Becoming an affiliate marketer is one of the easiest things that you can do. You may be surprised at what you need to become an affiliate marketer.
It is open to anyone and you don’t need any special skills or prior experience to start. Affiliate programs are free to join and there are hundreds of thousands of them to choose from.
I started affiliate marketing the same way that I am about to share with you in this post. These are the four essentials that you’ll need to begin affiliate marketing.
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What Do You Need to Become an Affiliate Marketer?
One of the best things about affiliate marketing (besides earning an income of course) is that there is a low barrier to entry.
You don’t need any special skills, nor do you need any previous marketing experience. In fact, it is actually fun to learn once you get started.
1. Choose a Niche
The first thing you will need to begin affiliate marketing is a niche. A niche is a segment of a market. There are all types of niches to choose from.
A niche is important because you’ll want to focus in on a specific audience. You will help the people in your niche by creating helpful content.
Choosing a niche is often the biggest stumbling block for beginners. That is because there are so many to choose from.
That is why I recommend choosing a niche that you have a genuine interest in. You do not need to be an expert in the niche that you choose.
However, you should be interested enough to want to learn more about it and to create content for it on a long-term basis.
The more niche you can get the better. Meaning, avoid staying to broad. For example, you don’t want to choose health and fitness as your main niche.
It is way too broad and much too competitive. However, you could subniche and choose to help people over 40 lose weight and build muscle.
Making money is a great niche but much too broad. What if you helped people learn how to achieve financial freedom? Jeff Rose does that with his niche website Good Financial Cents and earns a full-time income doing it:
Get the idea? Pick a niche that you like and think about niching down even more if possible. It lowers your competition when you promote your content.
2. Get a Self-Hosted WordPress Website
Once you have chosen your niche, you can create your niche affiliate website (niche blog).
You will need to register a domain name, get a web hosting account, and install WordPress on your account.
If all of that is going over your head, don’t worry. Any commercial web hosting provider offers everything that you need.
WPX Hosting, for example, will let you register your domain name, set up your hosting account, and offers one-click installation of WordPress. All that you have to do is select any of their WordPress hosting plans.
3. Choose an Affiliate Product
There are tons of affiliate products that you can promote. There are surely products that are related to the niche that you choose.
You want to have an idea of the product or products that you wish to promote. Finding affiliate products is fairly easy.
All that you need to do is search for “[niche] + affiliate program” or “[product] + affiliate program” in Google.
When you find the product that you want to promote, apply for the affiliate program. Affiliate programs are free to join.
Some programs may have an approval process but most will approve with no problem. This will be the product that you will recommend on your niche blog.
You can promote multiple products as long as they are related to your niche.
4. Create Content
Your website will need content. Content is what will attract visitors to your blog. Over time, the content that you write will rank in the search engines.
Content creation can also be in the form of YouTube videos and social media posts. However, your most important content will be on your blog.
Your blog content can bring in traffic for many years to come. You will post your affiliate links within your content. These affiliate links are special tracking links provided by the affiliate programs you have joined.
When visitors click on your affiliate links and buy something from the merchant’s website, you earn a percentage of the sale (a commission.)
I recommend creating new blog posts at least 1 to 2 times per week. If you can produce more, even better. One good quality post per week is ideal.
Other Optional Tools
There are other optional tools and software that you can use to grow your business. They are completely optional when you’re starting out.
An Autoresponder
Many affiliate marketers use an autoresponder for email marketing purposes.
An autoresponder is software that will store any user information that you collect such as email addresses, names, phone number, etc.
Building an email list can be done in the beginning of starting your niche blog or down the line in the future.
Landing Page Creator
Eventually, you may want to invest in landing page creation software. This is software that you can use to create squeeze pages (opt-in pages) to collect user email addresses.
Popular landing page software includes ClickFunnels and LeadPages. This kind of software can be expensive. It isn’t necessary for beginners unless you are really interested in creating a sales funnel.
Keyword Tools
A keyword tool is used to help research keyword phrases. You can use these keywords for your blog post titles. Most keyword tools have a fee to use them. They are not required for content creation but can be helpful.
My Closing Thoughts On What You Need to Become an Affiliate Marketer
The four things outlined in this post will get your well on your way to creating a niche blog.
It will take consistent effort but over time your blog can generate a consistent monthly income.
It isn’t always easy for beginners to create and maintain a niche website. However, a step-by-step training course such as this can make the process much easier.