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Free Ways To Start Making Money Online As An Affiliate
Many new and even some experienced affiliate marketers feel lost and overwhelmed by the quantity of information out there. They run around like a headless chicken until they give up, or find another product to buy and emotionally invest in, until they don’t see results then give up, and repeat.
Before spending thousands on software, websites, etc ... I believe getting a result (any result, even one sale) via free methods is huge. It proves that this whole game actually works. It builds confidence, and it helps to spot where others are going wrong in their efforts. Meaning you can help them! Meaning you can start gaining a following (no matter what your experience levels are).
Here’s how to start with no website, or resources other than your computer and internet connection...
In principle, affiliate marketing is an easy concept, but sometimes putting it into play can throw people off a little. Following a few guidelines can ensure that you give yourself the best opportunity for success.
Affiliate Marketing really comes down to three basic components:
- The offer you’re trying to promote;
- Traffic;
- A way to direct that traffic via a website, or email (or both);
The Offer
This is where the fun starts!
Choose a niche:
To find an offer, first, you must choose a niche. What is a niche you ask? A niche is an area of interest or expertise that offers products for you to promote. Some examples of niches are; investing, make money online, health and fitness, dog training, woodwork, dating, and technology to name a few.
If you’re promoting physical products, your niche could be almost anything.
If you get stuck at this point, don’t stress too much. You can choose different niches at any time. My advice would be to go through an exercise to help you determine where to start.
- Think of something you are passionate or at least interested in. It can be anything at all. From music to crochet…There’s no wrong answer. If you don’t have anything you are particularly interested in, or passionate about that’s cool too.
- Perhaps just think of a skill you have that you could comfortably chat to a friend about.
Don’t overthink this step. It’s just to get the ideas flowing. Once you have something in mind, keep reading…
Here’s an example to help get you started.
Let's imagine that you have a dog (if you don't) and let's say that dog was a difficult and often naughty pup. You know what I mean ... he hung out with the naughty dogs from down the street, pee’d on your carpet, ate your flowers, and barked at everything that moved.
As a result, you started learning about dog training. You read so much that, generally speaking, you actually became quite good at training dogs.
If you had to spend five minutes telling a friend about dog training could you do it? Yes? Cool….now you have your niche: Dog Training.
Okay, so you’ve chosen your niche – now what?
At this point, you should have chosen your niche. If not, no problem – but you might want to pause and think on it a little more. If you’re still with me at this point then read on. Let’s dive into how to start an affiliate marketing business series.
Personally, I love the ‘how to make money online’ niche. It is huge, it’s evergreen (i.e there is always someone wanting/needing to change their life by creating an online income), and there are always new techniques and skills to be taught.
I also prefer this as the vast majority of products that hail from this niche are digital. That means that people aren’t waiting on shipping for their products to arrive, and can get started immediately in most cases. I also just like the fact that (aside from the occasional not-so-great product), the whole niche is designed to help people.
Where to get your affiliate links?
There are now many networks that you can join to promote a multitude of offers. As a beginner, it makes sense to go to some of the larger ones to start with.
Clickbank is one of (if not the) largest affiliate networks in the digital space. They also offer physical products as well, but their digital range is huge!
The major benefit for newbies in this space is you don’t need approval for each offer you are looking to promote.
Click here to check out Click Bank
Warrior Plus is also up there as being one of the larger players in this niche. They specialize in the MMO (Make Money Online) niche and have thousands of products to choose from. You have to apply to each vendor to get approval to promote a product.
I recommend you create an account with Warrior Plus to get started in the ‘make money online’ niche.
JVZoo is another huge affiliate network, and once again they specialize in digital products. They seem to have everything from how to make money online offers to more advanced training and software available.
One of the awesome aspects of both of these networks is once you’ve built up a few sales, you can get instant payouts to your Paypal account. This is basically getting instant gratification for all your hard work. Pretty cool huh!
Click here to check out JVZoo
On a final note, as a ‘next step’ I recommend signing up for all three of these networks.
How To Promote Your Offer
I am guessing that you are looking to start your business with a little-to-no budget. In this article, I’ll cover how to start promoting your offers with a few free methods.
Youtube
Youtube is a monolithic media platform (no surprises there), and is growing at an amazing rate. One incredibly relevant fact to note here is that ‘How to’ video searches are growing by 70% year on year. As marketers, this is absolutely massive!
This is not necessarily the fastest way, but it does work. Having chosen your niche, hopefully, you have some level of understanding of your topic and can talk about a few tips to offer your viewers.
By setting up a channel, and offering value to your viewers, you can start to build up a following. By that stage, you can simply promote a product at the start of your video, or do a full product review. Simply leave your affiliate link in the section below the video and offer an incentive for your viewers to buy through your link. i.e offer a free bonus of some kind.
The operative word here is ‘value.’ The more value and free stuff you provide your audience, the more they will get to know, like and trust you. Meaning when you go to send out a recommendation, the audience is ten times more likely to take an action. This write-up is a great example. I am providing as much value as I possibly can to you. I could have just as easily said...Nope, you need to buy all these tools, get a website, etc and put my affiliate links in throughout. I chose not to do that because...
I truly want to help people out. Help them avoid the absolute sh*tstorm of bad advice out there. Help them navigate from newbie to money-making machine as soon as possible, and to build trust. I have no need to ‘burn’ people in my group or on my email list.
Lastly, in order to scale your business you will need tools. It is my hope when I recommend one that I use in my business, you may also wish to use it, in which case I make a small commission. Everyone wins. This is secondary to me though.
No real surprises here right? The landscape across Facebook has changed in recent years. Once upon a time, you only needed to have a fan page with a few likes to get decent traction with your affiliate offers. Now due to the volume of people on the platform, the number of other pages, and the sheer fact that Facebook also needs to slot into your feed their ads, you can no longer slap up a page and hope for the best.
You can however have up to 5000 friends on Facebook. I’ve seen people make $20-$50 per day by simply posting comments on their own wall asking if anyone is interested in their product etc.
You can join groups related to your niche. Again the trick is to add value to the group and not be like every other marketer spamming their crap out there. Once again I’ve seen posts go viral with over 1400 comments simply by saying something like:
“I’ve just created (insert something that will help your audience related to your niche and related to the product you’re promoting), who wants a copy? Comment below!”
Of course, there are a vast number of free ways to promote your offers, but I really think when you are starting out it is more important to stick with one or two and get some traction before moving on.
Additionally, you can utilize these platforms:
- Pinterest - you can pin anything and add your affiliate links to the images.
- Quora - become an expert. Answer questions and refer people to your links/back to your bio where you can place a link
- Forums - Add value, and place a link in your signature.
- Instagram - DM people. Provide value first
- Free blog sites such as blogger.com or wordpress.org
That’s it for now. If I may make a suggestion, it is to stick with one platform to start with.
Remember that the results will be a reflection of the effort you put into it.
Of course, if you want to fast-track any of this information, stay tuned as I will be going over everything.
Lastly, here is a good video about organic marketing mistakes by Jamie Gardiner - click here to watch on YouTube. As an experienced and successful affiliate marketer and a truly kind person, he provides a lot of free tips to get you started.
I hope this helps! For more tips, join us on Facebook.
