I am looking for anyone experience in this space to advise me on what steps would be the most effective ways to get started.
When you say you are working on some affiliate marketing sites you are referring to joining them and promoting their affiliate products.
The first thing to consider in affiliate marketing is to be successful in affiliate marketing you must first treat it as a business. It is not a magic way to make money overnight. If you think you can follow an easy step by step formula, doing what everybody else does then you are destined to fail. I am just saying this because there are so many fake guru's out there preaching some easy road to riches and usually Clickbank (CB) or Maxbounty are the first stops, as they accept everyone.
But as you are already assembling a team I think you are taking it seriously.
1.) Find a niche:
Many people think affiliate marketing is just about promoting any product you like. Not true. It is virtually impossible to promote unrelated products profitably unless you have an email list. And even then, people would soon unsubscribe if you one day promote a flight to the Bahamas and the next day an Excel beginner’s course.
On the other hand, let’s say you are in the travel niche. People will not mind if you send them offers of cheap flights, hotels and so on, mixed with great content all year long every year. And best of all you only had to pay once to acquire the customer and when you do it right you will get many commissions from this one customer for many years to come.
Now how do you find the right niche?
1.) Write down topics you know a lot about.
2.) Write down topics you are passionate about.
3.) Find those that you know a lot about and are passionate about.
4.) Go to Google Trends (Google Trends) and type in your main keyword of your niche. Change the time frame from past 12 month to past 5 years and check if the trend is stable all year long. You do not want a seasonal trend like focusing on an affiliate business for e.g. Mother’s Day gifts or on a fad like fidget spinners. You want what we call an evergreen niche, so you build it once and grow it instead of building something new every time.
After you have found an evergreen niche make sure it is big enough. It is better to get a small piece of a huge pie than a slightly bigger piece of a tiny pie. Or in other words the niche Jellyfish t-shirts might just not be big enough in order to be profitable… or is it? I did not bother to check. But you should for your niche.
Go to Ubersuggest's Free Keyword Tool, Generate More Suggestions which is a free tool to check search volume for your keyword. There is no hard and fast number, but your keyword should have at least a couple of thousands searches each month. I would even say at least 10,000 searches.
2.) Find an angle:
Now that you do have a niche find an angle/ idea on how you are going to build value around it. For example, let’s take the travel niche again.
There is Skyscanner, which is a tool to compare and find the cheapest flights. Booking.com: The largest selection of hotels, homes, and vacation rentals does the same for hotels. Then there is Tripadvisor which provides reviews. We have HolidayPirates, where you can search for deals. Last but not least, there are lots of travel blogs that could be considered reviews but differentiate themselves from review sites by giving their customers a unique perspective about the places they have visited.
So, as you can already guess from the examples above there are traditionally the following angles:
1.) tools: mostly comparing and searching for deals
2.) reviews
3.) coupons and deals websites
4.) blogs
5.) combine elements from above
6.) find your own
3.) Find affiliate offers
Login to your networks and type in your nice related keyword in the search. Maxbounty also assigns an AM. So it is vital to build a good relationship, as they can point you to great performing offers.
When thinking about promoting a product or service I always ask myself: would I buy this product from this website myself if I was in the market for it.
Another set of question is:
Is this a well-known brand?
Does the website look appealing?
Is the website built to convert?
Are there a lot of positive reviews/references?
Is the product priced competitively?
Does the product owner offer competitive services (money back guarantee, free shipping, etc.)?
Of course, you also must look at the commission. Sometimes you have similar products but with a big difference in the commission you would receive. Let’s consider two products with exactly the same price. One is a well-known product with 10% commission. The other a more generic brand with 30% commission. All things being equal the well-known product would have to convert 3 times as much as the generic one to break even. And this might very well happen due it is better brand recognition, but then again it might not. Therefore it is worth testing.
4.) Getting traffic
A further misconception is when you build it, people will just come. Of course this is not the case and therefore promoting your business is of utmost importance.
You should start with one traffic channel to begin with. Also realize there is no real free traffic. Free traffic always costs time and your time also is worth money. Therefore if you have more time than money focus on free traffic if you have more money than time it might be worth considering starting with paid traffic as you get either immediate results (not the same as conversions) and learn what works and what does not.
Free Traffic Sources:
With any free traffic source, it is important that you do not SPAM! Most think writing a few lines and then always putting their affiliate link underneath will do. But that is still SPAMMING. You have to be willing to provide real value, connect with people and then you can link back for more value to your website, blog etc. when appropriate.
1.) Quora
2.) Forums
3.) Facebook Groups
4.) Instagram
5.) Pinterest
6.) Medium
7.) Youtube
Paid Traffic:
With paid traffic you should know most people do not manage to be profitable on one offer. This means if you get say 50 USD commission you will most likely not be able to get a conversion for less than 50 USD. This is where many people fail and give up, as they only focus on this one conversion and wonder why they can’t make it profitable, as their guru promised them. But when you build a real business, even as an affiliate, meaning not owning any products but your business, you are not only getting to promote one offer but many and the average lifespan of a customer is let’s say 2 years and the average lifetime value is let’s say 200 USD. Then even when your average cost of acquisition is 80 USD, which would be a 30 bucks loss on the first offer, you still have a 120 USD profit per customer over the 2 years.
List of paid traffic channels:
1.) Google Ads
2.) Youtube Ads
3.) Facebook Ads
4.) Instagram Ads
5.) Pinterest Ads
6.) Bing Ads
7.) Reddit Ads
8.) Quora Ads
9.) Outbrain
5.) Managing your team
Managing a team is not easy. Everyone should have a clear understanding what his or her role and task is. It is also important to define performing the role successfully and completing tasks successfully. Do you expect them to build1 landing page per day or 5? Is conversion rate of 1% the mark or should it be 3%? If you cannot set a clear vision and expectations, then you are to blame if nothing gets achieved.
I know this is a lot to digest
I want to leave you with a link to a collection of many successful affiliate websites as a source of inspiration and wish you the best of luck:
https://nichehacks.com/affiliate-websites/22-examples-lucrative-affiliate-websites
And if you need any help give me a call.
https://clarity.fm/gerdtf
Gerd Tittel-Feller
