How Does Affiliate Marketing Work? – 5 Basic Steps of an Affiliate Campaign
Affiliate marketing refers to promoting and selling the product of another for the payment of a commission. Many stories exist about people many a lot of money with affiliate marketing and even quitting their day jobs because of it, but exactly how does affiliate marketing work?
What follows gives a breakdown of the processes involved in affiliate marketing.
5 Steps of an Affiliate Marketing Campaign
Find a Starving Crowd or Niche– The first basic requirement of any affiliate marketing campaign is to find a starving crowd or a niche. This refers to a group of people who are desperate to solve a problem in their lives, such as an acne problem or an excess weight problem, or a problem in their relationship with a significant other.
A starving crowd may also refer to a group of people who are passionate about a hobby or pastime, such as playing golf or breeding dogs or bass fishing. The common feature between all these people is that they are rabid buyers for the product that will either solve their problems or will feed their interests and hobbies. The common belief is that these desperate buyers are credit card in hand ready to purchase the in-demand product of the affiliate marketing campaign.
Select Keywords – A keyword refers to the specific words that a starving crowd would key in to a search engine to get results on the products they are searching for. Someone trying to lose weight will search with a phrase relating to losing weight. The specific phrases used are the keys to an affiliate marketer’s campaign.
These specific phrases may be ‘lose weight after pregnancy’, or ‘how to improve a golf swing’, but not a general phrase as ‘lose weight’ or ‘golf’. If the proper time is spent on researching these specific keywords, then one of the key elements of a successful affiliate marketing campaign is found. An affiliate marketing campaign that runs on keywords that are not those of a starving crowd will not be successful.
Select one or More Products – Having selected a niche, choose one or more products in that niche that may be appropriate for the starving crowd you have identified. The products may be a digital product from the Clickbank marketplace, such as an e-book on ‘losing weight after pregnancy’ or a physical one such as ‘golf clubs for left handed people’ that can be purchased from Amazon.
Research Additional Keywords – At this point you have already selected keywords for your niche. Make sure that your keywords are long tailed keywords. These keywords should be researched to determine how many people are searching with them on a daily basis and how much competition there is for these keywords by other marketers. Next you will select the keywords that have many searches a day but have relatively little competition for them.
Build a Website – This step involves building a website, a blog, or Squidoo lens, among other forms of virtual real estate, and promoting the product you are representing. A few articles on the product should be written using one or two of the long tail keywords in them, and they should be submitted to a few article directories for publication.
The articles will contain links back to the webpages which will further pre-sell the product and will also contain affiliate links to the product sales pages. If the visitor purchases the product from the sales page, then the affiliate will earn a commission on the sale.
How does affiliate marketing work will depend on the successful running of an affiliate campaign that is based on the selection of an in-demand product by a starving crowd of people, and successfully marketing to that targeted hungry crowd by driving them back to the product’s website through a link, or an article so that they can purchase the product being promoted.
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