Welcome to Day 2!
Affiliate marketing is the easiest and cheapest way to earn money on the internet. It's what I do to make money, and it's what I'm going to teach you to do so you can earn money online too.
What's Affiliate Marketing?
Essentially, you are getting paid a commission to promote a product or service.
How does this process work?
When you want to buy something online, typically you do a search in a search engine, Google.
For example, I wanted to buy a smoker to make some smoked ribs this summer, but I had no idea how to smoke meat.
Potential questions I would type into Google would be:
- what smoker makes the best ribs?
- how much meat can you make in a smoker?
- does a smoker use real wood or liquid smoke?
- should I buy an electric smoker or a propane smoker?
- what's the best smoker for newbies?
- how long does a smoker last?
- how long does it take to smoke pork ribs?
These are all things I'm curious about because I want to make really good ribs.
You can see from this picture above that not all the results are click-worthy to me. First off, I don't care what Amazon is selling. It's just a paid ad, and won't tell me much. I want to read what real people say about smokers.
AmazingRibs.com sounds like a great choice, and I'm definitely interested to see who won the 2018 contest for best backyard smoker!
I'd also like to click SeriousEats.com to see what kind of smoker I can get for under $500.
On both of those websites, you'll find affiliate links, which means if I click their link and buy a grill, they make some money.
I'm still not really ready to buy at this point, so I do another search, this time for “best backyard pellet smoker”.
Here are the results:
There's a few of the some websites from the last search, but a couple of new ones popped up as well. Each one has a unique title and interesting reason to click. Some have stars in the results, or display an author name, or show a preview of pricing.
Each of these websites is a person that's making money online.
Many of these people are not professionals! They are people just like you that have a hobby or interest, and they made a website about it.
What’s the point?
You don't have to manufacture grills. You don't need to start a cooking show. You don't have to open up a storefront in your town and start selling smokers. You can make money talking about grillin' and smokin' with a simple website and some articles that you write yourself.
This is just one topic, and there are hundreds of thousands of possible topics to choose from.
Let’s look at one more example.
A few years ago I started learning about stocks and I wanted to take a course on the internet. I typed into Google, “Online courses learn stock investing”, and that turned up quite a few results – way too many for me to decide.
I then modified my search to “Best online courses for beginners learning to invest in stocks”. That turned up a couple reviews which I read, and eventually followed the advice of a blogger who had taken some stock investing courses before.
He made a couple of recommendations, and I picked one that sounded good to me. Guess what! He probably got paid a commission!
Making Money In Affiliate Marketing Step By Step
Let’s take a look at what exactly you'll be doing to make money online through affiliate marketing.
Step 1: Pick A Topic (Niche)
Pick something you are interested in. ANY website can make money. If you are interested in a topic, there's going to be thousands of other people that are also interested. Don't worry about things like competition, profit level, or an exact plan to make money right now. (Experienced professionals will consider these things, but that can means months of research to pick the perfect topic.)
This is your first website, so you want to pick something you'll enjoy. You can tweak the website as you grow. The most important thing right now is to learn the process rather than hit a home run on your first try.
Step 2: Build a Website
This may seem scary to someone who’s never done it before, but getting a basic website set up is actually pretty easy these days. In fact, you can do it in 30 seconds. We're going to make a WordPress website, which is the most popular website builder in the world.
There's lots of ways to customize your site without knowing any code at all!
Step 3: Find Affiliate Programs
This is how you make money, and affiliate programs are all FREE to join! They'll pay you a commission for each sale you make. Some companies are big like Amazon or Walmart. Other companies are small business who would love to work with you. Here's how to find affiliate programs that pair well with your website, but we are not at that point in the training yet.
You can browse around to see what's out there, but we need a website with content before we start contacting these affiliate companies.
Step 4: Research And Create Content
You need to provide people with helpful information on your website. We’re not making an online shopping mall Amazon product showcase here!
By providing people with useful, unique content, you gain authority on the internet.
“Authority” means better ranking in search engines, which means more visitors, more sales, and more money! Writing content is tough for many newbies, but there are many simple formats you can follow to create great articles for your website without using too much brain power 🙂 For example, here are 8 Simple Article Styles To Make Money Online.
One basic style is the “top 10” style article, where you review the top 10 items in a category like “Top 10 drones for kids” or “Top 25 vegan brownie recipes online”.
Step 5: Expand & Promote
Once you’ve got the core website up, the work doesn’t stop there. To promote your website on the internet you can create video, share pictures, write articles, answer questions, participate in forums, have your own podcast, guest blog on other peoples websites, and tons more stuff.
You can easily make a six figure time income from just one website! You don't need to run 20 tiny websites on different topics for multiple streams of income. One website can promote many different products and make money in many different ways.
In day 4, we’ll dig into some some specific online business models that can help you diversify your income.
Tasks For Today
Task #1: What's the last product you purchased on the internet? Think about how the process happened including what you searched for, what websites you looked at, which links you clicked, and where the final transaction happened.
Task #2: Write down 3 hobbies or interests you have, and list a couple of paid products or services related to them. My hobbies are motorcycles and beer. Do you dive or enjoy gardening? Are video games, computers, or fashion some of your passions?
Task #3: Watch this video in Wealthy Affiliate about choosing your niche and if you have any questions, post them to the discussion area and see what everyone has to say.
Nathaniell
What message are you getting when you sign up?
Dawn Gentile
Hi Nathaniell,
Thank you, you definitely explain things easily, but I am stuck. There are a lot of things I am interested in, but I still can’t visualize my niche? This is a big problem . I started this email several days ago but never sent it. Since then I started thinking. About three years ago I was introduced to squid ink hair dye. I .love it. You cannot purchase it in the states I use to purchase it directly from Confume in Korea, I wanted to somehow start something back then..I should have acted on it back then. Now you can only order it through ebay at double the price, But it is still an amazing product.air I don’t just want to talk about hair dye though,.I just know I need to come up with something.
stuck Dawn
Nathaniell
Hair dye is probably too narrow of a niche anyway, and it’s good you recognize that you don’t want to talk about it all day long! I always recommend to start with a personal interest or hobby, and not try to think of a “business” idea. Many people get stopped up and frustrated feeling like they have to invent a new business. You don’t!
As you go through the training, your vision for your website will change. Start with something familiar to you, a topic of interest, and you can modify your idea slightly as you grow your website.
T
Hi Nathaniell, I just googled your homebrewing website and will bookmark it to see how the principles you’re teaching are applied out there in the real virtual world (wait, isn’t that an oxymoron?) Seriously, enjoying the email course so far, even though I’m trying to wedge it into an insane schedule, and I don’t even watch TV! Do you post the link to your homebrewing site or any of your other sites anywhere in your email course? I think that could be a really helpful way for people to see your course material in action. Thanks, T
Nathaniell
Kyle provides a good weightloss site which is ‘by the book’ so you can follow along with the course and see a better example. I do some extra stuff on my brew site including some stuff which requires extra fees and I don’t want to confuse people or make them feel like a website will cost them a bunch of money. Kyle’s is very basic, and a better example to follow.
Still, I use my brew site in some tutorial I make inside WA and have it listed in my profile. I also did an ‘inside look’ as part of the Black Friday bonus I’m offering, so it’s not like the site is a huge secret.
Roselene Santiago
Thank you for your info. You know I am doing the certification program on WA plus listening to your videos as well as your bonuses. At first when getting all this stuff I thought it would be overwhelming but it’s not. The videos are not too long and the reading is understandable. I feel all the info is reinforcing each other so it doesn’t feel complicated or get complicated. Thank you for doing this.
Roselene
Nathaniell
Thanks for the positive feedback Roselene! Glad you are getting it 🙂
Justina
Thanks Nataniell for breaking down the whole process for us in a layman’s language. Its quite easy to understand, you are really a good teacher. But I still have one question. Must we blog to make money in our website? Are there not other ways of making money with a website except by blogging. I hear of dropshipping? I really need to do other things in my website to make money that do not require blogging. Please help.
Nathaniell
I focus on blogging related businesses. Dropshipping is a different business model. You can see my views on drop shipping VS affiliate marketing here. People gravitate towards it because it “sounds” easier, but it’s not. While you don’t have to blog, you do have to source a lot of products, manage profit margins, and deal with a lot more stuff that you don’t have to deal with for affiliate marketing.
You can do affiliate marketing without blogging, but you have to pay for traffic.