Study the eight steps to building a profitable affiliate marketing business for beginners. If you have already started your affiliate marketing business but want some simple tips to expand your reach and increase revenue, you can skip this article and read the FREE (Advanced) Affiliate Marketing Guide. Building a profitable affiliate business is easy if you stay consistent.

What Is The Best Way To Learn Affiliate Marketing?

In my experience, the best way to learn affiliate marketing is to jump right in and start doing it. There’s a lot to learn but if you study some free affiliate marketing training guides and get involved with a good cellphone affiliate program, you should experience steady compounding results as you grow in skill and knowledge.

1.) Become An Expert In Your Affiliate Niche

As a Best Cellular affiliate, your niche is probably focused on cell phones and cell phone accessories. You will need to become educated in, and have a passion for, the prepaid wireless industry.

Search engines try to send customers to the most relevant website in reference to their search query. There is a LOT of competition when someone decides to search for a product. Customers most often buy from sites who provide relevant content that answers their questions about a product they’re interested in. If you plan on building an affiliate marketing business, the way to generate a lasting residual income is to be an expert in the affiliate niche that you plan to target.

Best Cellular is a cell phone company so our focus will be on helping you build a prepaid wireless affiliate marketing business that focuses on helping you sell cell phones, accessories, prepaid wireless services and phone related products such as signal boosters.

Subscribe to YouTube channels who do smartphone reviews. Follow relevant authorities on Twitter. Connect on LinkedIn, etc. (Click the image below to follow @BestCellular on Twitter).

2.) Invest In A Great Domain Name

You’ll find that having a good domain name can be a huge advantage. Do your research. Make sure it’s easy to remember. If possible, your affiliate website URL should include the main keyword you wish to target. Avoid long or hard to spell words. The goal is to have a site that’s easy for your potential customers to access and easy to remember.

3.) Get Quality Web Hosting

It’s okay to start out small and there’s no need to buy more than your budget allows. Again, do your research. If you can find an inexpensive hosting provider who offers solid-state hard-drives, you will see a noticeable speed benefit. “The speed of your mobile pages currently doesn’t impact your mobile rankings, but soon it may.” -Gary Illyes of Google.

Make sure your hosting provider offers scalable services that can grow as your affiliate marketing business expands. https://hostingfacts.com/ allows you to compare hosting options, speeds, server uptime, price, etc.

4.) Build An Awesome Website

Building a profitable affiliate business will take a little bit of skill, a good amount of research and a lot of time and energy. If you aren’t a web designer by trade, it may be worth it to hire a freelance designer to create a really cool template for your site.

There are tons of DIY options but the majority of affiliate marketing websites use WordPress. Some benefits of WordPress include ease of integration and customization. There are over 29k WordPress plugins available that allow you to modify a WordPress affiliate website to exactly the features you want.

Another cool feature with WordPress-based affiliate websites is the option to select from thousands of themes that you can then modify to fit your desired look and feel.

If you’re going to make changes to a WordPress theme, we recommend using a child theme. A child theme is simply a theme that inherits the functionality and looks of the parent theme. The parent remains intact and everything is built around the child theme so updates don’t break anything.

5.) MOST IMPORTANT – Produce Excellent Content

Currently, there are over 1.2 billion websites on the internet with over 294 Billion web pages online. Many of these sites have probably never been seen by anyone besides the owner of the site.

To build a profitable affiliate business, you must produce excellent content and update regularly. Affiliate marketing business owners who write great product-specific articles end up building a loyal audience that values your site as an authority when they’re looking to buy a new phone, accessory or signal booster. If they land on your site to read a review of a specific phone and you have written excellent content, chances are they will order the product using your affiliate link!

Simply placing affiliate links in the menu bar of your header typically won’t generate much traffic.

6.) Focus On Search Engine Optimization / Affiliate SEO Strategies

Don’t write for search engines. Write to satisfy your readers and the search engines will follow. Only use, “white hat” SEO techniques to build your affiliate business. We recommend the Yoast SEO plugin because as you write each new page or blog post, the Yoast plugin makes it easy to write great content by using the Red/Yellow/Green feature that automatically shows you how your article will score for readability and SEO.

7.) Promote Affiliate Products & Services

Build a successful affiliate business by promoting affiliate products and services in your content.

• Product Reviews – This is the most time-consuming (& most profitable) way to make money as an affiliate. Write honest, detailed reviews about a specific product or service. Build trust with your audience. Your audience relies on your opinion. Don’t just point out all the positives of a product while glossing over the negatives. An honest opinion will be valued. Add compelling images and make mention of useful features, specifications, and other details. Your product review can then link to the page (with your affiliate ID attached), where your audience can make a purchase if they’re interested.
• In-Text Content Links – If you’re creating product review pages with your affiliate links, you will probably be using contextual links that connect directly to the product or cell phone you’re writing the article about. If you’re using a less targeted in-text affiliate link, you may use a general term like the Best Cellular online store. When you hover over the link, you may notice the URL has a query string: /?wpam_id=1 at the end of the URL and that’s how the affiliate tracking system knows that if a sale is made, affiliate id=1 will get the commission.
• Image Links – In a product review page, it is probably a good idea to link from both image links as well as relevant text links to increase conversions. Hover over the SIM Card picture as an example for an affiliate link to the SIM Cards page.

8.) Build Your Audience

Chances are your affiliate marketing business will start off slow. Don’t worry… It takes time to gain in search rankings. As you write interesting, SEO friendly phone review articles or blog posts, it’s a good idea to share the posts on social networking sites and build strategic internet partnerships to build a hungry audience for your affiliate marketing articles.

Protip: Avoid Intrusive Advertising

Many affiliate sites are overloaded with popup ads, tons of banner ads and intrusive marketing that makes readers lose trust in the site. If you plan on building a profitable affiliate business that generates a massive monthly revenue, it only makes sense to offer a clean, well-designed site that generates trust. Too many advertisements break a users trust. Keep your site clean and focused.

Read the Advanced Affiliate Marketing Guide for more tips on building a profitable affiliate business.