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What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the best and most common ways you can monetize your site to earn money online in your business, and more than 90% online entrepreneurs use it.

It is the process of promoting other peoples products in exchange for a commission every time a customer makes a purchase.

For example, if you promote a web hosting company such as Bluehost, and someone uses your link or affiliate tracking ID to purchase you will get 50% commission, which is half the sale.

Thus, to earn money online with this method of monetizing a website you must work hard to drive high sales resulting in more commissions.

In case you are wondering how the affiliate company will know that the customer used your affiliate link, read more on affiliate link cookies to understand how the tracking works.

Parties and Terms involved in Affiliate Marketing

Merchant/Advertiser: This is the main retailer, producer or manufacturer of the product you want to promote. For example, Bluehost is a merchant in the example provided above.

Affiliate/publisher: This is now you who want to promote the merchant products. Also known as publishers, and in the real business world, these can be likened to retailers.

Affiliate Networks: This acts as a middleman between the merchant and the affiliate. Some merchants host their affiliate programs, while others manage them through networks, such as ShareASale, Amazon Associates and CJ Affiliate among others.

Consumer: This is a buyer who will purchase the product either directly from the merchant or indirectly through the publishers tracking ID.

Commission: This is the percentage of the money the affiliate will earn in the case of a successful sale.

Affiliate tracking ID: This the unique identifier is given by the merchant or affiliate network to the publishers used to track purchases.

Affiliate materials: These can be links, banners or any other method that the publisher will use to promote the affiliate products.

How do you monetize your site with Affiliate marketing?

To make money online through affiliate marketing, you must use the right strategies and tips for success.

Below I have compiled a list 8 tips you should consider when you choose to monetize your site through affiliate marketing. 

a) Find a Niche

Most online entrepreneurs who make money online through affiliate marketing have a specific target market and the audience they sell to products which meet their needs.

You cannot promote every product under the sun, and it is even more challenging to do so on the online platform.

For this reason, begin by picking a niche market if you want to succeed in monetizing your website through affiliate marketing and making money online.

For example, fitness, SEO, weight loss, personal development, and health are all examples of niche markets.

Use these three articles 103 high potential niches, most profitable niches 2018 and 1859 profitable niche markets to find other niche market examples.

From the above examples, you can tell that customers interested in the SEO niche will not consume the same products as those interested in the weight loss niche.

Therefore, to earn money online through affiliate marketing, you must sell the right products to the right audience in the right niche market spaces and opportunities.

b) Do keyword research

The secret to making money online through affiliate marketing is selling the right products to the right customers who are willing to buy from your online business.

Keywords are the words or phrases that people enter into search engines to find information.

Keyword research will help you know which search phrases buyers in your niche use most before they make a purchase. For example, a common keyword which reflects buying intent is “best weight loss pills for men.”

To monetize your site right with this method, the best keywords to use are long tail search phrases, which have low competition and high click-through rates since they represent the buyers intent.

Recommended reading: How to do keyword research for affiliate marketing

c) Find the right products

Your ability to make money online with affiliate marketing will largely depend on your ability monetize your site effectively by selling the right products.

There are many ways you can find products to promote on your website

• Promote products you already use in your online business, such as themes, hosting, SEO tools, social media tools and any other product you use in your life.
• Find products relevant to your niche in affiliate networks, such as ShareASale, Amazon Associates and CJ Affiliate.
• Borrow your competitor’s products. I know you visit other entrepreneurs websites in your niche, find out the products they promote while you are there.

For example in the keyword above, “best weight loss pills for men,” the best place to find affiliate products in is Amazon Associates network.

Recommended reading: How to Choose the best affiliate marketing products.

d) Create highly converting selling copies

By a selling copy I mean the method you will use to monetize your site with the affiliate products.

These can be text links in blog posts, banners on sidebars and other website locations, landing pages, video marketing, social media campaigns, product giveaways and email marketing among others.

The only way you are going to monetize your site effectively with affiliate marketing is being valuable to your readers and customers.

Those customers will only buy from you if they can trust you or look up to you as an influencer or someone in a position to give an expert recommendation.

For example, if you are a blogger who wants to monetize your site with this method, you should consider writing detailed how-to guides, review articles and comparison posts, which help customers to make decisions.

Therefore, to earn money online with affiliate marketing you must always create content and products with the following characteristics.

e) Promote your website and content widely

Affiliate marketing is not a get rich overnight make money online strategy.

Affiliate income takes time to grow, but the good thing is that you can accelerate this growth through promoting your content widely across many networks for it to reach a broad target audience.

The more you reach your target market niche and audience the higher the chances of making many affiliate sales, which will result in high commissions.

Therefore, to monetize your site effectively with affiliate marketing spend 20% of your time creating unique selling copies and use the rest 80% promoting the content and your website or online business in general.

Recommended reading: The ultimate guide to online business promotion strategies

f) Create SEO friendly websites

SEO is the process of making websites user and search engine friendly. It involves all the activities performed on a website design, architecture, social profiles and content among others to make it more crawlable by search engines and easy to use for your customers.

Therefore, SEO will help you to create a website which will attract more customers and also give them a reason to stay and buy from your online business.

Search engines are a source of free organic traffic, which you need to earn money online because this can only happen if you have customers buying from your website and online business.

SEO is divided into two: on page SEO and off page SEO factors.

Therefore, if you want to earn money online and monetize your site right with affiliate marketing, then you must take care of all the SEO ranking factors in the two categories above.

Recommended readings: On page SEO and Off page SEO

g) Track, Evaluate and Measure your performance

The truth is that affiliate marketing is tedious and time-consuming.

For this reason, you do not want to waste time with the wrong products with poor conversions and sales returns or even destroy the reputation of your online business by monetizing your website with the wrong products.

Tracking is vital to know which products your customers want more, and which ones are poorly performing.

These data will help you to decide which products to promote more or which ones to leave behind.

In WordPress, you can use Thirsty affiliates, Ad sanity, and MonsterInsights plugins.

Affiliate Marketing Quick summary tips

• Sell what you use and know about to build more brand loyalty with your customers.
• Research your market, niche, competitors, and The only way to promote the right products is through understanding their market and buyers well.
• Measure everything and do not be afraid to change goals or drop any irrelevant and under-performing product along the way.
• Cloak your links and use a no-follow attribute to avoid messing up your SEO reputation.
• Be useful and valuable to your customers. Write articles, produce course and create videos that are informative and help them in their buying decisions, such as detailed guides and how-to posts.
• Long-term success in affiliate marketing begins with SEO best practices. Take care of on-page SEO, off-page SEO, link building and Keyword research to succeed in affiliate marketing through free search engine traffic.
• Promote promote promote and again promote your website and its content like crazy. The only way customers will buy from you is when they know you exist and where to find you and your products.
• Use the right tools. For example, SemRush for market research, KW finder for keyword research, Convertkit for email marketing, Divi builder for creating attractive long form guides, AdSanity for banners.

Types of Ads

These are the main of ads, but not the only ones you can find a detailed list of all kinds of ads in this article

 

Types of Ads	Example
1.     Text ads They contain text describing a product or place that is being advertised.
2. Video Ads These are playable video media ads
3. Image Ads They operate with the model that, a picture is worth 1000 words.”
4. Link Ads Are clickable hyperlinks

How to monetize your site with Advertising models

To earn money online in your business website you can use any of the ads types above or a combination of two or all the formats in every campaign.

Advertising is a broad topic when it comes to monetizing a website with ads.

There are many different advertising models/campaigns that you can use to monetize your website.

Your online business or website will make money online effectively only through choosing the right advertising model that suits your business niche, audience, and type.

Below are 8 advertising campaigns/models you can use to monetize your site and begin to make money online like a billionaire.

a) Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising

Also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) is the most common type of advertising you can use to monetize your website, and you earn when people click on the ad.

The more clicks you get, the higher the payout, which means that you must have high website traffic to earn money online effectively with this type of ads.

The upside of these types of ads is that they are easy to set up, while the downside is that they have a low payout, especially when you have low traffic to your site.

The most common advertising network that offers this type of monetizing method is Google AdSense.

To learn more about Google AdSense use these three resources, how to set up Google Adsense in WordPress and how to make money with Google Adsense.

Yes, Google Adsense is the best and most common way to monetize a website, but sometimes your account may get rejected or banned, or even you may not be making the money you want due to low click rates.

In such a scenario, you can use these alternatives to Google AdSense, such as Media.net and Infolinks to monetize your site.

b) Cost Per Mile (CPM)

These are ads where you make money online for every 1000 impressions. By impressions, it means the number of times the ad appears on your site.

Thus, if you monetize your site with these types of ads, you will earn a commission every time the advertisement is displayed 1000 times on your site.

This means that you will still make money from CPM ads even though your website visitors do not click on them like in CPC model.

The upside of this model is that it is less risky, and it’s easy to make good money with it, but the downside is that there are few advertisers and it is limiting because you do not make money if people click on the ad.

There are many CPM ad networks out there, such as Propeller Ads, Conversant Media and Casale Media.

c) Cost Per Action (CPA)

Also known as cost per acquisition is a model where you get paid when people click and perform and action the advertiser’s website, such as buy a product or sign up to the newsletter among other actions.

Therefore, when you monetize your site with CPA ads, you only make money online when your website visitors click on the ad, which redirects them to the advertiser’s website where they have to complete any action, such as purchase a product for you to earn your commission.

The upside of this ad campaign is that it has high payout margins, but it is riskier because you can quickly fall victim to a publishers fraud.

There are many CPA networks, which you can try today, such as MaxBounty, CPA Lead, and Dynamic Yield among others.

d) Private/direct Ads

This is the best method to monetize your site if you have high decent traffic.

If you are ready to have a control on your ads, you can use this campaign method in the following ways to make money online.

Firstly, sell ad space. You can create an “Advertise with us” page which will attract interested advertisers in your niche to place ads on your site. You must conduct a market hunt and intensive website promotion for advertisers to find your services among other activities described in that article.

Secondly, you can save yourself the hustle of selling the ads yourself and sell them through several networks, such as BuySellAds and BlogAds. These networks with take 20-30% of the commission, which is fair because they will help to display your customer’s ads to a broad audience.

The advantage of monetizing your website with private ads is that you have direct control on the ads and the payout commission is high, but the downside is that they require more effort to manage.

e) Create a Paid Directory

A paid directory is a form of advertising model where you make money online by creating a website where people advertise several things, such as jobs in exchange for a fee.

Job boards and event calendars are two common examples of paid directories that you can use to monetize your site today.

This guide will provide all relevant information you need to get started on how to create and earn money online with paid directory websites.

f) Text Link Ads

When you monetize your site with these ads, you will make money online through adding links from advertisers in your niche to words and phrases within your content.

You must always use nofollow links with these type of advertising to avoid search engine penalties, find more tips here.

There are many networks that offer this model of advertising, such as LinkWorth, Skimlinks, Infolinks, and VigLink among others.

g) Sponsored Content

This model works where an advertiser looks for a website with decent traffic and approaches the owner to publish or feature their content on their website.

There are many examples of sponsored content, such as posts, interviews, webinars, and videos among others.

If you choose to monetize your site with these advertising model consider these many factors you should consider when setting the price for sponsored content, such as word count and visibility time among others.

Therefore, this method of monetizing your website earns money online only when your site is already generating high traffic.

Remember that some advertisers will not find you, and so you should not shy away from finding them in the right places.

h) Paid Reviews

In this method of monetizing your site, it is similar to sponsored posts, but they differ in that you sign up to different networks and get paid to write reviews for products related to your website niche.

There are many networks, which you can find these types of ads to monetize your website, such as SponsoredReviews, PayPerPost and PayU2Blog among others.

Monetizing a website through affiliate marketing and advertising methods above were all about selling the products of other people on your site.

It does not always have to be this way because most go-getter online entrepreneurs consider moving a step forward and taking things into their control by creating original digital products from scratch.

There are many digital products you can sell in the online space like the few examples listed below.

• E-books: Read this case study to find out more.
• Courses: Look at a case study
• Webinars: Here is a case study that will show you how it works.
• Stock Photos
• Digital downloads, such as plugins, themes and automation systems among others.
• Web-based applications, such as email marketing services, file storage apps and SEO tools among others

Quick Tips

• Carry out intensive market research before launching or creating your product to avoid disappoints of failure for choosing the wrong product.
• If your online business is new, focus first on nurturing an audience with free content and selling other peoples products before you can begin selling personal digital products.
• Use the right tools. Creating, launching and selling a product from scratch is time consuming and resource consuming. Therefore, if you choose to monetize your site with this method, use the right tools to avoid frustrations, burnout and time wastage.
• Build traffic through promoting your website extensively. If you monetize your site with digital products, they will need buyers for you to earn money online through this method.
• Practice on page and off page SEO best practices to generate free search engine traffic and to make your website easy to use.

As an online entrepreneur, website owner or blogger you already have some expertise in a specific niche.

In this case, you can allow yourself to be hired by other people who can benefit from your services to earn money online.

One quick way to monetize your site with this method is by adding a “hire me” page on your website.

Below are three main ways you can monetize your site through offering services.

Become a Freelancer: There are many freelancing opportunities in the online platform you can use to make money online, such as writing, developing websites and becoming a virtual assistant among others. There many ways you can find freelancing gigs, such as pitching clients directly and applying to offers on job boards and freelance networks.

Consulting: Why not make money online by turning your passion into a career by giving others a chance to approach you for advice and hire you for tasks that will multiply their success through consulting? This method requires some expertise and an established reputation. Nevertheless, this should not turn you off because the returns are worthy.

Coaching: As you build your online business and website, you will gain information and experience not known to beginners. You can turn this into a monetizing opportunity by becoming a coach and mentor to people who want to learn and acquire the skills you possess.

To make money online with this method, you can either create paid membership sites, or you can monetize your site by transforming some sections of your website into a membership site where people must pay to access in the following ways;

Create restricted content: This is premium content, such as timed downloads, ultimate guides, and video content among others that readers must pay a membership fee to access either for a specific period or lifetime. Visit this two article here and here to learn how you can monetize your site with this method in WordPress.

Communities: These are groups that bring together like-minded people, such as bloggers, mom entrepreneur and new bloggers among others.  Some communities have premium content, and you must pay to become a member, such as Wealthy Affiliate for affiliate marketers.

Private forums: They are similar to communities, but most are question and answer sites where you can ask any question related to your niche. In WordPress, you can monetize your site by creating a forum site with these 5 plugins, such as MemberPress.

By physical merchandise, I mean real tangible products, such as those sold on Amazon, E-bay and other online stores.

Selling merchandise is a business model where you showcase several retail products on your website related to the specific niche to make money online.

Below are some few types of merchandise businesses you can use to monetize your site to earn money online.

Create an E-commerce store: Examples, include Amazon, E-bay, and Alibaba among others. There are several plugins you can use to create one in WordPress, such as Woocommerce.

Sell Branded products: These are products that you can design, such as T-shirts.

Begin Dropshipping: If you monetize your site with this model, you will be a merchant without directly handling products like in the e-commerce store model. Visit this article to learn how to make money with this business model. See example below.

You can monetize your website with this method if you are too lucky to have an engaged audience who are ready to support your efforts and sites you can ask for a donation from them directly.

It sounds spammy, right? I would not advise you to use this method, especially if you are starting out.

If you are ready to use this method here are few tips you can use.

Offer value: The only way people will donate to your site is if you are offering exceptional value, such as providing quality products and content.

Create a campaign: Instead of looking as though you are asking for money for your personal use, you should consider attaching some value to the donation motive. For instance, you can say that the money will be used to help needy children. See example here.

Add a donate button: You can add one with Paypal or Stripe for best results.

Embed a donate form: This will increase your credibility and create some uniformity in all donations. See example below.

Flipping is a method you can use to monetize your site by auctioning or selling it to interested buyers.

If you are good at designing websites or you are not ready to carry out all the tasks involved in building a site, you can sell it to someone looking for a developed site.

Not everyone wants to create a website from scratch. Some prefer to buy ones that are already established, and this is where flipping comes into play.

To make money online flipping websites, you can either sell your sites in several marketplaces, such as Flippa, or you can buy sites from other retailers and resell them at a profit.

It is over to you!

I hope that this post has been informative to you, and you now know exactly how you can monetize your site to earn money online.

It is not possible to use all these website monetization methods, but try using at least two, which are fit for your audience and niche.

Remember that you will need a website before you can use these monetization strategies. If you have not created a site yet follow this link the ultimate guide to creating a site in 2018.

Additionally, the only way you can make enough money online to make a living is when your website has traffic and an engaged audience.

Use these eight online business promotion strategies to learn how you can drive traffic to your business and attract the right customers to it for you to make your first sale.

Finally, do not forget that you must carry out on page and off page SEO best practices to prepare your website for these monetization strategies.

Want three books that will teach you how to make money online in any niche and website? See the list below.

How to create a passive income business empire online

Passive Income guide

Make a Fortune While you sleep

Feel free to leave a comment below asking a question, sharing your own personal process of monetizing your site or even better provide a suggestion of a post you would like me to write about.

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