Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: A BrandBuilders Guide

We often come across the term “affiliate marketing,” but only a few understand what it really means, and only a handful of marketers can tap into the potential it has to offer. People often see this as a passive source of easy money. However, this is where they go wrong. 

Many marketers lack the know-how and the skills to effectively set up and manage a successful affiliate marketing business. Here’s where experienced professionals like BrandBuilders come in handy. They provide a one-stop solution to all of your affiliate marketing needs. From designing websites to managing content and generating links, they have you covered.

In this article, we’ll help you understand what affiliate marketing means and how beginners can start this journey. Stick around to see how BrandBuilders’ services will make your affiliate marketing journey smooth and hassle-free.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing has become the new face of referral marketing in the millennial business environment. It can be viewed as a more advanced and organized way of referral marketing. It involves selling third-party products on your online platforms, such as blogs, websites, or even YouTube. 

To get started, you’ll need to first sign up with an affiliate program. There are tons of these programs available, all operating in different niches with varied commission rates and cookie periods. Selecting one will heavily depend on your line of interests. 

After registering into a program, you’ll be provided with affiliate links to the product you want to sell. All you have to do is place these links at relevant places so they attract more visitors. As people click these links and buy the product, you’ll earn a commission. Therefore, affiliate marketing is just a modified form of sales promotion.

What Is Traffic and Why Is It Important?

Regardless of the commission rates, your website traffic will determine the amount of money you generate. Traffic refers to the number of people visiting your website in a given time frame. 

As more people visit your website and click on the affiliate links, the chances of making affiliate sales increase. So, how can you attract more traffic?

  • Publish SEO-optimized content on your website that ranks high on search engines, so that when people search those topics on a browser, your article shows up first.
  • Generate backlinks. Backlinks are described as inbound links when a third party provides links to your website content on their platforms. This is a way of promoting your own content through someone else.

Link building is perhaps one of the most effective ways of attracting traffic. However, it can be challenging for beginners with little know-how. You can always hire experts like BrandBuilders for all your optimization needs. 

Professionals, like those on the BrandBuilders team, ensure linking to only high-quality and authority websites. Moreover, you can choose the anchor text you want your content to be linked to.

The Importance of Conversion Rates

Conversion rates can be defined as the percentage of visitors who actually purchase the product after clicking on the affiliate link. A 2-3% conversion rate is considered decent for the average webspace. Conversion rates usually depend on the affiliate product itself. 

  • An expensive product will have lower conversion rates, as people will put more thought into the item before buying.
  • A product from a reputed and well-known brand will have higher conversion rates and greater trust from consumers.

It’s a good idea to choose the affiliate program and the products you promote based on the amount of traffic you expect to see every month on your site. If you can generate decent traffic, you could choose a high-end product that would earn high commissions, even with low conversion rates.

How to Choose an Affiliate Program

Choosing an affiliate program can be quite a task due to the sheer number of programs available, each with its own features. However, here are a few parameters that you should take into consideration.

Commission Rates

You should always go for an affiliate program with high commission rates. Some platforms such as Hubspot offer a flat commission on products, whereas platforms like Amazon, Target, and CJ Affiliates offer a rate ranging from 2-10%, depending on the type of product.

This is the period during which a sale can be completed by the visitor after their first click on the affiliate link. You should always look for platforms offering a longer cookie period to give the consumer more time to purchase – and yourself more time to earn.

Niche

Consider what niche your site falls under, and choose an affiliate program with suitable products for your specific niche. Look for affiliate programs with good commission rates on the desired products.

Challenges for Beginners

If you perceive affiliate marketing as an effortless source of minting money, you could be highly mistaken. If you’re a beginner, there are certain aspects that you should pay attention to:

Building a Website

This is the first and most fundamental step of affiliate marketing. You need to build a website that could earn a sizable income for you. This involves complex tasks such as:

  • Choosing a theme
  • Niche and keyword research
  • Adding plugins
  • Design and implementation
  • Putting up SEO-optimized content
  • Improve the on-page SEO

Beginners cannot be expected to have all the technical knowledge to crack the code, and here is where professionals like BrandBuilders come to their rescue. 

BrandBuilders provides fully functional pre-made affiliate websites for you. As unreal as this may sound, it will save you from the hassle of building a platform from scratch and provide you with a head start to your affiliate marketing journey.

Advantages of Purchasing a Website From BrandBuilders

  • You would get access to an easy-to-rank affiliate website within 24 hours. Considering that it can take months (or even years) to build a quality website from scratch, this can be a major starting point for beginner affiliate marketers.
  • Purchasing a website is more economical when compared to building one. You could spend thousands of dollars on your own before you start attracting bare minimum traffic. However, Brandbuiders’ pre-designed websites are more feasible when you zero in all of the costs that you’d incur otherwise.
  • You can choose from multiple niches. Each niche is ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 based on their difficulty, with 10 being the most difficult niche to earn money from. The rankings help you choose a more profitable niche.
  • You can compare parameters such as commission rates, product prices, number of keyword searches, and estimated profit margins of different websites available for sale.

However, if the idea of a pre-designed website doesn’t sit well with you and you wish to exercise a certain degree of control over your website designing, BrandBuilders also provides custom website designing.

This includes services such as:

  • Market Analysis
  • Keyword Research
  • Content Development
  • Web Design
  • Search Engine Optimization

Apart from this, BrandBuilders also provides complete guidance to beginners, which helps them scale their business. This includes strategies to attract more traffic and post-sale training. You can choose between different plans depending on your requirements. 

Quality Content

After you’ve built a website for your affiliate business, the next most important thing is to generate quality content. It’s rightly said that in modern marketing, content is king, and unless you have a strong king, your kingdom won’t flourish. It’s imperative to post quality SEO-optimized content to attract higher traffic. 

It goes without saying that not all website owners are born writers. Plus, it can be both time-consuming and expensive to invest in premium content apps like Hemmingway or RankMath. This is another area where professionals like BrandBuilders come into the picture. 

They can save you from the trouble of having to write and manage and edit articles for your website.

Benefits of BrandBuilders’ Premium Content Service

  • Includes extensive keyword research to find the right words to rank your site higher on a search engine.
  • The articles are written by a team of professional writers and are optimized as per SEO norms.
  • An article passes through at least three people before it takes its final form. After being written, it’s proofread and edited by duly-hired professionals.
  • BrandBuilders provides creative meta descriptions and even uploads the content on your website.

The only task that you’d have to execute is to place an order and select a niche. Everything from writing the article to uploading it would be done by BrandBuilders. You can even request unlimited changes and edits so that the final product is exactly what you desired in the first place. You can choose among different plans depending on your word requirement.

Site Management

Consistency is key. Once you’ve established a website with premium content, you’ll need to maintain the webspace to stay on top. The idea is not to “rank and bank.” 

Rather, you must adopt a more long-term approach when it comes to affiliate marketing. People often view affiliate marketing as an add-on to their existing profession or business, neglecting to take the time to grow their websites.

BrandBuilders provides professional site management services tailored to your goals. They have different plans for different long-term goals: Starter, Growth, or Surge. This includes everything from finding new affiliate programs to producing and updating content and generating backlinks.

Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing demands time and effort. While many have a keen desire to ace the game of affiliate marketing, they may lack the skill or not be able to spare enough time. BrandBuilders provides you with the perfect take-off by pointing your business in the right direction. 

With the combined experience of professionals in the field, you can be assured of a smooth sailing affiliate marketing business. Contact BrandBuilders now!