If you’re thinking of starting an online business around content and link building, then affiliate marketing business might be just the thing for you. You might have heard about it, and it might sound hard, but it’s not. Let us explain the basics and guide you through steps you need to make to start affiliate marketing business with WordPress.
But, first things first…
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a web-based business that evolves around content marketing. Basically, you recommend various products and/or services to your audience /potential customers/ and get commision for every purchase that was made from you. It is one of the very productive ways of passive income where your content does most of the work. To do this type of business, you need to have these 4 + 1 requirements or people involved:
- The Merchant or Retailer
- The Affiliate Network
- The Affiliate or Publisher
- The Buyer or Consumer
- The Affiliate website
The Merchant or Retailer is a brand or a company that has a product or a service and wants to promote it through you to sell it.
The affiliate network is a mediator and acts as the middle man between the company and an Affiliate.
An Affiliate is a person that sells a product or a service via recommendation and promotion. In this case, it would be you. And you do this with the use of both marketing and advertising skills. If you know them and know good storytelling, this is a great way for you to have a steady income.
The Buyer or the Consumer is the person who comes to the affiliate website, reads the content you wrote and act on if persuaded.
An affiliate website is a place that sells affiliate products or services. You find a niche you’re good at and want to participate in and start building content that promotes those products/services. Then, every time there’s a sale that came from your recommendation, you earn a piece of the profit.
How to start affiliate marketing business with WordPress
The thing you’ll need to set up and start affiliate marketing business is a website. And what better tool than WordPress to do it with? Now, we covered earlier how to start a business website with WordPress; now it’s time to guide you through the process of starting affiliate marketing business with it. It’s easier than you think.
What you need is this:
- Pick a niche
- Build a website on WordPress
- Connect with the Affiliate network
- Create relevant content around that niche and products you’re promoting
- Promote the site itself
The example
So, let’s go through each step with an example. Say you know your way around photography and photo-equipement. It can be a great start to build up affiliate marketing business and start building a profit. And how? One of the biggest affiliate networks out there is Amazon, for sure. Their affiliate program Amazon Associate gives you all you need to start doing business. Just sign up, pick relevant products and start writing content about it on your website. A website you can actually build on WordPress and use one of our premium photography theme, for instance.
Being such a diverse niche, the content you create can be so detailed, deep and various. Write your content in a way that’s informative and useful to your readers and that describes the products in an appealing way, so they want to buy them. The more specific and reliable content you produce the more interest you’re building around your website. Interest builds community; community converts to consumers and, before you know it, you’re earning money for every visitor that clicks on your affiliate link and buy a product you promote.
What about the promotion of your website?
The fun never stops, right? Once you set up everything and put it in motion, you’ll need help to get those wheels rolling. Meaning, set up accounts on all the Social Media accounts your targeted audience is and start interacting with them. Moreover, those accounts can and are a further part of your selling platform, just look at the Instagram and its selling features. Apart from that, it’s good to use e-mail marketing to further connect with your audience and inform them of your new content and offers. Also, affiliate networks like Amazon have a ton of usable tools and widgets to help promote the content and site itself.
Affiliate marketing business tips and tricks
Profit from your experience
Don’t start with what you don’t know. Sell the thing you do know, what you’re familiar with.
Have a niche website
The more specific you are, the more successful you’ll get.
Content quality
Don’t try to stuff your website with any content. Think through, write thoroughly, specific and with as many details, use content to bring value to your readers. Make it engaging, meaningful and valuable to the readers. Only by doing that you’ll get to enjoy steady profit.
Use analytics
Analytics is an absolute must for any business as well as affiliate marketing. With it, you’ll get to really know your audience, how they interact with your content, if they convert or not, are they making you closer to those goals you’ve set up. And the best thing about it – you get all that data for free, simply by installing GA code. If you don’t know how we wrote a tutorial how to add Google Analytics in WordPress.
Affiliate marketing WordPress plugins
One of the perks of starting an affiliate marketing business with WordPress is you get to maximize it with these pretty useful plugins as tools. They help by improving your earnings in various options.
Once you have all those affiliate links that promote products and services, it’s good to have a tool that keeps track and puts everything in order. Easy Affiliate Links does that as well as tracking the basic analytics.
An ad management plugin that simplifies managing ads and campaigns as well as helps you easy set up banners and ads. Easy to set up and monitor your performance and profit.
Amazon Affiliate for WordPress
As we mentioned earlier, Amazon has it’s own set of tools that help improve your affiliate business. Amazon Affiliate works as your sidekick, helps you insert and localize Amazon affiliate products on your site. Moreover, it creates product comparison tables and lists, automatically updates product prices and such things.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing business with WordPress or social networks is worthwhile. You get to do what you lave and are good at, set your working hours and work from anywhere and everywhere. But, not to misunderstand it, it takes time to make a successful, sustainable affiliate marketing business. Don’t get impatient or worry if things don’t go up within weeks. Just do your best and stick to it, it’ll come. Also, don’t get too overboard. Be consist, stick to what you know best and let people get to know you, enough to trust you and enough to buy of your recommendation.
Do you have any questions about how to start affiliate marketing business with WordPress? Let’s talk some more and explore the options. While we’re at it – take a look at our premium quality themes, you might find just the one for your business!
