How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
Tony Robbins famously stated that success leaves clues. He meant that you could find success by learning from others who are successful. This is true for new affiliates who want to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing.
Let’s take a look at what you can discover from one website’s success.
I interviewed Kenert Kumar from the content team at the lucrative affiliate marketing website HostingFacts.com to discover how they started, what’s important to them, and what they do to earn commissions every week throughout the year.
1. Determine Your Niche and Partner Program
I asked HostingFacts.com how they chose to work as affiliates in the hosting world.
How did you determine your niche?
“We got passionate about tech and hosting after we built our first few websites. The world of web hosting is vast, and having understood that other people were interested in the topic as well (read: plenty of potential traffic), we decided to move forward with it.”
If you’re completely new to the subject and have no idea on how to make money with affiliate marketing, a couple of key questions you want to ask are:
- How do I choose the right niche?
- How do I choose the right partner program?
Have you been doing this for a while? Do you know you’re doing everything right but not earning the money you wanted to achieve? You might want to revisit your choice of niche and affiliate program or refine and/or expand them.
Why choose a niche? Why not be everything to everyone?
When you focus on one context or small area of products or services, you’ll get better results because your audience is more focused.
This one decision affects all of your marketing, promotions, website, social media, message, voice, tone, and emails, and it influences your all-important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts and results.
All of these elements affect your profits.
What are some key niche factors?
- Choose a niche with affiliate marketing programs that pay high commissions.
- Be sure you like your niche; you’re going to work in it frequently and for a long time.
- Learn about affiliate marketing strategies that work.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Make sure the niche you go after is big and consistently has lots of traffic all over the world.
2. Sometimes the Best Promotion is Building Great Content
Kenert shared an insightful answer to my question about promoting your affiliate site.
What promotional methods work the best for you?
“Our best promotional method is, by far, our content and research. We go above and beyond to measure, test, and compare different solutions/providers. After that, it's a matter of providing all our research findings in the best way possible, so our readers get the most value out of it.”
Driving traffic to your website can require a mix of advertising, content marketing, search engine marketing, and email marketing. You won’t earn money from a site you don’t work on.
An ancient Latin phrase tells this truth: ex nihilo nihil fit - “You can’t get something from nothing.”
And if you want to be profitable, you’ll want to control expenses such as advertising. A superb way to limit or eliminate advertising is by focusing on great content.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Take the time to do quality research into your affiliate products so that your content rewards your visitors for hitting your site.
3. Use an Evergreen Content Marketing Strategy
I asked Kenert about evergreen content.
Which evergreen articles or topics bring you the most revenue?
“Our best articles are ultimate guides (where we provide in-depth information about a topic) and how-to articles which focus on providing effective solutions to common problems.”
Evergreen content is blog articles and other content that doesn’t need to be updated frequently due to changing prices, dates, technology, or other short-term considerations. When your marketing strategy includes evergreen content, you’ll be working on fewer, higher-quality, more in-depth blog articles that help your SEO and bring you more traffic.
You can create the right content, but if your audience isn’t at the point where they’re ready, willing, and able to purchase what you’re writing about, you’re not going to get paid.
Take some time and learn about buying stages to be sure your content is focused on people who are about to make a buying decision. Otherwise, your affiliate marketing website will just be informational. When you get this right, you’ll want to put most of your work into evergreen content.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Create high-value blog posts that can last year after year with occasional updates.
4. Show Me The Money: Earning Revenue
I asked about the all-important money question.
How do you earn money from your affiliate blog?
“We are partnered with some of the hosting providers that we know are good (having tested a lot of providers within the past years) and whose services we can recommend to our readers.”
Affiliate marketing isn't hard; you just need to learn how to make money using effective strategies. Your great marketing strategy should lead to affiliate income, or you’re wasting your time. But how do you know which direction to go to make sure you’ll see revenue from commissions?
KEY TAKEAWAY: Make sure you’ve tested the products you're representing and recommending for the best return on investment for your time.
5. Organic Search Engine Optimization is Promotion
Here’s what Kenert had to say about SEO.
What's the best SEO advice you could give people?
“I would sum [up] my SEO advice into two sentences:
- Less is more. Quality of content is much more important than quantity.
- Content is king. You can put a lot of effort into implementing different SEO tactics. However, if your content is not 10x better than your competitors', you will not have long-term success.”
Many website owners, bloggers, and affiliate marketers look at SEO as an afterthought. It’s something they do after their site is done. You know, build it, then get it in the search engines. But that approach is 100% backward.
Start with SEO and then build your site and content. Everything should be built toward an existing audience that has a strong search volume. Focus on creating great content that people are already searching for.
When you do this right, you don’t need to promote by paying for ads online to get traffic. Your superb, in-depth content can bring organic (natural) traffic to your site for free. And this helps you keep more revenue for your efforts.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Like almost everything in life, quality, not quantity, is what pays the most.
6. SEO is Much More Than Keywords and Phrases
I asked Kenert about SEO looking forward.
Where do you see SEO moving in the future?
“In the nearest future, we see SEO moving towards user experience signals. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that content is still of the utmost importance when it comes to SEO.”
When you start typing in Google’s search box, Google tries to finish your sentence. What’s happening is Google is using the millions of searches that happen every second to help you find what you’re looking for faster. That’s all part of Google’s focus on user experience. The things they fill in for you are the things most people are searching for, and sometimes it’s what Google wants you to find. Part of affiliate marketing success is getting into those results often.
In fact, once you enter your phrase and search, Google shows you the results they want to show you based on their algorithms, goals, and the things other users found most helpful. Their goals can be testing, profits, influence, and even other things, but Google knows that when they get you to the thing you’re looking for faster, you’ll be happier. And that’s User Experience.
Google knows the quality of user experience by looking at what you typed in for your search vs. how many websites you had to click on in the search results before you found what you were looking for. Part of that falls on the person typing the search, but Google handles human errors and language variations easily now. The other important piece is your website’s content and content structure.
A poor man’s SEO trick: The sites that get the most clicks (without the user going back to the search results and clicking again) are often the sites that rise to the top. If you’re in a niche, you need to search your competitors and see which ones rise to the top. Look at what they do and do it better.
KEY TAKEAWAY: As with other takeaways, quality is everything. But not just content quality. How your user gets to and uses your site are important factors.
Sidebar: Some of the most essential user experience factors are speed and uptime. Liquid Web and Nexcess hosting ensure your website is both fast and online.
Wrapping It All Up
In summary, a successful affiliate marketer should:
- Research and choose the right niche for their market and themselves.
- Promote and regularly test and refine how they promote.
- Create long-lasting evergreen, high-interest blog posts and content.
- Partner with good, high-paying affiliate programs.
- Focus their SEO efforts on quality content.
- Make sure their user’s experience is great.
Now that you’ve got the fundamentals, you can expand your knowledge and check out how to use affiliate marketing on your website.
Join thousands of successful Liquid Web affiliate marketing pros.
Enjoy these key benefits:
- Free to Join.
- 150% commission rate.
- $ 150 minimum payout.
- $ 7,000 maximum commission per sale.
- Full-time staff of affiliate program managers.
- Full-time marketing and promotional support.
- Content, ads, banners, and promotional resources.
- 24/7 access to Impact Radius account to track results.
Christopher Eller
Christopher Eller is a dad, husband, veteran, and an Affiliate Marketing Manager at Liquid Web, helping affiliates find more ways to monetize their platforms while helping their audiences. Christopher joined Liquid Web after being a happy client for several years, and a web developer/manager for two decades. His hobbies include cooking, board game design, and story building. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
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