Affiliate Marketing 101: 5 Golden Tips to Achieve Success 

 

 

In this affiliate marketing guide I’m going to share my 7-year experience in affiliate marketing.

I believe my thoughts and tips will be very helpful both for beginners and even advanced affiliate marketers.

As you may know, experience is invaluable because you learn from the mistakes of other people.

Your own mistakes cost you money and time. When you learn from others, you save your time which is the most valuable thing in life. 

When you start your affiliate marketing career, you must know some important things. First of all, you can start your affiliate business without spending any money at all.

But this will take a lot of time and effort before you achieve some good results and start earning some income.

Making some investment will make this process much easier and faster for you with less effort.

If you read my post above, many things will become clear for you. So, let’s dive into the subject so you can learn 5 golden tips to achieve success in your affiliate business.

 

   

 

1.Website Traffic – Know the Reality

When you start your affiliate marketing online business, you must know that traffic is the most critical thing for your success.

All websites available online struggle for it but very few can actually get it and and even less sites can monetize that traffic.

Getting traffic can take from 6 up to 24 months before you can start getting a massive traffic, something around 500-1000 visits a day.

For youtube it’s not enough to make a considerable amount of money. But for a website, it’s enough to earn $500/$2000 per month and even more.

Anyway, when it comes to search engine traffic you must know that there are three types of websites that I’ve seen in my 7 year experience: 

 

• Websites that never get any traffic
• Websites that get some traffic and then lose it over time
• Websites that always get traffic

 

Let me explain in a few words what I think about the first group of websites that never get any traffic.

All affiliate marketers know that content is the only thing that can drive a ton of traffic to your website.

Everyone is trying to create high quality content for their website but very few can do it which is why very few sites get traffic.

A new website needs at least 6 months to start seeing steady daily traffic. Sometimes it can be 12 months. Once a website reaches that time frame, it starts getting traffic.

But many websites don’t get any traffic at all even after 6-12 months because of creating low quality content. Good content will be noticed by Google, but not always.

I’ve seen it many times in my 7 year experience when websites producing the same level of content get different amounts of traffic.

Same level of content means the same quality and without any backlinks.

Some websites get a few hundred visits a day while other websites don’t get any traffic or 5,10 visits a day at best. I’ve seen it many times.

 

Second group of websites are those that start getting a massive traffic after 6-12 months of hard work.

Such websites start getting a flood of traffic that grows over time as they produce more quality content.

The same happened to my sites when I started getting traffic after 6 months of hard work. Unfortunately, I lost it very soon for unknown reasons.

The same happened to many other affiliate marketers who I made friends with over the past 7 years.

Some websites were getting close to 1.000 visits a day and then lost all their traffic due to Google algorithm update.

They were completely upset with no idea why they suddenly lost their traffic.

They were getting traffic for years due to creating high quality content and avoiding black SEO tactics. And suddenly lost traffic. I know many such affiliate marketers.

My sites lost traffic as well but not all traffic and fortunately, I’m still making money.

I’m just trying to share this information with you so you can be aware of what can happen to your business even if it is successful.

BTW, in this post you can learn with real examples how websites lose traffic.  

 

Third group of websites are those that always get traffic and no updates affect their sites in any way. I’ve seen such websites and I know those affiliate marketers personally.

It’s very interesting but they never lose any traffic. They create quality content exactly like many other affiliate marketers and Google updates never affect them in any negative way.

Even if they stop writing content for some time or change their wordpress theme or do some changes, nothing bad happens to their websites.

Some of them lose some traffic after Google updates but it doesn’t affect their sites seriously. They don’t have any backlinks, only content and believe me, I’ve seen their content.

It is not much different from the content of those sites that lose traffic. I’ve seen even sites that have very stupid content and still outranking quality websites.

This is the reality you must know before you start your affiliate marketing career.   

 

 

 

2.Free and Paid Methods – Avoid Wasting Money

• Free methods take time 
• Paid methods are risky

When you start online as an affiliate marketer, you like everyone want to achieve your online monetization goals as quickly as possible. It’s totally understandable.

There are basically two methods you can take advantage of: free and paid methods.

Free method means creating content and getting it ranked in top search results and driving traffic to your website. Ranking content takes time, from 6 up to 24 months.

But this method is completely free and can make you a lot of money.

Second method is paid and includes instagram, display ad networks, PPC, PPV and etc. This method can make you money and can easily waste all your money. You must use it carefully. For more details about paid methods you can read my post here.

 

 

 

3.Content Secret – Understanding Content Creation

Now let’s talk about one of the most important things in affiliate marketing which is content creation. Content is still a king in online space.

If you can’t or have no time to invest in creation of high quality content, affiliate marketing is not for you. Creation of high quality content takes a lot of time.

You don’t have to create content for the sake of content.

Before publishing content you have to do a lot of research of your competition and create content that will be interesting and more thorough than that created by other websites in your niche.

Such content can take from a few days up to 2,3 weeks, but this type of content will considerably increase your chances for ranking your site in top search results.   

Another important thing you must know is that content is not a guarantee of your success online.

In my 7 year-experience in affiliate marketing I’ve seen websites with very mediocre content outranking other sites with way better content.

I’ve written a post on this topic with some real proof.

It doesn’t mean you have to stop writing content for your website but content alone is not a guarantee that your website will be ranked high in search engines. 

 

 

 

4.How to Choose an Affiliate Marketing Course (Two extremes)

• Avoid cheap programs
• Don’t buy expensive programs

If you plan to start your affiliate marketing business online you need to choose the right affiliate marketing training/course/community.

Your success depends on your choice. There are three types of programs: cheap, affordable and expensive. Cheap programs cost $15-$50.

Such programs can teach you something but this won’t be enough to achieve success online. Especially because cheap programs never provide quality support.  Avoid such programs.

Expensive programs cost $1.000-$3.000. Most of the time such programs provide quality training and support but still they can’t guarantee your success.

Very often they are called “Done for you systems”. There are many complaints about such programs because people like you pay thousands of dollars and can’t achieve their online money goals.

Even if you pay so much money, it doesn’t mean the company you pay will do things for you. It is you who will have to start and grow your business.

Especially, when you are just starting your very first affiliate business and have no experience, it doesn’t make sense to start spending thousands of dollars.

I’ve seen many people in such a disappointing situation.

Affordable programs cost $300-$500. The best type of programs are this third group that are affordable and provide both quality training and support.

They provide less services compared to expensive programs, but the difference is not critical in my opinion.

The only difference is that you pay 2,3 times more and still have no guarantee of success. Among such programs I can recommend Wealthy Affiliate, Income School.

Both provide excellent service, training, support and are affordable.

Income School provides better training but Wealthy Affiliate provides better support and technical support.

For me personally, WA is better than Income School. I would recommend trying both of them if you can.

 

 

 

5.Monetization Secrets

Before joining the affiliate marketing world you need to know a few important things regarding monetization.

First of all, you have to understand that even if you have the greatest looking website in the world you can’t make a single dollar without traffic.

It’s as simple as that. No traffic, no money. 

Even if you have no products to promote on your website, you still can make money from your website through display ad networks.

Just write a lot of quality content, drive massive traffic to your website, at least 500-1.000 visits a day and you can easily monetize your traffic.

There are many display ad networks, such as Google Adsense, Medianet, Mediavine, Ezoic etc. 

The last thing you must know is that not all niches can be well monetized.

Some services, products have very low traffic potential, are low cost products and you need really massive traffic, thousands of visits a day to be able to monetize your website.

That’s why before choosing a niche you need to do a lot of research to make the right choice.