When starting out as an affiliate, getting traffic to your website that generate commissions with your affiliate programs can seem like a daunting task. This tip can help you generate unlimited (at least a lot of) free traffic for your affiliate programs.
The only way that I know of to generate affiliate marketing sales is by making websites and doing SEO. I am not an expert when it comes to email marketing, social media, or paid ads.
Here’s my simple 3-step guide for new affiliates and any other affiliates that struggles to make money. These steps should be enough to give you a decent chance of generating a lot of affiliate commissions over time. Keep in mind that this is a high level guide that is simplified and does not go into details for each step.
#1 – Make a Website
The first step in my journey to make affiliate commissions was to create a website and publishing content on it. I’ve found that making simple websites is just as effective as creating advanced custom websites, so you don’t really need to have any knowledge of web design or coding to get started. Buying web hosting, installing the free WordPress CMS, choosing a theme (web design) is enough to get you going.
#2 – Get Traffic
To get traffic from Google, you need to have a decent website with a decent amount of content. Getting a few other websites to link to your website is also crucial. Keep in mind that it can take a few months before you see results and traffic coming from the search engines to your new website.
#3 – Make Money
Once you have a website with traffic, you can start earning money with affiliate programs. The trick I like is to promote really relevant affiliate offers for the content. This makes the affiliate links really useful for your visitors and makes it likely that they will purchase what you advertise. I can tell you from my own experience that you can get some really high conversion rates when choosing the right affiliate programs for the content.
A Few Additional Tips
When researching what content to add to your website, or what niche to make your website in, you could start by finding some affiliate programs that you think looks great and build your content around that. Check out my post about the highest paying affiliate niches.
When just starting out, I would suggest doing some keyword research, and go for low competition keyword. These are keywords with a difficulty of 30 or less in SEMRush.
Staying away from spammy links. As mentioned, getting a few dofollow links pointing to your website is an important signal for the search engines to start ranking your website and giving you traffic. One mistake I see some people make is that they don’t care about the relevancy or quality of their links. I would suggest staying away from buying cheap link packages that are advertised on various SEO forums.
Instead, doing guest posting, or getting links in other ways, from a handful of relevant websites, would be my suggestion. And stay away from sitewide sidebar links. Those were common before, but now they might be harmful for your SEO. In content links from relevant pages, one by one, are the best links to get I believe.