A few years ago, Warren Buffet, who is arguably the greatest investor in human history, made a profound statement which I think is worth pondering.
“If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you’ll work until you die.”
Ouch! That’s a hard pill to swallow.
But while that statement may come as a slap to the vast number of people who aren’t investors, Warren is right.
The best approach to financial freedom is to find a way to consistently earn passive income — the kind of income that keeps coming even while you sleep.
While there are a lot of ways you can achieve this, there’s ONE approach that has proven to work.
That’s exactly what this post is about…
To teach you the 100% proven best approach on how to make money online even while you sleep.
This approach is called Affiliate Marketing!
If you’re able to get it right with affiliate marketing [by following the tips shared in this blog post], be rest assured you’re going to be reaping hundreds to thousands of $USDs for many years to come.
In this post, I take complex out of the way and present a simple and easy-to-follow guide on how to make money with affiliate marketing in Nigeria.
You’ll be led through the process of finding a profitable affiliate marketing niche guaranteed to consistently generate sales.
You’ll discover how to find products people can’t resist. Starting an awesome blog to promote your affiliate products, and how to get people to see your products.
All right, now that you’re probably all pumped up, let’s go over the basics.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission [an amount of money] from promoting other people’s product.
For example, let’s say I launched a new t-shirt online. You visited my online shop and liked the t-shirt. You then decide to tell your friends about the t-shirt and refer them to my shop to buy. Whenever a person you referred buys a t-shirt, you get a percentage of the profit from the sale.
This is basically what affiliate marketing is all about. You simply find a product that you like, promote it to people and earn a portion of the profit for each sale you make.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate marketing involves the process of earning a commission for every product you promote on your website/blog through a referral link (affiliate link) that leads to a purchase.
An affiliate marketing system is made up of four parties, namely:
1. The Merchant.
This is the creator of the product. It could either be an individual or a company.
For example, an individual or company who creates an online course might want to boost its sales and decide to incorporate the efforts of others. Such individual (or company) who issues out a commission to anyone who refers a buyer is known as The merchant.
2. The Consumer
The consumer is a buyer who purchases through a referral (or affiliate) link.
3. The Affiliate
This refers to you— the individual who does the Affiliate marketing per se. This is the person who acquires an affiliate or referral link and tries to promote a product on his website or blog.
This is the party that earns a commission from the purchase made by a buyer they referred.
4. The Affiliate Network/Program.
The affiliate network acts as a middle man between the merchant and the affiliate. The affiliate network provides a wide range of products or services from which an affiliate marketer can choose to promote.
So basically, the affiliate network serves as a storehouse for numerous products.
Such that, when a company wants to sell a product fast, they hand the product over to the affiliate network and agree to split the profit with anyone who can refer a buyer to purchase their product. The affiliate network then links the product with a marketer (the affiliate marketer).
So whenever the affiliate marketer can refer people to buy the product, he gets paid a percentage of the profit.
In simple terms, an affiliate network seeks to connect a seller (the creator of the product) with a prospective marketer [who gets paid to promote the product].
How to become an affiliate marketer in Nigeria.
To become an affiliate marketer and earn money online through affiliate marketing, you simply need to get an affiliate link ( referral link) from an affiliate network and have it placed on your website/blog.
So that whenever someone clicks on your referral link and lands on the website of the affiliate network and makes a purchase, you get a commission.
How much money can be made as an affiliate marketer?
The profit scale of affiliate marketing is dependent on the amount of work and dedication you put into it. Hence, the profit potential of this business is limitless.
However, you can go from earning a few dollars at the initial stage to earning 4 or even 6 figures overtime monthly.
How do you get paid with affiliate marketing?
To start making money with affiliate marketing immediately, all you need is an affiliate link. This is the link you’ll place into your blog/website. So that whenever someone clicks on the link, they’ll be taken to the page of the product/service you’re promoting.
If they make a purchase or take the desired action, you get paid your commission.
Here’s the break down of the entire process on making money with affiliate marketing in Nigeria:
- Create your blog/website
- Sign up with an affiliate network
- Find the product of your choice
- Get the affiliate link to the product
- Place the link on your blog
- Get paid a commission when your referrals buy a product.
That’s all. It’s nothing complex.
Right. But how would the merchant know that I was the who referred a buyer?
When your affiliate link is clicked, a small file called a cookie is stored on the user’s computer for a period time (could be 30-90 days). When they buy a product, the merchant can see that they were referred by you.
Also, if a user performs the desired action within the cookie period, you’ll still be awarded your commission.
Awesome!
Since we’ve covered the basics, let’s have fun with the fundamentals and turn you into a full-fledged affiliate marketer.
We’ll cover everything step-by-step. Ensure you read carefully, and slowly… To the very end.
How to make money with affiliate marketing in Nigeria [Step-by-step]
Step #1: Choose a niche.
The very first step [before anything else] in making money with affiliate marketing is to choose a niche.
A niche comprises of people (audience) with similar or specialized interest.
Therefore, choosing an affiliate market niche means you’re focusing all your efforts and marketing to serving that audience.
How to choose the perfect affiliate market niche.
1. Choose the industry for your niche and Narrow down:
There are a lot of niches out there. But not every niche is capable of fetching you cash. Hence, when it comes to making money with affiliate marketing, you must narrow down your niche.
What do I mean by this?
There are two kinds of niches. Namely: broad niche and narrow niche.
Broad niche is otherwise known as an industry. It comprises of people with multiple interests under a particular field. For example, Sports is a broad niche (or an industry) — it consists of people who have an interest in soccer, boxing, basketball, etc.
Narrow niche, on the other hand, is more specific and detailed. It comprises of people who have the same interests.
Let’s break down the explanation.
Sport is a broad niche — a huge collection of people who like or have an interest in football, boxing, basketball, swimming, baseball etc. All these activities all fall under Sports.
We can then choose to narrow down this niche by being more specific. Instead of targeting Sports in general, we can narrow down our focus and target football only.We can even narrow down further by targeting Men’s football and leave out women’s football.
I’m sure you get the idea.
So basically, a narrow niche is a more streamlined and specific focus of interest.
Why it’s important to choose a narrow niche instead of a broad niche?
It doesn’t take a pearl of heavenly inspired wisdom to realise that you can’t please everybody. As the adage goes… “you can’t serve two masters.”
You have only limited energy and time. Trying to serve different people with varied interests will leave you worn out and you’ll end up serving no one.
It’s better to narrow down your niche because doing so makes it easier to find people and figure out what exactly their pain points are.
Doing this would make it effortless to deliver them a product that solves their problem.
The basic principle of making money online is simple: Provide what people want and they’ll surely pay you for doing so.
Choosing a narrow niche is a sure-fire way to know what a specific set of people want. Streamlining your focus will avail you the precision to study them intently, identify their problems, and come up with a product that solves that problem.
If you’re confused on what niche to choose, answering the following questions would be of tremendous help:
What are you passionate about?
It could be anything. Allow your brain roam. Trust me, you can turn any passion of yours into a business. Also, ask yourself what you’d enjoy writing about.
What niche sites do you spend the most time on?
This would help cast a beam on your interests and give you a bit of clarity on what you enjoy reading the most. Do you hang out on sites that dwell more on business? Or freelancing? Or even fashion?
The purpose of these questions is to help you come up with a niche you’d enjoy working in.
There’s nothing more demoralising than working on something you don’t like—that’s why a lot of people quit halfway into starting a business.
If you already have an idea of what niche you’d like to delve into, or if you’re still a bit confused, then the next step would clear every doubt and help you find the perfect niche.
2. Ensure your chosen niche has a lot of affiliate products.
While narrowing down your niche is great, you also want to choose a niche that offers sufficient affiliate opportunities—a niche that has a lot of affiliate products which you can market.
You can do this by employing simple research. It’s nothing you can’t handle. Let’s do it right now!
To determine whether a niche has sufficient products available for you to market, simply head over to Amazon.
Amazon is the largest online retail platform with a humongous number of products. We’d be using it for our niche and product research— to identify which niches are most profitable.
Click on any of the categories of your choice to access their subcategories. Here you’ll find a truckload of products. You can go further to refine your search (narrow down your niche) by using the filter options at the left-hand corner of the page.
Now, to find the perfect niche, use the filter to adjust the price to $100 and select a 4+ star review rating.
If you’re able to arrive with a lot of products that meet the search specification above, you’ve found a perfect niche just like the one below.
To make your research much easier, below are some of the most popular and top niches for affiliate marketing.
- Health and wellness.
- Wealth and money.
- Self-improvement.
- Dating and relationships.
- Beauty.
- Technology and gadget.
Now that you’ve identified your industry and narrowed down your niche, you’re set for the next step.
Step #2: Start a blog.
Starting a blog isn’t as complex as you might think, especially as a beginner. The process is easy and quite fun too.
For you to be able to make money with affiliate marketing in Nigeria, owning a blog is crucial.
A blog is needed to sample and unveil the products you plan on marketing. Also, you need a blog to be able to grow your audience and get people to see what you’re marketing.
As earlier stated, creating a blog isn’t difficult. With the aid of Content Management Systems such as WordPress, starting a blog takes only a matter of minutes. The best part is, you don’t have to be a computer expert.
So, let’s recap one more time on the process we’ve taken far. First, we’ve talked about choosing a niche. At this point, I assume you already know the niche you plan to focus on.
Since we already have that sorted out, the next step is to create your blog. As previously established, you need a blog to market your products.
In this case, a blog can be likened to a shop which houses your products, and where people stop by to have a glimpse of what you’re up to.
How to create a blog.
To start a blog, you need only three essential things. They are:
1. Register your Domain Name.
A Domain name is the name of your blog on the internet. It is what people type into the address bar of a web browser to access your blog (e.g yoursitename.com, yoursitename.net).
your domain name acts like your blog’s unique identifier. It establishes your blog on the internet and makes it possible for internet users to visit your blog.
You can purchase a domain name from a domain name registrar. Don’t worry, it’s nothing complex.
There are numerous domain name registrars from which you can register your domain name under and it usually costs a little over N1, 000 per year.
Some examples include GoDaddy, Namecheap, Qservers etc.
To register your domain name, simply go to any of the aforementioned registrars and type in your desired name. The system will look it up and inform you if it’s available or not.
If your domain name is available, you can then proceed to make the payment for your domain name acquisition.
2. Purchase a Hosting Plan.
To make your domain name accessible by internet users, you need a service called web hosting.
Web hosting is an internet service that houses your blog on the World Wide Web. It is where all the files of your blog/website are stored.
Think of it this way, If your domain is your address, hosting is like the actual house within which your site will live.
To “host” your website, you’ll need to purchase a web hosting package from a web host company.
Don’t worry, web hosting has become increasingly cheap these days. So be guaranteed it’s not going to bore a hole in your pocket.
Some popular web hosting companies are Namecheap, Hostgator, Bluehost, iPage etc.
The cost of hosting your blog varies from company to company. Costlier doesn’t necessarily mean better. Browse through the aforementioned hosting companies and see which works best for you.
Registering your domain name and purchasing your hosting plan from the same company will reduce your overall spending on both services.
I’d advise you to take advantage of this. Namecheap offers quality services and getting your domain name and hosting from them is very easy. Nothing complex.
Now, let’s proceed to the next step.
3. Choose a Blogging platform (or Content Management System).
Once your domain name and hosting is set up, you need to install a content management system into your blog.
I highly recommend WordPress.org because it is the best choice for beginners like you, who are just starting a blog.
WordPress is a free Content Management system (CMS) software that makes it extremely easy to manage, design and regulate your blog.
It is used to carry out all your blogging activities such as publish posts, change theme & designs, install plugins and build web pages without having to touch a single bit of code.
Again, It’s awesome for beginners!
Integrating WordPress into your blog is very easy. You can do this from your control panel.
Your control panel is a web-based hosting control dashboard that grants you access to manage your web hosting server.
The login details of your control panel will be given to you upon purchasing a hosting plan from your hosting company. It’s nothing you can’t handle. I promise.
However, if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed with the entire process of starting a blog, my team and I can set up one for you in less than 10 minutes.
Yes! You don’t have to move a muscle. We do all the work for you. Contact Us Now!
Step #3: Create Quality Content.
Now that your blog is up and running and you’ve decided on a niche to focus on, the next step is to begin creating awesome content.
By content, I mean, publishing blog posts capable of attracting and retaining visitors to your blog. This is by far, the most crucial part, and perhaps, the most rewarding of the entire process of affiliate marketing.
I’ve already written a highly detailed article on how to write amazing blog posts. Ensure you look it up.
It’s heavily packed with information and resources to help you succeed in your quest to making money with affiliate marketing in Nigeria. I recommend you read it before going further. You can pick up from this post after reading.
What kind of content should you create for your affiliate marketing blog?
Remember the very first step we spoke about, concerning choosing a niche? Good. This is where everything begins to make sense.
If you’ve chosen a niche (at this stage, I presume you have). Coming up with content won’t be difficult.
All you simply need to do is come up with blog posts/articles that resonates around that niche.
If, for example, you have chosen the Fashion industry as your niche, you can start creating content about latest fashion trends (clothes, shoes, et al) — topics that resonate within the industry.
The purpose of creating quality content around a specific niche is to establish yourself as an expert in your industry.
When you’re able to successfully do this, your audience would come to trust your opinions and wouldn’t mind making a purchase based on your recommendation.
A good way to establish yourself as an authority is either to write product reviews or ever-green informational posts.
Writing product reviews involves you airing your unbiased opinions concerning products or services you’ve used or tried.
Your blog could be focused on writing reviews of several different kinds of products and helping your readers make the best decision about the product they want to buy.
After reading a review on your Blog, if the user clicks through to the product/service using your affiliate link, you get a commission.
You can also combine evergreen informational articles to your content strategy. This involves writing about industry news, updates or trends.
It is worth noting that before creating content for your blog, you should engage in a bit of keyword research—this will take guessing out of the equation—and equip you with the accurate knowledge of what your audience likes to read.
When you’re able to deliver the right content to the right audience, you’re going to see your affiliate income soar to great heights.
For more detailed information on how to carry out keyword research and create content that resonates with your audience, click the preceding link.
Step #4: Join a high-paying affiliate program and choose an affiliate product to promote.
Once you’ve decided on a niche and have your blog running, the next step is to source for affiliate programs where you can get products to promote.
There are a lot of affiliate programs out there today. However, choosing the one right for you would require for you to do a bit of digging. The research is well worth it since to a large extent, it determines your affiliate income.
What to look out for when choosing an affiliate program.
Are other merchants in your niche using this affiliate network/program?
Before touching base with an affiliate network/program, you want to be sure other merchants in your industry are partnering with them. This will help you measure your likelihood of success.
A key indicator is to look out for the popularity of the network/program.
How much commission do they pay?
This is perhaps the most important question to ask. How much commission you’re able to make from a product will determine your overall income from that program. You want to opt for a network that offers fair (relatively high) commissions.
Different affiliate programs offer different commission rates, depending majorly on the niche and product you’re promoting.
Some affiliate networks such as Clickbank pay as high as 50% – 70% in commission. Again, this depends on the niche and product you’re promoting.
Making the right choice: The best Affiliate program.
The right affiliate program for you depends on your niche and audience. There are numerous affiliate programs currently available that offer products that cover practically any niche imaginable.
A simple Google search can help you get started on your research.
You can also check out this detailed guide by Adam Enfroy on some of the highest paying affiliate programs.
When you’ve successfully signed up with an affiliate program of your choice, all that’s left to do is to choose a product/service to promote. Get your affiliate link and place into your blog and begin promoting it.
You should only choose products that you feel would be useful to your audience. Promoting the wrong product to the wrong audience would be counterproductive. You won’t any make money.
Let’s consider a scenario where you’re running a fashion blog. It would be very wise to promote clothes, accessories or shoes— products that resonate well with your users.
Also, common sense would make it clear that promoting electronics such as TVs or phones to such an audience won’t be productive.
You can choose to write a review on the product or service you’re promoting or better still, you could include the link within the body of your blog posts. This is often more effective.
Piling up the affiliate income: The odds are in your favour.
The most essential element to affiliate marketing is tracking. Affiliate networks provide tracking software that places a cookie on a user’s browser when a user clicks on your affiliate link.
The cookie has a specific period it remains stored on the user’s computer. This time frame is determined by the merchant. It could be between 30 – 40 days.
This means that if a user performs the desired action within the cookie period, you’ll be awarded your commission.
Now that we’ve covered to the core of affiliate marketing, let’s talk on how to get people to see your blog and possibly get them to click your affiliate link.
Step #5: Build an audience: Drive traffic to your blog.
All right, my friend, this is the part we’ve been waiting for. And I have a good reason to save for last— you can’t successfully scale this step if you neglect the aforementioned steps we’ve already covered.
This single part of this guide will determine your affiliate marketing success. To make money with affiliate marketing, you need to get people to see view your blog
Once you’ve successfully created your blog, signed up with an affiliate program and shown you have something valuable to offer in your niche [by publishing quality content], it’s time to build your audience and promote your affiliate link.
I’ve already covered this step in detail in this exhaustive guide:
Do check it out.
Now, let’s scratch the basics on how to drive traffic to your blog and promote your affiliate link. For a detailed guide, read up the aforementioned article above.
As at 2020, there are over 3.8 billion active social media users in the world. Joining one of these social media platforms will be an effective way to build a target audience, grow your brand, foster customer relationships, and drive visitors to your blog.
A good place to begin is Facebook. All you need do is create a Facebook page. You can go further by sharing your content with your friends and also encourage them to help you broadcast.
For faster results, you can employ the use of Facebook ads to promote your blog posts to reach more people.
2. Build an email list.
An email list is undoubtedly the most reliable means of generating traffic to your blog.
Most users who stumble on your website may never return, but setting up a system designed to collect their emails before leaving can be an effective way of getting them back to your site whenever you publish new content. This is known as email outreach.
It involves the process of getting users to subscribe to your mailing list; whereby you get their emails to alert them whenever a new blog post gets published on your blog.
This is the reason why it is advised to start building an email list the very moment your blog goes live.
When a user subscribes to your email list, it probably means they find your content valuable and they have some level of trust in you.
You can leverage this medium and use the opportunity to recommend your affiliate products/service to your subscribers.
Email marketing is the most effective way of promoting your affiliate link.
3. Improve your blog’s SEO.
SEO means Search Engine Optimization. It is a long term approach to generating traffic to your blog. It involves tweaking your blog and its content to make it more visible to search engines.
Optimising your blog content to meet search engine requirements will give a huge boost to your blog traffic, and consequently increase your affiliate income.
If done rightly, you can start seeing results in only a matter of months. Although SEO takes time to yield results, it is, however, the best means of generating traffic to your blog.
Bringing it together.
Making money with affiliate marketing in Nigeria involves a considerable amount of work. However, the information shared in this guide is a great place to kick off your journey towards making your first affiliate sale.
