How to run a Successful Affiliate Marketing Business

Intro

Affiliate Marketing has quickly become one of the most sought-after techniques for increasing your business' reach, sales and revenues. Both the companies and marketers have engaged with affiliate marketing proactively, making it a $12 Billion industry in 2022. With more companies shunning traditional marketing tools like banners, billboards, & advertisements, affiliate marketing is becoming their go-to technique to promote their business. This puts a huge opportunity and challenge in front of marketers to create a successful business for themselves. However, the sheer easiness of making money by creating content online has substantiated the competition. But you do not have to worry. Today, we will take every aspect of affiliate marketing under discussion to leave you with a knowledgeable outcome. But firstly, what is affiliate marketing?

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In the most basic terms, affiliate marketing refers to the process of earning a commission by promoting someone else's products online. Typically, an online retailer pushes its products and services through different content creators to generate impressions, leads, and sales. The creators get a commission on every sale made through their affiliate link. Anyone can become an affiliate marketer in 2022. There is no bar related to profession, qualification, age, gender or anything else. You can do it full-time or even part-time. But for the purposes of this article, let us talk about full-time affiliate marketing business. What are the best channels on which you can start affiliate marketing?

Best Channels for Affiliate Marketing

Social Media

One of the most powerful tools for any marketer, social media greatly benefits affiliate businesses. Social media's biggest advantages include huge customer reach, low investment & higher returns. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram & Twitter have a combined monthly user count of more than 5 billion people across the globe.

YouTube

Some would argue that YouTube is another type of social media. It might be, but it deserves a separate mention due to its huge potential. All kinds of content creators – professional, amateur & even freelancers can build a decent audience on YouTube without breaking a sweat. YouTubers promote many products in their videos. Any content, from product reviews and DIY to simple entertaining vlogs and dancing, can be viral on YouTube.

Blogs

Perhaps the most used platform for affiliate marketing, blogs are written articles that anyone can post on their own or someone else's website. Blogs involve some time and effort to create revenue in affiliate marketing as it involves a more technical approach with tools like SEO, Keyword Tracking, Website Credibility and much more.

Podcasts

One of the newer ways of entertainment, Podcasts are long audio episodes that stream on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime etc. These may be fictional stories, interviews, case studies, life experiences or anything else. Creators usually take a special segment out of their podcasts to promote their affiliates by talking about their products, benefits, origin and pricing.

Forums

Forums have existed for a long time now. They involve websites like Quora, Reddit, Discord etc. People can earn money through affiliate marketing on forums by answering people’s requests and queries. Uploading promotional content occasionally and subtly including affiliate links, helps build a genuine revenue stream from forums.

Now that you have some platforms to become an affiliate marketer, let us discuss the essential tools you may need to run a successful affiliate marketing business.

Best Tools for Affiliate Marketing

We will divide these tools into two categories for your benefit – written and visual content. Let’s first talk about the tools for written content.

UpPromote

This affiliate marketing software is an absolute show-stopper. It's the most-favored app on Shopify with over 3500 5-stars reviews praising its features, designs, and support. Within a single platform, you have everything you need to create, run, maintain, and pay affiliate all at once. The team also put out a dynamic pricing plan with a free forever option to help you test out the water before committed to a paid subscription.

Grammarly

Every content writer needs to know the importance of good grammar and vocabulary in a written piece of content. Grammarly helps bloggers improve their articles by pointing out grammatical mistakes and providing suggestions based on clarity, readability & conciseness. You can do all of this through the free version. The premium version also allows users to check for plagiarism in their articles.

Ranktracker Keyword Finder

To become a successful affiliate marketer, your content needs to come before many people's eyes. Whenever someone puts in a search intent on Google, the website uses crawlers to look for relevant keywords on different pages and show results from the most accurate ones. This makes the importance of keywords paramount. Ranktracker helps writers search for the best keywords related to their topic. The website provides results based on search volume, difficulty, history, tail etc.

Ranktracker Website Audit

You can have the most beautiful website with some amazing content, but it would be no benefit if the internal factors are not up to the mark. Ranktracker Website Audit tool helps writers get a deep insight into their website's SEO problems and provides actionable insights by working on more than 100 data points.

Now, let us discuss some of the most important tools for visual content creators

Canva

One of the most powerful and easy-to-use tools on the internet, Canva is a graphic design portal that allows users to choose from its huge repository of templates or create their version of graphics. Content creators can use it for creating posters, logos, presentations, cards, thumbnails and much more. The platform is available in both free and premium versions.

Filmora

While Canva is a great graphic design software, its abilities in video editing are quite limited. Filmora, on the other hand, is one of the best, user-friendly software that allows content creators to edit their videos efficiently in the most creative way possible. The software, available for download on Windows, iOS and Android, provides many presets related to intros, credits, transitions, etc.

Unsplash

Content creators often require stock images and footage to add to their videos. This stock content can be expensive for amateur creators and knock your budget out of order. Unsplash provides royalty & copyright-free stock images and videos that creators can easily use without legal or monetary bounds.

How to find success in Affiliate Marketing

Certain tips and tricks you can follow to make your business go from zero to a hundred in no time. These tips will also help you stay at the top of that mountain of competition for as long as you want.

Budgeting

Every full-time affiliate marketer has to be a content creator, and content requires some investment. For blogs, it can be your hosting, domain, writing tools etc. While people creating video and audio content may require a good camera, microphone, lighting and much more. Either way, you must set a budget for the beginning stages of your business. Investing too much too soon may not prove to be as fruitful as you’d like. So, be cautious and stay within your financial ability.

Choose your Platform

Everybody has different skills and talents. One type of content does not suit every platform. Before becoming a content creator, it is important that you play on your strengths and choose the right platform for yourself. Short-type content performs better on Instagram and Tiktok, while long videos are made for YouTube and website blogs are the best place for your articles.

Good Content

You can have the best tools and still fail to become a successful affiliate marketer. There is no replacement for good content when it comes to affiliate marketing. Your content – videos, photos, articles, blogs, answers, etc.- needs to have some uniqueness that sets it apart from everyone else. You need to provide value to your customer’s time and money. We advise you to research your topics well and create engaging and crisp content.

Topic Priority

You cannot specialize in every topic and niche. While affiliate marketing is a newer subject, creating content on redundant topics or in a boring manner may not get you anywhere. You need to ask yourself what kind of creator you want to be and what kind of content you want to make. For example, you can be a finance educator providing knowledge through comedic reels and posts. That is only one way. There are several paths in front of you. Choose the one that works best for you.

Right Affiliates

Every company these days provides an affiliate program. That does not mean that you need to collaborate with everyone. Your content and your brand have a certain tone and feeling. You should research your partnership options and choose the best affiliate partners that match the vibe of your content. For example, a beauty content creator collaborating with a sports company would make no sense. It also makes sense to look for an affiliate partner that is trending or experiencing rapid growth. For example, Lucasgift is a company that sells personalized gifts such as pens, wallets and keychains. The online seller has recently launched an affiliate program, and quickly signed up 18 sellers, with more joining all the time.Choosing the right affiliates is one of the best ways to increase leads and sales and build a long-term loyal following on social media.

Competitors

There is competition in every market, and content creation is seeing immense growth & new players every day. This makes it all the way more important for you to take a deep check on your fellow content creators' strategies. Learning about their affiliations, posting schedule, type of content etc., may give you an idea about what you need to do to optimize your business.

Track & Optimize

Tracking tools are always available to marketers on any online platform. These tools provide valuable insights like click rate, impressions, most liked content, active user time, age, location, gender etc. You can use these insights to optimize your content to create the most helpful and entertaining content online. Insights related to your affiliate links may also be available on different platforms.

Conclusion

We have listed down for you the best platforms, tools as well as practices that are going to help you become a successful affiliate marketer. All that is left is for you to start working on creating your network. Choose the channel & the topics that excite you the most and start your affiliate marketing journey today.