Special Announcement: It's my pleasure to introduce you to my very first guest poster – Ibrahim Dahy. Please see his bio at the bottom of this post as well as a link to his site. As someone who is interested in affiliate marketing I know you'll get a lot from this post.

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A lot of people who want to get started in affiliate marketing get overwhelmed by the various aspects of the affiliate marketing business.

And it is rightfully so, because starting your own affiliate marketing business involves web design, niche finding, product selection, reviews writing and getting traffic (among others).

And that’s just the basics because there is a lot more to learn before you can become a profit generating affiliate marketer.

There are a lot of resources online you can use to learn affiliate marketing, like from affiliate blogs or affiliate marketing courses. Both of those resources can equip you with the required skills but they vary in the depth they offer in their training.

In this article we are going to compare learning from affiliate blogs vs. learning from affiliate marketing training courses.

Affiliate Niche Finding

Since finding a niche to promote affiliate products is the first step of becoming an affiliate, we are going to start with it first.

Finding a niche involves skills like:
• Detecting profitable niches
• Detecting high demand niches
A profitable niche is the one that has high paying affiliate products and a blog post that can show you the techniques to find them will certainly help you find your own niches.

For example, if you look at Clickbank’s products marketplace, you will see the affiliate commission listed next to each product.

Any good blog post can go into details of how to pick one product above the other, considering not only your affiliate commission but also the product reputation.

But the fact is, you need to learn how to judge niches from using multiple affiliate networks and not only using Clickbank.

A blog post no matter how good it is, cannot walk you through the top affiliate networks and at the same time teach you the skill of detecting a money niche vs. free niche.

And here is where an affiliate marketing course can help you more as it would go into more details on how to use advertiser’s data to judge the niche profitability, and even use the niche competition as a judging factor on how profitable it is.

Same can be said on detecting high demand niche, as you would need to read many blog posts on dedicating niche’s demand.

Not to mention that it is hard to find more than a handful of posts that will soley focus on the techniques of finding high demand niches.

A high demand niche can be detected using many methods like: the monthly search data for a set of keywords related to the niche and also using suppliers number (product vendors), because the more products in the niche mean the more client base there is.

An extra step that a good affiliate marketing course can go is to provide you with a tool to automate finding your niche or at least semi automate it.

Affiliate Website Design

Your affiliate website is the bridge between the buyer and the product, and therefore it has to reflect the quality of the product you are promoting.

Most of the blog posts talking about web design will be technical because web design itself is done using tools.

So affiliate blogs will either recommend you a good website theme or provide you with a free theme along with a guide on how to customize it to your needs.

Affiliate marketing course on the other hand can provide students with a web design tools to create affiliate review pages or squeeze pages.

Also there are some graphics elements that website themes can’t provide, like scribbles, arrows, headlines designer.

Unless you have a budget to hire your own web designer or buy a website theme, you need to find an affiliate marketing course that can provide you with the tools to create all this yourself.

Finding Affiliate Products

There are many blog posts that can show you how and where to find affiliate products with high commission, even providing you with a list of high paying niches that only offer high paying products (like the luxury items niche).

The basic factors you should consider when picking your affiliate product are:

• The commission per sale
• Product credibility and brand popularity
• Product’s sales history and refund rates

A good affiliate blog will help you judge a product based on these factors.

Giving how you only need 1 or 2 products to start with, you will find that affiliate blogs teach you everything you need.

Even reading case studies on affiliates who promoted certain products and generated sales can give you guidelines on the certiria used by the affiliate to pick that product.

Sometimes you even don’t need to learn about finding affiliate products, because you can simply pick few popular products in your niche and promote them on your affiliate website.

If you are looking to escape the affiliate competition that comes with any popular product, then you need an affiliate marketing course that offers a tool to find products in bulk and at the same time compare their commission and their reputation.

Writing Your Affiliate Product Review

A converting product review needs to be written well which is not as easy as you might think, because you need to consider:

• The Grammar
• Your Spelling
• Copywriting Skills

You need to read many blog posts about copywriting and not necessarily from affiliate blogs, because copywriting is not just limited to affiliate marketing.

Also read about how to structure your product review, in the sense that you need to know which keywords to highlight and where to put screenshots and videos.

Beside these basics, you can simply go to any product review and see how the affiliate structured it and what elements he used. You can learn a lot from other’s experience if you pay attention to details.

I don’t think an affiliate marketing course can provide you with more value than affiliate blogs.

That’s because the majority of your review page will consist of:

• Testimonials
• Screenshots
• Videos
• Product benefits

All which you can collect manually using common sense.

However, if your affiliate marketing course provides you with tools to automatically search for those elements or at least shows you how to search for them, then it will save you the extra effort.

 

Getting Traffic to Your Affiliate Website

Traffic is the trickiest part of being an affiliate. Many affiliates will fail or succeed based soley on their ability to generate traffic to their website.

With the vast traffic sources that exists online, be that as free or paid traffic, it is hard to find a blog or an affiliate marketing course that can cover all of them.

However you can move from blog to another trying to learn about different traffic generation techniques and you can start by learning about:

• SEO
• Social Media Traffic
• Pay Per Click Ads

You then start implementing those different techniques until you find the one that works for you.

However, what makes an affiliate marketing course your best bet when it comes to traffic is that most courses provided by top affiliate gurus already perfected various traffic generation methods.

They then teach you step by step, how to implement those methods on your affiliate website.

This is especially in the case of paid traffic like PPC, because it is easy to come up with a proven system to launch a paid traffic campaign while at the same time improving your targeting and your ad copywriting skills.

Conclusion

As you can see, there is no absolute need to enroll in an affiliate marketing course, because the number of affiliate marketing blogs out there are sufficient to rely on.

A well put affiliate marketing course can however organize everything for you, and take you step by step through the various affiliate marketing stages. And if it comes with tools then it will help you even more.

Guest Poster Bio Details:

Ibrahim Dahy is a veteran internet marketer and programmer. He would love to share with you his experience that he gained over the past 10 years working with the top IM professionals in the field.

It’s Your Turn

I know just how busy you must be so many thanks for taking the time to leave your comments – both Ibrahim and myself will appreciate your feedback

As a beginner affiliate marketer which of the tips did you find most helpful?
Are you having problems choosing a niche?
Care to share if you've had any affiliate marketing trwaining before?
What have been your biggest challenges or struggles as an affiliate marketer?
What has really worked well for you as an affiliate marketer?
What were the key things you got from this post?
Would you like some help with your affiliate marketing?