If you are not familiar with what affiliate marketing is, it is basically where a marketer promotes someone else’s products or services and they receive a commission for driving a conversion (purchase/lead).

This is a way to earn a passive income, suited to people who have blogs and active websites.

To succeed in affiliate marketing, there are a number of crucial steps you must take before you earn those first affiliate profits. And these steps are, well … not passive.

The good news is that if you’re determined to make this work and are willing to put in the time and effort, you’re already well on your way to affiliate marketing success.

The steps in a nutshell

• Choose your niche.
• Build a site.
• Produce excellent content.
• Build an audience.
• Research different affiliate programs and products to promote.
• Mentorship

What is my website all about?

Before you even begin building your first site, you’ll need to decide which topic I gonna write about, in other words, which niche you’re going to target. A niche is a distinct segment of a market, in other words, an "audience".

When choosing a niche you should take the following in consideration : 

What topics am I already passionate about?

It's much easier to work on something if you're passionate about it. Plus, when you have a passion, you're usually quite knowledgeable about it too, so that definitely helps.

Is there money in this niche?

Any product works. Really!

Take a look at Potato Parcel...

Potato Parcel is a service that allows you to send anyone a potato with your personalized image and/or message on it.

When I first thought about it, I thought it was the dumbest idea possible. But I also could see how it would get a laugh out of a person you were fond of.

Writing on these potatoes has to be the most bizarre day job, lol

Successful? You betcha!

They were also featured on Shark Tank, CNBC, Cosmopolitan, USA Today and Playboy.

Building my first website

If you're a newbie to building sites, the easiest way to set up a site is by using WordPress. 

WordPress is an online, open-source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it's probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.
WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
Around a quarter of the web is powered by it.

Using WordPress for your business, you say?

An entrepreneur’s focus should be on their business; they do not want to have to solve endless website problems.
Fortunately, WordPress meets this need perfectly.

To build your website you need professional web hosting and a domain name.

Be a blog beast!

A blog is an excellent marketing tool for businesses. It takes time to establish your blog but the results are well worth the effort. To get the most out of your blog, you will need to set aside some time every week to write quality content.

As I said before, you will be writing a lot of content to reach out to your audience. 

A question I often get is how often should I post on my blog?

How often you should post on your blog. It depends on you, the time that you have and the way you like to work.
I do suggest planning out a content schedule and sticking to it.
If you intend to post every day, then stick to it! You will only end up losing visitors if you post every day for a month and then once a fortnight after that. You need to think about your readers, they will come to expect daily posts if that’s what you have been supplying up until that point.

I like to post a couple of times (3 times) a week.

Build your audience

Understand how to drive traffic to your website.

Affiliate Marketing is all about driving targeted traffic to a website. In order to do that, you need to have a vast array of knowledge that is all of the different types of traffic generation.

Build an email list with your prospects on it

Start building an audience via social media. Depending on your niche and industry, you can choose from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube (and several others).

Research different affiliate programs and products to promote.

Once you’ve shown that you can offer something of value in your niche, it’s time to continue adding value by promoting products that will be useful and helpful for your audience.

Choosing an affiliate program will take some work, but don’t be afraid to invest a significant amount of time into it because this is, of course, where your income will come from.

Building trust with your audience is a must so make sure the products and services you choose to promote are trustworthy enough.

You find those affiliate programs either via affiliate networks or directly offered by the product owners.

Through a single portal, affiliate networks give publishers (one of them is you) access to numerous affiliate programs.

An example of an affiliate network is ShareASale and which I use to find my products to promote.

But before you do join one of them, it is essential you complete the previous steps or those affiliate networks won't accept you.

Mentorship

The importance of having a mentor or mentorship program I cannot emphasize enough.

Some of the benefits in a nutshell :

• being encouraged and empowered in personal development
• being helped to identify and achieve career goals
• being helped to identify and correct gaps in generic skills and knowledge
• increasing your confidence
• developing and maintaining a broader perspective on career options and opportunities
• having access to a senior role model
• developing mentoring/coaching skills yourself

To Conclude

I will teach you how to generate passive income online with Affiliate Marketing. 

Are you ready to take the first steps?

Join for FREE as a Pioneer and see for yourself if this is really the best place to learn affiliate marketing or not.

I will see you inside!

All the best,

Luc

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