How to Make a Living with Affiliate Marketing

Are you looking to start an online business? Not sure you can make it with affiliate marketing? I’m here to let you know that you can! Other people have learned how to make a living with affiliate marketing and so can you! However, affiliate marketing is no get-rich-quick scheme, the first thing that you are going to need is a lot of patience. You’ll also need to find the willingness to learn the skill and start applying it on a consistent basis.

Learn the Ropes!

Affiliate marketing can take many forms on the internet. You can decide to create pay per click campaigns, you can go for social media marketing, you can rely on keywords and SEO, or you can create your own hybrid approach. There are literally hundreds of ways to be successful at affiliate marketing online!

The first thing that you need to do is to learn the basics. Essentially, what you are doing is referring buyers to a product online. How you get those buyers interested in clicking on your particular link is going to be up to you. However, you should learn some basics. I highly recommend learning from the Wealthy Affiliate training. It is free to start and then just a low monthly fee as you ramp up and learn more about affiliate marketing.

Test Out the Techniques

As you start affiliate marketing, you may be surprised what works best for you and your market. You may have initially thought that you were going to rely on straight Search Engine Optimization, as I did, but quickly discovered that there were lots of people in social media groups that were dying to hear my message.

Creating video didn’t turn out to be quite so profitable for me, but I have discovered that quite a few people were following me on YouTube. As I improve in video content creation, I can see that there is opportunity to learn more and make more with video!

Hone Your Craft

Once you have tested out a few different techniques and ways of sharing your affiliate links, it is time to dig down and hone your craft. Continue for another month or two of interacting with your audience, publishing the type of content that you have decided upon. Find ways to improve your delivery. You can get feedback from others in the Wealthy Affiliate community or seek out feedback from other internet marketers on the presentation of the material and how frequently you are sharing it.

If you are creating videos, find ways to make them more interesting. You can also improve the descriptions, so that they can be discovered by search engines. For blogs, you may want to include some more pictures and link to other relevant content within your website.

For the social media crowd, create a schedule of what and when you will be posting. Create a plan of attack for engaging in discussions. What groups are the most effective at generating conversations, where are people likely to read your content. This is all important information for you to know as an affiliate marketer.

The pay per clickers should be consistently analyzing their campaigns to discover which keywords are getting clicks and which ones aren’t all that relevant. What is making sales and what is not?

Scale Your Business

Once you have discovered what is working for you and your niche, you’ll want to enlarge those efforts! For people in the pay per click business, this means increasing your budget as profits come in. For the social media gurus, you can scale your business by increasing the amount of content and engagement that you put out.

Scaling your business does not mean that you have to be the one spending more and more time on it. Once you have mastered an affiliate marketing technique, you can train a virtual assistant to do it for you. There are inexpensive virtual assistants that will be happy to work for you. Some of them may be from other countries, but the dollar goes a long way in their country and you can get a bigger bang for your buck by hiring them. Here are some resources to look for virtual assistants:

• Odesk.com
• Upwork.com
• Redbutler.com
• Zirtual.com
• Uassist.me
• Onlinejobs.ph

You’ll want to hire a virtual assistant when you discover that you can’t handle all the tasks on your own. You also want to wait until you actually have an income from affiliate marketing before you start to think about hiring a virtual assistant. Finally, you’ll be ready to hire a full time assistant when you have learned what you need to be profitable with affiliate marketing. Prior to that, you won’t have a clue what is effective and what you will want to train your assistant to do for you.

Stay Positive

Affiliate marketing is a process that takes a bit of time. You don’t be an overnight millionaire unless you have spent a lot of sleepless nights working. Affiliate marketing for most people is more of a journey than a destination. Enjoy the ride and realize that you will face bumps along the way. You’ll get discouraged when all of your efforts don’t amount to a ton of money right away, but that is okay! It is consistency online that builds a community and a buyer base. Your consistency will pay off in the long run and after a year or two, you will discover that you are easily making a living from affiliate marketing. You may even be loving it by this time.

If you’re in the beginning stages of learning affiliate marketing and haven’t made your first dollar yet, there are a few things that you can do. You can start to reward yourself for taking the daily actions that will lead to success with internet marketing. You can start sharing your posts with your friends and family that encourage you. Finally, you can listen to positive affirmations. This keeps you in a positive mindset that you are moving forward and you will eventually be making a full time living through affiliate marketing.

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