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Learn the attributes of a good affiliate marketing program — Affiliate Marketing for Newbie Bloggers

What is affiliate marketing? it’s a word that may be new to a beginner Blogger, one who just started blogging or is about to start but to veterans, it’s not a new word, In fact, its a word that means earning income for Bloggers.

Affiliate marketing is promoting other peoples products for a commission payment. Affiliate marketing can be a huge source of income for your blog if you have gained a following and people trust your advice or the services you offer. Just like you are likely to trust your medical doctor if he were to prescribe medication for you.

Bloggers use affiliate marketing for making income from their blogs because most times when you are writing a post where you are providing useful information you are likely to point people to products and sites that will help them to achieve their desired results.

By linking to that site via your post, you help your reader to achieve their goals of reading your Blog and you also make income from that referral, I will count affiliate marketing as a referral based business.

After you have learned what affiliate marketing is, the next thing will be how does it work.

In this post, I will be detailing to you, how it works, what affiliate options are open to you and how to choose the right ones.

How to choose the right Affiliate program

When you want to start affiliate marketing the first thing you need to do is to decide to choose the right affiliate link. This is because if you are careful to choose the right affiliate program, you increase your chances of spending your time promoting products that will pay you better and increase your income earning potentials.The right affiliate link has the following attributes

It fits in with your audience type:

You use affiliate marketing links that tie into the overarching message or niche which your blog is all about or what your post is about. It will make no sense for you to choose an affiliate link whose products do not tie into your niche, this is because most affiliate links are tied to your original post while writing, so if you choose the wrong affiliate link which does not fit into your niche, you may find it difficult to slide it into your post.

For instance today I am writing about affiliate marketing, the easiest thing for me to do is to recommend affiliate products that you can sign up for that pays well. One of such affiliate program is Viglink, Viglink is an affiliate marketing program that is a marketplace for a great number of products covering a lot of niches. Signing up with Viglink will give you access to a whole lot of other products.

The good thing about using Viglink for affiliate marketing program is that once their code is inserted in your blog, they do the affiliate linking themselves. They are able to affiliate any word that ties into a link on their platform thereby saving you the stress of inputting their affiliate URL in your posts. To sign up for Viglink you can click on any of the banners shown below.

Note for instance how I used the affiliate link in the above post, I explained briefly how this affiliate link benefits you and pointed you to where you can sign up for it. This example above fits in with my overall post idea today.

Another example, For instance, my Blog that talks about starting home businesses so it will not be out of place for me to encourage you to use a Shopify store to start your online selling business, it ties into my overall niche. But if I started selling to you a product that has to do with baby teething perhaps I saw a baby teething product which has a good commission and I decided to fit into my post write up today, I will struggle to find a place to fit it into because my post today is not about selling baby items.

Choose Affiliate links with a good commission percentage:

I always love affiliate products that give you up to 40% mark up, of course, it all depends on the final price of the product, for instance, I once made a sale via one of my affiliate links, that link paid me about 45 dollars. It had a 50% commission on it. It was a service based product. I have noticed that the service based product affiliate often pays more. For instance, when you are promoting a course, the course owner is often willing to pay you 30- 50 % of each sale that you make. I believe that intangible based products pay more commission s than tangible products. That’s why people who promote courses and software often make more money from affiliate marketing than those who promote physical goods.

For example, a digital seller of ebooks or courses may pay you 50% commission while an Amazon will pay you 5% or even 2% of the sales. This is where you need to make a decision, do I promote the products that pay me more? of course, you can as long as it fits into your niche. To know which affiliate networks will accept you as a Newbie blogger, click here

Choose affiliates programs with a wide range of Products:

There are affiliates that gather a lot of products under them in that once you are signed up with them you have access to a wide range of products and services. Signing up with one of such affiliates saves you the headache of signing up or applying to each of the products one by one. These types of affiliate programs are called affiliate marketplace, this is because they have a lot of products within all kinds of niches signed up for them. Having access to that affiliate marketplace means you can easily;y apply to the ones you like and have them approve you. Examples of such affiliate programs include Viglink, Awin, and Shareasale

Choose affiliate Links that offer extended cookie period:

This is the time it takes for a customer to come back and make a final purchase. Sometimes a person might click through from your blog to a link but may not be ready to make a purchase immediately. Perhaps that person will come back say in two weeks time to make a purchase. If the cookie length is one week, even though that customer made a purchase finally, it may not be accredited to you so you won’t get paid. But if that cookie length was about 30 days, anytime that person comes back to make a purchase without necessarily going through your blog again, you will still get credit for that purchase.

Choose affiliate links that offer both CPC and CPA:

Most links on affiliate marketing are based on either CPC( Cost per click) or CPA( Cost per action). Cost per click means that as long as someone clicks on your link to the website even if they don’t make a purchase you get paid. Cost per action means that the person who clicked through has to do something, sometimes its a purchase or perhaps fill out a form. Whatever they get to do which was the desired intent of the advertiser, you get paid for such actions. Some advertisers pay for both actions while some will only pay for CPA.

ThirstyAffiliates

What to consider before you sign up for an affiliate offer

Minimum Payout: Do they have a have threshold of payout such as requiring that you make up to 500 dollars or 1000 dollars before you are paid, you should pick affiliate programs that will pay you out for as low as 50 dollars. For a blogger starting out, every dollar counts.

Promotional Materials e.g banners, videos, links, affiliate panels are the affiliate program structured enough to provide you with the materials you will need to drive your promotions. This is important as it helps give you more options for promotions. For example, a text link may be great for some promotions perhaps through your Newsletter but the visual banners may be good for online social media channels or Blog posts.

Payment method: What type of payment method do they have? PayPal, check, transfer are they flexible with their payment methods? These are important parameters because it’s not enough to make money from the affiliate marketing efforts, getting the cash in your pocket is important too.

Tax forms: Do you need to fill out a tax form before you collect your payment

Are they popular? are people recommending that you join them? this is often an indication that people are being paid, beware of affiliate programs that people are not promoting. I will always advise that you search for a review of such programs before you join them.

How to attach affiliate Links to your Blog posts.

People often ask, how do I attach affiliate links to my Blog posts.

Manually Linking

There are various ways to do this, you can do it manually, meaning that if you are writing your post and you get to the place where you need to use your affiliate links you can refer to it by highlighting and then adding your affiliate link.

Remember that for each affiliate Program you sign up for you are given a special link to your account, this special link is to enable the product owners to track your sales. If you link to just the normal website link provided on their website, you will not get paid because they cannot tell that the customer came from you. Therefore be sure that you obtain a product link before you can then link to that product.

Another way to manually add an affiliate link is to insert the code which often represents the advertiser’s banners on your website.

Automated Linking:

You can use a Plugin like Thirstyaffiliate, they help to cloak your links and protect the income you make from your affiliate links.

You can also use WordPress Auto links if you are using WordPress as your content management system: WP auto link helps list your links for web crawlers so that people can easily click on it.

How to Know which Affiliate Programs will accept you.

Various affiliate Programs require some conditions before you can be accepted into their network. There are however some affiliate programs that will accept you as a Newbie blogger as long as your content is not offensive. Please read my post on affiliate networks that will accept you. By reading up that post you will get access to my curated list of affiliate networks that will accept you as a Newbie Blogger.

Do you have you other ideas on how to choose the right affiliate marketing program for a Newbie blogger? Leave your comment below

5 proven strategies for driving traffic to your site + free facebook group list — 5 ways to drive Traffic to your Blog post

When I started writing my Blog posts, I thought that I didn’t need to drive traffic to my post, I felt that all I had to do was write my post on my Blog and that was it, the people who love my post will naturally find it and I don’t need to do much anymore.

You can imagine how disappointed I felt when my post had no visits for the first few weeks. I was like are you sure my WordPress site is even on the internet? I went back to my backend and checked to be sure everything was alright, of course, it was.

That was when it dawned on me that you had to do more than just write a post, you have to drive traffic to your post if you ever hope to have it found by people.IIt’sfunny the idea you have about the internet when you are a newbie blogger.

I came into blogging with that mentality that everything you write is obtainable, all you had to do was write it and it will be on in everyone’s face. I mean that’s how I discovered all other blogs, I never knew there was much work you had to do to drive traffic to your post or even your site.

Quality traffic is the lifeblood of the internet world. It determines how much you earn and how you have perceived by businesses who want to connect with you.

If you are having very low page views now, I want to share with you 5 simple methods you can use to drive traffic to your posts. It is like the original building blocks of your blog and its traffic journey.

To drive Traffic to your Blog post and Site here is what you must do

Join Facebook Groups:

To be a New Blogger and not join any Facebook group is like shooting yourself in the feet or setting up your blog to fail. When I got to know about joining Facebook groups, I joined some few ones. But after a while, I got bored and decided I was not going to participate again. I soon realized that my Facebook group contributed all most 90% of my Traffic and still does. Not joining one means that your journey to growing your Pageviews will be very long. Your facebook groups will make that journey shorter as long as you participate in active ones. Not just those who are just there for the sake of having a group.

Do you want to get a List of very active and Profitable Facebook groups that will boost your traffic, Click here

Pinterest Group boards:

If you have been a blogger for a while now you must know by now that Pinterest is the Queen when it comes to how to drive traffic for Bloggers, in fact, I will refer to her as a she because she is very good at getting you started, in your Blogging journey especially if you obey her rules.

Pinterest group boards help you gain traction in traffic because you get to pin with others where a lot of people are contributing to the same board, this means that your Pins get more exposure and stands a chance of going viral. The only issue with Pinterest group boards is that you have to apply to the owner to allow you to have access to such boards.

Some may accept you and send you an invite while for some, they may not be accepting new members. If you are wondering how to get good group boards, join a facebook group and look out for when people are opening up their boards for contribution. You can then email them for interest. A good resource for Pinterest group boards is Pingroupie. You will find a lot of group boards there, all you need to do is set time aside to apply to as many as you like.

Instagram Pods:

Instagram pods are a group of people who come together to create what you call a pod, the idea Is to get a group of people commenting and liking each other post hence increasing engagement and likes on your Instagram page and therefore driving traffic to the main post itself if your post was about your blog post. I made a mistake on starting my Instagram page late because I felt I didn’t need it, but when I started I soon realized that people were coming to my blog posts from my Instagram page. That helped my traffic. To learn how to start a Pod or Join one, go here

Google Plus:

We are all on the internet because we hope that people can search the internet and be drawn to our posts and hence comment on our pages, follow us or even buy through our affiliate links. But we must never forget that Google is the King of search engines, in fact people don’t use the word search anymore, they use google it.

This infers that you can’t afford not to have a Google plus page where you are consistently posting your blog posts and ensuring that you use your keywords. By putting an asterisk before and after your keywords you signal to google plus that, that is the word you want to rank for. Ensuring that you post consistently on Google plus will help you to drive traffic to your post because Google loves its own. You will get more referral traffic when you are consistently on Google plus.

Youtube:

You may be someone who does not like to be in front of the camera like me, but youtube is another search engine you can not afford to ignore. Think of the last time you wanted someone to show you how to do stuff and you went and checked it out on youtube.

Those 10 mins videos have been a lifesaver when it comes to learning how to do stuff yourself like when there is a glitch on your wordpress site and you want to learn how to fix it without calling an expert.

I cant tell you how many times it has been a lifesaver, a funny fact because I am not tech savvy when I started my Blog newly I will literally break out in a cold sweat whenever I had a glitch on my site because I was already thinking how much will it cost me to fix this.

But using videos I got for free from youtube has helped me run my blog efficiently doing and fixing things I never thought I would fix before. That’s why I know that you need to be there promoting your posts as much as you can.

Getting people to subscribe to your channel can help drive tons of traffic to your posts. The best part, you don’t need to talk or be in front of the camera if you are camera shy, you can start by using Lumen5 to turn your Blog posts into Videos.

Subscribe to my Youtube channel and see a sample of the video I made using lumen5.

Do you want more ideas on how to Boost your Blog Traffic, Click here

Want more from my Blog posts read this

Ultimate Cheat Sheet To Newbie Blogging

Resource Library for Newbie Bloggers

How to choose the right affiliate marketing program