Whether you’re starting a new website, YouTube channel, or social media page, the formula for Affiliate Marketing success is similar. Here’s an overview:
- Pick a niche and build a genuine online audience
- Pick a relevant product or service to promote and
- Join an Affiliate network.
- Create content around that product or service & include Affiliate links.
- Promote your Affiliate content.
- Get paid for commissions & optimise to earn more
Pretty straightforward, right? Let’s dive in a little deeper for each section:
STEP 1: Pick a Niche & Build a Genuine Online Audience
The recurring advice that Affiliate Marketers (including content creators and influencers) give for someone starting is building a genuine audience before you even start thinking about making money online.
There are 2 ways you can build an online audience:
- Pick a niche and stick with it. Pick a topic that interests you. Experiment with different subtopics, but don’t stray too far off course. You want to be known as someone specialising in a specific topic. It makes it easier for brands to work with you later in your Affiliate Marketing career.
- Only create entertaining or useful content. The world is full of mediocre content. The only way for you to stand out in a sea of noise is to be useful or entertaining.
For inspiration, here are some blogs which cater for niche audiences:
- The Lead – Provides non-fluff information about technology, business and marketing
- Digital Entrepinoy – Share tips on how to earn money online, such as running an online business and doing affiliate marketing
STEP 2: Pick a Product or Service That is Relevant to Your Niche
Once you have built up a steady audience that likes your content and follows you, you can consider monetising your audience by recommending products relevant to your niche.
For example, if you’re a fashion Influencer, it makes perfect sense to promote fashion items. Not something unrelated to your niche, like groceries and car insurance.
Here are some examples of relevancy:
| Publisher Niche | Relevant Products to Promote |
| Fashion Blogger | Shoes, make-up and dresses |
| YouTube car reviewer | Car insurance and accessories |
| Personal finance influencer | Credit card application, insurance and financial management courses |
| Tech reviewer | Camera gear, phones and computers |
STEP 3: Join an Affiliate Network
Now that you have an audience and have identified a relevant product to promote to them, the next step is to generate an Affiliate link for the product.
PROBLEM: Let’s say that you’re a tech blogger and you’re reviewing a particular laptop from Dell and want to promote several items together in your content:
- Promote your audience to buy the laptop (i.e., from Dell).
- Promote your audience to buy headphones (i.e., from Shopee).
- Promote your audience to buy a laptop repair kit (i.e., from Mr. DIY).
Joining affiliate programs directly with brands and generating separate Affiliate links would be tedious. Also, some brands may not even have their affiliate programs.
Solution: It makes sense for someone to start applying with an affiliate network instead.
What is an Affiliate Network?
An Affiliate Marketing network, such as Involve, acts as an intermediary entity between Advertisers and Partners.
Affiliate networks make it easier for Publishers like you to find all the brands to promote under one convenient platform.
The relationship between Advertisers, Partners (you) and the Affiliate network is illustrated below:
In the example of the previous fashion blogger, you can generate Affiliate links for Shopee, Dell, Mr. DIY and all in Involve’s convenient dashboard.
Below is an example of how you can generate an Affiliate link through Involve’s Affiliate link generator:
- Select Property where you are going to promote the products at.
- Find the URL of the product you want to promote from the Advertiser’s website.
- Select the Advertiser.
- Add in Sub IDs which you will be able to track your conversions. Read our article to learn more about Sub IDs.
- Generate your Affiliate link.
- Promote your Affiliate link.
STEP 4: Create Content Around Your Affiliate Link
Now that you have generated your Affiliate link for the product that you want to promote, the next thing to do is to get people to click on your link.
This sounds easy enough, but in reality, people won’t click on your Affiliate links for no reason.
You need to create useful content around your Affiliate link.
A common way to do this is to create a quality review of the product and persuade your audience to click on your Affiliate link.
When creating product reviews, you need to take these points into consideration.
- Know what your followers want
- Know about the products inside and out
- Be unbiased and objective
- Share your experience with the products
- List down the pros and cons of the products
- Mention technical information
- Provide suggestions on using products
STEP 5: Promote Your Affiliate Content
You need all the help you can get to get people to consume your content and ultimately click your Affiliate links, especially if you’re starting out.
Common ways to expose your content to as many people as possible:
- Organic traffic (SEO)
- YouTube traffic
- Social media traffic
- Backlinks from other websites
- Paid advertisements: Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
STEP 6: Get Paid For Commissions & Optimize to Earn More
As in any business, Affiliate Marketing is a numbers game. The more people are exposed to your Affiliate content, the more likely someone will click on your Affiliate link and make the purchase.
As a rule of thumb, the more useful content you publish and promote at a regular pace, the more you’ll earn through Affiliate Marketing.
Involve makes it easy for you as a Publisher to promote different Advertisers under one platform.
Take a look at an example of a fellow Malaysian blogger promoting multiple Advertisers through Involve:
Pretty powerful stuff. Involve consolidating all of your performance in one convenient dashboard.
You’ll be able to see which Advertiser and which type of your content converts the best, giving you invaluable insights to focus on what works.
Having read this far means that you are keen to get started in Affiliate Marketing.
Click the button below to sign up as a Partner with Involve and earn money online.
