There are few thrills sweeter than scoring that first affiliate marketing commission. For many people, a commission of even a couple of cents is enough to put a smile on the face. Months and months of hard work will have paid off. It is proof that whatever you were doing actually worked. You have a business model that can be scaled. In theory, you can now do something that could potentially put a lot of money in your pocket.
Here, we want to talk to you about getting that first affiliate marketing commission. This is a method that we know works. It is also a method which when implemented correctly could deliver affiliate commissions within a day or two. It is a simple method, but it is going to require a whole lot of work on your part. However, if you follow the techniques here, then you could be opening up your affiliate account within a few days and you could see a couple of conversions there.
Brief overview of the method
Our method has a few steps:
- Choosing your niche
- Choosing the right affiliate offer
- Building a website
- Producing your content
- Marketing on Quora
A lot of these stages can be expanded upon a little bit. For example; with the last step, you may want to market on other sites in addition to Quora. However, want to make making your first affiliate marketing commission nice and simple. You expand this method later on. For now, we just want to get some money into your account and help to kick-start that passive income dream.
Selection of your niche
For this method, niche selection is actually rather simple. Since we are not going to be too fussed about search engine optimization or anything for this method, the niche can be as competitive as you want. You are not going to be that focused on ranking. However, ideally, choosing a smaller niche will make it a bit easier for you to get noticed. This means that commissions will roll in a little bit quicker due to less competition on sites like Quora.
We would recommend that whatever niche you select, it should always be evergreen, and there should be money to be made. So, think along the lines of personal finance, home improvement, certain hobbies etc. Try to avoid being too niche. While this method may work if you really drilled one of these evergreen niches into specific products (e.g.. home improvement you could niche to ‘best Dewalt drills), it can be a lot more difficult to find places you can actually market yourself.
We would recommend that you opt for niches that you have a solid understanding of and that you would enjoy writing in. This method will require a lot of content creation at the start, and you will get tired and bored if you don’t love the niche. You will also find it difficult to produce content to a standard high enough that people will ‘trust’ what you say.
Choosing the right affiliate offer
For the method we are using here, it would be better to go for CPA offers. This way you will get a commission if you can encourage somebody to complete a specific action. For most CPA offers, there will be zero cost on the part of the site visitor, and this means it will be easy to gain conversions. This is a method which works well in the personal finance industry, particularly when it comes to insurance or credit cards.
That being said, if you want to develop healthier affiliate commissions, and you don’t mind waiting a bit longer for your first affiliate commission, then you may want to look into promoting certain products. Amazon associates is a great place to get started here. Tons of products that you can promote. Something for just about every single niche. Easy to gain conversions.
We suggest that you come up with a decent list of offers you wish to promote. Just so you have an idea on how to write your content.
Building a website
While you can go for one of the free website options here, we don’t really recommend it. If you want to take life as an affiliate marketer seriously, then you will need to have your own website. You need something that you have complete control over. This means picking up your own domain name and some cheap web hosting. You need to invest in yourself. If you can’t do that, then affiliate marketing isn’t really for you.
It is important that you go through the selected affiliate programs to ensure that you include the pages on your site that these programs require. In many cases this will mean putting up:
- Terms and conditions
- Privacy policy
- Disclosure statement
- GDPR cookie confirmation
- Contact details
Even if your affiliate program doesn’t require these pages, it is still useful to put them up and give your site a bit more legitimacy. You will also want to have Google Analytics installed on the site. This way you can analyze your traffic and see if what you are doing is working.
Producing your content
Now the hard work really begins.
What we want you to do is go through the ‘most asked’ questions for your niche. Think about the questions people always seem to ask on sites like Quora, Reddit, and forums related to your niche. You can also use your own personal experience here. We suggest you put together a list of maybe 40-50 questions. You aren’t going to be writing about all of them now, but it is a solid start. It will reduce the amount of effort you need to put into research later on.
Once you have the list, you can start writing your content. Each page on your website should be dedicated to answering one of these questions. Try to ensure that your pages are as detailed as possible. Your site needs to be trustworthy. You need to demonstrate that you know what you are talking about. This is the key to successful affiliate marketing. You will also want to ensure that your content is somewhere in the region of around 800-words. Yes. It may seem like a lot, but we guarantee you that at 800-words, your content will be longer than most sites online. For questions with ‘shorter’ answers, it should never be under 300-words.
You may want to do a bit of keyword research at this stage. While our aim isn’t to get ranked in the search engines, it certainly wouldn’t harm us. It just delivers an extra source of traffic.
Weave your affiliate offers into the questions that you are answering. For example, if you are in the home improvement niche and the question is ‘what is the best cordless drill?’, then you could perhaps have a top 5 list of the best cordless drills. There will be affiliate links pointing towards Amazon. How you work those affiliate offers in is it up to you. Just don’t go overboard. You do not want the page to seem too promotional.
Ideally, you should be producing 2-3 posts per day. This will build up your content quickly, and you aren’t really going to see a penalty for producing this much content. It just gives you more options to work with on the final stage.
Marketing on Quora
Quora is a question and answer website. Marketing on this site is dead-simple. There will be a lot of competition, though. However, if you can beat your competition on just a few questions, you will make your first affiliate marketing commission rather simply. These are the steps we want to follow:
- Search for questions your site has answered
- Draft a detailed reply to these questions
- Link to your website as a ‘source’
Simple, right? It actually is. Finding the questions related to your niche should be simple. Since you have taken the time to put pages on your site which answer the most-asked questions in your niche, then you will likely find a few people per day asking the same question. This will give you ample opportunity to share links to your website.
The real money is made when you become the highest rated answer on a Quora question. You won’t be able to do this by simply linking to your website. You need to go into detail on an answer. A few paragraphs should do it. When it comes to marketing on Quora, it is more about quality than quantity. A single quality answer will generate more sales than fifty small one word answers. You really need to show what you are talking about. Ideally, the information will be different to your website too.
At the end of your answer, you give a ‘source’. This would be a link to your website. People will click this link. Not all of them will be converting website visitors, but that is the same for every marketing method so this isn’t an issue.
Conclusion
This is a dead-simple method to put into action. You can get started by building a single page on your website today. It will be half an hour of work maximum. If you put this plan into action, you really could make your first affiliate marketing commission today. Don’t forget; you can take your method to any website that works on a question and answer basis. Why not scale your business to Reddit, social media, and forums? You can use the same pages you have built in multiple places. Just produce quality content, and that commission will roll in soon enough.
