Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money in your sleep. It’s simple. You’re a store, and you’re selling anything and everything you want to sell. You can do it from your desk (or even from your phone in bed) and you don’t have to hire anyone. All you need to do is place links on a blog that people like to read, and wait for them to buy products through those links.

If you choose to focus on higher end items, like expensive exercising equipment, gaming PCs, appliances, or jewelry, you don’t need to make that many sales to get a substantial kickback from every product you inspire someone to buy. If you’re looking to get started, there’s just a few things to learn. Once you’ve got the basics down, you’re good to go.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when you use your own website to sell someone else’s products. Most people work with Amazon, as their affiliate marketing program is easy to join and offers affiliate marketers one of the most substantial cuts. Many specialty websites also allow affiliate marketing. It’s popular in beauty, wellness, and food niches.

You’re responsible for creating a website, filling that website with useful and engaging content that will inspire people to buy products, and getting people to visit that website. All you need is some kind of platform and hosting, a well-designed website, writing skills or a hired writer, and some kind of ad tracker that will help you use an ad network to measure each traffic source and its performance.

The website that sells the product will deal with the customers. They manufacture or supply the products, deal with order processing, and handle returns. You’re completely hands off in that regard. You can become an affiliate marketer with nothing more than a smartphone, and you can work from home.

Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?

Affiliate marketing is worth it as long as your earnings amount to more than what you spend to operate your website. If you’re savvy enough and you have the time to dedicate to affiliate marketing, you won’t have to pay for more than your domain, hosting, and the monthly fee for your affiliate tracking software or native advertising platform. To learn more about how ads work, click here.

You also want to consider how much your time is worth per hour of this work. If you would pay yourself $20 per hour, you need to be sure you’re making more than that amount per hour to cover all of your costs, including your wage.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing

First, decide on a niche. Many people opt to enter affiliate marketing by selling something that costs a lot. The reason for that is simple: 2% of $500 is a lot more than 2% of $5. If you think you can make up the difference in volume, lower ticket items can be significantly profitable.

Then, build your website or have someone else build your website. Add as much content relevant to your niche as possible. You want to establish yourself as an authority on the subject, rather than as a person who just so happens to be selling stuff.

If your niche is kitchen tools, create sections with guides about how to use these tools, the different kinds of tools, recipes you can make with them, and comparisons to every version of those tools on the market. Your goal is to be a one-stop shop for anything and everything someone would want to know when they’re considering making a purchase within your niche.

Making the Venture Profitable

In order to make your venture profitable, you need to be sure that enough people are going to see your content, be influenced by it, and make a purchase. The best way to do that is by using a tool like Voluum DSP. You’ll be able to create native advertisements and track their performance. You can find people looking at things that are relevant to what you’re selling, grab their attention, and bring them in.

Once they’ve arrived, your well crafted content will help them to become informed researchers with an intent to buy. They should be able to decide which versions of which products are best for them, and commit to making that purchase.

The Takeaway

Affiliate marketing has the potential to be highly profitable, but getting started can be time consuming. You may not be an overnight success, but you shouldn’t expect to be. If you remain dedicated and keep crafting useful content, you’ll start to generate passive income. Even if you take a few months off of running a highly profitable affiliate website, people should still be able to find it and make purchases. All you need to win are patience, knowledge, and the right tools.