Here are some frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing.
What’s affiliate marketing?
Most brands that sell their products (including services) online worldwide, such as Jumia, Konga, Amazon, etc. They often partner with bloggers in their selected niche. These bloggers are affiliates. An affiliate marketer helps companies promote their products and services while getting commissions for every client they referred.
Affiliate marketing is a unique business model where you are not at the mercy of your recruiters and marketers and can work directly with the companies like eBay, Amazon, etc.
The best part?
There is no involvement of the teams in affiliate marketing and you are your boss.
Let’s consider the Jumia affiliate program as an example. If you become an affiliate partner with Jumia, they will give you a unique affiliate link that you’ll place on your website. When someone clicks on that link and purchases any products from the Jumia store, you get a certain percentage as commission.
Now, it’s entirely up to you on how you promote your partner’s products. One way is to recommend the product to your existing audience via email, blog posts, or social media posts. Another way is by attracting new audiences on behalf of your partner, like building a dedicated website and driving SEO and PPC traffic to it. You could organize training courses or launch promotional sales.
Whatever way you choose to promote the products, the idea is still affiliate blogging: affiliate marketers refer new clients to a partner’s website and receiving payment for that.
Does SEO work on affiliate marketing websites?
Google thus frowns upon affiliate websites. . Affiliate websites can get frown upon by Google, not because of their affiliate (business) nature, but because they are often created with minimal effort.
Here’s what Google’s John Mueller said in his Google Webmaster Hangouts session:
“Of course, affiliate sites can have a lot of really useful information on them. We like showing them in search. But, at the same time, we see many affiliates who copy and paste the feeds. Moreover, they get and publish them on their website. It’s not something where we say that an affiliate site is bad; we just see many bad affiliate sites. And if you have affiliate links on a website, it is totally ok. That’s not going to be something that we would count against a website.”
John Mueller
Taking a step to participate in an affiliate marketing program is a good idea. It doesn’t hurt your website’s SEO rankings. If you handle SEO seriously, you can turn the organic traffic on your site into a source of affiliate earnings.
Is Affiliate Marketing A Sustained Business Model?
Remember that affiliate marketing is not an MLM and is a totally different business model.
If you want to get much more leverage, then you should give a chance to affiliate marketing.
Let’s understand affiliate marketing with an example.
Amazon.com is a company that directly hires people as affiliates. You do marketing for them and earn commission directly to your bank account. You can integrate Amazon.com as an affiliate income source on your website and can get the handsome check at the end of each month.
How to Pick an affiliate niche to focus on?
Affiliate marketing is about narrowing down to a specific niche and, at most, plus a few “shoulder niches.” Then select a topic that you are passionate about.
Let me simplify this by giving you the three basic steps to follow before settling into a specific niche and product.
Step 1. Pick a niche within a niche.
Say you are running a blog on social media marketing. In this case, the most obvious niche for your affiliate efforts is tools and services. But the topic of social media marketing is huge. You are unlikely to be able to cover all of it with high-quality content. And even if you do, you will become just another generic social media blogger.
The best affiliate success tip is to narrow down on a niche (don’t worry, you can carry on with a shoulder niche as you build reputation and trust within the niche), establish a reputation as an expert in this specific area. You can focus on Facebook advertising and Instagram. You can review social media management tools, collect case studies, among many other things. Over time, your blog will become the place to go to learn about this particular area of social media marketing.
Step 2. Check traffic potential.
Choosing an interesting topic is not enough. It has to be interesting to other people as well. To know if the topic is interesting to other people, do a bit of research on the topic to discover keywords that relate well and that people are searching for it.
You can use many tools to check keywords to know the search volume – the number of searches the keywords have, but in this article, I will focus on Ahrefs. Other tools are SEMrush, Moz SEO Toolkit, SEO Powersuite, keyword everywhere, keyword.io, and even the popular Google keyword planner, which is entirely free.
Step 3. Size your competition.
It is most likely that some of the keywords in your list are probably already targeted by the big and powerful websites. You won’t be able to rank for this type of keyword – with high competition in good enough positions to attract visitors to your site.
So, to check which keywords are too competitive. Go to the Keyword Explorer in Ahrefs and check Keyword Difficulty. Do it for all discovered keywords as a group or for each keyword.
How To Choose a domain name.
If you’re planning to build your affiliate website from scratch, here are a few SEO considerations you might want to take into account when it comes to choosing a domain for your site.
Don’t be obsessed over exact match domains.
Exact match domain names used to have substantial SEO benefits some years ago, when they were a significant ranking factor. But today, having keywords in your domain name is largely irrelevant. Google looks at your content and not your domain name when ranking your site on a search engine result page. So don’t be too obsessed over exact match domains. Paying a huge sum of money just to purchase a keyword-rich domain name isn’t worth it because, at the end of the day, your content is what Google will use.
Having keywords in the domain doesn’t guarantee that you’ll automatically rank for those keywords. And that’s something that’s been the case for a long time.
John Mueller
Avoid brands in the domain name.
One of the affiliate program rules clearly states that using the name of the brands you’re promoting in your domain name is strictly prohibited. So, unless you have explicit permission from the company, a branded domain name is no going area. You can face a lawsuit for infringing on a brand name if you do.
So these were some most frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing that can help you in starting affiliate business from scratch.