It is hard to make money when you are a student. There’s a lot on your plate and that student debt that keeps piling up certainly doesn’t help. However, technology has given students many great chances to make some money with minimal investment and a lot of flexibility. Those who don’t have the time to take a full-time job while juggling their studies often turn to freelancing, online gigs, and of course, the highly popular one – affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an amazing field to work in if you’re just starting to make money. Your job in the field entails working up different strategies that will attract the target audience and convincing that audience to purchase from retailers. You don’t have to create a product or sell anything, which is an excellent way to make some money with minimal risk or investment.
In other words, affiliate marketing means having your own site or blog and redirecting the traffic to other people’s websites with the goal of helping them make sales. For every link from your site, you will earn an affiliate sales commission.
For a student on a limited budget, pursuing a career in affiliate marketing is one of the smartest choices. It requires an extremely low investment compared to other startups. If you choose to do this through a website, which is the most popular method, you’ll need to spend around $10 per month for hosting and domain. Or, you can go 100% free by using social media such as Facebook or Twitter, or platforms like YouTube.
To be more, affiliate marketing can result in fast income. If you’re good at it and find a popular niche, you can earn a fortune for every customer that you convince to buy from a retailer.
Tips for Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
Now, the competition may be big but, if you know what to do, this can soon become your source of regular income that will help you pay off all those student debts. Below you’ll find five tips that will help you achieve precisely that.
1. Choose an affiliate niche
Choosing an affiliate niche is similar to choosing a topic for your research papers. It requires some research and should take up quite some time. This is what all your future strategies and steps will be based on, so you better choose wisely. If you don’t know how to approach it, AssignmentHelp has created an excellent guide where you can learn how to write an assignment for school. Their tips apply to writing academic papers, but can be an excellent guide for any type of research.
What you’ll learn from their guide is that you need to choose a niche that interests you. This should keep you motivated until the point when you actually start earning money. What is more, your choice of niche requires a certain expertise on your behalf, so make sure to favor in your skills and knowledge. Finally, the most important thing is to pick a niche that people like, a popular niche that’s easier to promote.
2. Build a social media community / blog
Most highly effective affiliate businesses are built with the help of websites and blogs. There’s quite a lot of importance that lies in websites but, if you don’t have the funds for this at the moment, you can always start with a social media community. Create social media accounts and start gathering followers.
Once your efforts start paying off, you should definitely create a website or a blog.
3. Find affiliate products
You can’t really pursue affiliate marketing without products and brands to promote. Sign up on some of the popular affiliate networks such as Amazon Associates or Clickbank. Once you register for an affiliate program, you’ll be given a unique link for a product from the affiliate networks. Use this link on your blog or website, social media posts, as well as the emails you send to your followers and prompt them to make a purchase. Whenever someone uses your link, you’ll earn your commission.
4. Build traffic for your website or social media
There’s no such thing as too many followers and customers. You have simple goals in affiliate marketing – attract more people to like and share your pages or social media posts, and make those people move onto retailers’ websites to make a purchase. The more visitors and followers you have, the better are your chances of increasing the affiliate sales.
5. Promote the affiliate products
This is by far, the most important and hardest part of affiliate marketing. When you’ve created your online presence and attracted followers to your pages, it is time to promote the affiliate products. This is how you’ll actually make money from your efforts.
There are many strategies that can make this happen for you including:
- Product reviews that build trust with your audience
- Free tutorials and e-books that demonstrate the quality of the products and how your audience needs them
- Comparison posts that compare two similar products and convince people to buy one instead of the other
- Series of emails that you send to your followers to promote a product
- Interesting videos that promote the products and include a link to the affiliate website
Final Thoughts
In this field, there’s one thing that you will certainly enjoy – the flexibility. The market is highly competitive which is why creativity and originality are highly praised and accepted by the audience. This means that you aren’t asked to follow strict guidelines and rules to make people buy from the retailers. You have the full liberty to use your creativity and marketing skills to achieve this, so don’t be afraid to experiment and be unique!
Author’s Bio
Emma Rundle is a digital marketer. She works alongside small businesses and startups that aim to build their company and make it successful. Rundle is also a blogger and a proud owner of several affiliate program websites that make her quite the hefty regular income.
