5 Tips For Making Money As You Sleep Via Affiliate Marketing

1. Start a Blog or Build a Website

You will require a platform before you can participate in any affiliate programs. If you were to start a company, you would require an office as well as register a legal business. The same concept applies to affiliate marketing. 

2. Post Quality Content on Your Blog or Website

No matter the era we are currently in, quality content will always be important when it comes to digital marketing. With some affiliate programs, you must have a certain volume of traffic to your website, quality content, as well as monthly page views before becoming one of their affiliates.

If you are a beginner affiliate marketer, it is important for you to prioritize the creation of content to drive and retain traffic on your website or blog.

Just how much content do you actually need to get started?  You need to have at least 10 pieces of high-quality content at the start. You can create various types of content for your website, whether videos or blogs or both.

A golden rule to follow when choosing an affiliate program is to pick one that closely relates to your niche. Ideally, you should choose a program related to your post content and vice versa.

Example: You love to help small and micro businesses take their businesses online. 

When it comes to choosing an affiliate program, you would ideally consider one that’s related to digital solutions. When you create content, you would put yourself in the shoes of your target audience to understand how they think.

You would ask yourself, why should I read this content? What problem are you trying to solve in terms of growing businesses online? You would then do a lot of research to validate any “Answers” that would come into your mind.

Ex. 1: If a person wishes to build a website the DIY way and isn’t a professional, he or she might want to know which website is not only easy but also free to use.

Ex. 2: A person wants to know the difference between .com, com.sg, etc. domain extensions. The person might want to know which domain extensions are best-suited for their small business and which ones are affordable.

Ex. 3: A person wants to buy hosting for their website, but they only have a very small budget. Such a person might want to know which hosting plan is the cheapest and best-suited for their website.

Once you understand your audience, you can then customize your content and topic to meet their needs – “cheapest” solutions.

Why the cheapest? You are probably wondering. Going by the example provided, you are targeting micro to small businesses, remember? This category of businesses will most likely be searching for the lowest-cost solutions.

Your content plan would be something like this:

- 5 cheapest domains and hosting in…

- 5 effective ways to create SEO backlinks for free…

- 5 tips for creating a WordPress website yourself

Simply put, your job is helping your target audience discover the right product that best meets their needs. You can use your content to help them decide as well as navigate them to the affiliate product website to make the purchase.

The other golden rule is to always do proper keyword research since it lets you keep track of the hot topics in your niche. It will help you understand the current needs of your target audience and gain insight into the next content you should create.

3. Include Affiliate Products in the Content

Now that you have done proper keyword research, you need to know the solutions that your target audience seeks and create content that solves that need. You can then place your affiliate link in the content.

When you create content, place the affiliate links where they are likely to get maximum exposure. A good rule of thumb is promoting your affiliate products as early as possible in your content and promote on Twitter and your social media.  If you have a blog, it means within the first 20 percent of the post. For video, it is typically within the first minute of recording.

Why? Here are some additional free golden tips for you again. Nielsen eye-tracking studies have shown that users typically do not read very much and the typical behavior for higher literacy users is scanning through text. On typical web pages, users have an average time to scan up to 28 percent of words for each visit. That’s a fact.

So, always make sure that you place the affiliate link within the first 20 percent of the post. If you put your affiliate links in front, you increase the chances of clicks by users and a higher chance of making the payment. Again, it is important to promote affiliate links appropriately, powerfully, and naturally. Once you have set up your affiliate marketing you can go to sleep on your trusted hybrid mattress brand and make money while you sleep.