I still remember telling a co-worker one day years back now that I did some affiliate marketing. At the time, he looked at me and said “You mean like a pyramid scheme” and I said “No, you get paid for referring people to products or services when they buy something”. You sure do get a lot of interesting comments when people are curious but are not informed about a topic like affiliate marketing. Like with most new things that you try, you must experiment to find what works best for you. For me, I can tell you that my niche seems to blogging about technology and for the last 5 years or so I’ve been perfecting what I know.
About 3 years ago I started to add a few articles to a blog I was running and still run to this day. The great thing is that the payments are recurring meaning that every month a customer stays signed up and using this service I collect my affiliate commission. Now there are many ways that affiliate marketing programs are run, a lot aren’t worth the time and energy involved because either the commission is too low, the product is obscure, the company has ridiculous payout terms or it just isn’t a good fit with what you are passionate about. The good thing is that there are lots of programs out there to take advantage of.
Getting back to my story, I wrote a number of articles (approximately 26 including various app reviews for products that integrate), did some basic SEO on them and slowly promoted them over the past 3 years. To date, I’ve been rewarded with a total payout $4627,80 over the months and years and all from a few articles and continued content creation over the years. Some things to keep in mind are that I’ve never paid for advertising to grow this out more, I simply rely on organic traffic from search engines and social media, that’s it.
So you are probably thinking that’s great, but how does it apply to me and what can I do to further myself? Personally I would start with the following…
- Do your homework – I can’t stress this enough. It took me years to do this, countless experiments, trial and error. You’ve got to do your homework, to keep on improving to be successfully.
- Find your niche – At the end of the day, if you don’t know or aren’t interested to know more about what you are trying to affiliate market you won’t be successful. Sure you might have mild success but it will probably be sporadic at best.
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