The second step of starting in affiliate marketing is determining how much time you will devote to it each day or week and what kind of work you want to do.
The first step is fairly straightforward: How much time each day or week do you have or want to work on affiliate marketing? I recommend at least 1-2 hours a day and at least 5-6 hours a week. If you spend less time, the results will come so slowly that you might give up at some point.
I work 1-3 hours a day, mostly Monday through Friday and some weekends. Typically, most of my affiliate marketing work is done early in the morning, between 6-8 a.m. Some days, I’ll spend an extra 1-2 hours during the day or after I am done running another business I have as my ‘day job’.
The second step is part of a bigger question everyone trying to make money online is seeking answers to. What kind of work do you want to do? With affiliate marketing, the main task is to promote products and services via your affiliate links. How do you do this?
There are many methods to choose from. The hard part is that you do not know what results you can achieve with any given method, and so, from my experience, I would recommend picking one that resonates with you. Whichever method feels right to you, makes the most sense, and helps you envision the outcome is a good place to start.
Here are some standard methods:
- Maintaining a blog. I would recommend this for all affiliates because it is your ‘home’ where you can make blog posts with educational information about the topics and products for which you are an affiliate. It is a huge asset because you can leverage the information in your blog posts elsewhere and have a ‘store’ page with all the products you offer for people to check out. Having your own website and blog makes you look like a legitimate business, a legitimate affiliate who is serious about what you are doing. People can look and see that you are posting exciting and educational information that can help them decide and purchase a product.
- Socia media apps. People hang out on social media nowadays. Some social media apps are mainly written content, while others are visual (videos) or audio (podcasts). As an affiliate, you can get traffic by hanging out on social media, i.e. making posts on an app. What kind of content are you good at- written, visual, or audio? Are you good at writing? Or do you prefer making short 15-45-second videos? Not sure? Try both and see which one comes more naturally to you. Then, pick one social media platform and post content consistently- daily if possible. This can be a primary driver of traffic to your affiliate links and website/blog. I recognize there are many nuisances to this, but the purpose here is to give you the idea to get started.
- Online advertising. There are tons of paid advertising methods you can pursue. It costs money to run ads, so this is an option if you have some money you are willing to lose initially because most ads, in my experience, do not do well upfront. It takes time to try different headlines and descriptions to find something that seems to work. But there are many paid ad options- FaceBook lead ads, Google Adwords ads, YouTube, even websites like MSN.com, Microsoft Bing, and all sorts of other media companies have advertisement opportunities.
- SEO. I’m not an expert on SEO, but there are affiliate marketers who maintain a website and seek to be at the top of Google searches for specific topics related to the products they promote.
These are four good options to choose from. My experience has been that you want to pick two that makes the most sense to you, something that feels right. Then, stick with it until you start to see results. Traffic and people are everywhere, so there is no real bad choice. The difficulty is in getting started and producing content consistently so you begin getting attention and traffic. Spend the time you have in creating content for your blog, social media, or advertisement, learn as you go along, and things get easier.