Guide to Affiliate Marketing with WordPress

The ease of accessing blazing-fast technology has opened doors to the "while-at-home earning" model. If you have a skill-set, marketing ideas up your sleeves, and a revenue model – then earning will be easier than ever before. Internet marketing professionals, bloggers, SEO individuals and many others have adopted the ‘Affiliate marketing’ trend for an over-the-top earning.

Those who are aware of doing Affiliate marketing the right way, are earning leaps and bounds. Setting a WordPress blog is the first step towards this marketing journey. Once you have done it, you can earn a good source of income from the confines of your room. Affiliate marketing is the simplest thing that you can do to make your WordPress blogs and websites profitable.

Given here is a complete guide to mastering the art of Affiliate Marketing that can give you an incessant source of income. But let us get down to the basics first.

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What is Affiliate Marketing; simplified in layman terms?

You have a WordPress blog which is capable of fetching a fairly good traffic, and now you want to generate some good income through it. You can be a publisher of the advertisements for the business websites which sell several products. In other words, you can be an affiliate marketer for them. Businesses or vendors start paying you when your visitors are brought to their ads, where they buy with your marketing efforts.

This all happens online. If you have a strong web presence, you can attract the like-minded visitors in a fairly good amount, warm them up to the extent that they begin to think that the product that you have put on display is the perfect solution to their needs.

You can put up products of any type and for any business, but it is always better to publish the products that belong to your blog or website’s niche. For instance, if you run a health or a beauty blog, you can put advertisements for health drinks, herbal beauty face packs, diet supplements etc. The reason to do this is the fact that people who read your blog are very inclined to the subject and can be easily motivated.

When visitors click the affiliate link or the advertisement put on your site, they are directed to the vendors’ site. It is as easy as it gets. If visitors are motivated to make a purchase, they buy and you get a commission out of this sale. For an instance, if a vendor is selling any particular product that costs $500 and has agreed to give you a commission of 30% on every subsequent purchase, you earn 150$, right there.

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Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

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This type of marketing is the perfect one for the beginners who do not have any technical expertise. Without the need of having a physical product, the whole endeavour will hardly cost you anything. If your blog has a good amount of traffic, this can be a constant source of income.

The mantra of affiliate marketing is simple: No need to do the physical selling, putting up payment gateways, shipping and a lot more. Vendors take care of all these from their end. All you are required to do is enhance your affiliate marketing efforts for a better return.

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5 Tips for a simplified experience

Take it Seriously

The fact that everyone else is earning via affiliate marketing does not mean that you can also earn the same way. It wouldn’t make you earn millions overnight. A specific skill-set and dedication are must.

Build A Website and Work Hard to Bring Traffic to It:

If you think that affiliate marketing can make you earn without having a website, you are grossly mistaken. Spamming social media sites with affiliate links would land you nowhere. Do not think that making a Facebook page or putting products on some other site will work; what if FB removes your page. You need your own full-fledged website.

Choose A Niche Meticulously

Select a niche which has the highest number of searches. Project yourself as a problem solver and a solution provider. Before you begin, ask yourself about your compatibility with a certain niche.Will you really bring visitors and keep them engaged on your site? Does the niche appeal to you? Do you have the flair to provide friendly solutions to seekers?

Selecting a niche that you are passionate about and updating the blog daily are the keys to success.

Select A Domain and Buy Hosting

Select a domain name that contains the niche you are writing on. For instance, if you are writing on weight loss, weightlossiseasy.com can be an option. GoDaddy and Namecheap are some of the top domain registrar. Buy a good web hosting service from a provider who is reliable and capable of giving you the maximum uptime. Once you have a visually appealing website which is speedy, secure and engaging content, you are half way past the tunnel.

Find the Right Product to Sell

Once you have set up a WordPress site that has a high traffic, you are good to go. Start with affiliate marketing now. Know what you can sell profitably. Ask yourself a few questions before you start. Would you yourself buy the product that you are selling? The best product to sell is the product that relates directly to your niche.

Take care of the merchant’s page where buyers are reaching. Take advertisements from the merchants who have a good repute for after-sales support.

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Where Would You Find Affiliate Products?

There are hundreds of merchants that wait to be get listed in the affiliate networks like Clickbank, Linkshare and Amazon. There are some that are PPC (Pay Per Click) like Google Adsense and some are Pay Per Action (PPA) like Neverblue.

You can go directly to the Merchant’s site directly like Elegant themes affiliate programs are handled directly by their site or you can put Google Adsense banners. Go to your top competitor’s site and see what they are selling.

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Where Would You Place Banners and Affiliate Links?

Place your ads within the engaging content on your site. This is the key to making money. No, sidebar ads do not perform very well. Google AdSense program does this because if the product blends so well with your content it would sell for sure. Informative content has the power to convince and indeed, ‘convincing sells’. You should not try affiliate marketing at all if your site does not have useful content.

• Put on efforts to make your content viral on Social Media, use Guest posts from renowned authors, strengthen your social media etc.
• Create pages like FAQs that solve queries, quests and problems.
• Send newsletters to all in your e-mail list and the promote your content well. Once you have followed this trick successfully, people would not mind banners ads at all. Indeed, people expect banner ads on the authoritative sites.
• Make use of the best marketing affiliate tools for WordPress like ThirstyAffiliates, Google Analytics, and Adsanity, etc.

Affiliate Marketing is successful only if it aims the targeted traffic. Of course, if you sell blogging tips to a well-established blogger, it will be futile. If the content is great and is adequately promoted, you will be successful in driving traffic and engaging visitors which will directly mean interested and potential customers.