What You Need to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing [1.2]
Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the second
lesson in our affiliate marketing course. In this lesson, we're going to talk about
the two things you need to get started with affiliate marketing. The first is a property or platform. A platform is simply a place where
you can recommend your links. So that might be your own
website or YouTube channel. Now, creating either of these is pretty
straightforward so we won't go into things like how to make an affiliate
website because this course is about the actual marketing of an affiliate site. The second thing you'll need is
relevant and consistent traffic. Relevant traffic means that you're attracting
visitors to your website that are interested in a topic and ideally want
to make a purchase soon. And one of the most important parts
to getting relevant traffic is by creating content, which will house information
as well as your affiliate links. So that might be reviews of products, best
of comparison lists, and how-to articles. We'll talk about how you can come up
with these topics in a later module. As for getting consistent traffic, much of that
will come down to where you get your traffic from.
Three of the most popular channels are
social media, ads, and search engines. Now, social traffic is typically inconsistent
because social media networks are designed to surface new content. But many affiliate pages can actually
be somewhat evergreen. So if you don't have a significant following
and brand, I wouldn't count on social media as a reliable primary source
for traffic to an affiliate site. Now, ads can be great because you
can get highly relevant traffic fast. But you have to pay for every single
person who clicks on your ad. So unless you're a part of a very high-paying
affiliate program and you have the expertise with ads and conversion rate optimization,
I'd stay away from ads because you'll find yourself underwater fast.
Now, search traffic is free,
consistent and passive. And the way you get search traffic is
through a marketing method called search engine optimization, or SEO. It's the primary traffic source I recommend
and it's what many multi-million dollar affiliate websites rely on. We'll go much deeper into the tactical and
strategic elements of creating content and getting relevant and consistent traffic in
a later module but first, you need to know whether the reward will be worth the effort. So in the next lesson we're going to talk
about how to make money with affiliate marketing and how much you can actually make..
