Given the rise in inflation around the globe, making money online with minimal effort is an increasingly popular trend these days. Since the dawn of time, people have always sought ways to improve their abundance. In the past, they moved to other uninhabited places, discovered new territories, and even fought to acquire and protect them. With the dawn of industrialization, when people had to make efforts in quite challenging, even inhuman conditions, the dream of passive income became more and more popular: for example, by renting out arable land, business premises, and dwellings. These are still popular ways to gain passive income. But usually, achieving such a dream takes a lot of time and a lot of hardship.
However, modern technologies allow a person to earn a decent monthly passive income with zero to minimal effort. And while investing in funds and cryptocurrencies carries certain risks, there is another exciting and profitable way that differs from all other popular methods. It is 100% risk-free and the initial investments are equal to an ordinary Sunday expense at the supermarket. We are talking about affiliate marketing - the safest way to earn money on the Internet.
In this article, we will explain to you what affiliate marketing is, how to become an affiliate, and why hosting affiliate marketing is one of the most successful ways to increase your monthly income in an easy and painless manner.
What Affiliate Marketing is? How Does it Work?
Affiliate marketing is a way to earn passive income with no risk and almost no investment. Unlike ordinary advertising campaigns that are usually very boring for the viewers and thus often have the opposite of the desired effect, businesses don’t pay anything in advance with affiliation. They pay money to the affiliate marketer once a month or once every few months based on the calculation of their commissions. Along with the fact that this type of advertising is far more persuasive as affiliates usually give honest reviews of products and services, many affiliate companies prefer this method of advertising because they do not need to pay beforehand for traditional advertising that could never guarantee the return of the invested amount over the next few months.
With affiliate marketing, the merchant whose products and services are promoted by the affiliate marketer pays a commission (usually 5 to 25% of the profit from the sale) to them for each product purchased through their affiliate link that is usually embedded in call-to-action (CPA) buttons or in keywords in the text itself. The affiliate link contains a unique identification code, so it is clear that the purchase was helped by your advertising activity. Thus, every sale made through your affiliate link could bring you profit.
How to get Started
Your only 6 steps of effort in creating your new, fresh, and potentially quite successful affiliate business will be the following:
- Choose your favorite niche
- Sign up for an affiliate program
- Create a site or a social network profile page
- Create posts about the product(s) or service(s) that are both useful and advertising
- Attach the link to a button or to keywords in the text itself
- Learn your platform’s marketing tricks
Step #1: Choose your favorite niche
Unlike traditional trading practices, honesty is a very precious quality in affiliate marketing. The more honest your ratings and reviews are for the products and services you offer, the more profit you will make over a long period of time. That’s why the first thing you should start with is thinking about which niche will be the most interesting for your personality, perceptions, and hobbies. The more interesting the affiliate niche is to you, the more entertaining it will be for you to offer products and services that are related to it by preparing honest reviews. And the more passion you will be putting into your business as well.
Here are some examples of very profitable niches for affiliate marketing business:
- Web hosting affiliate marketing
- Finance and cryptocurrencies
- Online betting and casinos
- Fashion and cosmetics
- Fitness and healthcare
- Tourism
- Plane, train, and bus tickets
- Baby and childcare
- Pets
- Devices for home
- Tickets for concerts, festivals, cinema, theater, etc.
But no matter how profitable your favorite niche is - scantily or lavishly, the biggest contributions to your success will be a combination of three main free components: desire, creativity, and passion.
Step #2: Sign up for an affiliate program
Once you've determined your niche, the next crucial doings are choosing an affiliate program to sign up for, getting your link, and getting started with the creative work.
You could sign up for several affiliate programs and help with the sale of many similar products and services but from different brands. Choosing an affiliate program (or maybe several affiliate programs) might be quite entertaining. Just type the name of your niche followed by “affiliate program” and you will find dozens of affiliate programs to register. For instance, if your niche is hosting or software products, type “hosting affiliate program” or “software affiliate program” on Google and choose the most favorable options from the abundance of possibilities.
Affiliate programs have their conditions and payment politics. Usually, each affiliate program offers the following types of deals, but they may vary:
- Revenue share: The most common one. Affiliate marketers earn percentages of the revenues generated through their affiliate links.
- Per purchase: Affiliate marketers get a set amount of money for each purchase made through their individual affiliate links.
- Hybrid deal: Usually, this is a combined “per purchase” and “revenue share” option. In this case, the “per purchase” option is compensated by a lower percentage of the total turnover that is generated by an affiliate link.
- Flat deal: Affiliate marketers earn a fixed profit based on their advertising only. But this is quite a rare option and, usually, it is favorable for really very huge affiliate marketers only.
To all these options, there is a possibility to add one more additional option: a sub-affiliate deal. By referring another affiliate marketer to the program, you’ll be paid a fixed percentage of their income too.
In order to make the most suitable choices from the very beginning, it would be good to consider your real possibilities in advance. Keep in mind that it is possible to change the deal type over time, but it is usually not easy to convince affiliate managers to do so. That is why it is very important exactly which deal you choose right from the start.
Payouts are usually transferred by bank accounts. Often, you could also benefit from e-wallets, such as PayPal, Skrill, or Apple Pay. Most probably, there would be many different payout methods. How you will be getting your earnings is usually up to your personal choice.
Step #3: Create a site or a social network profile page
Once you have registered for an affiliate program, you should choose how to advertise the products and services. The affiliate marketer earns a commission from the products and services they resell through a single channel or various channels. Here are the most frequently used straits for popularizing your affiliate link:
- Affiliate website: This is the best way, at least in our opinion, to promote products and services through affiliate marketing. For this purpose, you need an affiliate website where you can publish honest and genuine textual or video reviews. In them, you could analyze the qualities and abilities of the products and present their positive and negative sides. Of course, it is important to also embed the affiliate link that leads to the merchant's offer page in a visible place. In case you present several similar products or services from different brands, you could also present a ranking based on your own criteria. Applying decent SEO practices will definitely improve the traffic to your website and increase the number of your sales.
- Blog: Another way to promote your affiliate link is to embed it in blog articles. In them, you could retell stories of real users who are satisfied with the properties of the products or services you are promoting but you could also represent their disappointment by some flaws. Or you could write useful articles related to your product niche based on quality and trustworthy scientific, statistical, or expert sources. Just like with the affiliate pages, it is very important to apply good SEO practices to be findable and competitive.
- Text and video posts on social networks: Posting content from affiliate pages on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn is very popular nowadays. Affiliate marketing can also be conducted by creating nice affiliate pages directly on these social networks. There, you could share short and right-to-the-point messages promoting products and services. You can also record short videos showing how a product is being used and how you evaluate its advantages and disadvantages with its appliance. A good and very popular modern idea is affiliate marketing by influencers. I.e., advertising your affiliate link on social media or video platforms with the ad being directly linked to your personality.
- YouTube or other video channels: There is no way you have not come across useful videos on YouTube that include advertising of various products and services. Usually, such videos present a lot of useful information, and the affiliate link is often attached right below the videos. If you have the necessary filming, video editing, and scripting skills, this could be the right way for you to promote your affiliate links.
- Email marketing: Though being a less and less popular method, email marketing still has its initiators and customers. With it, advertising messages are sent to various potential buyers, but these emails need special precautionary attention. To make sure the messages do not end up directly in the spam folder, some specific skills are needed for a successful email marketing campaign. For instance, taking the necessary preventive measures against some specific challenges.
Step #4: Create posts about the product(s) or service(s) that are both useful and advertising
Here you have to rely on two main factors - your own creativity and your writing and marketing skills. Here is a list of some general key points that will not be bad to consider following when preparing both useful and advertising content.
- Honesty and Integrity: As mentioned above, the most important principle in preparing affiliate marketing copies, posts, or videos is being honest with your customers. Only then could they gain trust in you and become your regular buyers.
- Make a brainstorming (on your own): Think of several creative ideas and how each of them can be implemented. So, you can choose the right approach out of several to build the right textual content, social media post, or YouTube video.
- Identify with your clients: Imagine you were a client, and think about why someone might need this product or service: what would be their worries; what they would like to gain or avoid; what exactly would the service do for them; and what would make the product really special for them. If you can truly put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer, you will certainly have better chances to make your clients happy and the service or product profitable for you.
- Choose your target: Each product is best marketable to a different group of people. It would be good to create a certain target group based on specific signs and direct your messages to them. There is no point in targeting the product to groups that simply will not need it. Some popular social networks, such as Facebook, allow you to make your sponsored posts appear only to people from a particular target group.
- Refine your language: Once you've written your text or video script, read it over a few times, try to get into it with your heart and mind, and make beneficial corrections to it so that it looks more and more polished after each read. And once it seems perfect to you, you can stop making new corrections and consider this point of the task completed.
- Remove unnecessary words: It is especially important not to use redundant words when posting on social networks. Choose precise and short messages affecting human emotions. If you use quite long sentences, the post is very likely to be passed by scrolling down.
Step #5: Attach the link to a button or to keywords in the text itself
Once you have prepared your wonderful blog or article, it is time to add the affiliate link to it. Most often, it is implemented into call-to-action (CTA) buttons or in important words in the textual content. These buttons might be with the following exemplary short CTA texts:
- Order with discount
- Buy here
- Check Prices
- To the offer page
- Look at our special offer
The call-to-action buttons need to be somehow outlined. That’s why they tend to be mainly in color, chiefly in the most noticeable hues, such as red, blue, orange, or green. These are the main short rules for these buttons that contain the embedded links:
- Their shape should be rectangular, preferably with refined edges.
- It must have CTA (call to action) text on it.
- It should be in a distinctive color.
To make sure that the client won’t buy the product from the trader’s official website but through the affiliate link, they might be required to type a short and easy-to-remember bonus code to get a discount. For this reason, the prices advertised on affiliate pages are almost always lower than on the affiliate program holder's website.
Step #6: Learn your platform’s marketing tricks
Whichever channel you choose to advertise your affiliate link - affiliate site, blog, social network page, video portal, etc. - you will really help yourself a lot if you learn its specific marketing tricks.
Depending on the particular channel type, your affiliate business could benefit from the best possible search engine optimization (SEO) practices, trending hashtags, and other promotional instruments that could popularize your affiliate link.
Here are links to some useful videos you could watch to learn some tricks to advertise your ad publications:
Why Hosting Affiliate Marketing is Both Profitable and Cool?
Hosting affiliate marketing is among the most favorable online niches nowadays. If you think that this is your best choice for earning passive income, do not hesitate even for a moment and explore the most attractive and profitable affiliate programs right now.
Why don’t you check the types of proposed deals on MissAffiliate.com? Our services are top, we have favorable deals, and we are proud that we have very friendly and cordially helpful customer support for both affiliate marketers and customers. We do appreciate everyone who we are working with, and therefore our team of highly qualified experts works directly with our clients 24/7. We assume that our great attitude and big responsibility is the reason why we were ranked by our customers really aloft on Trustpilot with the wonderful 4.9 out of 5 stars.
Now, you already know how to resell products and services online very easily and earn money for almost no effort. You just need to choose your best affiliate program out of hundreds out there. It is really that easy!
