Universal

Affiliate Marketing Guide

Nikhil Ganotra

Universal Blogging Tips

Universal Affiliate Marketing Guide

Copyright © Universal Blogging Tips

About The Author

Hey, Sup?

I am Nikhil Ganotra. I am a passionate blogger and an affiliate

marketer from India who loves to read and write about Internet

marketing, blogging tips, SEO, and social media.

I have just completed Economic Honours from Delhi University and

pursuing CFA as well.

Besides my studies, I used to spend most of my time in blogging and I

never thought that blogging would become my profession.

Why should you ready my guide? I am

not making five figures

online!

Being blogging for 4 years, I have hustled to make a decent income

online by reading and implementing the strategies and even coming

out with new methods that are not shared on the web.

I started Universal Blogging Tips after 2 failed blogs and only this

blog appreciated my hard work.

Today, I make over $1000 monthly and cover my educational and

personal expenses from my blogging revenue.

There is no hard and fast rule that you should follow everyone to

become successful in blogging.

Most people quit because they are not passionate about the topic on

which they’re blogging about.

Some of my friends started blogs because they see me making money

online but they were NOT passionate about it. Then what’s the use of

doing it...?

If anyone is thinking about JUST money, then it’s better to work 9-5.

The rule is simple… DO SOMETHING THAT

MOTIVATES YOU TO DO MORE!

If I can make over $1000 working just few hours a week, then why can’t

you.

Choose the niche you love and see the sales flowing in! :)

Some of my affiliate earning screenshots.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is form of marketing in which you promote other

companies products and once someone buys from your link, you get

a commission.

But how would company know that you have referred a

customer?

It is through your tracking link or affiliate link.

When you join an affiliate program, you will be given a special link

with your tracking id at the end which would be used to track your

conversions.

For example here’s an affiliate link of MyThemeshop:

https://mythemeshop.com/?ref=nikhil869

?ref=nikhil869 is my username at the end which lets the

company track conversions made by me.

Let’s understand the Affiliate Marketing model in the most simple way

through the following flow chart.

Basic Affiliate Marketing

Terms

Now, before getting started with the main part of this guide, let’s get to

know about some basic Affiliate Marketing terms.

Though, I have shared it on my blog and even through emails but still

it’s necessary for those who are not familiar with them.

● EPC: Earning per click is calculated by taking your clicks divided

by commission earned.

It is a metric used to indicate the average earnings generated as a

result of your 100 clicks on your Affiliate links.

The formula for EPC is Affiliate Earnings/Number of clicks x 100.

This is really an important metric when you get started with

Clickbank. Below is a screenshot for a reference.

● Click-through rates: CTR defines your targeted audience.

It is calculated by using this formula : Number. of sales / Unique

Clicks x100.

● Affiliate marketplace: There are many marketplaces like

ShareASale, Peerfly, Commission Junction, JvZoo, ClickBank

that works as central database for affiliate programs in

different niche.

● Affiliate software: Software's used by companies to create an

affiliate program for their product. Ex: iDevAffiliate

● Affiliate link: Special tracking link offered by your affiliate

program to track the progress of your affiliate promotion.

.

● Affiliate ID: This is Similar to Affiliate link, but, in this case, many

affiliate programs offer a unique ID, which you can add to any

page of the product site with “XYZ” affiliate ID.

● Payment mode Offered: Different affiliate programs offer different

methods of payment. For ex: Cheque, Wire transfer, PayPal and

many more.

● Tier 2 affiliate marketing: This is a great way of making money

from an affiliate program.

In this type of marketing, you recommend others to join affiliate

programs, and you will get a commission out of it, when sub-affiliate

make sales.

This is one of the best ways to generate passive income.

Check out this post on my blog, which I have written to attract Affiliates

for MyThemeShop and it's generating passive income for me!

How to get started with

Affiliate Marketing?

Build a website, join affiliate programs, put a banner on your website and wait for sales flowing in. Simple, isn’t it? ...

NO!

It’s not that simple.

Affiliate Marketing is all about solving problems of your targeted

audience and if you fail in that, you fail in affiliate marketing.

People spend their hard earned money if they wish to have a solution

for their problems.

Why should they spend their hard-earned money on your product, even

if you guarantee a solution to their problems…?

It depends on how much they trust you! How much you will make

from Affiliate Marketing, depends on how you market that product.

Now, let’s compile the 3 mantras of

Affiliate Marketing

Success:

1. Learn about the problems of your

Targeted Audience

Suppose you targeted a niche market of frustrated corporates who want

to quit 9-5 lifestyle and want to make money blogging working at home.

Now, how will you get to know about the problems that they are facing?

Some are very common that you might

yourself know :

● Financial risk ● Fear of failure ● Takes time to learn and setup

But.. it would be better if you ask them yourself, right?... But how?

You don’t have their contact details yet…

Now, your first motive should be to capture their emails by giving

some strong reasons to hustle as a blogger than working 9-5.

Write an ebook or a small case study and give it out for free on your

website in exchange of their emails. Once they optin to your list, send

them an email and let them ask anything from you!

Here is the template that you can use :

Hey,

Nikhil from BloggingProfits.com ..

Just to let you can ask me anything by simply replying to/sending

an email.

Whether you are looking for an advise about how should you change

your lifestyle from an employee to be your own boss. I know it’s not

easy, it requires courage to quit your job and then start your own

business online. There’s a huge risk, but there is no such problem

that doesn’t have a solution in this world. Let’s have a chat. What

say?

I personally reply to each and every email and give the best advice

where I can.

I am not an expert in everything but I can try as I have also gone

through this phase of life. So, feel free to tell me about your

problems and we’ll discuss.

So, go on, hit the REPLY BUTTON and ask me now…

All the best … Nikhil Ganotra BloggingProfits.com

2. Build Trust And Credibility

RANK And BANK method will work much better if you have a good

reputation in your niche. People will love to buy from you if they know

you better.

Stuart Walker from Nichehacks.com has built a trust in his targeted

audience.

When he promotes any products, nobody thinks whether they should

buy or not... THEY JUST DO BUY!

Even I do...

This method works SUPER BEST if you really want to become

successful in Affiliate Marketing.

3. Product Promotion

Let’s say you’ve got a good product to promote which your audience will

love.

But... to make money from that product you’d need to follow some good

strategies.

Just putting up a banner or emailing them once, won’t work. I will cover

the exact steps in detail below. But for now… let’s go through the main

points.If you’re focusing on email marketing, then pinging them

once will not REALLY work.

Promote the product in the form of review, case studies, FAQ’s , show

them your results etc. with enticing subject lines. Create an urgency for

them to purchase your product.

DON’T PROMOTE JUNK. If you really promote crap, they might buy

from you once, but not again. Use the product and deliver an honest

review so that your audience trust you.

Getting Started With Affiliate

Networks And Programs

What is the difference b/w affiliate

networks and affiliate programs?

Affiliate Networks are the mediators between merchants and

affiliates. In an affiliate network, you can find thousands of merchants

and their schemes. For e.g. shareasale, clickback etc.

While an affiliate program is the just a simple program offered

directly by the merchant and there is no intermediary. For e.g.

Bluehost, Amazon affiliate programs etc.

BEWARE... A LOT OF AFFILIATE PROGRAMS ARE SCAM. BEFORE

JOINING THEM READ ABOUT THEIR HISTORY AND REVIEWS ON THE

WEB.

Affiliate Networks:

Before getting further ... here are the top affiliate networks that you

should know:

● Shareasale ● Clickbank ● Commission Junction ● Amazon ● Avangate ● Bluesnap ● Impact Radius

Benefits of joining affiliate networks is that you don’t need to worry

about the payments. It would be paid on time as it is now mediator’s

responsibility to pay you.

While if you are joining affiliate programs directly, make sure you read

reviews about them.

I don’t know your niche, so I can’t share the affiliate programs. But here

is search string that you can use to search affiliate programs in your

niche.

"KEYWORD" + "Affiliate program"

Let’s say, if you have a blog on blackheads, search

“Blackheads” + “Affiliate Program” and you’ll get to know about some of the best! :)

How to choose a right product

to promote?

Ah... One of the most important step in Affiliate Marketing.

Before choosing a product, learn more about your audience. As told

earlier, don’t start a blog on a very vast niche such as weight loss.

Weight loss for whom?...

Umm.. I don’t know..

Start a micro niche blog and be specific with it.

Weight loss for busy moms... This is

perfect.

Umm.. Still you can dig deeper

Weight loss for busy moms who work from

home

Now, you are specific about your audience. The next step is to

develop a buyer persona:

A buyer persona tells you what your consumers are thinking and

doing as they weigh their options to the problems that your company

resolves.

Here’s what all is included in the buyer’s

persona:

1. Day in their life

You have to spend a little time on research on how they spend their

day and what all information they search on the web.

2. Demographics

Get to know about their age, income, education and location of your

audience.

This will actually get to know about the actual worth of your customer.

This will tell whether you should go for paid ads or not rather than

moaning later that you wasted your money on Ads.

Promoting $1000 products to students doesn’t make any sense. Isn’t? ...

So, there is a need to create a buyer’s persona.

Buyers persona includes Objectives, Experiences, Goals etc. but

to get started with affiliate marketing, I won’t take it too technical.

Just focus on the two and it will look like as follows :

I am … Pianist

Age: 25-55 Income: $250K Education: Bachelor of music, PU Location: United States Challenges: Turning the pages while practicing, playing with cold

hands, small fingers.

Now, you know how to learn about the problems of your audience. You

know how to create a buyer persona.

This makes it a lot of easier for you to find a suitable product to promote.

Let’s suppose you started a blog on weight loss and promoted a weight

loss product. Your conversion rates would be SUPER DUPER LOW.

As then you won’t be able to create a perfect buyer persona and it

would be completely messed up.

But... now if you started a blog on Weight Loss For Busy Moms Who Like

To Work From Home… From this you can create a perfect buyer

persona.

How to learn about the challenges that your

audience is facing?

One of the best way is that I shared above with the template.

But if you are REALLY Lazy about not going with emails right now, just

head over to forums and question answer websites and believe me, it

is one of the best ways to choose the topics and learn about the

problems that your targeted audience is facing.

I use Quora. It is the best. Besides that you can also go with the following

:

● Yahoo Answers ● Blurt It ● Anybody Out There ● Wiki Answers ● Fun Advice ● Ask Me Help Desk ● Answer Bank

How To Sell Your Affiliate

Products - How To Make A

Strong Pitch?

Now, you are ready to sell... And I know … YOU CAN SELL!

Here I am going to mention some strategies to make

a strong pitch.

Focus On Capturing Emails And Building High Converting Funnels

Imagine you as a visitor on a website which is directly redirected to a

sales page from social media or any paid ads and convinced to make

a purchase. Will you buy?... Think...

You will be reluctant to make a purchase until you know who is

selling it. Isn’t it?

Now, imagine you as a visitor redirected to any informative content

which you were looking since a long time to solve your problem in

anyway.

The CONTENT WAS AMAZING. Now, the page flaunts an optin giving

you a free checklist or any case study, won’t you subscribe? …

You’ll...

Even I do every time.

Now, at this moment you have found a great blogger to follow. Once you

successfully optin it redirects to the product that solves your problem.

Now, you are most likely to make a purchase… Am I right? ….

Let me give you an example:

Recently, I was looking for some profitable niches to start affiliate

marketing and I landed to this informational piece of content.

The above piece of content is really informative. The boxes that you

see in the content redirects the visitors to the optin pages like shown

below and once the user optins, it redirects them to the sales pages.

Once you successfully optin, it would redirect you to the sales page.

This is how to create a sales funnel.. Now, the next step is how to MAKE

THE MOST OUT OF YOUR SALES FUNNEL…

Want to make more money selling

products?

Before starting a blog, keep your end goal in mind. Suppose your

end goal is to sell a product worth $997. Now, if you directly

convince your visitors to buy such an expensive product, they are

most likely NOT to buy… Right?

But now if you create a proper funnel like the following, they would be

willing to buy your product if you REALLY deliver them value through

this product.

Blog / Website / Opt in Page >> $7 front end

product/ebook >> $19.99 upsell product >> $49

upsell product >> $997 product.

Now, let’s assume they didn’t bought the product that you

recommended them in the sales funnel. Still you have their emails,

right?

Give them value through emails and pitch them the product over

and again. I will cover some email marketing methods below that I

learned.

How To Get Started With

Email Marketing

1. Welcome them to your tribe with a

welcome email

Once the user opts in, make sure you welcome them with a welcome

email. In your welcome email, make sure you mention what are you

going to send them and what would be the frequency and fix to it.

They are new to your tribe. Tell them what to do next..

Let them know what emails are you going to send them in the coming

days...Make your welcome enticing to get it opened.

In your welcome email, mention that you never promote junk and

stick to it, otherwise you will lose their trust.

2. Do List Segmentation

List segmentation is very much important to increase conversions.

Imagine you have a SINGLE list of Affiliate Marketers which consists of

all the affiliates of amazon, clickbank or CPA marketers.

And now... You want to promote an Amazon Training Course as an

affiliate.

What will be the use of Amazon Affiliate Training Course to

Clickbank or CPA marketers?... They will either unsubscribe or there

would be very low segmentations.

Now, here are the steps you need to follow to get started with list

segmentation:

Step 1. Shoot out an Ask Me Anything email to your list.

Through this you will come to know about their problems and you will

be able to segment your list without any hassle.

Step 2. Keep testing

Shoot out some mails sending free stuff which is not found anywhere on

the web. If they open your email or clicked on the links, which means

they are interested in that and if they didn’t means they aren't

interested.

Send out different stuff every time and you will easily get to know

about their interests.

Once you make a different lists of affiliate marketers, it’s time to

enjoy higher conversions for lifetime! :D

3. Build a brand before starting with email

marketing

Even if you are starting a micro-niche site, DON’T JUST RELY ON SEO.

Building a strong brand is really very essential.

And how to build a brand?

Just keep it simple. Deliver value through your content and just be

HONEST.

That’s it.

Give them a lot of valuable stuff for FREE and they won’t be reluctant to

be a part of your tribe. They’ll just optin.

Believe me, it works like a charm.

Once you build a brand name, you don’t need to worry about your

ranks. If your readers love your content, Google will automatically

reward you with higher rankings.

Once they optin, don’t just spam their emails with promotional stuff.

Do email marketing the right way!

Before pitching them, engage with them and build strong relationships.

First of all you need to focus on boosting your Click-through rates

by using enticing subject lines.

E.g. “15 Ultimate Ways To Improve Your Keyword Ranks” is much

better that “improve keyword ranks”.

Or...If you’re promoting a limited time offer then use “Uh..oh, you’re

going to miss it” or “Did you see this?” instead of “Last day to grab

the deal”.

4. Write a long email for promoting an

affiliate product

Long emails work far better than short emails just forcing them to

make a purchase.

Show them the results/revenue screenshots, if any that you got using

that product. Or any case study of the person who has got good results

from that product or FAQ’s which answers the common questions that

occur in the buyer's mind before making any purchase.

How To Write A Perfect

Review Post

I have a friend who has many review posts but doesn’t make a penny

from them.

Why?

Because the review posts are not able to convince readers to buy that

product.

Before writing a review post, know about the objective of writing it.

The ultimate goal is to convince the readers to take an action or make a

purchase, right?

Now, the next step is to keep yourself as a targeted consumer or

according to the buyer persona that you created above and now

think, can this product REALLY solve your problem?

Is this product worth the money?

Once, you get to know about it and chosen a product which solves

your targeted customers problem, then you are ready to go!

When I generally write product reviews, I follow the AIDA principle of

marketing.

Writing reviews like a bot gives rise to hit and trial method. I am a

human being, so why should I behave like a bot?

Now, let’s see how I use AIDA model to write product review.

A ---)) Attention I ----)) Interest D ---)) Desire A ---)) Action

AIDA principle helps in boosting your

conversions by creating a funnel which

REALLY CONVERTS.

26

There is no such review post on my blog, which I haven’t made money

with!

A = ATTENTION

Your first motive is to grab their attention by sharing the great intro of

the product and making them exciting about how they could use the

particular product in their businesses.

To grab their attention, you should clearly know whom are you

targeting. This information you will get from the buyer persona that

you created above.

Secondly, you need to know about their problems which can get by

shooting them an email or checking out the forums.

Now, suppose you are promoting Washing Machines, check out the

forums and question answer websites for the exact ‘Keywords they

are searching for and including those keywords in your title tags will

grab your visitors eyeballs and boost your Click-throughs too.

I = INTEREST

Now, it’s time to dig deeper with the problems. You have grabbed

their attention through an enticing headline and super good intro.

Now, you need to go in depth with their problems and tell how the

product you are promoting will solve it very well. In this case, you need

to deliver them a really informative piece of content that they don’t find

anywhere else.

D = DESIRE

Okay, now they get to know about how the product can help them but

do you think, if you were in the place of the consumers, have you

bought the product at this stage?...

Ummm... I doubt...

You might be reluctant to make a purchase at this stage, so they are!

Do you know what?... PEOPLE NEED RESULTS!

Show them how using that product made you $$$$$ or how it has

helped you in any other way or give them a brief case study how

others have got results using that product.

If you have screenshots, show them.

This will create a desire in them to make a purchase otherwise why

would they spend their hard earned money?...

A = ACTION

Now, most of the hard-work is done but still there is a most important

thing to be done which to make the user sign up/make a purchase or

take any other action.

This is done by delivering a short and strong Call to action. Like

flaunting a big button which allows them to take action.

That’s how AIDA principle works.

How To Do Promotion?

How To Promote Your Affiliate Posts:

1. Question and answer websites

I look for people on the question answer websites such as Quora and

Yahoo Answers matching the buyer’s persona and have a look at the

problems they are facing.

Then, I leave a quite interesting answer to their problem mentioning

my post link at the end.

This has two benefits:

1. My answer doesn’t looks like a spam. 2. It makes people click on the link

2. Share On Communities

Communities are great source of traffic for my blogs and it can be for

you too.

To make the best out of the following communities that I am going to

share below, make sure you just don’t spam them or get ready for get

banned.

Start by sharing some useful stuff, make people realize that you’re a

human.

After sharing some informative tutorials and guides or just helping few

people, promote your post.

Here are some communities that act as a good source of traffic for

my blogs:

● Bizsugar ● Klinkk ● DoSplash ● Growthhackers ● Inbound

● Reddit ● BlogEngage ● Scoop.it ● Triberr ● Google + Communities ● Pinterest ● LinkedIn ● Visual.ly ● Slideshare

3. Make personal recommendations

Give out a free service and ask them to make a purchase from your

affiliate links.

Suppose, you are a bluehost affiliate.

Ask your readers to make a purchase from Bluehost from your link

and you will setup a blog for them for free and I hope its commission

would easily cover your cost.

Some Tools That I Personally Use In My

Affiliate Marketing

Business

I am not forcing you to buy these products. If you can afford, it will be

great and will DEFINITELY help your business.

Otherwise, don’t put a financial burden on yourself at this stage.

Once, you start earning, focus on savings and investment rather than

spending on useless things.

The below mentioned tools are REALLY some great investments to be

made and they had helped in boosting my revenue in my Affiliate

Marketing business.

1. SEMrush

SEMrush is tool which is used for competition analysis.

Analyzing competition is one of the most important tasks need to be

done in this business.

SEMrush flaunts all the keywords that my competitor is ranking for and

their difficulty levels. It also flaunts the keywords which are being

targeted for paid traffic.

Besides that, it is great tool for Adsense users too. It helps in finding

high CPC keywords which can generate a good revenue from

Adsense as well as Affiliate Marketing.

2. Long Tail Pro

Aha… One of my favourite tool that I use daily.

Do you know my strategy of ranking short tail keywords?

I target LONG TAIL KEYWORDS to rank short tail keywords.

I discovered this technique a year ago and till now, it works like a

charm.

It helps in the fetching the long tail versions of the short tail keyword

with their search volume and other metrics.

Themes That I Recommend :

1. Thrive Themes 2. MyThemeshop 3. Themeisle

FAQ’s

1. What skills are required to start an

affiliate marketing business?

There are no such skills required indeed!

What you need to be just honest and have a good knowledge about the

product that you’re promoting.

Besides that you need to have some marketing skills which will help you

in building a brand and promoting your products more effectively.

The above mentioned basic techniques will help you in getting started

with affiliate marketing and once you get familiar with them, you will

develop your own skills and new methods that nobody is using.

Believe me, it’s true!

2. Which Affiliate Program Is The Best To

Start With?

Don’t think of the commissions. Think of the niche you’re passionate

about.

Once you get that niche, start working on it following the techniques

mentioned above and the money would start flowing in hopefully.

3.Is Affiliate Marketing A Safe Career To

Build?

I think, it’s not!

It’s NOT, unless you don’t have a brand name. If you have a built up a

brand name and built a good list, then you need not worry!

If you are only relying on SEO in affiliate marketing, then you might

face trouble in future! :)

ASK ME ANYTHING

Do you know?

I AM REALLY EAGER TO HELP YOU OUT WITH ANY TYPE OF

QUERY!

So, just feel free to ask.

Here are my contact details:

Email : nikhil@universalbloggingtips.com

WhatsApp : +91-8826866726

Connect With Me:

Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/nikhil.ganotra

Google Plus : https://plus.google.com/+nikhilganotra/

Twitter : https://twitter.com/unibloggingtips

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