You’re planning to start an affiliate marketing business, Right? That’s why you visit this page. So here I will give you some ideas on how to do affiliate marketing without followers.
Affiliate marketing generates millions of dollars in monthly revenue for tens of thousands of independent content creators and website owners. But can beginners start affiliate marketing and be successful without a big audience? The answer is “YES”
Affiliate Marketing Overview
Nowadays, a bunch of people are joining the affiliate marketing industry, that’s why it’s becoming a popular online business model. This business model is suitable for anyone who has internet access and little online presence.
People’s lives have been revolutionized by digitalization. Money is something that everyone requires, and many people use the web to earn money. Making money online with affiliate marketing is the most efficient way because of its higher success rate and easiness.
Some affiliate marketers are changing their life simply by promoting and selling other people’s products. That’s why people are interested in this affiliate marketing business. Many affiliate marketers share their success stories and revenue on their blogs or YouTube videos. But more of them don’t share their success secret.
In this article, I share the effective methods to start an affiliate marketing business without followers. So stick to this page. I guarantee you will get valuable information from it.
How to Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers
To do affiliate marketing without followers, first, you need to know the basics of affiliate marketing, then choose a niche, create a website/blog, research niche-related keywords, find products with affiliate programs, write content based on keywords, and publish on search engines.
Those are the steps, now let’s look at all steps one by one:
1. Understand the Basics of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a pay-per-sale marketing approach in which affiliates get a commission on each sale they make.
Through a blog, microsite, video marketing, social media marketing, or even an email newsletter, the affiliates send traffic to a company’s website via an affiliate link and get paid a small commission when customers make a purchase.
This is a paradigm of monetization and marketing that benefits both sides. The affiliate may use their existing audience and knowledge to assist another company in driving sales and get paid for it.
The merchants receive more purchases without having to actively promote themselves. Everybody benefits from the situation.
In the affiliate marketing business, four main parties make the process successful. Here are the four main parties:
Merchants
A merchant is a product or service supplier who supplies advertising content through affiliate marketing, which publishers subsequently incorporate into their websites and advertising networks. If the publisher is successful, the merchant will pay him a pre-agreed-upon commission.
Affiliates
Affiliates (publishers) are just individuals or corporate organizations that have agreed to represent a company. Affiliate connections give internet merchants the chance to increase traffic to and sales of their products and services. And for every lead or sale that affiliates complete, they get paid some amount of the revenue. (Maybe your new job!)
Affiliate Networks
An affiliate network works as a go-between for affiliates and merchants. An affiliate network is a website that can store and manage the company’s products and has a large number of affiliate members.
It does help to make easy interaction between the affiliate marketers and companies (merchants). As a result, merchants may use it to contact influencers and convince them to endorse their items.
Similarly, affiliate marketers (you) must register to participate on the site. If you agree to advertise other people’s items, you will receive a commission for each click that results in a sale.
Let me give you a list of the popular affiliate networks. Then, you can join some of them and start your affiliate marketing career right after reading this page. I listed only those suitable for beginners and those that don’t have requirements or interviews.
Consumers
Consumers are those audiences of affiliates or publishers who can click the affiliate links and buy the products or order services.
2. Choose a Niche You Know and love
Researching a niche for affiliate marketing can be tedious. It requires lots of time. But if you rush through this first phase, you’ll come to regret it. Please accept my word for it. Long-term investment of a lot of time and money in a market that doesn’t provide a lot of profits or is very competitive can be frustrating.
A fast strategy for choosing a lucrative affiliate marketing niche is as follows: Find a market niche where you may advertise products that sell well and have little competition.
When selecting an affiliate marketing niche, you should consider the following questions:
- What are my interests?
- Can I make money in this market?
- What subjects can I easily cover in 30 or more blogs?
- Are there affiliate programs accessible for this market?
- Are the products and services in this market niche exciting?
To decide which niche fits you, answering those questions is the solution. We can’t decide which niches are the best and worse. However, based on my opinion, I listed the most popular and profitable affiliate niches here.
- Health and wellness
- Beauty and cosmetics
- Finance
- Software and online services
- eCommerce
- Gaming
- Sweepstakes
3. Create a Useful Website/Blog
Of course, you’ll need a blog or website to begin affiliate marketing. Most companies that offer affiliate programs will only accept you as an affiliate if you have a website or blog. This is so that you may develop authority in your field and provide some confidence that you are not a spammer by starting a blog.
Blogging on a site like Medium or a free WordPress subdomain is a free way to get started blogging. There are affiliate marketing rules that must be followed on free sites, so keep this in mind if you decide to go this path.
If you decide to invest a little bit of money in your blog or website, that can give you more advantages in growing your brand, and rules don’t limit you from your site monetization.
Even though there are several blogging platforms available, I usually suggest WordPress for anybody interested in creating a blog since it’s free and provides you complete control over your content.
So the first thing you need to do is get the hosting company that hosts your website and your domain name or URL. The best and most well-known web hosting platform I recommend is Bluehost.
Bluehost has a good support team and can easily integrate with WordPress. It costs you only 2.95/month, with a free domain name for one year. I think it’s affordable and worth trying to start a profitable business like affiliate marketing.
4. Research Your Niche Related Keywords
Your level of success in affiliate marketing is greatly influenced by a few factors. Choosing keywords, creating content, marketing, traffic sources, a niche, engaging the audience, etc. are a few of them.
However, as essential as these elements are, how you do keyword research for affiliate marketing will have a significant impact on your performance.
If you choose the wrong keywords, every other part of your business will fail terribly. This is because the relevant audience will not see your affiliate offer. Even great products/services will not sell without relevant traffic or audience.
Best Types of Keywords for Affiliate Marketing
Informational Keywords: These types of keywords can give you a lot of visitors every month, but they convert less. People visit search engines first for the information they need.
So if you can get informational keywords that have no high competition with some search volume, you can give them the information and recommend some products that can fix their problem through your affiliate link.
“How To” Keywords: These kinds of keywords have good search volume on search engines, and they can convert well. People need tutorials to complete their simple tasks. So if you can show them how they do their stuff, they will check out what your offer.
Brand Comparison Keywords: Although brand comparison keywords have lower search traffic, they convert better. This is because the consumer has already focused his search and is in the purchasing stage.
As with other keyword research tactics, finding appropriate brand keywords to create your content around will be difficult. However, certain tools make it easier for us. And to compare brands or services, first, you need to know about those well.
Product Review Keywords: These keywords are very profitable and medium-competitive keywords. Those have low search volume, however, they convert well. People search for product or service reviews to make sure the product or service is suitable for them.
How to Find Keywords Based on Your Niche
To find golden keywords in your niche, you need a quality keyword research tool that gives you information about search volume, competition, and cost per click (CPC). There are plenty of them, so you need to pick the best one. To make it easy for you, I listed the bests here.
As you can see the Semrush keyword research tool does give you all pieces of information about the keywords. It gives you related keywords that don’t have much competition if you have a new website. So you can rank your blog posts on Google easily.
However, in the beginning, I don’t recommend purchasing expensive keyword tools that are very not affordable for newbies. You can do keyword research manually.
Doing keyword research for free or manually can take a lot of time. But, if you haven’t budgeted for keyword research tools, you can see YouTube tutorials to get keywords manually.
5. Find Products & Affiliate Programs
While there is no clear-cut answer as to which items are the best to promote through affiliate marketing, starting with a product you believe in and love using is a smart place to start.
If you come across a product that you are unfamiliar with and that fits your profile, learn everything you can about it. Read about the product, utilize it, and become connected with it.
Of course, you may not be excited about every product, but excellent product knowledge will help fill that void and give you success.
Research to Find Good Products
Finding good products or services in your niche that have an affiliate program needs a little bit of research. I mention here some of the ways that you can get companies that have an affiliate program.
Find Your Competitor’s Affiliate Partner
Start the research with your competitors or those who have related niche blogs like you. First, check their website and what product or service they are promoting for their audience.
After you get their affiliate partner, check if it’s perfect for your audience too, and be a partner with them.
Join Affiliate Networks
The other and easy way to get products or companies that have affiliate programs is through affiliate networks. As I mentioned earlier, merchants or companies find affiliates from affiliate networks.
So sign up on affiliate networks and filter the marketplace by your niche, choose a well-known product, and apply to be an affiliate partner.
Find Companies Website
If you know well-known brands’ names in your niche and if you think that helps your audience, go head to their website and then find their affiliate program page.
Nowadays, some companies manage their affiliate program by themselves, so try to find them and ask to be their affiliate partner.
7. Write Product-Related Blog Posts Based on Your Keyword Research
Now is the time to write and structure your content for your website/blog visitors. Writing blog posts all depend on your keyword research. After finding your keywords write your blog post based on that keyword type. So how to write a blog post that ranks on Google?
Research About the Topic
Before you write your blog, first, research the topic that you write about. Read other blogs on that topic, watch YouTube videos, and like that. Be sure to get all updated and valuable information about the topic.
In affiliate marketing, the first stage is giving value to your audience, not making money! If you can give valuable content to people and they love it, the monetization part will be easy.
Write and Optimize Your Content
After researching and gathering updated information on the topic, now is the time to start your writing and optimizing for search engines (SEO). When you write your content, that needs to be readable and engaging. To optimize your blog post,
- You have to include your main keyword in your H1 title.
- You have to separate your paragraph with H2 and H3.
- You have to include your keyword in your first paragraph.
- You have to include your keyword in your image alt text.
- You have to add keywords naturally, not spammy.
- And, of course, add your affiliate links.
Those are the basic tasks you should do to optimize the content. And for advanced tactics, you can read other blogs or watch YouTube videos about SEO from experts.
Finally, publish it. Google will scan your content, and If your content is well-optimized and valuable for people, Google will rank your blog post, and you will get a lot of visitors and hopefully a lot of sales.
Conclusion and Final Words
So, if you’re thinking about starting affiliate marketing, that’s great! You’re on the good way. Affiliate marketing is the right business model to start in the 2020s.
I shared this method and steps because I have tried and got exciting results. However, there are plenty of methods to do affiliate marketing without any followers.
You need to consider that, this is a real business, so there is no guarantee of being successful. If you follow these seven steps, maybe you will be a successful affiliate marketer, because it works for me and many others.
However, that all depends on your skill level, hard work, and patience. Affiliate marketing is worth trying! Because, after all, it gives you time and money freedom, that’s your main goal, right?
So that was all the information I can give you about doing affiliate marketing without followers. I hope that was useful. It’s time to take action and be your own boss. I could be happy if you share your thoughts, so leave your view in the box below.
Hello
Superb post but I was wanting to know if you could write a litte more on this subject? I’d be very thankful if you could elaborate a little bit more. Bless you!
Best Regards
Thank you, Niki, for your feedback.
I will try to write more informative articles on affiliate marketing and related topics.
Best,