Best way to make your first affiliate commission

Looking for the best way to make your first affiliate commission? We have got you covered. We know that making your first affiliate commission is going to be the hardest. It can take months to get to that point. Months of hard work that you are not sure will pay off. However, that first commission will validate all of the work you have done. It shows that your business model works, and more money won’t be that far behind.

On this page, we are going to share the best way to make your first affiliate commission. This is not necessarily going to be the fastest way. Our method, however, will give you the greatest chance of future success. We want to help you to build a website that will make you money for years and years to come. We have a lot to cover, so we are just going to dive in.

Brief overview of our method

Our method has a few simple steps:

1. Choosing your niche
2. Building your website
3. Gaining traffic

That’s it. Honestly. We know people dress affiliate marketing up as being a complicated process. However, it really is as simple as choosing the niche you want to work with, building up your website, and then sending traffic to it. As long as you can send quality traffic to your affiliate offers, then you are going to make money. We promise you that.

Choosing your niche

The first step of the process is choosing the niche you want to work in. Our suggestion is to work in a niche that you know and love. It makes producing your content so much easier, One of your goals as an affiliate marketer is to produce content which sounds believable. It needs to sell like you genuinely know what you are talking about, and you believe in the products that you are promoting. If you do not understand your niche, you won’t be able to do this. You will write as if you are bored with writing. Not a good first impression when somebody lands on your website.

Of course, a love of a niche is not enough. You should also ensure the following:

• There is money to be made
• Competition is low
• There are affiliate programs that are available

We suggest that you aim for a ‘broad’ niche. Nowadays, the most popular affiliate sites are the ones that acts an authority site for the niche. While you can probably earn cash focusing on a single product, you will struggle to gain authority. This means that you will never rank that high in the search engines. You will also find that your site can’t be expanded that much. You will always be stuck focusing on a very specific type of product. If this product is discontinued, you have lost your business.

In terms of affiliate program selection, go for whatever is the best fit for your niche. If you are promoting physical products, then opt for Amazon Associates. If you are doing dating, then looking for dating sites which have affiliate programs. For everything else, look through sites like Commission Junction to see which programs are available for your niche.

Building your website

Now the fun can begin.

Since we are looking to set up a long term business here, you are going to need to purchase hosting and a domain name. Do not use one of the free website services. You will have zero control over your business, and that can make things difficult. Your data will also be controlled by a particular company. If that company goes out of business, all of your hard work will be undone. You will have lost your company too. Thankfully, hosting and domain names are fairly affordable.

While there is a lot of software out there that you can use to make your website, we recommend that you go with WordPress. It is ridiculously simple to use, and there are a ton of plugins available for your site (check out Yoast!) which will make affiliate marketing a whole lot easier for you. WordPress takes only a couple of minutes to set-up, and meets current SEO standards, so that is one less thing you need to worry about.

The content on your website will need to be a mix between informational posts and review posts. Before you write your content, we suggest you do a bit of keyword research on one of the big ‘keyword research’ tools. Grab a list of maybe 300-400 different keywords for your niche. Over time, you will be building articles which focus on these keywords. Yes. It does seem like a lot, but a lot of these keywords will overlap and you could, potentially, include them in the same article.

Make sure all of the content that you put on your website is well-written. It should be informational, while also subtlety hinting that people click on the affiliate link. If you are using WordPress, then you will want to make sure that you have the Yoast plugin installed. This will tell you whether your article is SEO-ready or not. If you want the greatest amount of success, then we recommend that your posts are no shorter than 1,000-words. The more quality content you pack into a page, the easier your job will be when it comes to gaining traffic.

You can also read: 5 Niche Topics you should choose for successful affiliate marketing

Gaining traffic to your website

Once you have 5-10 articles up, you can start focusing on gaining traffic to your website. You have several different methods available to you here. We suggest that you try all of the methods. Some will gain you traffic quicker than others, which means that your first affiliate commission will roll in faster, but other methods are going to be a lot more sustainable.

We won’t go into depth on these methods, we just want to give you a bit of advice on the various traffic generation methods you have available to you.

Search Engine Optimization

At the heart of every successful affiliate marketing campaign will be search engine optimization (SEO). This is the process of allowing your website to be discovered through the search engines. It is SEO which will give you the most traffic, and it will be SEO which gives you that passive income. It is a slow process, though. It can take months for the first proper traffic to start flowing in. However, as long as you do your keyword research and produce quality content, you will end up ranking. At the same time, you will want to track down backlinks for your website (talk to other webmasters about guest posting). A lot of people will claim that SEO is difficult. It isn’t, it is just slow. Just bear in mind these two points and you should be fine:

• Quality content
• External links to that content

Social Media Marketing

We are talking about Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest here. If you are lucky, you could earn your first affiliate commission within a day like this. With social media marketing, you will be sharing links to your content. How you accomplish this will be dependent on the site you are on. For example; on Instagram, you may want to look for relevant hashtags and share posts with those tags. On Facebook, you may want to create your own group, or join a relevant group and post your link there.

Related content : 8 Tips to Step up your Social Media Game in 2019 and Beyond

Social media marketing can earn you commissions quickly, but it is something you will need to do virtually constantly if this is your only traffic generating method.

Quora

Our favorite method for earning money through affiliate marketing is Quora. You could, feasibly, earn money within minutes of posting a link to your site. Your goal with Quora is to go through the site and search for questions that are relevant to your niche. Answer these questions (answer well!) and give a link to your website. People will click on this link, and they may end up purchasing whatever you are promoting. For many people, posting on Quora is the way they earned their first commission.

Related: The Ultimate Guide to Successful Affiliate Marketing

Conclusion

Yes. There are faster methods for earning your first affiliate commission. However, we are not going to mention them here. Many of them can be quite costly, and a lot of them are not sustainable. Our goal with this post is to provide you with an ‘outline’ on not only making your first commission, but on making commissions for years and years to come. We hope the information was useful.