Below you'll find the posts at Sugarrae from the affiliate marketing category. I highly recommend you read each of them if you're serious about making an income as an affiliate marketer.
If you already know about affiliate marketing and want to get straight to the tips and strategies for making more money with it, click here.
If you're not familiar with affiliate marketing or are unsure of how it works, keep reading.
Affiliate marketing allows you to recommend products and services from other companies and be paid a commission if someone buys the product as the result of your recommendation. To track which purchases happens as a result of your recommendation(s), the merchant will provide you with a special link to use when linking to their website that contains a unique referral code assigned to you. If people click that unique link, and buy the product or service within a specified timeframe (the timeframe varies depending on the merchant), you get a commission on the sale.
The products cost the consumer the same amount of money as it would if they didn't buy it through your affiliate link, but the merchant pays you a referral fee for generating the sale. For a visual explanation of this process, click here.
Absolutely. Affiliate marketing is a viable and legitimate way to monetize your blog or website. Tens of thousands of merchants run affiliate programs and will pay you a commission for sending them sales. However, there are some scams centered around affiliate marketing. You'll find information on how to spot affiliate scams – and avoid them – here.
The easiest way to find affiliate programs to promote is to check if the people selling products and services you love have an affiliate program – assuming those products and services would be relevant to the visitors to your blog or website. There are also multiple ways to find new quality products or services to promote to your audience based on their interests. You'll find more information on how to do this here.
Yes and no. You should never pay to become an affiliate for a merchant's program. Joining and promoting an affiliate program is a free opportunity. If someone is asking you to spend money to become their affiliate, then you're being presented with an affiliate scam and should steer clear of that program.
While joining affiliate programs is a free opportunity, it's a business – and like any business, it will cost some money to start and run it. But those costs will be associated with building, running and promoting your blog or website. There are many tools – free and paid - you can use to assist you with all of these processes. I list a few of my favorite affiliate marketing tools here.
Yes and no. Affiliate marketing can generate passive income, but the passive side of the income usually only follows putting in a few years of hard work to generate the brand and audience you'll need to begin generating those passive sales. I have multiple sites earning passive income, but each of those sites took a lot of front end work to build up to that point. And not every site gets to the point of passive income. Some sites require continual maintenance though the revenue they generate can also allow you to pay for that maintenance to be done vs. you needing to do it yourself.
Anyone promising to teach you how you can make thousands without putting in much work is selling you the dream and should be avoided.
I offer a ton of free resources, tips, guides and tutorials here on my website that can help you get started in affiliate marketing – and help you find success with it. While there are plenty of paid training programs out there, you need to be careful. Some of the people who create these programs make their money by selling the dream and not through doing true affiliate marketing for products or services outside of selling you the dream. That's not to say there are not some good training programs out there - but buyer beware. For now, I'd recommend you start with my free information here on my website – and to sign up for my free weekly newsletter here.
I've been doing affiliate marketing – successfully – for well over a decade. While I earn affiliate income from this website, I've made the bulk of my affiliate revenue from selling real users products and services – in multiple niches - that have nothing to do with the making money online niche. I've been nominated as Affiliate of the Year three times in the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards – taking home the award in 2016. I've spent the last decade+ teaching people how to find success with affiliate marketing - based on my own experiences - as well as advocating for the industry as a whole. I'm often blunt and can sometimes be controversial, but I'm also 100% bullshit free.
If you have suggestions for posts you'd like to see me do or information you'd love to see provided, please feel free to contact me and let me know.
I get a lot of newer, aspiring affiliates on the Sugarrae site and when you've never done affiliate marketing before, all of the terms can get a little confusing. So I created this glossary of affiliate marketing terms to help newer affiliates and ... Read More
I always run my affiliate links through redirects - also referred to as cloaking affiliate links - for several reasons:Running them through my redirects means I have a click count to match up to the one the merchant is reporting. Affiliate links ... Read More
Sometimes an AdSense unit won't display an ad to a user for whatever reason. When an AdSense unit doesn't show an ad, it leaves an odd amount of space within the content, and reduces my ability to monetize those pages - and I find that unacceptable. ... Read More
Google Alerts is a free service offered by Google that will alert you to new content Google finds on the web that contains keywords you specify. Google Alerts is most commonly recommended as a way to monitor your brand - and your competition's brand ... Read More
For those who aren't familiar, Panda is a Google search filter that (in part) penalizes sites that have a large amount of thin or duplicated content. Panda has been a harsh filter for those using datafeeds in general - be they a merchant or an ... Read More
In part one of this series - identifying the demographic - you got a good handle on who will be reading your blog based on your niche and where you social efforts should have the most impact (#protip - you can begin working on building a social ... Read More
In prior posts we've discussed how to come up with a niche idea, how to research a niche before entering it and how to find the best affiliate programs within a niche to promote. Now it's time to build and promote that site, right?Wrong. Now it's ... Read More
In my recent post on how to research a niche one of the topics I glazed over was checking for the presence of multiple affiliate programs. Assuming you've found a niche idea that passed the research litmus test (or are already in a niche), it's time ... Read More
There are of thousands of opinions on how to build a successful affiliate program. The easiest way to sum it up is to say the affiliate manager needs to "Get It".If they don't understand affiliate marketing, the program will never see its full ... Read More
Figuring out which niche to target is the stumbling point for a lot of wannabe affiliates. As I mentioned in my post on how to research a niche, I've stumbled on some of my niches completely by chance - others I found and targeted.If you're ... Read More
How do you an evaluate a potential affiliate niche? It's a question I'm asked several times a week. Half of the niches I've created affiliate sites in were ones I stumbled across totally by chance. The rest are in niches I directly set out to ... Read More
Keyword targeting can make all the difference revenue wise when working on SEO for an affiliate site that relies on SEO as its primary marketing method. You have vanity terms, traffic terms and then you have your "money" terms.Seeing results from ... Read More
