Did you know that you can build a blog and earn money every month from it? Yes, it is possible, and that too from right here in Kenya, in the comfort of your home. Through the blog, you earn passive income as an Affiliate marketer. If you play your cards right, that income may turn into a full-time living.

The first time I heard about Affiliate marketing was in 2015. I thought it was something complex and tedious. But after taking time to study it, I launched my first website in 2016. It was a simple website with around 15 pages, that was already earning me $300 every month within the first six months. From there I was hooked.

That is why in this post I want to share with you how you can earn money through affiliate marketing and SEO. I’ll take you through how you can become an affiliate marketer and SEO expert while getting paid for it. For some of you, affiliate marketing and SEO may sound like a foreign term. For others, you may not have a clear understanding of what the two entail or how they work. Not to worry. Before I explain to you how to make money from it, let me first walk you through what I mean by Affiliate marketing and SEO.

What is Affiliate Marketing and SEO and how do they work?

Starting with Affiliate marketing, it involves starting a blog on something you are passionate about. The differing bit is that, you promote products by adding links to them in your content. So, if someone buys the product through the link you’ve provided you get to earn a commission. Simple right?

A great example is a site like this called Yardthyme.com. In one post by Yard Thyme, the owner reviews the best lawn mowers for small yards. Within the content, each of the products reviewed has an Amazon link attached to it. If you were to click on any of the links and buy the product, then Yard Thyme earns the standard 3% commission Amazon pays based on the price of the product bought.

How does Amazon know who to pay? Normally, the links to the products have special tracking IDs that allow affiliate programs such as Amazon Associate, identify which affiliate marketer sold the product. That’s simply how you make money from Affiliate marketing.

So, how do you get traffic to such a blog?

The traffic source we are going to use is free organic traffic from Google. That means when someone, for example, searches on Google for “best laptop for students”, we want to be on Google Page one for that search term, that way we can get free traffic and earn commissions by referring sales once they read the article we have written and click on the links to make a purchase. To rank one Google’s first page for specific terms, that’s where SEO comes into play.

SEO

Now when it comes to SEO, this stands for Search Engine Optimization in full. This involves optimizing a website’s or blogs to increase the quality and quantity of its organic traffic from the search engine’s results. Imagine you own a website where you sell Jackets online, you’ll want your website to rank among the top sites on Google page one when people search for “Buy Jacket in Kenya “, so that you get more traffic and sales. There are different techniques you can apply to ensure that your website appears in the first page of the search results. That is what we mean by SEO.

Point-to-note: Before we go on, I cannot emphasize enough that Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Most gurus online will feed you with the illusion that venturing into this field is easy and you don’t need any special skills to get started. Or that you’ll make a lot of money overnight, but as you will see later on in this article, this is not the case. You do not need to be an expert nor have a large social media following. You do, however, need to learn certain skills before venturing into affiliate marketing to be able to be successful. Keeping this in mind let us proceed.

Why is affiliate marketing important – why should you try it?

Affiliate marketing is a great and lucrative business model for generating passive income. There are very many reasons for you to venture into the field. The most common reasons include the fact that:

• Earning a passive income online. With an affiliate marketer, you’ll require little to no effort to earn and maintain your income. But, keep in mind, that you will first have to invest some time and effort at the beginning to be able to get to that point by publishing articles to your blog.
• Freedom of choosing your work location. Since affiliate marketing is mostly conducted online, you can do it from anywhere. That means you no longer have to worry about being stuck in an office for long hours or the commute to and from work.
• Financial freedom. Through affiliate marketing, if you get some sense of control over how you earn. Like I said if you play your cards right you may not even need a 9-5 job.
• A huge payout from the affiliate market by selling your blog or site. Once your website starts bringing in good money, you can sell it for up to 35 times its monthly earnings. You can use the money to invest in anything even building a new website and growing it.

How can you get started as an affiliate marketer – what are the steps you can follow?

Now that you understand what affiliate marketing is, how it works and why you should consider it, you must be wondering how can you get started. I’m going to give you a summary of steps you can follow to ensure that you start on the right foot.

Step 1: Look for a niche that is profitable and interesting to you

A niche is a specified sub-group of a larger market that focuses on a particular interest. So, a niche site is a website that serves as a hub focusing on information on that niche. For example, you could have a niche site on beauty, sports, cars, gardening, photography, the list is endless. To find a profitable site, look at platforms like YouTube and Google trends, what type of content is most people consuming. You could also look at eCommerce sites like Amazon to figure out the type of products most people are interested in.

Step 2: Start developing your content and conducting keyword research

If you plan on being successful as an affiliate marketer then having quality content is important. Once you’ve figured out your preferred niche, start developing content around it. Conduct keyword research to know what consumers are looking for and so you can come up with relevant topics that will bring traffic to your site.

Step 3: Build and brand your website

The website is the most important thing in affiliate marketing. You don’t, however, need anything complicated or fancy. A simple user-friendly WordPress site should suffice.

Step 4: Get Traffic to your website

The kind of traffic you should be focusing on is organic traffic. That is traffic generated when people find your site after searching for a particular keyword on a search engine. This is where SEO comes in handy. For example, if your run a niche site on Mental Health, then you want people to find your site when they search for keywords like ‘signs you’re an empath’ or ‘symptoms of depression’.

Step 5: Apply for affiliate programs and start monetizing your site

Once you’ve started getting traffic to your site, it’s now the right time to monetize it by applying for an affiliate program. There are many different affiliate programs available including Amazon Associates. Other popular programs are Commission Junction Affiliate, Sharesale, and eBay Partner Network. If you want to go a different route, affiliate programs are not the only options. You can also try Google AdSense, Ezoic, and Mediavine. Such programs display ads on your site and your paid for Ads shown on your blogposts. You could also secure sponsorship, where a company or individual pays you to promote their product or service on your site.

How much can you make – how can you access your payments?

With affiliate marketing, you get paid per sale. By that I mean, for every person who buys a product using your affiliate link, you will receive a commission. Mainly how much you earn will depend on the amount of active traffic you get on your site. How many people end up buying through your link? That is the quality of your content is very important. On average, there are many people that have been able to grow their affiliate sites up to monthly earnings of $300-$1,000 plus within a year or less. Even better if you’re running multiple affiliate sites then there is no limit to how much you can make. When your site is earning enough money, remember you can also make a huge profit by selling it on platforms like Flippa.com

As for how you can access your payments, one of the most common payout methods is through PayPal. It is the safest and easiest way to send and receive money, especially for small amounts. What’s more is that today, you have the option of transferring your funds from your PayPal account into your Mpesa. Payoneer is another alternative which allows business like yours to make online payments globally. So as a Kenyan Affiliate marketer, you can receive funds from platforms like Amazon because Payoneer provides you with a US account.

What are the skills needed?

From the face of it, it may seem like affiliate marketing is an easy job, but by now I’m sure you have realized that is not the case. The initial process of starting requires time and effort to be invested as well as some capital for purchases like domain and hosting. You also require certain skills like SEO, how to build a website and knowledge about keyword research. You also need knowledge about what affiliate programs are available, what is required, and how to gain traffic for your site.

With such skill and knowledge, you are guaranteed to build a successful career as an affiliate marketer. So, how do you gain such knowledge and skills? Well, that’s what we are here for.

About Wingu’s Professional Affiliate Marketing and SEO Training Course.

Here at Wingudigitaltraining.com, we have put time and effort into coming up with the best possible course on Professional Affiliate Marketing and SEO Training for freelance affiliate marketers. Through the course, we provide you with the ideal guide into Affiliate marketing.

You will find detailed information on what affiliate marketing and SEO is, with examples to help you understand. In the course, we break down the important elements of affiliate marketing and go in-depth into what they entail. You’ll get to learn how to find and pick profitable niches to start a blog on. You’ll also get to learn how to conduct proper keyword research and how to find keywords you can easily rank for on Google this way you can start earning money within a relatively short time frame. We will equip you with the needed knowledge to build a professional looking blog /website with zero coding involved and you won’t need to hire anyone to build a site for you. We will teach you how to design your site from scratch and we make it very easy to follow along even if you have never done it before in your life.

What do you walk away with?

• Proper skills and adequate knowledge to start and build a career as an affiliate marketer.
• You’ll be able to create a blog from scratch without any coding knowledge.
• Access to our Wingu student website where you can practice how to publish and format content before venturing on your own.
• A Detailed plan of action to follow to grow your blog so that it can generate a full-time income for you.
• Comprehensive text and video lessons that makes it easier to consume the content from anywhere be it your laptop or mobile phone, in the house or on the road.
• Expert mentorship. Aside from being a part of our Wingu Master Minds community on Facebook, you can reach out to us 24/7 on email or call, whenever you need guidance.
• Practical test assignments with detailed feedback and assessment from our team to ensure you master the skills taught in the course.

 

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is the best way to earn passive income online, but you can only succeed in the field with the right skills. It’s not enough to just run a site, you need to have an understanding of what you’re doing. Our course not only shows you how to build and grow a site from scratch, we also equip you with the SEO skills needed to get organic traffic to your site. So, don’t waste any more time. Join our course today and let us help you build a successful career in Affiliate marketing.