What is the best affiliate marketing program for you? Simple, it’s a program that will actually teach you how to make money as an affiliate.

I used to teach swim lessons at the local YMCA. It was fun. I loved interacting with the kids in my classes.

One of the kids in my class had no fear. He would jump into the pool every chance he got. He would immediately sink to the bottom and I would haul him up and sit him on the side of the pool.

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I told him over and over not to get into the pool until I was there with him, until it was his turn.

Still, every time I was working with another kid this boy would jump into the pool!

By the time the 6 week course was completed he had learned some basics, he could float and swim enough to get himself back to the side of the pool.

Whew! That was a relief to his mom!

But he was lucky, it could have gone much, much worse.

When it comes to your affiliate marketing business are you like this kid at the pool?

Are you jumping in with both feet even though you don’t know how to swim? If so, you’ll be lucky if you make any money at all let alone make a consistent, large, full time income.

You must learn before you can swim. That’s where a quality affiliate marketing program comes in.

Learn & Earn

A good program will teach the skills you need to learn if you want to start making money quickly. It will also teach the skills you need to know to keep making money for the long term.

After all, this is a business you’re building. It isn’t a get rich quick scheme. You want to build your business on a solid foundation.

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Making money quickly with your affiliate marketing business is fantastic, but it won’t mean a thing if you can’t continue to make consistent income for the long term.

One of the biggest reasons new affiliates fail to really make good money online is that they don’t know what they’re doing.

Even though affiliate marketing is pretty simple in theory, there are still skills you need to learn in order to build a solid business and make commissions on a consistent basis. That is where are solid affiliate marketing program comes in.

One of the best parts about building an affiliate marketing business is that you can create passive income. If you do it correctly, you truly can create an income stream that can make you money well into the future with little additional effort!

How cool would that be?

There are 4 basic steps you need to take in order to become an affiliate marketing success. If you can get these steps dialed in, you can make virtually unlimited affiliate marketing commissions for the rest of your life!

Choose the right niche. There are so many niches you can choose to promote as an affiliate, it’s practically limitless. BUT choosing the right niche can be the difference between long term success or total failure.

Find the right audience. Promoting golf clubs to someone who doesn’t golf is a total waste of time and money, right? To be successful you need to find the people who are passionate about your niche. People who spend money in your niche. Get your product or service in front of them, and you will make commissions!

Create a path to purchase. A quality sales funnel will warm up your traffic and get them primed to make a purchase. A good funnel helps build the interest of your prospect. It is called a funnel for a reason – it’s wide at the top with a lot of people flowing into it.

It offers information and products to the people in it. Those people who aren’t interested in your product or service drop out. That isn’t a bad thing because even though there are fewer people in the bottom of your funnel, these are the people who will buy from you!

Consistent, targeted traffic. There are two kinds of traffic free and paid. One type will cost you money and the other will cost you time.

To optimize the traffic you get you want to build a quality blog that provides people in your niche with great content on a consistent basis. Once you do that, it becomes really easy to get tons of highly motivated prospects to your site and into your sales funnel.

A Solid Foundation

Learning these skills will ensure both short term success and long term success.

You really can create a long term passive income that can comfortably support you and your family when you know the exact steps to follow.

Affiliate marketing can lead to the perfect lifestyle mix of making lots of money AND having plenty of free time to enjoy it.

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who decided to go back to work part time to make a little extra money for her family.

She didn’t necessarily need the money, she just wanted a little more wiggle room in the family budget every month.

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She got a job as a cashier at a local hardware store, she liked it well enough. But within a few months she realized that the tradeoff of her time versus the money she brought home might not be worth it.

Sure, she brought home more money, but she had a lot less time to enjoy it.

Plus, it was a little demoralizing to realize that 20 hours of her life were worth so little when she actually got her paycheck.

You’re reading this so it’s likely you’re in the same boat – you want more money but you still want to have a life.

To create a true passive affiliate marketing income just remember 2 words: recurring commissions.

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There are many products you can promote as an affiliate that have a subscription plan. When you refer a customer and they sign up, you will earn a commissions over and over again, as long as that person stays subscribed.

It’s a little like a writer who writes a book once but gets paid each time that book sells a copy. Do the work once, continue to get paid over and over again.

The big takeaway is this: It takes the same amount of work as an affiliate to make one sale one time as it does to sell a recurring billing product and make ongoing commissions indefinitely.

To increase your income, make sure you promote quality products that people will actually need. A quality subscription product will ensure the customer stays subscribed for a long time, then you get paid for much longer from that one subscriber.

The Downside of Recurring Commissions

Of course there are some downsides to recurring affiliate marketing commissions.

Here are a few things to be aware of:

1. Most products with recurring commissions will offer a low introductory offer. So, the first commission you make may only be a few cents if the initial offer is a $1 trial offer. That means it will take a little longer to get a decent commission.
2. If you can promote a quality product that people will really need, then they are likely to stay subscribed for a long time. But even in this scenario people will fall off and your commissions will fall off too.

Neither of these two issues are deal breakers – a recurring commission program will enable you to do the work once and get paid over and over again for a period of time. That means you can be earning even if you’re not actually working.

Also, continue promoting the recurring payment model since people will eventually cancel the recurring programs you already have.

By continually adding new people to the recurring program you’re promoting you can keep your commission level the same even when people cancel their subscription since you’ll be adding new people regularly.

The best way to run your affiliate marketing business is to promote a combination of single pay commissions and recurring commission products.

That way you will have money coming in right away, and also have money coming in over time.

Here are the top affiliate marketing resources you need to have from the start to build a long term affiliate marketing business. Some of these tools are free, some are paid but they are all necessary to build your affiliate marketing business on a solid foundation.

Here are the affiliate marketing resources you should have:

A WordPress website. WordPress is the simplest type of website to set up because it has thousands of templates you can choose from. Installation is a few mouse clicks. It’s very easy and once your site is setup you can design it the way you want it to look.

In addition to easy set up, WordPress sites allow you to add plugins that can increase your sites functionality. Most plugins are free.

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There are 2 things you will need before you install your WordPress theme – a domain name and a hosting account.In order to create your website you will need to sign up for a hosting account and purchase a domain name.

Neither of these things are expensive. A domain name will cost around $10 a year and a hosting account can be as little as $10 a month. I personally use NameCheap.com for my domains and web hosting. They are inexpensive and I’ve never had better customer service!

NOTE: Do not start your business on a social media site like Facebook. Social media sites should only be used as a method to build your brand and to get traffic to your website. This is one of the biggest mistakes people make when starting out.

There are two main reasons people try to use this shortcut of using Facebook instead of creating their own website:

1. They are scared of the prospect of creating their own website.
2. They don’t think they can afford their own website.

But that’s a mistake. Think of it this way – you would never build a brick and mortar business on someones else’s land would you?

At least not unless you had an ironclad rental agreement.

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But with social media there is NO agreement at all, ironclad or otherwise. You use their property, their website, at their whim.

If they change the rules, if they decided you haven’t been abiding by their rules your page is gone. And there isn’t a darn thing you can do about it.

You’re back at square one. That’s a huge risk for your business, don’t do it!

Graphics design. You will need graphics especially if you use social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram to grow your audience and drive traffic.

Creating eye popping graphics is actually really easy with a site called Canva.com. You can use their templates to create professional looking pins, Facebook updates, info-graphics and eBook covers, etc.

Canva has a very robust free plan which will be enough for most people. If you do want more options such as more templates, more free images, more clip art choices or more choice of fonts, you can upgrade to the paid version.

Royalty free photos. When you create content for your blog you must include some images.

Images break up the text and add color and interest to your blog posts.

You need a good supply of eye catching images you can legally use that are free.

There are several sites where you can legally use their photos for whatever purpose you want. The top 2, and the ones I use, are Pixabay.com and Pexels.com. You should be able to find images on either of these sites that will work for whatever project you need.

Autoresponder. To be a successful affiliate marketer you must build an email list of loyal fans. To automate this process you will need an autoresponder.

This is simply a service that automates your email marketing. These services will make it easy to create an optin form for your website, add subscribers to your list and automate the process of sending emails out to them periodically.

You just have to create a followup email series one time and it will go out to the people who sign up to your list automatically. There are many autoresponder services available but I like GetResponse.

One of the reasons I chose them over other services is that they are easy to use, they have good tutorials and their customer service is very responsive if you need help.

Tracking. When you start spending time and/or money to drive traffic to your website it’s imperative that you know what works and what doesn’t. The only way to know that is with tracking.

Google Analytics is one of the best ways to get tons of information about the people who are coming to your website. Google analytics doesn’t cost anything so sign up and add it to your website as soon as your site is up and running.

What’s Next?

There are other affiliate marketing resources you will want to add eventually.

But, these resources are what you need now, no need to overwhelm yourself with every little thing. Besides, some people prefer different tools than others. Once you’re going you can decide which tools and resources work best for you.

For now, these tools will help your affiliate marketing business get off to a solid start.

Affiliate marketing for bloggers starts with creating a great blog. Now “great” can be subjective.

Opinions can vary greatly as to what constitutes a great blog but the most important aspect is quality content that is congruent with whatever niche you choose.

Here are the top 5 affiliate marketing for bloggers tips to get started:

1. Choose Your Niche

This is the obvious starting point since you can’t have a successful affiliate marketing blog if you don’t know what niche you want to be in. There are tons of ways to do niche research but 2 of the best, in my humble opinion, are Pinterest and Facebook.

Both of these social platforms have an enormous amount of people who visit them daily. And they have an enormous amount of topics that people view.

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If you’re not sure if the niche you want to pursue will be profitable go to these 2 sites and plug your niche name into the search bar, choose “groups” and see what comes up.

In Facebook it looks like this…

Find some groups in the niche you’re considering and check them out. How many members do they have? How active are the? This will give you a ton of information about the niche you’re considering.

In Pinterest it looks like this:

And as you can see in Pinterest, you don’t even have to enter the full search term, you will get other ideas listed below. This tells you what other topics within a given niche people are looking for!

And one more thing to consider about a niche, don’t be afraid of a niche that’s really competitive, that just means there are a lot of potential customers.

To give yourself an edge, though, don’t go broad in your niche, drill down. For example, instead of using the niche Keto Diet, drill it down to Keto Diet for people over 50.

Once you’ve chosen a great niche, you need products to sell. Now it’s time to find an affiliate network and sign up. There are tons to choose from and which ones you choose will depend in part to the niche you’re in.

If you’re niche is something that you would want to sell physical products – like yogas accessories, golf accessories, cookware, etc. your first affiliate platform should probably be Amazon.com

If your niche is the type of niche where digital products are popular – think learning to write, parenting tips, or dog training, Clickbank.com is a great place to find a wide variety of digital products for you to promote on your blog.

NOTE: Dog training, and many other niches, can straddle both digital and physical products. For example, you can sell a digital dog training course and also offer physical products such as leashes and dog pens.

2. Your Blog Needs A Home

Affiliate marketing for bloggers means you’ll need a blog! Your blog will need a domain name and a hosting account. It may seem confusing but think of it like this – the domain name is the name of your website, it’s kind of like your online address.

The hosting account is the “property” your website sits on. It’s like your online lot.

There are many places to get a domain name. They’re cheap too. You can usually get one for about $10 a year.

When choosing a domain name here are some tips:

1. Keep them name fairly short
2. Make sure the name tells people what your blog is about
3. Only get a .com domain name

A hosting account will only cost a few dollars a month so this isn’t a big expense. Most hosting accounts and/or domain providers offer a lot of resources to get your website set up and ready to go.

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3. Add Content

Affiliate marketing for bloggers means that people in your niche will come to you to learn more about your niche topic. Since a good niche includes lots of people who are passionate about it, they are always interested in sharing ideas, learning ways to improve or getting motivated.

If you consistently add new, interesting and helpful content to your blog, people will come back over and over again.

So, what type of content should you add? Well, ideally you’ve chosen a niche that you have at least a little interest and experience in.

If so then you arelady have a good idea of what issues or problems people in that niche routinely encounter.

So, with this knowledge you can provide content that will help your audience overcome any problems.

For example, let’s say you’re in the golf niche. People are incredibly passionate about golf. They are always looking to find ways to better their scores, looking for new and better equipment or the best golf courses, etc.

Maybe you could write an article about the best golf courses in a certain area, or a review of the newest putter. Or maybe record a video with tips on improving your putting.

You get the idea. Find what problems or concerns people in your niche have (Facebook and Pinterest are good places for this) then provide helpful content that will help your audience overcome that problem!

And content is more than just the written word. A well written blog post, if done correctly, will attract a large audience. But, you can also add video, info-graphics and any other type of content that will help your audience.

The 2 big things to remember about content are:

1. Be consistent. Don’t write 10 articles one week and then not write another word for a year.
2. Always create content with an eye toward providing value to your audience.

4. Build A List

I think this is one of the single biggest mistakes people make when just starting out, they fail to optimize their website visitors.

I talkk about this a lot but I’ve heard, and my personal experience confirms it, that upwards of 98% of the people who come to your website won’t buy anything and they won’t ever come back.

Think about that, that’s a huge number of people you’ll never see again.
When you consider all the effort you put in to creating great content and driving traffic to your site, dang, what a waste!

The good news is that there are ways around this, namely building an email list.

It’s pretty easy to do, here are the basic steps:

1. Get an autoresponder. This will automate the process of sending follow up emails and adding subscribers to your email list.
2. Create a lead magnet. This could be a short report, a checklist, a short tutorial video, etc. Just think of something that will help your audience solve a common problem in your niche.
3. Add optin forms to multiple places throughout your blog and use your lead magnet as an incentive to get them to sign up to your email list.
4. Create helpful followup email sequences. With the autoresponder you can create these followup messages once and they will be delivered automatically over time whenever someone signs up to your email list.
5. Treat the people on your email list with respect and they will stay subscribed for possibly years to come. Learn how to create the right balance in your email sequence between informational and promotional emails here.

5. Time To Monetize

Building an email list is one of the best ways to make money from your blog. If you do it correctly people on your list will stay on your list over time and when you send promotional emails many of them will buy from you.

But, an email list is just one of the ways you can make money with your blog. Here are a few other ideas to monetize your blog:

1. Add Adsense. Adsense is a Google product that you’ve probably seen but just didn’t know it. When you go to website you will see ads, many of those ads are Google Adsense. As a blogger, you will be a publisher. When you sign up to Adsense ads will be placed on your blog (this is all automatic and easy to do). When someone clicks on one of those ads you’ll earn a small commission.
2. Affiliate links. When you become an affiliate for various affiliate programs you will be given a distinct url for the specific products you choose to promote. You can add those urls to your blog posts. When someone clicks on the url and makes a purchase you earn a commission.

Affiliate Markeintg For Bloggers

Bloggers have the potential to make a lot of money using affiliate marketing as a way to monetize their blog.
But it all begins with a blog filled with really good contnet.

Now dont’ think “really good content” means you have to be a great writer.

You don’t.

Create quality content of course, but overall make sure your content provides value for your audience.

Helping your audience solve some problem or teach them something new through your content is the biggest secret to making money blogging.

And remember – the sooner you start the sooner you’ll be making a steady income online!