How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing, Offline and Online (II)

I am a little deflated as robbers came to my apartment 2 nights ago and carted away, among other things, my precious laptop. I had backed up my most important documents, but some of them only as far back as November last year. So I have lost considerable traction with those files as I have to do my researches on them all over again.Phew!

Anyway, it is only a temporary setback, and a very valuable lesson learnt in that I should regularly back up my files, at least weekly.

Back to blogging now, let me finish up on the affiliate marketing subsection of our 40 different ways to make money online, section on internet marketing. Following the outline from the previous article

How to make money from affiliate marketing offline
Making money as an affiliate offline is almost as straight forward as making money online, the only difference is that instead of trying to get traffic to a site or landing page, you need to get customers to your store, or get the product you are marketing to the customer as a normal sales rep will do.

In case you missed it earlier in this series, I explained how to make money as an affiliate for the sports betting companies offline in this article, please read it if you haven't. When you work as an affiliate, it is far better than working for the same company as a paid employee. Why? For example, an affiliate gets paid on commission basis, therefore, the more sales he generates, the more money he makes. But a paid employee is given a target and must meet it else his salary or even his job, is on the line.

To really make money as an affiliate offline, get and promote products in an industry you are knowledgeable about. Also seek ways to promote the company and it's products online as this will increase your sales. And this leads me to the next point...

How to start an affiliate business and make money without owning a blog or website
So let us assume you are an affiliate for a company, offline but you want to also widen your client reach online (not limiting it to your state or local region), yet you don't want to own a website or blog. There are a number of options:

1. Ask the company if they can give you a custom-built static webpage that you can use as a landing page to woo new customers. Many companies with an online presence do this for their affiliates.
2. Maximise and monetise your social media  presence by promoting your products there. I will talk more on how you can make money from social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn. Stumbleupon, and others in the section on social media marketing (just after Network Marketing). But it also works by influence, as  'social media marketing is about utilising your friendships and social influence to making a sale.' 
3. You can essentially make money through PPC by paying for advert slots with your affiliate banner displayed on popular search engines e.g. Google, Yahoo, or even on popular blogs/websites in your country. You make money each time someone clicks the banner. But be careful, ensure you get your calculations right so that you do not end up in debt.
4. Write reviews for popular sites such as Goodreads (books), Cnet (gadgets, etc), or as a guest writer on popular blogs or sites such as Ezinearticles. Write a quality article addressing a need and direct traffic to your affiliate link. Check this link for 20 sites that will pay you to write reviews for them.
5. Use popular classified sites that will allow you to paste your affiliate banners for free such as Craigslist and USfreeads.
6. You can even buy a domain name from popular companies such as godaddy, namescheap, etc, and link your affiliate link to the name.
7. Write a good ebook and market it with your affiliate link(s) attached. This is an alternative to writing daily/regularly with a blog.
8. Build a Squidoo 'lens' by joining the site Squidoo which allows you to build a one-page site about any topic you are knowledgeable about. This picture below shows a sample of such:

Credit: affilorama.com

General tips for success as an affiliate marketer from the Internet Marketing gurus
In case you are still confused as to who the gurus of affiliate or internet marketing are, check out some of the top names in my earlier post- Introduction to Internet Marketing. Please follow as many as you can in order to be well grounded and schooled in the art.

In my post 'How I make money from affiliate marketing', I shared with you the enlightening tip I got from John Reese on how best to make money from affiliate marketing online. Some other tips I have discovered while researching the experts include:

• Don't just find a profitable niche, find your own niche! It is not all about doing what everyone is doing, or you too doing what Linda Ikeji is doing simply because she is now so successful at it that she is making tons of money. You too decide on what you love and are passionate about, and make it profitable. Using Google adwords will help you identify what people are searching for but if you have not established yourself as a guru in that field, you won't make so much money in it because the affiliate marketing business is so competitive now.
• Be ready for work. Affiliate marketing involves some degree of work so be ready to put in your best. And don't give up, no matter what. Your biggest sale might just be the next sale.
• Narrow down as much as possible. Even in your own niche, you will find many profitable affiliate programs and products. Choose one to two, or maximum three and really promote those ones aggressively. For example, don't promote Konga, and Jumia together.
• Develop on a strategy at the beginning and focus fully on it. Don't try other methods until you have become very successful at your strategy, unless your strategy does not work at all from the get-go.

So that I don't bore you, please check out the following articles/sites for more tips and information.
Wikihow's how to make money without a website
Join Copyblogger to access their free internet marketing articles
Check out Neil Pattel's internet marketing course, and Chapter 9 on affiliate marketing
Tips on how you can make money with affiliate marketing


Prominent Nigerian Affiliate Marketers
As I told you, affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways of making money online if done properly. Almost all top Nigerian bloggers are affiliate marketers, and regularly direct their traffic to their affiliates. In fact, most blogs and websites are created in order to generate traffic in order to make money/sales.

Bloggers and website owners such as Linda Ikeji of lindaikeji.blogspot.com, Pascal Okafor of naijatechguide.com, Jide Ogunsanya of ogbongeblog.com, and many others. Other names I found include Onome Maureen, Toyin Omotosho and Precious Ngwu.


Other useful resources;

• For more information, visit forums and affiliate marketing sites such as Warrior forum, Digitalpoint, Wickedfire, Affilorama. 
• For information marketing/ebooks marketing, use Clickbank, Paydotcom and E-junkie. Pepperjam (now eBay affiliate enterprise network) is popular for comics, and with scifi geeks, Linkconnector affiliate program is more popular east of the globe.
• You can also check out these smaller affiliate programs, though they are mostly CPA (cost per lead/action), Max bounty, Peerfly, Neverblue, Clickbooth, Ad2ad. While most of them might not accept people from less developed countries, you can read the article on how to make them accept you.
• You should also consider Chitika, Buysellads, Infolinks, Media.net and Superlinks, especially if you are looking for an alternative to Google's Adsense affiliate program.
• Addynamo is popular among Africans, and publishers who have been rejected by Google Adsense.

That is it for now on affiliate marketing. We will move on to Multi-level marketing, online.

Update: I have also come across a website that is building a digital marketing database. Thalamus.co styles itself as "The largest crowdsourced database of digital advertising opportunities and reviews." Check them out.