How to make money with Affiliate Marketing. Part II.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing, like any business, has its pros and cons that you should analyze:
Advantages
- there is no need to create products, nor do all the administrative and logistics management.
- Nor, take care of providing support or customer service.
- Once a good strategy is put together, the business can be profitable with little management on your part.
- collaborations are for a specific time, which will give you flexibility to work with different companies and choose the most favorable ones.
- When you recommend quality products that help people who visit your website, you earn a good reputation.
- companies can grow without taking risks and acquire an excellent sales force.
Disadvantages
- putting together your affiliate marketing strategy can take considerable time depending on your initial knowledge. You have to build a strong foundation as if you were selling your own products.
- The number of promotions you can do in a given period of time is limited, you can not just sell. The excess of links can bring penalties from Google.
- if a company chooses a bad affiliate, it will lose time and resources invested in creating links, images or banners.
Basic principles that I recommend you follow to create an affiliate page.
All essential and mandatory compliance:
be credible
Think that it is not about deceiving people by recommending any product, but those that you would particularly use and are part of your routine, work or lifestyle. Understand and respect the needs of your audience, because your opinion will be considered valuable and they will take what you are promoting as true.
Before being a member of a company, answer the following: do you have confidence in their products? Do you consider them to be of quality? What sets them apart from the rest and what things can be solved with them? Remember that you will earn commissions thanks to your reputation, so always keep it positive.
Recommend only what you would like to buy
Hand in hand with the above principle, do not promote any product. You are also a consumer and you like that your money is well worth it and, of course, that you are not deceived with false promises. Likewise, people will trust you more if you tell about your experience as a buyer. If you add explanations in your recommendations of how you have used or felt about X product, more people will be encouraged to buy it.
be relevant
There must be coherence between your website, your area of knowledge or business, the niche you are targeting and the product or service to promote. Being relevant is understanding what your audience needs and looking for those things that may be of interest to them.
Do not try to sell, but advise
Your website will be a place of information, you must help people to achieve something based on your knowledge and as an added value recommend a product. You must function as a guide and in the first instance you must offer useful content.
Affiliate links should seem second nature given your level of expertise. But if when people visit your page they only find sales, they will probably abandon it and not come back.
Don’t think in the short term
Affiliate marketing is a profitable business to generate passive income online, but it is not an immediate business whose results you will see in the short term. First you must:
- stablish a relationship of trust and value with the public
- position your content
- create authority
- then you can promote and get real results.
What do you need to know to create a successful affiliate page?
1. Knowledge about a product or service or a specific market niche
You can learn many of the techniques along the way, but you have to start from somewhere or, in short, you have to know something. When you master a product in detail, you will know its qualities and the problems it can solve. On the other hand, by knowing a market niche, you are able to measure and segment a group of buyers, therefore, the products they are looking to buy.
2. Create a blog
This will be the channel to publish your valuable content and the main source of traffic from potential customers for the product to be promoted. You will have to create your blog and for this you may need to know some basic parameters that will help you build it.
Aspects related to the domain, hosting, design and programming will be very relevant. If you can do it, hire professionals to do quality work and invest in quality hosting, it will pay off in the end.
3. Knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO)
Once you have your blog and a couple of articles, you should gain visibility. The content is useless if nobody sees it.
SEO optimization will help you climb search engine rankings every time someone uses a term related to your content.
Here keyword management criteria, link optimization, information hierarchy, relevance and authority come into play. There are professionals who are in charge of working on all the technical aspects of SEO.
Be in affiliate programs of the products you are going to promote
As I mentioned before, you could contact the companies directly and build your affiliate portfolio, but this may take more time. We recommend an affiliate program, as it will be easier and faster to start, and they already have a secure infrastructure.
5. Constancy
Even if you can’t dedicate 100% of your time to it right now and you just want to make some extra money, affiliate marketing could pay you big dividends in the long run, only if you stick with it.
6. A bank account with which you can associate the programs you sign up for
Of course, an administrative aspect no less important.
