If you do your research, looking to establish your business in digital marketing, you probably will come across the term “affiliate marketing”. What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is the ultimate form of digital marketing. For years, affiliate marketing has been a cool alternative to your 9-5 approach of making money. This is one model that has been highly utilized by bloggers, YouTubers and podcasters to make a living.
So, how can I make money from Affiliate Marketing? Basically, you are an affiliate if you promote a product you like and you get a piece of the profit from the company each time a user buys that product. Affiliate marketing is an awesome avenue for significant revenue no matter who you are.
How to become an Affiliate Marketer? In order to achieve that you need to know the dos and don’ts of affiliate marketing and that’s what we will be discussing in this article.
Don’ts of Affiliate Marketing
Let’s start with the don’ts.
You don’t want to promote products or services that are related to scams or schemes, the most common being pyramid schemes. These usually involve multi-level marketing companies. If you get involved with something that is a pyramid scheme and you are being told to just recruit and not focus on the product itself, that’s a red flag. A good MLM will have a combination of selling good products and doing some recruitment along the way.
Don’t purchase email lists because you don’t know what the demographics of your audience is going to be. So, don’t buy or sell your email list. Even if you do decide to build an email list, make sure you don’t spam your email subscribers by sending them email after email because you will lose those subscribers.
Don’t use traffic exchanges or buy clicks. This is because if you have a website and you are trying to promote your website by using traffic exchanges and buying clicks, people will go to your website but they won’t stay. And that’s going to affect your Google rankings.
Don’t buy YouTube videos, Facebook likes or Instagram followers. You want your traffic to be authentic and of good quality people who want your information in front of them and are interested in your products.
Dos of Affiliate Marketing
Let’s look at the dos now:
Do follow the Terms and Conditions of every website or platform you work with. If you violate them, your account can be banned. Always read them, it only takes a few minutes.
Do maintain an ethical and transparent mindset because you want to build your audience through trust.
Do utilize social media to connect with your audience to build a long lasting positive reputation.
Do research the products or services you promote. You don’t want to promote low quality products where people will buy them, be unhappy and then you will have to deal with refunds.
Do offer free information/advice to build trust. If they trust you, they are more likely to buy from you.
Do learn how to outsource to the right people. You get what you pay for so make sure you outsource to the people who know what they are doing and they have proof to back it up.
Bottom line
Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn honest and ethical income if you commit to consistent actions. Affiliate marketing companies follow the dos and more importantly, avoid the don’ts diligently in order to attain success.
