Opportunity – Build a Niche Website and Use Affiliate Marketing

There are several ways to make money online this year.  Getting familiar with the different online business models will allow you to apply those learnings to your business.  Give it a read and think about how this article can apply to your business.

“If there’s a niche you’re interested in and you can build a decent audience around, creating a site and using affiliate marketing is an incredible way to make money online.

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s product by referring customers to their online store. If you can create content or a resource so valuable to people looking for a certain product and then send them to where they can actually buy it, you’ll receive a predetermined percentage of each sale.

It takes time and effort, but website owners like Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, have built life-changing careers through affiliate marketing. In fact, Pat even publishes his income reports online, showing how he made over $2 million in the past 12 months alone!

Let’s start with the basics of building your website and blog and then get into how affiliate marketing will work for you.

First, you need to research and validate a profitable affiliate niche. What this means is: Are there companies in your niche who will pay you to send customers there way?

You can check this in a number of ways:

• Become an Amazon Associateand then use Keyword planner to find an in-demand niche: With more than a million different products to choose from and up to 10% commission the sales you drive, Amazon’s affiliate program is a great place to get started. Browse their available products and see what connects with you. Or take it a step further and use Google’s Keyword Planner to quickly check how many people are searching for a specific term. With affiliate marketing, the more relevant traffic you can pull in, the more you’ll make off your site.
• Sign up for a reputable affiliate network: Aside from Amazon, there are dozens of large reputable affiliate networks, such as Share-A-Sale, Clickbank, and Skimlinks, that specialize in connecting you with merchants who are looking for affiliates to sell their products. They charge relatively low commission fees for the privilege of connecting you with merchants, and the merchants on these sites tend to offer much higher commission percentages or set dollar amount payouts.
• Research individual companies in your desired niche: If possible, it’s always better to become an affiliate directly with a company (if they have an internal affiliate program), as no one else will be dipping into your commission rate. This is the preferred route for most of the prominent affiliate marketers, including Pat Flynn. Unfortunately, it’s also the most work, as you’ll have to do the research yourself to see who offers programs (they’re usually listed in the website footer).

Now that you know your niche and have signed up for relevant affiliate programs, it’s time to build out your site and blog to start driving traffic.

Start by finding and buying a domain name (such as www.myaffiliatesite.com) that works for your niche on a domain registrar like Hover, NameCheap, HostGator or GoDaddy.

Next, you’ll need a platform to build your site on. While you could pick a free option like Tumblr, Blogger, or WordPress.com, these won’t give you the flexibility or authority you need to build a truly successful affiliate site.

Instead, go with a self-hosted site—this means you host the blog on your own server and have full control over it. There are tons of reputable companies you can choose like Bluehost, WPEngine, or A2 Hosting.

Once you’ve got your domain name and hosting sorted, it’s time to pick a CMS, or Content Management System, that will let you update pages, build your blog and integrate with all the other services you need. It’s hard to go wrong with WordPress—the CMS powering close to a quarter of the internet.

Next, you’ll want to pick a WordPress theme from somewhere like ThemeForest or Elegant Themes. This is the barebones design of your site, which you can then customize with your own branding, copy, and images. That being said, you don’t want to cheap out. It costs less than $100 to buy a theme that will make your website look professional (and you can upgrade to a completely custom design once you get the business going).

Finally, it’s time to start creating content that will drive traffic to your affiliate partner’s site. Here’s what I mean by that:

Let’s say I’m an Amazon affiliate for camping gear, and I want to write an exhaustive, in-depth blog post and review of the “50 Best Hiking Backpacks for Adventuring Outdoors.” By running a quick Keyword Planner check on the organic search volume I can see that there’s around 5,500 monthly searches for the keyword ‘hiking backpacks’ alone.

If my piece of content is so unique and valuable around hiking backpack recommendations, that other reputable outdoor websites are willing to link to it and build the page’s authority, then I’d have a very real opportunity to rank high in organic search for these search terms (meaning, my page will come up first when someone searches for hiking backpacks).

Since it’s safe to assume that the purchase intent on searches for hiking backpacks is pretty high, the next logical step is that a reasonable number of site visitors would click through using my affiliate links and complete a purchase, over time.

While it often takes a significant amount of time and hard work to build up your affiliate income, if you have the ability to regularly publish high quality content that drives in targeted traffic to your website, this online revenue source can become quite substantial.”

See full article here:

70 Genius Ways How to Make Money Online Legitimately (on the Side) in 2020

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