they set their mind to it and understand what they’re doing.
What is it? It’s selling someone else’s product(s) for a commission.
Here’s how it works:
- Sign up to an affiliate program
- Find a product to promote
- Promote the product using your affiliate link
- Earn commissions on all sales made via your link
Yes, You Can Run A Full Time Business With Affiliate Marketing
A lot will depend on you with this kind of business. You will need to make it happen. The common illusion with affiliate marketing is that you can get someone else to do it for you. Well that business model doesn’t really exist.
Sure, if you know all about affiliate marketing and have an online business already established, you could start hiring other affiliates but there is no ‘Done For You’ system that can be handed to you as a beginner and provide you with a long term business.
It will require a fair bit of effort, work, persistence and I suppose a bit of luck here and there. But if you’re prepared for that, you can be an affiliate marketer and generate your own income as an online entrepreneur.
Also, the more you apply yourself, the easier this stuff gets – heck, you can even find the process enjoyable and satisfying.
To get to where I am now I used the training at Wealthy Affiliate, the largest affiliate marketing community that allows members to start for free.
I’ll be talking about the same kind of process that I learned through Wealthy Affiliate. Bear in mind, I only found this online community after trying many other scammy programs that promised me I could make money fast. This lazy approach made me go from one scam to another, losing far more money than I ever managed to earn.
When I found Wealthy Affiliate, I sensed that this was the real deal but was still scared off by the work I would have to put in to succeed. Eventually however, I stuck with it and simply applied myself to the training. That was how I became successful at last with affiliate marketing.
Well, let’s go through the process of how this works. We are going to focus mostly on blogging at first.
Blogging is a Great Way to do Affiliate Marketing
Create a blog, write passionately about something you like, add a few affiliate links here and there and you can make substantial income online!
That’s literally what we’re talking about here. Imagine doing that instead of slaving away in the 9-5 job system. No commuting to an office, no boss looking over your shoulder, no set time to start or finish your work, plenty of quality time and extra money to go other places and do the things you love!
A blog can be used in many ways including the way of making money through the blog as an affiliate. We’ll get into the steps in just a moment.
As a blogger, you will be able to generate free traffic; visitors who find your blog through search engines. You will need to do some keyword research of course, before you start writing your blog posts.
A well structured blog with good quality content that people are able to find has huge potential for generating revenue.
As a business model, affiliate marketing means that you don’t own the products you promote so you don’t have to worry about inventory or customer management/complaints etc.
You are simply promoting products on behalf of another company, such as Amazon, eBay, ClickBank, and really there are a great many out there. Most online markets have affiliate programs.
Right! Let’s get a look at the steps involved in making money as an affiliate with a blog.
Step 1: Chose a Niche.
You niche is what you focus on, what your blog is generally about. Even if your purpose for making a blog is to make money as an affiliate, you’ll still need to be natural and provide value. Value! That’s your first priority and money will come as a side effect.
Your niche should be something you are interested in or that you take a new interest in. You should be passionate about your niche and love it so that it will be easier for you to persevere with your website.
Let’s face it, you aren’t going to make great progress writing about something you’re just not into.
As well as niches you also have subniches. Some niches are so broad that you are better off choosing a subniche in order reduce competition and become more visible to your target audience.
So for example instead of the baby niche, you might focus on baby car seats, or baby playpens or similar devices and accessories.
Or you could go for the mountain bike niche, rather than just the bike niche. Or The Drone niche rather than the RC niche, or even the DJI Drone niche.
One example from the crash course, Commission Academy is Robot Vacuum Cleaners. Again, this narrows down the niche from simply ‘vacuums’ to ‘robot vacuums.’
You will also want your website to stay organised. If it is confused, search engines will also be confused and this can hurt your rankings. So again, a good way to keep it organised is to stick with one niche per site. All blog posts should be relevant to your niche.
Let’s give this a quick rundown.
Keep in mind when choosing a niche:
- Pick something that interests you
- Narrow down your niche
- Prepare to keep your blog focused on this niche
- Keep researching and improving your knowledge of it
Step 2: Build a Website.
This can be done in literally 30 seconds and for free once you sign up as a starter member at Wealthy Affiliate. It provides the basic training and free hosting for 1 website, as well as many other perks, live help and tools.
Wealthy Affiliate can get you up and running with a WordPress website in no time.
As you can see, it doesn’t take much to get this far. Choose a niche and build a WordPress website. Then you’ll want to make that site take shape and before long, you can start producing content on it.
Commission Academy is partnered with Wealthy Affiliate and they show you in the free crash course how to quickly get a brand for your site and integrate Aweber autoresponder which will enable you to do email marketing further down the road.
A brand helps with creating trust. You want trust in order to get a good following; people who trust you enough to purchase things from your site. WordPress encourages users to go to Fiverr.com to get an affordable brand for their website.
Once you know the basics of running a website and keyword research, you’ll want to crack on with producing content.
Not all of your content should be promotional material. Some of it should just be there to provide value and information. But within purely informative posts, you may link to other pages within your website. These other pages may include affiliate links.
This helps with building trust and better rankings from Google. Referring readers to other articles within your site shows that it is an authority site. But occasionally it will also help to link to other sites, preferably big ones.
To convert your website visitors into buyers you’ll want plenty of posts that focus on product reviews.
A person reading a review is like a customer at the end of the funnel; they are ready to buy. They just want to make sure what they are thinking of buying is really the best option for them. You are there to help them to make that final decision to buy.
You will list the features, the good the bad, (not that you should focus a lot on the bad points but make it an honest and factual review) and perhaps you will suggest an alternative and/or better option for them to buy.
Basically, how affiliate marketing works with a blog is to provide relevant and helpful content to a target audience through a niche site and within your articles to leave affiliate links here and there.
As the affiliate, every one of your links is tracked to you, ensuring that when anyone purchases something through clicking on one of your affiliate links, you earn a commission.
Let’s narrow this step down – getting your website going:
- Head over to Wealthy Affiliate and quickly get a free website up and running
- Get a brand with Fiverr and integrate Aweber on your site or another autoresponder such as GetResponse or Mailchimp to gather emails from your future website visitors. You can market to these leads by follow up emails, providing value, gaining their trust and promoting affiliate offers.
- With the help of free training and tools, from either Wealthy Affiliate or Commission Academy, start producing quality, engaging content relevant to your niche.
- Just keep it going with consistency, posting about 3 or more articles a week and be patient when waiting for results. It may take a few months for Google to rank you. Other search engines will rank you faster, such as Bing and Yahoo.
- To boost your visibility more, use video as well, such as an accompanying YouTube channel. Share your blogposts and videos on your social media channels. Build a following on LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. The same can be done on Facebook, such as by creating a group or page.
Step 3: Attract Organic Traffic
We’ve covered most of this step already. It’s the vital step before the good stuff happens!
To generate free traffic, follow all the usual directives, such as regular posting and always remember, provide quality and value to your visitors. This helps you rank higher than your competitors in search results.
But as well as following the usual stuff, keep learning! Never stop learning about affiliate marketing, blogging, SEO, keyword research, beating your competitors by doing a better job and ranking higher on Google.
Research your niche all the time and the ins and outs of internet marketing. Make it your hobby and become an expert in your field over time with a big, beautiful authority website.
Step 4: Earn Revenue – Repeat!
If you’ve been taking action with the previous steps, you can and will make money with affiliate marketing – money from free website traffic.
Another good money tip is to look into digital products which provide you with recurring commissions due to them having monthly or annual subscriptions.
If you have a successful website that is earning you money, you can continue to keep growing it or start a new website in the same niche, or a similar one, or even in a completely different one.
To really hit the ground running with all this, I always recommend to people sign up for free to Wealthy Affiliate and/or Commission Academy. Both are free (Premium is available for WA but not required) and each training platform is packed with information and resources.
I hope this has been a useful overview of how to make money online with affiliate marketing for free and using blogging as your primary method.
Take action today! I wish you the best!
