How to Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing ? Blogs and YouTube are two major platforms for Affiliate Marketing. But which one will be the right choice for you?
Read ahead to find out!
Affiliate marketing is among the most hassle-free ways of generating income online, and it has gained much popularity over recent years.
Whether you’re sharing reviews through blogs or unboxing products on your YouTube vlogs, you are likely to entertain and even convert a large pool of audience if you just know how to do it right.
So, how does one make money online with affiliate marketing? And which platform should you opt for? We’re answering these important questions in this article.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a popular medium of driving sales for a brand and generating revenue online. It is a marketing tactic that benefits both the affiliate marketers and the brands involved.
When you’re doing affiliate marketing, you are basically tasked with creating content promoting a brand’s products to your audience.
The content may range from a blog post and a review article to awareness and unboxing video – whichever it is, you’ll be providing your audience with sufficient information on the product along with an affiliate link and nudge them toward buying it. And when your audience makes a purchase following your affiliate link, you will earn a handsome commission.
Affiliate marketing is a growing business. As a matter of fact, more than 81% of brands use an affiliate marketing tactic to drive sales, and the numbers are only going to rise from here.
Businesses are allocating a large portion of their marketing budget to affiliate marketing, and you can leverage it to earn some cash online. It is a passive income source and an excellent place to start your journey as a digital marketer.
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How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
Choosing a Niche
Before you plunge into affiliate marketing, you will need to find a niche that interests you. If there is a certain product line that you hold expertise on, go for promoting them. You will have a fresh perspective and valuable insights to share with your audience. However, do your market research first. One of the many advantages of affiliate marketing is that you can promote products and brands that are already trending. Well accepted products help bring in higher traffic to your blog or YouTube channel.
Choosing a Platform
You can start a blog or a YouTube channel to share your content. The two platforms are completely different, not just because of the content you get to share, but they also come with different algorithms, different sets of SEO rules, conversion rates, learning curves, costs, and more. We’ll get further into it in a bit.
Creating Content
As you are preparing your content, keep in mind that you are not a sales representative – just a promoter with a business of your own. Try not to be too sales-y. It’s best if you can speak as a user and share your experience with the audience. Be sure to offer information on the nitty-gritty of the product and what it has to offer. Avoid filler words – in the case of blog and YouTube both.
Be authentic, and the rest will follow.
Signing up
Sign up for affiliate programs. While Amazon is the most popular affiliate marketing program in the market, there are thousands of others that you can leverage. There are many affiliate marketplaces that may help you sign up for affiliate programs and manage them. ShareASale and ClickBank are among the most popular ones.
Before you choose an affiliate program, take a look at the rate of commissions they provide. Amazon offers up to 10% commission (popular for a reason) while eBay and Etsy range from 4% to 8% affiliate commissions. Walmart offers 4% in most of its categories and Aliexpress 3%. These are just some of the most popular programs, but the market is vast. You can sign up for multiple programs once your affiliate business begins to scale.
Reaching the Target Audience
So once you have your content ready, now you need to focus on generating traffic.
No traffic, no sales.
Run marketing campaigns for your website or YouTube channel. You can integrate marketing automation tools if you can stretch the budget a little bit. Most importantly, whatever content you’re making, make sure it is aligned with the platform’s algorithm and is SEO friendly.
Blog or Video?
Before you decide which platform you should opt for, here are some key differences you should know about.
- In the case of blogs, you are the owner of your platform. It entails some expenses such as domain costs, hosting costs, automated marketing costs, and more. On the contrary, you don’t own YouTube, just a channel. So YouTube is free while a blog needs some initial investments.
- Generating traffic is much easier on YouTube than in blogs. YouTube has a much simpler algorithm and larger viewer pools. But you need to be careful about making your content SEO-friendly. Also, choosing a trending product or brand helps generate higher traffic. As for blogs, you are dependent on Google’s algorithm. And ranking on Google is much more competitive.
- Updating your content on a blog is like a walk in the park, which is not the case for YouTube. You cannot edit in new information or remove old ones once your video is live.
Consider all these differences before you make a decision on which platform you want to choose. You can even run affiliate marketing on both a blog and YouTube at the same time, and let them promote each other. This will allow you to get maximum exposure.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is a growing industry, and this incredible source of passive income is helping enthusiasts around the world get started on digital marketing. Yet, many people find themselves in a dilemma between blog or YouTube, and we’ve tried to clear the confusion on this post. So, now that you know how to make money online with affiliate marketing, we encourage you to leverage the knowledge and take the leap!
Source photos: Unsplash
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Hi,
Thank you for pointing out all the steps to take to make money with affiliate marketing. I would think about doing both, a blog as well as Youtube. I really think like you mentioned, that would get even better SEO results all together, also because Youtube is owned by Google 😉
thanks for the info
Hi Lizzy, thank you for writing. It is important to keep up with the trend, and if you can do Youtube videos along with a blog, you will get traffic faster.
I would say both. Both blog and video plays an important role in the online business nowadays. Blog alone can’t do much as the attention span of users is reducing day by day and technology is also getting advanced, so people end up looking shortcuts in everything.
Affiliate marketing is awesome and I must say that one need to follow your guidelines presented in this post to succeed in Affiliate marketing. I will follow it too.
Thanks a lot for sharing this valuable post.
Hi Akshay, thank you for writing and sharing your views. I am glad you found the information useful.
I would like to hop into this growing industry. I have been researching these days about dropshipping and cryptos but they all seem complicated for a newbie. And on the other hand affiliate marketing seems great. I completely understand the process and what I’ll be doing. So I’m excited to give it a try.
Hi Abel, that is a great choice. Affiliate marketing is fun to build up, and it is a lucrative business. Thank you for writing.