Affiliate marketing requires careful planning and execution to be successful. This How to Start Affiliate Marketing Guide will walk you through the essential steps you need to master before starting your affiliate marketing journey.
For much of our lives, we are guided by others who dictate our actions and schedules. Initially, our parents are our main supervisors. This responsibility then passes to our teachers, who not only shape our daily routines but also strive to influence our future paths.
One of the important advantages of being an affiliate marketer is the autonomy it provides. You have the freedom to design and execute your business plan according to your preferences. You can allocate your time efficiently to work toward your affiliate marketing goals, or you can waste it on unproductive activities, you get distracted by the next current trend, and convincing yourself that you’re working without making any real progress. The decision is completely yours. Your journey presents itself to you as a blank canvas, but you need guidance to undertake it effectively.
This freedom, however, comes with great responsibility: success depends solely on you. Every result depends on your efforts! Here, with our guide How to Start Affiliate Marketing you’ll learn how to set achievable goals for your business, evaluate your current skills, identify the skills you need to develop, and improve your approach – all critical steps before officially diving into the world of affiliate marketing.
Make the Right Decision about your Current Source of Income
What are your goals for your affiliate marketing business? Are you looking to supplement your current income or eventually use affiliate marketing to replace your current job? Either goal is possible; You just need to set your sights on your goal and then plan the steps you need to achieve it.
Affiliate Marketing as an Income Supplement
For most beginners, the best course of action is to use affiliate marketing to supplement your current income. It will take a lot of work and possibly a few months which as we have already mentioned, can extend to more than twelve before you start to see a good and constant income stream.
An advantage of this approach is that you will still keep your job and the means to support your life if you don’t put in the effort necessary to succeed or if affiliate marketing doesn’t meet your expectations. A disadvantage of this approach is that some new affiliate marketers do not take their new business seriously and therefore do not put in the time, attention and effort they need to be successful.
Replacing Your Income with Affiliate Marketing
If you’re considering affiliate marketing as a way to replace your current job, great! It is possible with hard work and months of perseverance. But you should wait to leave your current job until your affiliate income reaches a steady, reliable stream comparable to your current salary.
Some new affiliate marketers prefer to tightrope jump without a network. It works for a few, but not for many. Unless you have a lot of money saved before you take the leap, you’re setting yourself up for a path of anxiety, hard work, and possibly tight finances. When you jump into affiliate marketing without a network, you have to be successful. You do not have another option. That is both the advantage and disadvantage of this approach. You have to dedicate time, attention, study and effort to succeed. If your business is not working, you will have regressed in your finances and plans, and may need to pick yourself back up to where you were.
Affiliate Marketing as a Second Full Time Job
So the best option is not to leave your current job but to dedicate the time to Affiliate Marketing that you would dedicate to a second full-time job, because if you do not concentrate or focus on achieving success, affiliate marketing is far from replacing your main job will only become a poor extra income.
Essential Skills for Success in Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing requires a wide range of different skills. The exact set of skills you need varies depending on your particular method of promotion. However, you need a set of basic tools to become a successful affiliate marketer.
First, you need the ability to persevere and stay in the development of your career in affiliate marketing for a period of time that can range from three to twelve or more months, the period it takes to start generating income.
The second tool is writing ability and skill. You need to continually add content, whether it’s new posts and pages on your website, new posts on social media. You need some writing skills to help you craft your promotional emails and web pages. Writing copy that sells is one of the skills you need to create sales letters, posts, and emails.
The third pillar is some technical skill to be able to register a domain name, set up your website, etc. The technical skills you need are not as demanding as before. Nowadays there are many free and easy-to-use tools such as WordPress or website builders such as Wix, Weebly and Squarespace among others.
A Successful Affiliate Marketer doesn’t Sell, he Solves Problems
Even if you have already carefully read the previous two posts about Affiliate Marketing, you may not realize it, but you have already made a good start towards the success of your affiliate marketing. If you bring your own passions to your affiliate marketing business, put in the work, and follow your path, it will take you three, six, twelve, or more months to start seeing success.
Don’t you have passions? What about your interests? Do you have a topic you can write about for six or more months? What about the things you own and can write about? Do you have any skills or knowledge on a topic that can help others solve some problems they may be experiencing? Do you have any competencies you can share? Anything you’ve learned over time in your career?
Remember that the most successful affiliate marketers are not trying to sell to people, they are trying to help them solve their problems. If you have any life skills or experiences that you can use to help others solve the problems they also currently have, you have a great advantage in achieving success in affiliate marketing.
Turning Your Expertise Into Profitable Affiliate Marketing Opportunities
Excellent! You have some personal experience, knowledge, passions and interests that you want to share with others. You will be able to see how your knowledge can help others with their problems. But how can you turn your own knowledge into an affiliate marketing business?
You should find out if there are business affiliate opportunities to benefit from. You have to do some research to know if enough people are looking for the solution you propose. Are those people willing to pay for a product that solves their problem? Are there affiliate products you can promote effectively? Is the competition easy enough for you to rise through the ranks and benefit from your promotion?
Enhancing your Ability to Concentrate
It is important that you, as a new affiliate marketer, understand what focus is (and how lack of focus is a danger), what it means for your affiliate marketing business, and how to achieve it.
Mastering Time Management for Affiliate Marketing Success
We all live busy lives. Our 24-hour day is completely full: there are usually no empty spaces of time. This is because we constantly make decisions about what is important to us and what we choose to fill our lives with.
You must start making conscious decisions about what is and is not important in your life. What is and (isn’t) worth spending your money on?
If you’re not careful, all the things you need to do, like responding to your overflowing emails every day, will take up a lot of your time and won’t allow you to do the creative work you need to get your email marketing business off the ground. membership. When you spend your day reading and responding to emails or being sidetracked by constant calls for attention from notifications, rings, bings and bongs on your computer and smartphone, you are fulfilling other people’s priorities and not your own.
Start by making a list of what is important to achieve in your affiliate marketing business. Then make a list of the things that are not important in your life. Many of our decisions about how we live our lives are automatic. Make a list of things that do not add value to your life and that you want to eliminate. Just by making a list, you can become aware of what the time wasters are in your life. Keep a diary or calendar of how you spend your day. You will find it enlightening.
Setting your priorities
In the previous section, you divide tasks into two groups: things that are important and things that are not. But it still seems like you have a mountain of affiliate marketing tasks to complete, more than you can fit into a 24-hour day.
Now you have to prioritize those tasks, and the clearest and simplest way we have found to achieve this is the Time Quadrant system popularized by Steven Covey, a famous time management expert. Instead of printing out a to-do list and putting it on his computer, he prints out some blank time quadrant sheets, fills them out, and leaves them on his desk to use in the morning. A quick glance gives you a better idea of what to expect in your day than a list.
Steven Covey Quadrants:
Steven Covey divided the tasks into four quadrants:
1. Urgent and important: Examples of urgent tasks are fires or other emergencies; must be addressed immediately. By their nature, they can be difficult to schedule and predict, but they cannot be postponed.
2. Important but not urgent: From a planning standpoint, this is the most important quadrant because these things are important to the long-term success of affiliate marketing. Since they are not urgent, you can plan them. Examples of these types of tasks are setting up your email, writing content, and writing posts, tasks that will set you on the path to affiliate marketing success.
3. Urgent but unimportant: These items demand your attention but are not very important. Your task is to minimize or eliminate them. Examples of these are notifications, bings, bongs and boops from your computer or smartphone – distractions that try to steal your time. Eliminate or minimize them.
4. Neither urgent nor important: these are the total wastes of time. They add no value to your life and should be eliminated or minimized. Examples include mind-blowing television and listening to the latest celebrity gossip and YouTube videos.
At the end of your work day, refer to your quadrant chart and update it to reflect the next day’s tasks. Many tasks in quadrants 3 and 4 will remain the same. Most of the tasks in quadrant 1, by virtue of being urgent or emergency, will remain the same. So most of your updating will be done in quadrant 2. What are the tasks you need to move your business forward?
It’s helpful to write your quadrant chart on a dry erase white board and hang it in your office so you can look at it and update it at the end of the day.
Achieving Success Through Massive Action
Many people who seem to achieve the seemingly impossible talk about the magic of mass action. What does this mean? It means that you put in maximum effort in a short period of time. It means you put everything else aside and just focus on your goal. After that period of time, you will look back on what you have accomplished and be amazed.
We believe that the only way massive action works is if you have a limited time period and a strict deadline. We do not believe it is possible to commit to massive action over the next five years. But massive measures are possible over the next six months. If you would commit to massive action by doing niche and keyword analysis, creating your website, and building your email list, you will grow your business and be successful.
Balancing Massive Action with Creative Breaks
Spending time playing games sounds contradictory to the previous section where we described massive action, which requires almost continuous effort. One of the characteristics of a mass action campaign is that it is set for a short period and there is a strict deadline. Most of the time you work with your eyes fixed on the affiliate marketing tasks you need to complete to achieve your goals. But taking short breaks is equally important.
It is during these breaks that your creativity is unleashed and new ideas are developed. New affiliate marketing strategies emerge for you. The Internet is constantly changing and evolving. The creativity shown on the Internet always surprises us, inspires us and gives us new ideas.
These breaks should be short to prevent you from getting out of your rhythm and taking a long time to get back into the flow. We have known people who took a break and never returned to the massive action plan. Set aside half an hour to do or talk about something other than your affiliate marketing. Short naps (great energy rechargers), short periods of reading, exercise, and walks all work. You can also create your own power chargers. Just make sure they are short and get back to work; Don’t waste the rest of the day.
Identify and Eliminate Unconscious Time Wasters
Most of the things that you probably begin to identify as unimportant (as we recommended in an earlier section of this post) are the result of unconscious and automatic decisions that you are not even aware of. In the following sections, we shine the flashlight of awareness on these elements so you can work to eliminate them.
Silence All your Notifications and Alerts on your Devices
Today’s computers and smartphones are designed to unfocus and distract us with their endless notifications. In today’s always-on society, the fear of missing out keeps us in a perpetual state of mild anxiety. This low-grade stress robs you of your energy and the ability to focus it on what is truly important to you.
Silencing these notifications can help you maintain concentration, reduce stress, and improve your efficiency, particularly in your affiliate marketing efforts.
Mastering Email Management: Strategies to Reclaim Your Time
Reviewing and responding to emails can be time-consuming. It is essential to limit the time spent reviewing them as much as possible.
Set a certain time when you will check your emails. Also set a duration. Above all, the strict rule is that you will check your email only once a day.
If you were wasting your maximum creative time and energy reading emails, you will recognize the waste of your talent and move your reading to a less valuable time. The next thing you’ll realize is the amount of productive time you’ve freed up. Then you will feel the power to decide what is best for you. You will no longer feel the stress of all these “urgent” demands on your attention. Your email notifications, rings, and beeps will be elements that you determine when to address.
Notice what your personal energy patterns are. Schedule your most important tasks for times when you have the most energy and are most alert. Are you a morning person with maximum energy in the morning and starting to fade in the afternoon? Then, do all your most important affiliate marketing tasks during the morning peak. Don’t spend your peak period with emails. Save them for the end of the day when you start to fade. In this way, by eliminating distractions and increasing the degree of concentration, you will have achieved what is most important for your business.
You can’t have a good business unless you also take care of your body, and that means exercising. It is advisable to take short breaks for this, since this exercise counteracts some of the sedentary effects of working with the computer.