Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is often associated with this idea of creating a passive income. It's the common theme surrounding affiliate marketing and it creates an illusion that it can entirely become passive.

What many people fail to recognize is the amount of work that is required in order to one call yourself an affiliate marketer and second how to get your affiliate marketing business up to the point to which some components of it's functionality actually do become passive.

I'll be honest with you, there is no such thing as 100% passive income, unless you're a trust fund baby.

So let's demystify some common things you will hear about affiliate marketing. I know everyone has their own unique selling point to it, but let's take a stroll down a street most people don't go down when it comes to affiliate marketing.

THE WORK BEHIND AFFILIATE MARKETING

In order to truly gain an appreciation for affiliate marketing and all of it's components its a good to educate yourself on all the terminology behind this field of modern marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Glossary

In the realm of affiliate marketing it's your job and goal to provide people with valuable information that will help them make better purchasing decisions, that's it.

If someone values your opinion, depending on the mode of communication you chose, they will purchase that product or service through you (aka your affiliate link).

That is essentially the basic premise behind affiliate marketing, but it's difficult to get to the point in which people are making purchasing decisions based on your recommendations. This requires you to know the right type of blog you should start in order to attract the right kind of traffic.

This is the component that is so difficult to figure out and once you do, you can get it to the point where most of the functionality behind it runs passively, but you will need to make sure you have people that are coming back to you for your opinion time and time again. This requires you to continue building an audience and building valuable information that can increase the authority of your website.

This requires you to have an understanding of how to get organic search traffic to your website. Organic search traffic is the holy grail of creating a passive affiliate marketing business. But it takes serious time and effort.

ORGANIC TRAFFIC

In order to get organic traffic to your website or personal blog, you have to create content that is highly valuable to readers and gives them an answer to a problem that they are looking to solve. The content has to be very high quality and very relevant to what they are searching for.

The first step to having your content found on through organic search is creating a valid sitemap.xml file for your website. It's extremely important to have on on your website because it will alert Google and other search engines alike about pages that currently exist on your website. Once search engines know those pages, they can start the process of deciding how to rank you.

But don't stop there, you need to be creating content that will consistently help your audience solve their problems. This consistency will help you create trust with your audience.

Once you have some trust established, you can have automated systems in place to pitch them products or services. No one wants to be pitched products directly when they visit a website, unless it's Amazon or Ebay. People are going to those sites to shop because there is authority and trust established. With some websites, people need to take the time to trust first and then make a purchasing decision.

So if you want to become a great affiliate marketer, you first need to create amazing and engaging content. Second you need to work on retaining your audience and establishing trust with them. Once they trust you and feel like you are an authority for the subject, they you can gently pitch them your products or services. This is the essential process of become an affiliate marketer and starting the "passive income" journey.