In this era of the Internet and social media, the way people interact with each other commercially and develop their careers has taken a paradigm shift.

Baby boomers and X generations had different kinds of cultures and professional lifestyles compared to the current generations. Today, if you have skills and resources, you can make millions of dollars by just sitting at your home in your tracksuit.

You don’t have to go anywhere else to join an organization on a full-time basis to make money in this digital age.

Affiliate marketing is one of those ways that can give you constant sales and generate money to sustain a decent lifestyle. For all those who don’t know what affiliate marketing is all about, let’s have a brief overview of what is affiliate marketing.

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing India

Affiliate marketing is a legitimate way of earning money through commissions after selling products and services of companies and brands.

It is like word-of-mouth marketing, where you suggest products and services to other people. However, in this case, you are also getting paid a commission fee from the advertiser after every successful purchase from your referral.

In affiliate marketing, a commission is decided between advertiser and marketer whose job is to redirect customers to the merchant’s website and make them buy the products.

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One of the most compelling advantages of doing affiliate marketing is its performance-based nature. That means if you sell more products, you will automatically get more profit.

So, when it comes to the opportunity of scaling your business and profit, ‘sky is the limit’ in affiliate marketing. There is no benchmark for the upper limit of earning money through affiliate marketing because the more you sell, the more you will earn.

It seems to be a daunting and attractive business model, but when it comes to earning money, you have to put effort and work hard.

Similarly, although affiliate marketing is the most effective online business model, you need to put a lot of work and research to build a strong foundation for the lasting affiliate marketing business.

You can’t just share a link on your personal Facebook feed and expect to earn a commission. It does not work as if you are for the long-term.

Having experience in affiliate marketing India, I know what works and what does not when it comes to affiliate marketing.

Therefore, I’ve created a detailed guide of affiliate marketing for beginners and what are the best affiliate programs in India that you can sign up.

So without further ado, let’s understand how to start affiliate marketing.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing in India

In this segment, I am going to show you the exact steps that you can follow to begin your affiliate marketing journey.

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Pick a Niche

It is the essential element behind succeeding in affiliate marketing. You need to choose a profitable niche to do affiliate marketing.

Because the niche is going to determine the subsequent steps of your affiliate marketing journey, the niche is not only going to determine the type of content you publish, the variety of products that you are going to sell on your website.

Therefore, your niche must be a profitable one and least explored by fellow affiliate marketers in the given time.

For example, if you are choosing fashion as your niche, but there are not many affiliate marketing programs that you can leverage to earn maximum commission. Or you might not have expertise in the niche to publish engaging content and encourage customers to buy specific products.

In this particular case, I’m sure you would struggle if you don’t have any background knowledge of the niche.

Therefore, it is also recommended to choose a niche that you are passionate about. Your affiliate marketing niche should be profitable and must interest you to create content around it.

While choosing your passion, check if you find profitable products to sell. For that, you need to sign up for affiliate networks, discussed below.

Sign up on Affiliate Network

Affiliate marketers need affiliate programs that allow them to sell products and services to users online.

Having said that, find out profitable and reliable affiliate programs is not an easy task as it requires a lot of manual research to determine the credibility of a particular affiliate program.

A smart choice is to go for affiliate networks and register an account there. These networks will give you many affiliate marketing program options to choose from.

These affiliate networks work as an intermediary between advertiser and merchant. They connect brands with affiliates who can sell products. Therefore, brands can have more sales and sellers can earn a commission for their efforts.

Affiliate networks have a detailed reporting structure in place to provide advanced reporting and analytical capability to affiliates.

That means once you create an account on these networks, you get a dashboard where you can track visits, revenue, sales and CTR for your affiliate programs.

The affiliate network will take care of regular payout from merchant websites. Therefore, you don’t need to worry about whether you will get the payout or not.

Some affiliate networks also give you a dedicated account manager who will guide you throughout all the procedures in signing up, synchronizing your account with the website, finding out relevant affiliate programs and how to promote your products.

So, for anyone who is just starting and overwhelmed by these steps, anyone can leverage this excellent support.

Look for Products to Promote

Affiliate marketing is not only profitable but the most portable business opportunity. All must focus on finding reliable products to promote.

While choosing the products, avoid making ‘beginner’s mistake’ by choosing only those products that provide the highest commission.

First of all, you need to understand affiliate marketing is possible on any given niche. If you are into rare niches that are not followed by many bloggers, don’t worry, you can find products that people would buy. 

In fact, in my experience, rare niches are the most profitable ones because brands find it hard to look for reliable affiliates to sell products. Therefore, they will give more commission per sale in such cases.

Most importantly, choose products that are relevant to your niche.

Because these products will be sold on your websites or any other digital properties which are used to publish certain kinds of content, so your existing audience expects to come across only a particular type of content and solutions.

For example, if you are running health and fitness blogs and selling products of digital marketing tools and SaaS platforms, then you would get almost zero engagement from your audience.

Because your current audience would be more interested in health and fitness topics, so they would expect product suggestions like gym equipment, protein supplements, and so on. 

They have no interest in digital marketing products whatsoever, and therefore they would not click on your affiliate links.

Create an Engaging Website

A website is the foundation of your affiliate marketing journey because you will need a dedicated internet resource where you can entertain users and publish the relevant content to encourage them to purchase products that you want to sell.

Make sure your website is responsive so that you can also entertain smartphone users. A website can have unlimited pages to nourish your audience and leverage sales funnel through content marketing.

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A website can allow you to create a dynamic layout of your web pages so that the right audience can be targeted efficiently and get converted into returning buyers. 

Down the line, this website would work as a unique resource of a particular niche. So, users would always visit your website whenever they wish to find out something about a specific topic of the niche.

Create Content that Sells

Content is the essential element that could skyrocket your affiliate marketing sales.

Even though your website is attractive, your niche is profitable, and you have cost-effective products. Still, if you don’t have the right content, then you would not be able to ensure incremental growth through your affiliate marketing sales.

Content is the only thing that would separate your website from other competitors. 

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Your content will help you shape brand image and reputation in the industry because the type of content that you share on the online mediums will able to attract certain kinds of user base belong to certain types of demographics.

You need to create a framework that will help you create content for the audience. You can also choose content formats that your prospects prefer.

I would also recommend you to leverage the power of content repurpose and make sure you can generate more content without much effort.

Content repurposing is a method to utilize existing content and upgrade it as per the current market trend. Converting them into different formats is also a part of content repurposing. 

If you have a blog post that able to gather a few hundred shares on social media, you can create a YouTube video from it and share the same video on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

Focus on Persuasive Copywriting

The art of writing is the most powerful yet undermined way to keep generating money consistently. Make sure that you are working on improving your writing skills and evaluating your copies to make them resonate with your targeted customer.

Copywriting does not imply to writing social media captions or social media ad copies. Copywriting is a lot bigger than that.

It goes everywhere, including email, articles, websites, social media, etc.; when sales and marketing are included.

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So, if you are promoting your affiliate product through a blog post, article, sales page or in a comment on Reddit are Quora, your copy should stand out.

Your text should engage customers while educating them about your products, services or solutions. Copywriting is the art of not sounding too salesy.

In India, it is hard to find reliable and talented copywriters who can write engaging copies as native English speakers do. However, you can still go to LinkedIn to find talent copywriters to write copy for your affiliate products.

Develop a Robust Marketing Plan

The marketing strategy will help you broadcast your content effectively and make it reachable to targeted customers at the right time.

Even though you have found out profitable products and wrote the first draft of your content, but if you cannot strategize advertising, you cannot make money.

That’s why marketing strategy will come in place. Suppose you want to sell your affiliate products on Black Friday or Cyber Monday this year. You need to plan your online marketing activities accordingly and start putting out posts about the upcoming sale.

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This way, you can nurture your targeted customers and pursue them to become lifelong consumers of your products.

In this case, to sell maximum sales on Cyber Monday or Black Friday, you cannot just publish a dedicated social media post a couple of days back of the event and boost it using social media marketing.

I would recommend leveraging influencer marketing or email marketing to make people aware of your upcoming offer on these big days.

You can also run a series of social media posts to make them aware of the sale.

So, in a nutshell, a marketing strategy can help you create dynamic content to nurture your prospects who would be your returning customers.

Promote + Analyze + Optimize = Success

Remember that affiliate marketing is a journey, and you cannot expect millions of dollars of earning from your first campaign. 

It is a gradual process, and after every campaign, you will learn some valuable learnings that can help you level up your skills and understanding about the whole affiliate marketing game.

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So, once you research your niche, products, copy, start your affiliate marketing campaign and observe users’ engagement.

If you have signed up for specific affiliate marketing networks, then you can track all the activities of users. This would help you evaluate how your copies and content are performing.

This way, you can determine their effectiveness or create different versions of it to run the A/B test for advanced analysis.

In my experience, when marketers promote niche-specific products that they are passionate about, marketers develop an attachment to those products. So, even if they are not getting profits and sales, they still invest their time and effort into them.

I am not saying that you don’t run a campaign that is not performing. But if some products are not working at all, then you need to shift your attention and be creatively mindful and to invest your resources into other products without getting attached to anyone of them.

What Are The Best Affiliate Programs

We understand that finding a reliable affiliate marketing programs is extremely hard as there are too many options to choose from.

Therefore, we have compiled the best affiliate marketing programs that you can try right now. 

#1. Amazon Associates

Amazon, one of the biggest eCommerce in the world, has an affiliate program where advertisers can earn up to 12% commission per sale.

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It is straightforward to join the program, and you don’t have to pay any subscription cost to the platform. Amazon allows everyone, be it social media influencer, blogger, website developer or a local vendor to sign up to its affiliate program.

Now, Amazon is also allowing a separate program known as Amazon Influencer Program that will enable people to monetize their social media audience by promoting Amazon’s products and earn a commission.

#2. Shareasale

It is one of the renowned affiliate programs that allow advertisers to find out profitable products and opportunities to make money from affiliate marketing.

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They have been allowing people to share a sale for the past 19 years. Global affiliate network Awin purchased ShareASale to scale it for more international opportunities to domestic advertisers and publishers in January 2019.

#3. ClickBank

ClickBank provides an opportunity for advertisers to sell products based on the lifestyle industry. 

They have thousands of products that could allow a blogger, YouTuber or social media influencer of any niche to sell and make money.

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ClickBank is a U.S-based company that is started in a garage in 1998 and has now become a leading online retailer providing an opportunity and platform to affiliate marketers to make millions of dollars online.

Today, ClickBank has been improving the lives of more than 200 Million customers generating sales over $3 billion.

#4. CJ Affiliate

CJ Affiliate achieves around $15B+ in revenue through affiliate marketing. It is one of the most reliable affiliate marketing programs for not only beginners but experienced online marketers too.

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They have lucrative offers and products that could give your business stability while achieving maximum scalability.

CJ affiliate was also found in the year 1998 in California. With 20 years of experience in affiliate marketing, this program is a must-try.

#5. vCommission

vCommission is a renowned name in vertical of affiliate marketing India.

It is the only Indian affiliate program that provides a straight 30% commission per sale on all the products.

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They have grown to serve more than 18,000 affiliates and collaborate with well-known Indian brands that want to improve their online sales.

With 10 years of experience in the industry, vCommission will give you professional and reliable support for your affiliate marketing needs. 

To register an account on this platform, you just need to fill out a form and provide your business details.

Conclusion

I’m sure that after reading this article, you must have got a clear idea of how to do Affiliate marketing in India.

Please let me know what your thoughts on the topics discussed in this article are. Feel free to share your views in the comments below.

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