Fridays with Vicky 16

Are you looking for a step by step guide on how to start with affiliate marketing? Great, because that`s exactly what we will be talking about in this article.

We will go through the basics of what affiliate marketing is, how it works, the steps you need to take to get started.

At the end of this article I will share my favorite place (free to get started) to get all the help you need to take your interest of affiliate marketing and turn it into an affiliate marketing business.

Let`s dive in.

Affiliate marketing is the way that I`ve been making money online, for the last 7+ years. The reason I turned to affiliate marketing was that I wanted to stay home with my kids + I wanted an income.

Before I found affiliate marketing and was searching for an opportunity, I was looking for an income stream with the following criteria:

1. It had to be flexible – I wanted to be able to work when the kids naped and at night.
2. Remote – I had to be able to take my business with me. I love to travel and we live in the US but my family is in Europe so I needed something that I could bring with me.
3. It had to have the opportunity of real money – There are so many scams out there, I wanted something that really worked. I wanted to be my own boss and I wanted to be able to set my own limits (the sky is the limit right) of what I could earn.

I looked into many different opportunities but the one that I decided on and have been working with for years is affiliate marketing.

 

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is plain and simple ”suggestions that you get paid for”.

This is something we do daily, we suggest or recommend a movie, a restaurant, a book… to our friends. We recommend things that we like, enjoy and find helpful.

As an affiliate marketer you take that recommendation online and instead of just recommending it to your friends, you do it in a larger scale, you post it online so that more people can enjoy it. If they find your recommendation helpful and take action on it you get paid.

You might think: “-Right, so I can make money on recommending a movie like I do to my friends…”

In fact you can, there are programs out there like Fandango that sell movie tickets online, that you can partner with. You could set up a website that review movies and recommend them to buy the tickets and gift cards online.

 

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work? Movie Example

So let`s use the above example of recommending a movie to a friend. This is an example of how affiliate marketing works. How you can recommend movies and get paid for it.

This would be a very likely visitor flow:

1. Sally is interested to go watch the movie called ”best movie today”, she wants to find out more about it so she goes to Google and type in ”best movie today review”
2. You have done a review of the movie and show up on Google for this search term”best movie today review”.
3. Sally clicks the link and visit your site, where you provide her with helpful information.
4. Sally see a link where she can get discount tickets, clicks the link and land on the Fandango site (in the above pictures example it gives an example of Amazon, which you also can partner with). Sally purchase the discount tickets.
5. Since Sally used your affiliate link and purchased the tickets you will make a commission.

This is really a win/win situation for both you as an affiliate and the merchant you partner with in this example, Fandango.

As an affiliate you have the opportunity to partner with many different programs. You are your own boss and you get paid for results. You work on your own terms set your own hours. You don`t have to deal with complaints or returns. All you do is send traffic to the merchant.

As a merchant in this case Fandango you only pay for the traffic that turns into sales. This is a great way for them to get traffic and sales.

 

Who Can You Partner With As an Affiliate?

There are tons of affiliate programs out there. Merchants like Walmart, Target, Microsoft, Best Buy, the list goes on, offers affiliate programs. You can also sign up with Amazon and have a unlimited source of products to promote.

The most important thing to think about is to have relevant offers and recommendations to your content. If you do a website about movies don`t offer strollers. Make the offers relevant to the content.

 

How to Start with Affiliate Marketing –  4 Steps

At this point you are probably getting ready to start…

4 Steps to Get You Started with Affiliate Marketing

1. Interest / Topic

Find an interest, a topic that you want your website to be about. It is easier if this is something that you are passionate about. Pretty much any topic can be turned into a business, but you want to be able to help people with something.

You might have a small baby and you have researched every stroller on the market and feel that this could benefit others, then you could share that information and those products on a website.

 

2. Website

You will need a place to submit the information, the content that you create. That`s why you will need a website. This will be the place where you`re going to build your business.

With today`s technology it`s very easy to build a website. In fact you can start out for free. I recommend this place here, to start because they make it super simple and can have a site setup within minutes.

You also want to start to think about what kind of website you want. Will it be a plain information site, will you do reviews, will you offer downloads… This is nothing that you have to have figured out yet but start to think about the direction of the site.

 

3. Visitors

When you have your site set up, you will need people to visit your site. No visitors, no sales. Lots of visitors lots of …

You can attract visitors to your site in many different ways, the main focus should be on creating helpful content on your site. You want to create a site that people want to visit, that people find helpful.

 

4. Make Money

When you start getting visitors to your site that`s when you can monetize it in different ways. You can make recommendations and reviews as an affiliate, but there are many other ways to make money with a website. Advertising is another way to monetize, for example.

The good thing is that you don`t have to do all this by yourself. You don`t have to invent the wheel and Google every single step of the way.

I have found a great place that offers step by step free training on how to do affiliate marketing. If that`s something you are interested in then read my review here.

If you want a step by step 6 day affiliate marketing course, you can join my list for that here.

To sum things up, in today`s Friday`s with Vicky we talked about; what affiliate marketing is, how it works and how you can get started with affiliate marketing.

If you have any questions at all fee free to leave a comment below or contact me through the contact form.

So what`s your thoughts on affiliate marketing? I would love to hear it in the comment section below,

Have a productive day and a great week!

See you next Friday,

Vicky

Next week`s post – Is Affiliate Marketing for me?

P.S Thought I would let you in on some good and bad going on in my online business…

Worst Online Happening This Week: Having a hard time finding a good writer for one of my other blogs…

Best Online Happening This Week: Got some writing done this week, so it`s looking good for the summer.