Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money online, even though it is easy there are a few things you need to do right and one of them is choosing your path, in this post, I am going to explain what are the 5 affiliate marketing paths.
5 Affiliate Marketing Paths
As with everything in life, you can do the same thing in different ways, for example, you can go to town by public transport, an Uber, with your own car, or on foot, as long as you know your destination.
This is the same in affiliate marketing, your destination is making money by selling other people’s products, how do you do it? It depends on you.
Content Publisher
In my opinion, this is the easiest and the cheapest way to start affiliate marketing, you can start for free, although it might take longer than other paths.
The path of a content publisher is to find what people are reading, listening to, or watching online, create content that will answer some of the prospect’s questions, and recommend them affiliate products.
The content publisher path has three mini paths, that is the content could be written, and post it in blogs, it could be in video format, and post it in Youtube or Vimeo, or it could be audio and start a podcast.
As a written content creator you can promote affiliate links inside the content, if you have a blog, also you can add banners to it. Also, you can add a resource page.
As a Video content creator, the best way to promote affiliate links is to mention the products in your videos and then include the links in the description.
As an audio content creator, it is the same as the video content creator, the best way to promote those affiliate links is to mention them in your podcast and include them in the description or in the resource page.
Here I share how to start an affiliate marketing blog.
Pay Per Click affiliate
This is the fastest way to make money online as an affiliate, I recommend this if you have some money to invest and test things.
Instead of building your audience and then sending them to your landing pages and offers, you can pay those big companies to send some of their users to you.
Since the number of visitors you get will depend on how much money are you willing to pay, it is very easy to get started and test things out, and if you find a winning campaign, you can just scale and increase your ad budget.
Literally, you can set up a campaign in the morning, and if the ad gets approved the same day, you can make your first sale on the same day, it is that easy.
The bad side of it is that you need to have some data to know how to target potential clients, and if you are new there is a massive possibility that you will lose money.
By using paid platforms like Facebook ads, Google ads, Twitter ads,  Pinterest ads, etc, you can leverage the massive audiences on those platforms and grow your business faster.
Social influencer
You can build a huge following in big social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc, and leverage those followers and make some money.
Starting a social media account is easy but getting your first 5000 followers is the difficult part, but if you post good content every day, and if your content entertains, and educates people, your follower count will start to increase.
 What I have found to work in the social media sphere is to select one platform you are the most comfortable with, grow your users there and when people know you you can your main account to promote the rest of the social media account, this way you will become the true influencer.
There are many ways to make money as a social media influencer, but for affiliate marketing, the simplest way to start is to include your link in the bio.
When you post something on social media, written or a video, you can always include the word For more info click the link in the bio.
Sometimes also you can promote affiliate links directly in your post.Â
Most platforms will not allow you to directly post your affiliate links, you will need to create a landing page, so you send people from your social media platform to a landing page then from there, you send them to an affiliate offer.
Community Manager
There are a lot of communities online, these can be forums, Facebook groups, Twitter spaces, etc, what you can do is create a community and start inviting people to join your community.
When the community starts to grow you can share with them tips on whatever your community is about and you can start recommending to them some affiliate products that have a direct relationship with your community.
For example, if you have a community of people who are interested in Astrology, you can start recommending them some Astrology readings, books, and other resources, do not try to sell them very hard.Â
For example in the Astrology community, I will tell people about how astrology changed my life ( if that is the case) and then say something like this all started when I read this book, and then give them an affiliate link for that book.
This works in every niche you can think of.
Email marketer
This is the most stable way to make money as an affiliate marketer, this is how it works.
You find your niche, you find people who have problems in your niche, and then you create some kind of guide( video, audio, or pdf) that address that issue, and you offer it for free in exchange for their email address.
When you get their email address you can start sending them further emails with solutions and recommendations, you can use your affiliate link to redirect them to those recommendations, and if they buy something, you make money.
Imagine having a list of 10000 people, and when you send an email at least 2000 of them open it, and out of those 2000 people just 100 end up buying whatever you recommended, if you make $50 for every sale you just make $5000 in one single email.
This is how the big boys and girls make big money with affiliate marketing.
This path works best if you combine it with one of the first 4, this is the reason I put it last on my list.
Here I share How to start email marketing
Conclusion
That is it, if you want to make money online as an affiliate, you need to pick one of those 5 affiliate marketing paths, my recommendation would be to pick one of the first 4 and the 5th ( email marketing) this way you will make sure that you keep making money in the long run.