Affiliate marketing involves the process of referring a product or service via a blog, social media platforms, or website.
When someone buys, through your unique link, the product or the service you are promoting, the affiliate earns a commission.
To start affiliate marketing, you need at least the following steps:
A- You need to join an Affiliate Network. There are thousands of affiliate networks you can choose from so that you can promote their products or services. The commission can form one product or service to another. Some examples of the companies that have affiliate programs are:
- Amazon, Clickbank, eBay, Shopify,
- Convertkit, Getresponse, Aweber,
- bluehost, Hostgator, Elementor etc
B- Promote the product or service by using the affiliate link Ad Network.
There are 2 ways that you can get your ads there to the buyers:
1- You can promote the product or service Free without any costs. This can be through your website, Facebook account, Linkedin account, Email list, Pinterest Account, Instagram account, Text messaging and some platforms that allow you to place your ads and affiliate links free. You may send an email to your friends referring to the product that you were previously talking about. You can add an affiliate link in case one or some of your friends may show interest to buying it. You may also communicate the message about the product or services to your friends on your personal facebook account.
2- Paid ads. You can pay money to place your ads on some platforms like Facebook, Google and other paid platforms.
Let us take Clickbank as an example so that we can follow step by step how to set up an account or join an affiliate network.
Clickbank is one of the biggest affiliate networks. It is a popular affiliate network for over 20 years and affiliates all over the world except a few countries made fortunes from its affiliate program.
1- If you do not already have an account with Clickbank, sign up as below:
2- After logging into your account or signing up as a new person, go to Marketplace
3- Choose the product or service from the Categories on your left that you would like to promote
4- The popular categories are wealth and health. In the category Health & Fitness, let us choose subcategories Exercise & Fitness
5- We can click on the red button Promote to get our Hoblink
6- Click on Generate Hoplink button to generate your affiliate link
7- Your affiliate link has been generated as in number 1. You can press the button to copy the link as in number 2.
8- The link you copied looks long and ugly like this
https://6daacii9ta05rrqgndpcwq2o17.hop.clickbank.net/
You need to make the link shorter. Here you can use link shortener like Bitly. So, go to Bitly and put the long ugly link into shorten your link space as in 2 and press the button Shorten. You will get shortner link like in 4. Now your link is short and attractive. You can then press the button Copy to copy the short form of your affiliate link which will be
https://bit.ly/2YgvDKW
You can send this affiliate link with your email or facebook to your friends while communicating with them as above. Here you are using a free way of promoting.
9- You can click on affiliate page to get some ads and make use of the resources so that you can promote the product or service on paid ad networks
10- If a customer buys a product or service using this link, you get the commission. Sometimes the commission may be one time commission and sometimes may be recurring.
It is as simple as that.
What are the biggest challenges to you to start affiliate marketing? Which of the above steps and tips can you apply immediately?
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