Let’s cover some basics here. What do you need to get started with affiliate marketing?
1) First and foremost, a tracking software. This is most crucial if you pay for traffic. This is not your normal link tracking, but one that is specific for affiliate marketing. You can track traffic and conversion with it, and later analyze best performing metrics.
Example, you can start to see when people are buying, what device they are using, where they are from, what keywords are converting, which banner ads contributed to the sale, and many, many more. And based on that, you can further optimize your campaign. You can also do split tests among ads, landing pages, offers and see which performs best. What I use currently is Bemob.com. It is awesome.
2) A way to build and host landing pages. Depending on what you use, sometimes landing page builders come with hosting options. And you want your site to be ultra fast for best user experience. Some build their landing pages with WordPress and optimize for speed. Some convert the WordPress site into a static site and host on Amazon S3 or Google Firebase. Some use tools like ClickFunnels.com which hosts your site all together.
There are many types of landing pages that you build for affiliate marketing. But the main idea is to help preframe your traffic into the state of mind of needing or buying your recommended product or solution. And landing page can be an article page, or blog post page, a survey, an optin form. ClickFunnels does help a lot in creating many of those types of landing pages.
3) A way to generate traffic. Depending on the type of affiliate marketer you are, you generate traffic in different ways. Generally to see results quickly, you pay for traffic and optimize it so that your affiliate commission is more than your traffic costs (plus other expenses). Hence the need for a tracking software. I have used Google Ads (used to be Adword), Microsoft Ads (used to be Bing Ads) and Propeller Ads (for push and native ad traffic).
An affiliate marketer that focuses on SEO will need a different set of tools. He or she would probably be into inbound link outreach software tools, ranking position monitoring, domain and website analysis tools and more.
An affiliate marketer who is into info-marketing and personal branding would probably create his or her product first and find other affiliates to promote his product. So he would need an affiliate platform to manage the affiliates or probably go with ClickBank or HasOffer, etc.
4) VPN software. A VPN software will be able to mask your IP address with a different one in a different location. So to the web servers you are browsing you can appear like a visitor from Sweden even if you are from Japan.
This is useful when you run an ad campaign targeting only Sweden and you want to see if you ad is actually running. Or maybe you want to check out the landing page for an offer that only allows Swedish. Sometimes you want to see competing ads that appears in specific countries.
I use Ivacy right now. It is available for just $40/year and has over 1000 servers in 100+ locations. And you can use it concurrently with up to five devices. I think that is good enough for me.
5) Email marketing software. This depends on the type of affiliate you are. If you are really hard-on with the media buying type and you don’t want to get into email marketing, you don’t have to. But email marketing can really be a great tool to engage, preframe and connect with your prospects and convert more sales.
An email marketing software would allow you to build a page that asks for name and email address, have visitors fill it up, and then the software will automatically sends out your pre-written emails at certain time schedule that you have set. A simple example, you can create a free 7-day email course on how to grow orchids. It can all be automated with an email marketing software. And that is just one feature. There is a ton more.
For email marketing, I use GetResponse. It is really easy to get started with, backed with a great, solid company with great customer support.
6) Lastly, you need an offer to promote. Common networks and platforms are ClickBank, MaxBounty, CJ.com, LinkShare, ShareASale and many others.
There you have it… Now let’s go make some money.
