If you’re like most people, you wouldn’t mind making some additional money from your website. However, knowing where to begin can be tough, so we’ll show you how to get started with affiliate marketing – one of the most common ways to make money from a website.
Affiliate marketing is when you advertise other people’s products and services in exchange for a tiny percentage of the money from each sale. It’s extremely popular, with one study finding that 81% of surveyed brands use affiliate marketing. And the advantages of entering this sector are considerable. It is, for example, a mainly passive revenue stream with a minimal barrier to entry.
What Is Affiliate Marketing, and How Does It Work?
Before we get into how you may use your WordPress website for affiliate marketing, you should first grasp what it is. Affiliate marketing is promoting the products and services of other companies on your website in exchange for a percentage of the sales. You are paid not just for the promotion but also for a tiny percentage of the revenue generated by each sale made through your website. Affiliate marketing is a great way to supplement your income.
You place these adverts on your website, but there are other options. You can provide suggestions for items and services that complement what you provide. And you must ensure that what you are marketing does not compete with your business and will not harm or compromise your brand. This is why it is critical to carefully select your affiliate partners and set your terms and conditions before signing on the dotted line.
Various Types of Affiliate Websites
With a WordPress-based affiliate business, you have several options. Although I will attempt to keep this post as comprehensive as possible, this section is intended to assist you in selecting the finest affiliate website.
Daily Deals
If you can create partnerships with local businesses to provide fantastic discounts for your users, you can make a lot in commissions. Daily deal websites abound on the internet because they are relatively simple to set up and operate on a simple business model. The more the affiliate commission, the more bargains you distribute. You can supplement your income by serving advertisements on the side.
A big portion of the process entails gathering bargains from firms and manufacturers that can provide huge discounts to entice users to buy things they don’t need. You can earn anywhere from 30% to 50% of every sale you make. Groupon is a fantastic example, but there are many more.
A pre-styled coupon theme, such as the Friday WordPress theme, is an easy way to get your coupon site up and running quickly. This theme includes features such as front-end deal submission, simple theme options, coupon countdown, social integration, and more.
A plugin may be your best bet if you already have a favorite theme. The WooCommerce Coupons Countdown WordPress plugin allows you to add coupons to your WooCommerce store, and it’s a simple method to add customized coupons to any WooCommerce e-commerce website.
Price Comparison Sites
Price comparison websites often display a product and its price at various retailers. They typically offer user-submitted product reviews as the majority of their material. How does a pricing comparison website generate revenue? You get a commission when a user clicks on a link and reaches the retailer’s website. You can also sell advertising space.
Using the ReHub WordPress Theme, add your reviews (and affiliate links). It is an excellent choice for sharing your preferred items and services with your audience through simple comparison tables that include logos, dates, prices, and more.
The Go Responsive Pricing & Compare WordPress Plugin is ideal for making comparison tables for almost any purpose. Include photographs, videos, feature lists, icons, and other media to assist your readers in deciding which option is best for them. Pricing tables are an excellent tool to compare and contrast comparable deals (like hosting or theme packages).
Product Review Sites
Today, we are putting a light on this subject. Product review websites include professional opinions on products you’ve used or tested. You may also solicit feedback from consumers who have previously used the product to help you improve your content. When the user you referred to the store makes a purchase or completes any desired action, you earn an affiliate commission.
The Puva WordPress theme is a sleek review magazine theme with simple review options that allow readers to write their ratings alongside yours. Visitors to your site will be more likely to trust the ratings and, as a result, click on those affiliate links.
“How to” articles
People frequently look for “How-to” articles. Affiliate marketing does not always involve reviewing a product and suggesting it to potential buyers. You may also increase interest in a product by helping others understand how to use it or make the most of it. You can select a niche for your affiliate marketing blog and produce articles in that field. They are also more likely to appear frequently in search results.
A how-to article for a specific product can now be created, informing prospective consumers how to utilize it. It might also be a basic how-to guide for an activity where you can promote things. For example, if you sell art materials, you could write an article about how to utilize a specific paint brush to create different patterns. Alternatively, you may demonstrate how to paint an entire picture and then name the things that can be used to produce it, linking to the product pages with your affiliate marker.
Writing a solid how-to article takes more effort than you might imagine, and it must be both interesting and beneficial. Your how-to article must cover every process stage without boring the reader with unneeded material.
The title of your article is just as crucial as the content. The title should address a customer complaint. For example, “How to Repair a Dent in Your Car” or “How to Remove a Sun Tan.” Choose a topic related to your specialty and where the reader may be looking for assistance. You can even omit the “to” in the title to make it more personal and impactful. For example, “How I Built My Bookshelf in 2 Days” discusses your personal experience with the products while also providing step-by-step instructions for the reader. You’re smoothly blending your affiliate products into your tale.
Email Marketing
Building an active, engaged email list is a step that most publishers skip, even though it is the most successful route for generating repeat sales as an affiliate.
Email affiliate marketing can generate traffic to affiliate content by constructing emails as independent pieces geared to convert directly or refer to your existing content (blogs, tutorials, Etc.). However, the network or advertisers you are dealing with determines whether you should link directly in your emails.
Amazon, for example, does not permit affiliate links in an email. In such circumstances, it’s best to provide links to your newsletter’s blog or landing page.
In either case, you can be creative with affiliate content to monetize your newsletter:
- Including pertinent affiliate links in your Welcome Series
- Incorporate a “Recommendations” section into your regular emails.
- Developing an email course
- Compiling your previous product reviews
- highlighting a product that you find particularly useful
Keep providing value in your emails, regardless of how you deliver your material. Users are more likely to unsubscribe or flag your email as spam if it appears inauthentic.
Resource Pages
A resource page is a collection of your most useful tools and resources. It allows your viewers to find all the required information in one location without sifting through text. But it’s not just a collection of random links; your resource page should have a theme and, ideally, assist your reader in achieving a specific goal.
The Minimalist Baker, for example, offers a resource page that gives readers tools to “create an efficient, well-designed, successful food blog.” It’s not just evident that the website is intended for food bloggers, but it also specifically targets visitors who want to operate a “successful food blog.”
There isn’t much area on a resource page to persuade the reader, so it is critical to know whom you’re talking to and what they’re searching for.
Remember that users who land on your resource page often lack strong purchasing intent. While this is a terrific approach to gathering all your links in one place, the conversion rate will be lower.
Tutorials
Tutorials are similar to how-to articles in that they can be prepared as written or video content. To make illustrative photos more useful, written tutorials should ideally accompany them.
Video tutorials have grown in popularity. Video tutorials allow you to demonstrate to your audience how to utilize a product or execute a job using your affiliate items. A visual walkthrough of software or physical gadget is always far more valuable than words alone. When a video tutorial is accompanied by search engine-optimized material on your blog or website, you may drive traffic from the hosting site (say, YouTube) and your site.
One question is how to include an affiliate link in video instruction. If posting the video to YouTube, you can always include links in the description and mention them in the video. If you host the video on your website, you can include the link before or after the video.
However, making videos is much labor and lengthy, from shooting to editing to uploading. If you aren’t ready yet, you can always opt for another format, such as a step-by-step guide with photographs.
You can photograph or screenshot each procedure phase and clearly describe each step in writing beside the image. You may also record audio to explain the steps and incorporate them into a photo presentation. Tutorials can be fun to create and are often more useful to consumers than other types of content.
Landing pages
Landing pages are a critical component of affiliate marketing content strategy that we frequently overlook. If properly designed, landing pages have the potential to turn visitors into leads and leads into buyers.
When creating a landing page, think about conversions more than just creativity. What matters in the design of a landing page is how to entice visitors to click, join up, or make a purchase.
To create a landing page that converts, you must first conduct some research on your target audience. You must discover their problems and learn what they want to hear. Your content cannot emotionally connect with them unless it gives value to their life. Your affiliate products should address these issues and provide a solution. This will give you a good sense of what you should include on the landing page and what you may leave out.
After you’ve selected what kind of material to create, it’s time to start constructing the page. The design should be modern and uncluttered. Leaving adequate white space between sections allows visitors to focus on the most crucial areas. It would help if you directed the attention of your visitors to what you want them to see. Visitors may lose interest and abandon the page if your offer or the link to the product page is not immediately apparent. As a result, you should prioritize a basic design, highlighting the Calls-to-Action or coupons being offered.
How Do You Set Up an Affiliate Marketing Program With WordPress?
Setting up an affiliate marketing program is simple with WordPress. To get started, you don’t need to be a tech expert or have any particular programming experience, and all you have to do is select the appropriate plugin.
While numerous free website builders are available to help you get started quickly, it’s always best to invest some money in setting up your website, especially if you want to make a living through affiliate marketing.
A self-hosted WordPress.org site is ideal for most users since it provides you complete control over your website, even if you are not technically skilled. It also includes many styles and add-ons to build any website you can think of.
You don’t need a large budget to create a WordPress website that provides a reasonable income. You only need to pay for a domain name and a WordPress hosting package to host your site when you start.
A domain name is the address of your website. This is the name your visitors will type into their browsers to get to your site (For example, monsterinsights.com or google.com).
Website hosting is your website’s internet address, and this is where your website’s content and files will be saved.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing on WordPress
To begin with, affiliate marketing, select a niche topic for your site, select items based on the niche, and begin writing content on your site to promote them.
Joining an affiliate program such as Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, or ShareASale and browsing their site is the simplest approach to locating a product to promote.
After picking a product, you can obtain an affiliate link and promote it on your website.
You’ll most likely use the same affiliate link on various blog entries as an affiliate marketer. As a result, it is critical to manage and organize your affiliate links on WordPress. If you utilize an affiliate link management plugin, such as ThirstyAffiliates, you can organize all of your affiliate links in one place, making it easier to identify and replace them.
For example, if the business you advertise for changes its affiliate link, you won’t have to go through every blog post you’ve written to find and replace the affiliate links you’d included. Change it in the ThistyAffiliates panel, and all affiliate links on your site will be automatically updated.
In addition to link management, the plugin allows you to cloak your affiliate links, allowing you to transform your unsightly affiliate links into lovely links.
Affiliate links are often long, unappealing URLs, such as this:
http://example.com/products/?product id=123&affiliate id
ThirstyAffiliates assists you in cloaking such affiliate links to create short and branded URLs like those seen below:
http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname
You can now use the cloaked affiliate URLs on your website. This plugin makes it simple to add affiliate links.
Conclusion
When done correctly, affiliate marketing may help you build your business and website. However, you must ensure that your website is appropriate for affiliate programs. You must also maintain high traffic levels to attract affiliates and invite them to advertise on your website. Affiliate marketing is an excellent strategy to supplement your income and monetize your website’s visitors.
