Many people are interested in Affiliate Marketing but don’t know how to get started. Here are our best tips for beginners getting started in affiliate marketing who want to do things the right way with some integrity.
Table of Contents
1 Start a Blog For Your Affiliate Marketing
2 Keyword Research For Your Affiliate Marketing
3 How to Get Backlinks For Your Affiliate Marketing Website
4 Tiktok For Affiliate Marketing
5 The Best Affiliate Training Out There
Start a Blog For Your Affiliate Marketing
Alright, we may be biased here but there are many great reasons to start a blog. Our blog is a great place to share affiliate links and recommended products. The main reason for this is that a blog is one of the few things an online entrepreneur has some control of.
Have you ever considered that Social Media accounts are things you could lose? You perform a simple action that is entirely acceptable to you (and in your mind should be acceptable to Facebook/Instagram/TikTok etc) and suddenly your account is in jeopardy.
We have shared simple how to draw videos, and they have been labelled as inappropriate for literally no reason. Thankfully we haven’t been banned but others have, and still don’t understand why.
You could be penalised by Google because someone you don’t know decides to link to your website, and suddenly you have dodgy backlinks. This makes it difficult to rank and so your visibility on search engines is compromised. Also a Google update could seriously affect your rankings overnight, and you could find yourself unable to be found in search. After all, the old joke/adage holds true – if you want to successfully hide something put it on the second page of Google.
Unless you seriously break the policies of your host provider for your blog (which is much less likely than Social Media AND Google) you should always have your blog. You should always have this platform which provides great value to your readers.
In all honesty, starting a blog (much like starting a Youtube account) really does take time and effort and resilience. However the benefits outweigh the pitfalls longterm. You should start a Youtube channel, just as you should set up your own website and aim to rank on Google. Both are free and both can bring you a great deal of traffic.
It’s worth considering starting a blog because after you cross what some call the Critical Authority Threshold (CAT for short) you WILL start to generate traffic to your blog. As painful as it is to admit this threshold tends to take on average 6-9 months to cross. GASP. HORROR. FAINT.
If you know in advance the challenge you are taking on you won’t give up as easily as some. Adopt a steely mindset, produce great content and the rewards will inevitably come. After crossing the CAT our blog began to gather traction which lead to thousands of views.
Once you have a blog that generates 1000+ views a month (whether 6 months in or later) you can write blogs that rank on the first page of Google within a few days if you do your Keyword Research correctly. Especially if you managed to generate some worthwhile backlinks (high authority websites that link to your website. More on this later.
Keyword Research For Your Affiliate Marketing
In our experience getting a really decent SEO research tool like SEMrush, Ahrefs or Ubersuggest makes a huge difference. These platforms have a free (or cheap) trial period which allows you to find out the benefits for yourself.
Google Keyword Planner will give you the monthly search volume for chosen keywords as long as you have a Google Ads account. If you start a Google Ads campaign but then don’t go on to set it up fully and pay for it you can get access to the Keyword Planner and search volume for free.
Unfortunately, the search volume is only an estimate – e.g. 10000-100000 – so that’s why paid tools (or occasional sign ups for free trials are MUCH better). Finding out a search term is 100-1000 month is not very accurate or helpful. It’s too big a range.
If you do your Keyword Research well you can rank even with a relatively new website. Make sure you pay attention to Keyword difficulty. If a keyword has low competition (as in the websites that rank on Page 1 of Google have few backlinks) you should have a decent chance to rank.
Look at the first page of Google for a certain search (say for example ‘How to Rank on Google’) and see if there are any high authority sites on positions 1-7. If the first page of Google for that keyword is filled by Pinterest, Facebook, Etsy etc you can forget ranking for that keyword. You can’t take on these kinds of giants.
Instead, research keywords that have ordinary blogs with a relatively low DA (Domain Authority – based on how many backlinks the website has) on the first page for the keyword search. If ordinary blogs with a low DA dominate the first page of Google you know you have a chance. Learning how to analyse the first page of Google is SO important for understanding which keywords you can and can’t rank for, meaning you don’t waste your time chasing keywords that are unworkable. You get to know what you can rank for more and more intuitively with practice. The best SEO tools like SEMrush will help here because they will provide SEO difficulty as part of the process. Anything over 65-70 (classified as the upper end of medium difficulty) is going to be too difficult for a beginner website to rank for.
How to Get Backlinks For Your Affiliate Marketing Website
Backlinks enhance your website’s authority. Period. They are hugely important in how your website ranks in the search engines. The more backlinks your website has, the better it will rank in the search engines. Especially if the website that links to you has high authority itself. Domain Authority is based on the number of websites that link to that particular website.
Some people actually never set out to gain backlinks to their website as such. They aim to produce really good content so that people will naturally want to link to their website.
While that can be very successful if your content is outstanding, we would recommend that you actively pursue backlinks.
The best way to do this is to do what many call ‘outreach.’ Send emails to people and websites that are in the same niche as you, telling them how much you enjoy their content. Make sure you provide value to them by telling them you have ALREADY linked to them because you enjoy their content so much, and they might think about linking back to you. At first it’s best to offer them value without openly asking anything at all. Allow them to consider linking to you without pressure, and build relationships with other websites within your niche.
Google loves you to link out to other sources who are doing what you do because it enhances the user experience for people conducting the search. If you are searching ‘How to Start Affiliate Marketing,’ for example you could benefit from reading not just one but a few authoritative articles.
This will also reduce your ‘bounce rate,’ because people will read your whole article and go on to read other articles on Google. Your ‘bounce rate’ makes a massive difference to your ranking on Google because it means searchers are finding value in your article and not ‘bouncing,’ back to Google search again because they haven’t found what they are looking for.
Now we can move on to where to share your affiliate links without having a website. It must be stressed that having a ‘home,’ on the Internet really is the best starting point – all your efforts to build outwards should be based on having a blog/website that you can link back to and build from.
Quora For Affiliate Marketing
You can really add to your website’s visibility by signing up for quora.com. From this fantastic site you can answer questions related your niche and then add a link at the end to entice people back to your ‘home,’ website.
For the context of this article you could answer a question about affiliate marketing e.g. ‘Where can I share my affiliate links?’ and write a valuable and lengthy response to this question.
At the end of your response you could link to your article on your own website based around the subject of Affiliate Marketing. If this answer gets lots of upvotes (because it is helpful and informative) you could potentially drive a great deal of people to your website. If you use a keyword tool like SEMrush you will be able narrow down subject matter, Quora, and your topic (e.g. affiliate marketing) in such a way that you find the topics that are most searched and have the most visits and you could go viral, potentially driving traffic to your website on autopilot for months or even years to come.
Tiktok For Affiliate Marketing
It would be remiss of us NOT to mention the platform that is most likely to make your content viral at this stage. TikTok is unfortunately in a process of change and may soon be less viable for sharing affiliate links, but right now as this article is being published (October 2021) it’s not too late to set up your account.
If you can find some of the affiliate marketing accounts that have gone viral and use them as a model you can really have success. Don’t copy as that is useless and pretty much immoral, but do use the best videos as a model. Check out Spencerhacks or Make Money With Lori, and you will definitely find models you can use. You don’t need to do better videos necessarily, just understand what kind of video format is likely to go viral.
All you need is one or two videos to go viral and your followers will explode! Youtube can take months and months but at the moment Tiktok can blow up overnight, and no-one knows for how long this will be the case.
Take advantage of this opportunity to grow your affiliate marketing business while you can!
The Best Affiliate Training Out There
If you are interested in getting in depth high value Affiliate Marketing training we can thoroughly recommend these guys: Legendary Marketer.
For a mere $7 you can sign up for the 15 Day Challenge which gives you access to Sales Materials, done-for-you Sales Funnels, bonuses, their Facebook Support Group, a dedicated account manager to talk to over zoom, help building a business plan, a ton of training videos covering strategies/topics around marketing that you wouldn’t have dreamed of by yourself.
Yes we completed the 15 Day Challenge ourselves, and it that’s why we can fully recommend it, and know so much about it.
The CEO Dave Sharpe has over a decade’s experience online and has made $200 Million through his well proven methods.
Check out their offer, listening and considering carefully how it could benefit you here:
https://onlinebusinessbuilderchallenge.com/enter/enroll?aid=51089
Recommended further reading on Affiliate Marketing:
https://neilpatel.com/what-is-affiliate-marketing/