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Starting An Online Business For Dummies

Do you have the burning desire to have the freedom to work at home? Read my guide to starting an online business for dummies.

Imagine having the flexibility to work from your couch in your living room or being in the position to make your own schedule. Even better, imagine not having to put up with the long commute to work that drains you only, to attend meetings that do not interest you and report to a boss you might not even get along with.

Yes, it is with affiliate marketing. Your success is in your own hands. You are fully remote and passionately engaged with running a passive income generating online business.

Here is my guide to starting an online business for dummies.

There is much information about affiliate marketing out there that knowing how to start might feel difficult. Perhaps you are overwhelmed. Below, is a simple, yet effective, step by step guide to help you start an online business from home with affiliate marketing.

Build your audience

Your goal is to introduce products, digital or physical, to consumers. To achieve this, you need to build an audience of consumers that trust and listen to you.

There are numerous ways to do this. The most common one is through a website, an authority website, or blog. You need to focus on providing your users with useful content. Some examples are blog articles or product reviews. The only way to reliably build an audience is to offer amazing content. Another way to build an audience is to build a solid following through social media like Facebook and Instagram and tap into your audience to promote the products of your partners.

Make sure you put effort to set up. Imagine this as your initial investment. If you do this right, it will repay you many times over later down the line.

When you promote your content to you audience, keep in mind that you want to get consumers to click on your affiliate links.

Find products that you like

Once you have built a solid audience that knows and trusts you, your next step is to find suitable products to promote. Look at the products and services you already love using for example. If you love them so much, chances are that your audience will trust you and love them too.

These products need to be highly relevant to your audience otherwise, affiliate marketing won’t be a success.

Try not to be generic. Focus on content you are passionate about and possess great knowledge on. You can then, promote products that are relevant to your content and specific to your audience so that they will want to buy them.

Find great partners   

Having identified your products, you then, need to partner with the respective sellers. In some occasions, the sellers get in touch with you to see if you would be interested in promoting their products as an affiliate, if your audience is similar to their base of customers. Otherwise, you can simply get in touch with them instead. Introduce yourself, tell them all about your audience and let them know you can become an affiliate.

An alternative option is to use an affiliate marketing program like the Amazon Associates Program or Commission Junction.

You can then, earn a commission from your sales coming from your affiliate links.

Advertise to your audience

The final step is to bring everything together and start making money using affiliate marketing.

When you advertise your products to your audience, you promote your content that includes your affiliate links and they click on these links to buy your products. Every time you make a sale, you earn a percentage.

Final thoughts

Work at home can be a dream come true with affiliate marketing. It allows you to generate passive income from your couch with little investment and a lot of freedom. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a quick fix and requires a lot of effort and hard work, but it all pays off. Hope you found my guide to starting an online business for dummies useful. 

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AUTHOR

After being forced to shut down my brick and mortar business, I built my online business Be Your Maverick from scratch. Wasted way too much time researching ways to make money online. My mission is to help ambitious individuals cut through the scams and make better informed decisions getting started with an online business.