There are many ways to be successful as an affiliate, but this article lays out the process that we have found to be the most reliable and sustainable while still being very inexpensive. Many affiliates try to skip steps 2 & 3 and go straight from picking a product to immediately promoting it. This makes it really difficult to succeed, and doesn’t set up your business for success, so make sure to implement the steps in the order they’re listed here.

By reading this article, watching the videos, spending plenty of time working on each step, and taking consistent action every day, you have a much higher chance of being successful as a GetValue affiliate.

The following subjects are covered in this article:

Step 1: Choose Your Niche

Step 2: Build Your Platform

Step 3: Grow Your Audience

Step 4: Promote Products

Next Steps

Step 1: Choose Your Niche

The more you focus your efforts on understanding one area, the better you will understand the needs of the customers in that area.

In this video, we share strategies and tips for picking a niche for your new affiliate business. Be sure to spend plenty of time on this step! Don’t rush it when getting started.

Step 2: Build Your Platform

Building a platform gives you a means of communicating with potential customers.

In this video, we walk you through the process of developing and building your platform, which will be the basis for growing your audience and promoting products to them.

Resources

You can buy your own web hosting and web design from a number of different providers.

We typically do not recommend using free web hosting solutions, because you don’t technically own your website and can potentially lose what you’ve built at any time. It is worth investing a relatively small amount of money to use a paid web hosting service.

Step 3: Grow Your Audience

Attracting a larger audience means a larger pool of potential customers.

In this video, we’ll share the steps you can take to start growing your audience and getting traffic to your platform. If you’re not sure how to get visitors to your site, this is the video for you! Just make sure you’ve watched Steps 1 and 2 first.

Step 4: Promote Products

Once you’ve created a platform and an audience, you can begin to promote products.

In this video, we’ll talk about how you can promote products to your audience in a way that will get you the most sales and make your audience love you at the same time! There are lots of great strategies and tactics in this video, but your success hinges on having done the previous steps properly, so don’t jump straight into promoting products before spending time on the earlier steps.

Traffic Sources

There are many different ways to get traffic, both free and paid. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Paid

Paid traffic, such as PPC or banner advertising, is usually more controllable and scalable. If what you’re doing is working, you can spend more to grow your traffic. It also has the advantage of being able to start very quickly, if not immediately. The main disadvantage of paid traffic is that it can be quite expensive and requires a lot of supervision to avoid losing money. Paid advertising platforms such as Google AdWords can also have strict requirements regarding advertisers and ads, so be sure to pay close attention to all rules and warnings.

Free

Free traffic, such as organic search engine visitors, video marketing, or social media/forum traffic, can be a great way to get highly relevant visitors to your website without paying for each visitor. Building a platform that delivers free traffic can be a great long-term affiliate marketing strategy. However, the downsides of free traffic are that it can take a lot of time and effort before you start seeing results, and can be unreliable.

Conversion Rates

Your conversion rate is the percentage of order form visits that become purchases. It depends on many different factors:

Where is your traffic coming from? (Free vs paid, warm vs cold) How well does your audience know, like, and trust you? This can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. Conversion rates can vary widely, even among products in the same niche. Things like sales copy, pricing, page layout, and vendor reputation can have a big impact on how many Hops it takes to convert a sale. Because there are so many different factors that can affect conversion, there is no way to tell how many referral it takes to lead to a sale. For some affiliates it may only take a few referral, whereas others may take hundreds or more.