Affiliate Marketing

Imagine all you needed to make money online was a website. You don’t have to create your own products or offer a service. Sounds good? Welcome to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is where you promote another company’s product or service. When someone purchases through your affiliate link, you earn a commission. These commissions are usually a percentage of the sale price or a fixed amount.

Here are four reasons why you should consider affiliate marketing:

1. Low-cost and low-risk

Starting a business can be risky and expensive because there are upfront investments for products, employees, equipment, rent, and so on. With affiliate marketing, all you need is a website. If it doesn’t work out, you’ve only spent time and a little bit of money.

2. Passive income potential

If you have a job, you need to work hours in return for income. If you’re doing affiliate marketing, you can earn an income as long as there’s traffic to your website and they’re buying via your affiliate links. This can happen at any time of the day, even when you’re sleeping.

3. Work from home or anywhere in the world

Earning passive income means you can work anytime and anywhere, as long as you have Internet and can access your affiliate website.

4. Easy to scale

A typical salesperson only sells products from one company. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote products from many different companies and earn commissions from all of them.

How to get started with affiliate marketing

Step 1: Choose your niche

Your niche is the category you want to talk about and promote.

To stand out amongst the countless other websites today, my advice is to be specific. Instead of tackling a broad niche like food, go for something a bit narrower, like grilling. This helps you build a more focused audience and may also help with SEO.

Here are four questions to ask yourself to find a good niche:

What am I good at?

What do I like doing?

What am I curious about?

What do other people tell me I’m good at?

It’s hard to overstate the importance of choosing something you’re passionate about. You’ll need to create a lot of content to succeed with affiliate marketing. If you choose something you hate, you’ll find it hard to press on when the going gets tough.

That’s why, when I built my first site, I chose to talk about one of my hobbies—breakdancing. And despite knowing nothing about marketing, I grew it to an estimated 2K monthly visits.