HOW TO MAKE MONEY

WORKING FROM HOME

AS AN AFFILIATE
MARKETER?
Introduction

If you have been wondering how it is possible to make money working from home (or anywhere else for that matter),

here in this ebook, we will discuss how you can do that.

It is called affiliate marketing. This is essentially about earning commissions by marketing existing products or

services.

You won't be creating any products or services yourself, nor keeping a stock of products. Also, you won't need to do

any customer support - just to mention a few benefits of this technique.

What you'll be doing is to provide value to an audience. This value can be in the form of articles or informational

emails, and then making this audience aware of specific products or services they may be interested in.

In this ebook, we'll be going over two strategies that you can implement to start earning affiliate commissions. You

can even combine these two strategies if you wish.

02
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a kind of internet marketing where you - as an affiliate - can earn commissions by promoting

other people's products or services. As an affiliate, you simply look for products or services you trust and like. You

can then promote them, and for every sale you make, you will earn a commission.

You can do affiliate marketing through email newsletters, blogs, or websites. The sales you make are tracked using

affiliate links.

For example, if you sell weight-loss products, you could become an affiliate for a company that sells exercise

equipment. You would then promote the weight loss products of the company you are affiliated with.

As an affiliate marketer, you will have a particular target audience to whom you will market. By studying your

audience's interests, you can create a brand that helps attract consumers who are most likely to act on your

promotions.

There are many different affiliate programs, such as Amazon Associates, Clickbank, ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, etc.

What are the benefits of

affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money from home. In general, it is probably one of the best ways to make

money online. The best part about affiliate marketing is that you only need minimal technical skills to start earning

money. All you need is a computer, an internet connection, and some easy-to-use online software. The specifics of the

latter depend on the marketing strategy that you choose to implement.

Below are listed some of the benefits of affiliate marketing:

Passive income: Affiliate marketing allows you to make money while you sleep. The actual work you have to do is set

up your marketing software, create content that has value for your audience, and keep an eye on the traffic if you are

running paid ads. You'll be earning an income even when you are not sitting behind your computer. This is because

your audience will consume the content when they discover it, and some will purchase your affiliate offers.

03
No product: With affiliate marketing, you don't need to produce your own product or keep any stock. Creating your

own product can be very rewarding, but it will require quite an investment. With affiliate marketing, on the other

hand, there is no need to create your own product because you'll be marketing other people's products. In addition,

you don't need to keep a stock of products as you are generating sales or leads using affiliate links. You're not selling

anything yourself.

No customer support: As an affiliate marketer, your job is to send your audience to the product or service of

another seller - using an affiliate link. The seller will take care of the customer support for their own products. It is

their job to make sure that the consumers are satisfied with their purchase.

Work from anywhere: With affiliate marketing, you'll be able to work from anywhere you have a computer with an

internet connection. For our purpose here, it will be from the comfort of your own home, but it could be from

anywhere else, for that matter.

Performance-based rewards: Affiliate marketing is based entirely on performance. You'll earn money based on the

effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. This is in contrast with 9-5 jobs where you usually make a (rather low)

fixed wage per month.

Low initial investment: Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that you don't need to spend much money to start

earning more money. All you need is a website and some organic traffic. If you wish to invest more than that, you can

use paid advertising to drive visitors to your landing pages, where they can subscribe to your email list.

Low risk: Given that the initial investment to get started is low, you won't be running a high financial risk. Also, if you

invest time in creating valuable content, this content becomes an inherent value asset. The same content can even be

repurposed for different platforms. For example, if you write 100 blog posts, these can also be turned into a course or

an ebook.

Easy to scale: The more successful content you produce and/or the more extensive your email list becomes, the

higher your potential income. Increasing the amount of content on your niche website is a simple case of writing more

of it. You can do this yourself or outsource this process. You'd want to look at content that is already successful and

then create more of it. Similarly, increasing your email list is a question of sending more people to your opt-in page.

This can be done through paid advertising. Once you start earning affiliate commissions from your email list, you can

reinvest this money into buying more ads to grow your list even more.

04
Please also note that there are two interesting types of affiliate programs: one-time commissions and recurring

commissions.

One-time commissions involve a single sale, while recurring commissions involve subscription sales. If a consumer

signs up for a subscription that you referred to, you may receive monthly commissions as long as this person is

subscribed.

Recurring commissions are better for those who want to build a long-term business.

Before you get started with

implementing a marketing
strategy

Finding a good niche

The most profitable niches are related to health, wealth, and relationships. You may perhaps also include hobbies

here, but they are not as successful. The reason is that hobbies are 'wants' rather than 'needs,' whereas the first three

categories are 'needs.'

A niche based on 'needs' and that is also evergreen will perform well for a long time to come, so this may be a good

choice.

An essential rule is to also look for a niche in which there is some competition. The fact that there are already other

marketers present in that niche means that there is also an audience that is willing to buy. If you find a niche with

practically no competition, this may be a bad sign, even if the niche is based on 'needs.' It could be a sign that no one

is interested in buying products in that niche.

05
Finding an affiliate network or
program

Preferably you'd promote products or services that you use yourself or at least believe in very strongly.

Some marketers fall into the trap of promoting questionable products or services just because they provide a high

affiliate commission.

You can take a look at the big affiliate networks like Clickbank, Share-a-Sale, or MaxBounty to see if you can find

products or services you would like to promote. Specifically for Clickbank, you may take a look at the 'Gravity' of an

affiliate offer. The gravity gives you an indication of the popularity of the offer and thus how profitable it can be for

you.

Another strategy to find a product to promote is to look at which products you yourself are currently using or at least

like very much. You can try to find out if there is a dedicated affiliate program for that specific product.

To do this, you simply type into the Google search input "[name of product] affiliate program" or something similar.

Otherwise, you can also go to the product's website and look around to see if there is a mention of an affiliate

program.

Let's say, for example, that you are taking vitamins from the brand called "Dr. Mercola" and you believe that these

vitamins may also be of value to others. Then you may try to find the website of the brand "Dr. Mercola" and look

around to see if you find any links to an affiliate program on their website. In this specific case, "Dr. Mercola" only

seems to have a wholesale program, which is not useful for our purposes.

Instead, we may look around and see if we can find an online shop where this brand is sold and if they might have an

affiliate program. Actually, this turns out to be the case with "Lucky Vitamin." This online shop sells a whole range of

"Dr. Mercola" products, including various vitamins. This shop also has an affiliate program.

Actually, you'll find that many brands often have an affiliate program, although you may have to search around for it.

If you don't have any particular product or service in mind, you can also try a more generic Google search like "

[keyword] affiliate program". In this case, the keyword is more general than the 'name of the product' mentioned

above. This will also give you an idea of what other affiliate marketers are looking for.

06
Once you have found one or more affiliate programs that you find interesting, you may want to first check out their

own marketing. Imagine that you are a potential buyer of their product or service. Then take a look at their written

sales letter (WSL) and their video sales letter (VSL). If you think that these look fine to your potential customers, you

have found a good program that you can promote.

In addition to this, you may also consider subscribing to their email lists simply to find out how their email marketing

works. Watch their email for several weeks, perhaps a whole month. Here again, if you like what you see, then this is

a good sign.

Our recommended
marketing strategies

In this eBook, we recommend two marketing strategies - which can also be combined if you wish to do so. The first

strategy is to build a niche website. This is a form of content marketing where you create a series of articles around

your niche topic. An example could be a blog with articles about healthy living. In these articles, you could then refer

to affiliate products that support the message of your blog.

The second strategy that we recommend is email marketing. The idea is to build an email list with people interested in

your niche topic and send them regular emails with valuable content and the occasional reference to an affiliate

product.

If you choose to create a niche website, you'll most likely use WordPress for building the site, although there are also

some new alternatives like Publii. These so-called Content Management Systems are very user-friendly, and you can

learn to use them in no time.

On the other hand, if you choose to use email marketing as your primary strategy, here also, there are some easy-to-

use solutions like Aweber or our favorite Systeme.io. In fact, with Systeme.io, you can also create a niche website - so

you can do both strategies with one piece of software.

07
Strategy One - Content
marketing

Content marketing consists of creating valuable content on a blog or similar platform. Here for this purpose, we'll

take a closer look at a so-called niche website.

A niche website is a blog with articles about topics related to a specific niche.

Such a website generally uses organic search traffic to get visitors. Each article is designed to attract visitors, send

these to other articles, and bring affiliate offers in front of them. Such organic traffic usually comes from search

engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.

Organic traffic is often called 'free.' This is partially true, as you don't need to pay for ads to drive visitors to your site.

Yet, on the other hand, you do need to spend some time writing the articles. Or, if you choose to outsource the

writing, you need to pay someone to write those articles.

Several hundred articles of +/- 1200 words are needed to bring enough organic traffic for such a website.

08
As mentioned before, monetization can happen by linking to affiliate offers in the article on your niche website. But,

you can also monetize by showing ads on your site.

Below are the various parts of this strategy:

Organic traffic

People search for many things using search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. When they search for specific

keywords related to your niche, they will find articles from your niche website. Subsequently, they then click to read

the article(s) you've written.

A niche website with articles

Your niche website will consist of articles written around keywords from your niche.

Which keywords would that be, you may ask? Well, there is a whole science behind finding the best to use in your

articles. To keep it simple, here are some things you can do to find good keywords.

First, find the biggest competitors in your niche. You can do this by using Google and typing in various common

keywords from your niche. Then look at which sites pop up on the first page of the search results. Here you should

disregard the sponsored search results.

Using a keyword research tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs, you can find the keywords for which your main competitors

rank in search engines. From these keywords, you should then select those with the lowest' difficulty'. Write your

articles around these, and they should be able to rank quickly.

09
Monetization

You can include affiliate links in your articles - if they are relevant to the topic, of course. For example, suppose you

have a niche website about dogs and a few articles discussing dog training more specifically. In that case, you could

mention that there is an excellent course for sale on Clickbank that includes a complete step-by-step dog training.

In fact, you can also create a review article that discusses an affiliate offer. This review can mention the pros and cons

of the product or service from the offer. The article can include a walkthrough of the product, perhaps a video demo,

a comparison to other similar products, etc...

In addition to linking to your affiliate offers, you can also place various kinds of ads on your niche website.

When starting out, you'll have few visitors to your website. Therefore an ad network like Google AdSense will be the

most realistic network to start out with. They don't have any requirements regarding a minimum number of visitors

per month.

Some claim that you minimally need 30 articles on your website before applying for Google AdSense, but this is not

an official requirement. Just keep it in mind if your website is not accepted into the AdSense program immediately.

Reinvesting the profits

Once you have made a profit from your monetization efforts, you may consider reinvesting some of these profits into

more content for your niche website. As more articles become indexed by search engines, more visitors will come to

your site.

You'll be creating a compounding effect by reinvesting the profits regularly. More content means more visitors from

search engines. This, in turn, means more affiliate earnings, which means more profits that can be reinvested into

more content.

10
Strategy Two - Email
marketing

Email marketing has been around for a while. That does not mean that it has become less relevant over the years.

Despite the significant presence of newer technologies like chat applications and other social media apps, everyone

still has one or usually several email addresses.

The main idea is to build an extensive list consisting of the email addresses of potential customers for your affiliate

offers. The next step is to send emails to the list providing valuable content and sending them links to your affiliate

offers.

The emails should be sent out to the list as often as possible. Veteran email marketers recommend sending emails

daily.

When using a so-called autoresponder, email marketing is still the best method to generate passive income.

Your email list will always be yours. Consider it an asset that you own. This is in contrast to social media, for example.

If your social media account gets shut down then you have essentially lost all your contacts and thus your income.

11
The traffic that comes from your email list is traffic that you can control. You can always change the content of your

emails, as well as add new subscribers.

In addition, you can be confident that the people on your list are interested in your niche. As long as they are

subscribed, they will also have shown an interest in your content. This means that they are potentially interested in

your affiliate offers.

Below are the various steps needed to implement this strategy:

The paid traffic

All paid traffic should lead your chosen audience to your opt-in page, where people can sign up to your mailing list to

receive a lead magnet.

This paid traffic can come from social ads on Facebook, search or display ads from Google, Microsoft, etc.

The opt-in or squeeze page

The opt-in page is essentially a one-page website on which there are only a few elements. All your paid traffic needs

to be led to this one page. This type of page is also called a landing page or a squeeze page.

On this page, you'll offer something for free - the so-called lead magnet - in return for the email addresses and

perhaps other data of the visitors. This lead magnet can be a free ebook, a free infographic, a free checklist, etc.

To convince the visitors to download the lead magnet in return for their email addresses, your page only needs to

have the following elements:

A catchy headline

Some bullet points describing the benefits of downloading the lead magnet in short sentences

Some graphic or image that represents your lead magnet

A box with one or two input fields and a submit button

12
The most critical input field in the box is obviously the email address field, but you can also add a second field that

asks for the (first) name of the subscriber. The submit button can also contain a specific call-to-action (CTA). For

example, instead of "submit," the button could say "get the ebook now!".

Once someone has submitted their email address and possibly their name, they have become leads for your email

marketing campaign. They will be added to the database of your email service provider (ESP).

As you may notice, there are plenty of optimization opportunities here. All elements mentioned above can be A/B

tested to find versions that give higher conversion rates - i.e., that convert visitors into leads.

When they click the submit button, the new leads will be taken to the next step: a thank-you page.

The thank-you page

The thank-you page is also just one page, like the opt-in page. On this page, you can thank the new subscriber for

their interest in your lead magnet or congratulate them on their download. Something along those lines.

In addition to that, you should also use the opportunity to promote affiliate offers on this page. This offer should

relate directly to the lead magnet to make sense for the visitors to your page. It is an excellent opportunity to put an

affiliate offer in front of your audience.

13
The autoresponder sequence

When the email address of a new lead is added to your email list, you can send an automated series of emails to

them using a so-called autoresponder.

The autoresponder can be set to send specific emails at specific intervals for a particular period of time. For example,

you could configure the autoresponder to send a pre-written email every day for 10 days after adding the lead to your

database.

You can provide additional value to your subscribers by writing content related to the chosen niche in this email

sequence. In addition, some of these emails should contain links to your affiliate offers.

The nice thing about an autoresponder sequence is that you can test various configurations once you have a sizeable

audience.

Monetization

As mentioned above, some of the emails you send should contain links to your chosen affiliate offers.

In addition to this, you can also put ads in your emails. These ads can be of many different formats - native ads, text

ads, or display ads. Depending on the style of your emails, you can choose the format of the advertisements that fits

the best.

An important thing to take into account here is user experience. You should make sure that the ads do not lower the

quality of the user experience. This also involves making sure that the content of the ads fits your audience.

Reinvesting the profits

Once you have made a profit from affiliate and/or advertising-income, you should reinvest a part of these profits in

more paid traffic. This will drive even more visitors to your opt-in page.

By reinvesting the profits - let's say every month - you'll be creating a compounding effect. Your email list will grow

larger and larger, and your affiliate earnings will increase along with it - thus providing even greater profits.

14
Combining the strategies

The above strategies can, of course, be combined. There are many ways in which you can do this.

One way could be to create a niche website where you add an opt-in box on top of each article that you post. Like

this, every visitor that reads your blog articles will first see the lead magnet offer, and then they will be able to read

the article when they scroll down.

On many blogs, you'll see something like 'subscribe to our newsletter.' This is a less effective way to do email

marketing. As in - why would anyone want 'a newsletter'? That is why it is better to offer something of value to the

visitor upfront. This is the lead magnet's function and why you should mention the benefits of downloading it.

Testing and optimizing your strategies

When you have implemented your marketing strategy, your work is not yet finished. You'll notice that some content

gets more viewers, certain affiliate links get more clicks, and some emails get more open than others.

What you need to do next is to focus your efforts on building similar content, placing certain affiliate links, and/or

writing emails like the ones that have the most success. In other words, 'do more of what works.' Success is, in our

case, defined as affiliate sales.

Yet, sometimes you just need to try out new things. New headlines on your landing pages, new titles for your blog

posts, different placement of your affiliate links, etc.

The technique that you can use for this is called A/B testing. There are other techniques out there, but A/B testing is

the most common and usually recommended.

The idea is that you show some original version - called version A - to half of the visitors to your site or half of your

email list. The other half will see the alternative version called B. When there has been a significant amount of

interactions with the two different versions, you can see which of them has had the most success.

When A/B testing, you should only make one change at a time so that you can be sure which change made the

difference. For example, you could create two opt-in pages to see which headline works the best, each with a

different headline.

15
Further Resources

For links to specific software and other helpful resources that can help you get started with affiliate marketing, please

check out our resource page here.

We encourage you to bookmark this page as more resources may be added over time.

16
Copyright © 2021 Zeonoid

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

go.zeonoid.com