Affiliate Marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a very simple idea and when I was first introduced to it I really had a moment of thinking why isn’t everyone doing this?

The dictionary definition is “a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.”

Or put more simply affiliate marketing is the selling of other people’s products via a link, which you then gain commision from.

Let me explain it in an easy way for you to understand. Affiliate marketing is something we do all the time in real life, we just never normally get paid. Say you have a friend who always looks great and loves makeup. Say you asked that friend what was the best mascara? She might send you a link to the one she uses. But she gets nothing for it.

But what if she had a blog or a whole website dedicated to her passion for make-up. What if she wrote a post about mascara and added an affiliate link to the mascara she uses? Then if you followed the link and bought that mascara she would get a small percentage of the money. Now, this may seem small, but then you think about the number of people on the internet (billions) and the number of women who search for makeup tips each week (hundreds of thousands) then you start to see how you could to make real money from this. You can find a much more detailed explanation here.

Now I started looking into affiliate marketing in some detail and spent many days finding affiliate sites with products I could link to. Lots of the information I found was to do with blogging and adding links into your blog. So I started up a blog and tried writing a few posts and added some links. I shared these on social media in the hope that people who saw them would want the products featured in my blog.

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The problem I had when I started was that I didn’t realize that it could be so much more than just a blog. Why create a blog with a few links when you can create a whole website full of links? Why create a little blog when you can create a website that ranks in the top 3 on google? Instead of my little blog about mascara, why not create a website called bestmakeuptips.com that comes top on google when anyone searches for makeup tips. With a thousand links to a thousand different products, you earn a commission from?

Over the space of a few months, I have gradually learned how to build a website, upload content, create affiliate links and use SEO to attract visitors. That means that the people coming to my website are actively looking for the products that are featured there. So they are customers already, ready to buy!  I don’t need to endlessly share my posts, although you still should have a social media presence it isn’t the only way to generate traffic. I don’t need to pester my family and friends to buy from me, people come to my site looking to buy the products on there.

Over to you…

The best thing about affiliate marketing for me is that you can really focus on your passions. Whatever your passions are you build your site around that and help people who are looking for answers. If you love makeup, clothes, washing machines or power drills! You can build an affiliate site linked to that.

So, if you are interested in finding out more about affiliate marketing then head over to my wealthy affiliate. You can start training and building a website completely for free and learn loads about marketing, SEO and content along the way.

I really hope this information will help you to fulfill your dreams of becoming self-employed, If you have any questions for me then please feel free to leave a comment and I will get back to you!