A Guide To Making Your Affiliate Marketing Work

First Things First – Why Are You Failing?

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1. Not Having A Sustainable Platform

Everything starts with an impactful platform. You at least need a foundation by which you’ll be able to convince people to buy through your affiliate links or become a part of your business.

The platform here is either a blog, a YouTube channel, an Instagram account, a professional group, or a sales funnel.

So, one thing is clear at all. Those videos showing you strategies including commenting on blogs, spamming forums, and messaging hundreds of people on Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn don’t work.

Even if they do, it’s not sustainable. And all you want in this lucrative online world is something that can pay your bills over and over again.

On top of that, these methods won’t be generating you thousands of dollars at all. Actually, not even a couple hundred.

So, let’s ask, why don’t those methods work?

Simple answer – nobody knows who the hell you are.

In more than simple words, you don’t have any credibility or trust built. You don’t have any value to provide to people. You don’t have a professional blog where you share some great information.

Neither an Instagram with likable pictures nor a YouTube channel showing something.

If that’s the case, how can you expect people to just believe you and buy the products you’re offering them?

I know it can be discouraging but just ask yourself. If I’d find your Twitter handle and message you something like this:

“Hey, your profile looks amazing. This is a great product. I think you should buy this. Here’s the link. Just go and buy it right away.”

What would you think?

I’m just messing around, right?

That’s the point.

You’ve got to have some platform that will not only build up your credibility and trustworthiness but also generate a consistent income stream for the rest of your life.

3. You’re Sending Low-Quality Traffic

Getting traffic (visitors) is the most challenging part of the game. And it’s crystal clear that it has to deal with quality and not quantity.

Maybe you tried Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing Ads, or even creating content to send a couple hundred people to the offer but you didn’t make anything much.

The quality of traffic plays an important role here.

With paid advertisements, if you’re targeting places where people don’t have much to spend or you’re targeting cheap keywords via search engines to save money and make a profit, it’s not going to work.

Just think about it. Sending 10 people that have money versus sending 100 people that don’t. Which one you’d rather prefer?

The second one for sure.

The same story goes with content creation. If you’re writing blogs like – ‘Make $1,000 per day sleeping’ or ‘Make $1,000 playing games’ or even ‘Lose weight without going to the gym and drinking coke’, you might get a lot of people but I’m damn sure that they’ll not spend money on your offerings.

That’s super low-quality traffic and will never help you out.

Statement 1 – “Hey, so if you want to make money online, ClickFunnels can help you get there. Click the link below to claim your 14 day free trial with ClickFunnels.”

Statement 2 – “Hey, so if you want to make money online, you need to collect people’s contact information and follow up with them to make them interested into your products as an affiliate. First, you need to build a landing page with ClickFunnels to collect leads, then you need to teach them a little bit to warm them up, and then finally, redirect them to the affiliate offer so that they can buy the product you’re an affiliate for.”

Both the statements are good to convince someone but the difference is that in the first one, a person won’t be having an idea about how to use ClickFunnels and what it can do for him/her.

On the next side of the wall, the second condition educates people about how the particular product can be put into use.

5. You’re Making False Claims

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6. The Front End Offer Is Too Expensive

You watch these online gurus who teach the concept of ‘low ticket’ and ‘high ticket’ products. I’ve watched a lot of gurus comparing 100 products for $10 commission each and one product for $1,000 commission.

You again get excited and start promoting $3,000 or $5,000 worth of courses, masterminds, or supplements.

And nothing happens.

Why? Because nobody is interested in paying someone $5,000 front end (even if they have that money to spend).

People don’t even like to pay $1,000 upfront (if you’re a beginner with your targeting).

If someone’s selling that much expensive offers on the front end, it’s not a good marketing strategy.

Hence, your front end offer should be a small one. Just, for example, it can start with a $50 subscription and then as the user finds it valuable, there could be gradual and strategic upgrades up to $30,000 in the end.

That’s how it works. So, if you’re promoting a product that straightaway costs thousands of dollars, forget making tons of money.

I’m not discouraging you. But it is what it is.

8. You’re Not That Patient

It took me nine months before I made my first sale. Now, the circumstances with me were completely different. I had zero dollars in my pocket or bank account.

All I did was borrowed money from one of my brothers and started a health blog which took me nine months to get some serious traffic, leads, and sales.

Often, people try it for a day or two, or maybe even a month or two, and then give up. at the very moment when it’s just going to happen. I feel so bad for them.

You have to be super patient. It’s not a get rich overnight scheme. It takes time and money (both of them).

Just consider me. Not only did I have the patience to let it play by itself but there’s a scenario where I was actually losing money.

But hey, I was confident that eventually, it was going to take a turn. I believed in the power of the universe and my work.

10. You’re Just Hoping To Get Sales

See, this is online world. You can’t go in the traditional way of hoping for something when you can track every movement of your success.

If you have a blog and you’ve recommended products to your audience, don’t just assume people are going to buy. Help them walking their way to the thank you page.

If a lot of people are not clicking your links, you need to find the reasons for why they’re not doing it.

If a lot of people are bouncing back from your website or blog, try to find what is causing them to bounce off.

Track your links to figure out what is the problem people are going to the product page but not buying the product.

Retarget people who’ve visited your sales page but not the thank you page. It’s not always the reason that they didn’t like the product.

Maybe their cat started crying and they got distracted. Maybe they got a call from their girlfriend and they forgot about it at all.

It’s your responsibility to remind them that they need to buy the product.

These were some of the reasons why beginners fail with the ‘passive income’ idea.

I’m sure you would have been making some of these mistakes if not all.

Right?

Now, I’m going to share two practical ways to start making money.

Let’s dive right in.

So, what’s actually a niche?

Well, it’s a specific topic that you choose to work on. That’s the simplest definition of a niche.

In this process, you want to pick a relatively less competitive niche with high traffic potential.

For example, kitchen utensils, dirt bikes, mountain bikes, Italian food, and more.

As you can see, these topics are pretty small compared to kitchen (as a parent topic), vehicles, and food straight away.

Often, marketers amplify it up that you’ve got to do niche research (a lot of) before you choose one. Don’t worry about it for they’re just doing it so that you can sign up for their tools and pay them some (not all).

Once you choose your niche and get ready to start, you’ll need to create a blog with WordPress where some basic steps are involved. You are free to read this step-by-step guide on how to start a blog.

Great. Once you do all that necessary stuff like getting a domain name and all, it’s time to write something that’s going to get good chunks of traffic for free via search engines like Google and Bing.

Now here, you want to use a tool that I personally use and recommend – Ahrefs. By the way, you could be using Ubersuggest too, but for now, it’s better to stick with Ahrefs.

You’ll have to make a little bit of investment here – just take their seven-day trial for seven dollars.

When you’re in Ahrefs, head over to the keyword explorer.

Now, type in the topic that you want to write about. Let’s take ‘dirt bikes‘ as an example.

As you can see, dirt bikes is a small topic (with very good search volume) but it still has some competition for beginners.

So, what you need to do is scroll down a bit and look at the keywords ideas report.

Here, you’ll see thousands of related keywords that have great traffic potential and very less competition.

Let’s take one term from the ideas report and see how hard it is.

So, I chose a keyword and it has 9.600 search volume globally. That’s a lot of eyeballs to your content.

Look at the competition now.

It’s super easy.

Hence, when you search for a broad topic, go to the keywords ideas section and export them all into a CSV file.

Choose the best keywords that suit you and start writing amazing articles on those topics or titles.

Here’s how you can do it.

Go to Google and search for that exact keyword or term and then look at the articles that are showing at the top (the top 5).

Analyze how good they are, and what sort of information they’re all sharing. If you feel like you can write a better and more valuable article then all the ones that are currently showing up on the top, go for it.

That’s it. Once you write that masterpiece, go ahead and publish it, and submit your URL to Google Search Console for that to be indexed in the search results.

If you don’t know how to do that, I’ve mentioned it in my blogging guide that I just mentioned a few paragraphs above.

Promote your article actively on social media and ask your friends and followers to share it as well. Wait for about 2 weeks and you’ll see your result showing up on the front page (with some traffic).

Let’s say one article is getting you 300 visitors a month. What you’re going to want to do is utilize the exact same strategy and write 10 or even 20 articles.

That adds up to 300*10 = 3,000 visitors a month.

Or if you write 20, then 300*20 = 6,000 visitors a month or even more.

Now that you have traffic on your site, you’ll get excited to spam Amazon affiliate links in the articles. I know it.

BUT THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS.

Before you go about promoting stuff, you’ll want to collect the data of your visitors so that they can keep coming back to your blog, and also, you can keep promoting other products to them in the future.

But how do you collect emails?

The most recommended tool you can use to do it Moosend. It’s my all-time favorite tool that allows you to collect people’s information in seconds.

Here’s how to start:

First, go to Moosend’s official website and claim your free account. No risk about that, right?

After creating your account, go to lead generation and then signup forms.

Choose how you’d like to display your form to the audience and collect their information. That’s it!

Now, there’s a little bit more work to do. Write a nice email that provides value to your audience and also contains your affiliate links. Put those two or three emails into an autoresponder for reducing work to send those emails manually.

Let’s say if I’m into diabetes niche, I’d write about ’10 secrets to say goodbye to diabetes’.

And then, I’d mention a supplement product that I’m an affiliate for, as a solution.

Here’s an example of how you can do it.

This will not only help me in making more money but also build trust with my audience.

You see how that works like a charm?

That’s how you promote affiliate products effectively to make more money and build credibility at the same time.

But this is not only the way it’s done.

You can also write product reviews and then encourage people to signup for the product (or buy) via your affiliate links.

Example – As Moosend has its affiliate program that offers 30% recurring revenue for life, I’d write a review about it, and then mention a signup link for people to be able to use it.

By the way, if you’re into affiliate marketing and not promoting Moosend, you’re missing out on a ton of recurring revenue, my friend.

It’s converting like crazy and provides fantastic value as well. Here’s the link if you want to get on their limited affiliate list before the enrollment closes.

The same thing could be done by making videos on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn (to promote products and make more money).

Now, let’s move on to our second method.

Before we start, here are the things you need:

1. A product to promote
2. A Landing page with an email option form
3. An autoresponder software
4. A designing software (or designer)

I personally use ClickFunnels for this but I have to respect the fact that it’s pretty expensive for beginners.

So, the best platform you can use for this where not only you get to build landing pages but also an autoresponder software is Moosend.

Also, you might use Aweber and GetResponse too.

Now, moving on with the method…

First, go to business.facebook.com and create an account if you don’t have already.

Next, click on the create button to create a new advertisement.

Choose ‘traffic’ as your campaign objective.

Turn off CBO and name your campaign.

Once you do that, you’ll be taken to a new page where you’re going to want to target the audience that you want to sell your product to – according to interests, demographics, and locations.

You’re going to want to research for locations that work best for your offers or products.

Great. So let’s say I’m promoting a product about affiliate marketing and I don’t have a custom audience yet.

What I am going to do is search for some of the popular names/pages that are about my topic on Facebook.

So, popular names or pages in my case would be the following;

1. Pat Flynn
2. Russell Brunson
3. GetResponse
4. Passive Income
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. And more…

I’ll now have to set the demographics as well. For my product, I feel like people between 24 years and below 60 would be a great fit.

Why? Because they usually work and have money to spend.

Also, I’ll narrow down my audience by behavior. For every starter, I recommend narrowing down the targeting options by engaged shoppers (under behavior) in detailed targeting.

Under placements, I’ll keep Facebook and Instagram feeds for better results, and will select ‘Desktop’ in the devices option.

From here, you’re going to choose your daily budget. Other than this, choose ‘landing page views’ from the ad delivery segment.

The budget is up to you. You could start at $5/day as well. I generally start at $25/day and that works fine.

Next, it’s the game of ad creative.

First, select ‘single image or video’ and also select the page you’ll be using.

As long as it’s about creatives, you can use Canva to create a nice one.

But I highly recommend paying a designer on Fiverr to create one for you (for just five bucks).

Then, just optimize your ad copy and headline and it’ll look somewhat like this:

Good. It’s time to quickly create a landing page. In my case, it’s going to look like the one shown below.

Just keep it pretty simple and try to add a video if possible.

Next, I’ll just go ahead and link the URL of the landing page to my ad and publish it.

It’ll take some time to get the ad approved. Once it’s up and running, wait for at least three days for Facebook to optimize the ad for you and then you’ll start seeing some good results.

Again, don’t redirect people to the sales page. Send them at least two valuable emails and then pitch the product in the third one.

If you do that, you’ll see some crazy money coming in. Trust me.

By the way, before you go and create ads, read this post where I’ve shared 8 common Facebook ads mistakes that beginners should avoid.

That’s it for now.

These are the two real and working ways you promote affiliate products and make money. Hope you enjoyed.