Let us go through the steps on how anyone can set up to do affiliate marketing.
Step 1: Sign up a few affiliate programs including Clickbank (for mostly digital products or software), Amazon Associates (for physical products), and more. In your affiliate program accounts, make sure to learn how to generate the affiliate links of your products you are going to promote.
Step 2: Make up your mind on a niche in which the products you are going to promote and sell. The best is to find your desired product in the affiliate programs that you have registered.
Step 3: Do the proper and necessary market research, and identify your target audience. You may have to use free tools such as Google Trends, SimilarWeb, etc.
Step 4: Register a domain name and purchase a basic web hosting space. These items are for your new website. You can sign up on one of the popular web hosting solutions including Godaddy, Siteground, Bluehost, Hostgator, etc.
Step 5: Install and set up WordPress as your website builder in your web hosting account. At this point you should have a very basic website without proper content. Other options of website builder may be Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, Shopify, Bigcommerce, and more.
Step 6: Design a logo. Alternatively, you may find a design to create the logo. A good looking logo would give your business some necessary credibility.
Step 7: If your choice is WordPress you may have to design a theme for your WordPress site. An alternate option is to get a frontend developer to create a new WordPress theme. A third option is to purchase an available WordPress theme from one of the theme design platforms.
Step 8: When using WordPress as your site, you will have to install a few plugins to enhance the functions of your site, such as Jetpack, etc. If you website is going to have multiple languages (e.g. English, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc), you will have to install a plugin to enable multi-language site.
Step 9: You need to have methods to bring people to your website. Get this list of free traffic sources. Always start with getting visitors to your site for free. If you happen to start with paid advertising, you will quickly run out of budget, and your affiliate marketing business won’t last for long.
Step 10: Make a plan to schedule and create a steady flow of content. The content to be created should be good enough for the target audience to consume. The format of the content is not limited in only text (i.e. blog articles, industry whitepaper, eBooks, press releases), it may also be videos, podcast audio files, images as in infographics, etc.
Step 11: Install Google Analytics to keep track of the site visitors. Setup webmaster tools of Google, Bing, and other necessary search engines.
Step 12: Review the sales reports and click reports (if any) in your affiliate program accounts to understand how your affiliate marketing performance or results.
