In this post I want to talk about one of the endeavors I took. It was while on the path to do a startup. It was the year of 2019. I was going through some ideas over the web, on the possibilities of starting a self sustaining business online. There were a lot of ideas available but the one which struck me was affiliate marketing. To summarize this program, “you get paid commissions for a product you help to sell.”
What is Affiliate Marketing?
There are a lot of affiliate programs out there. The most popular ones are by Click Bank and Amazon Associates Program(AAP). Quickly walking through the process to enroll within the AAP. You need a website, nothing fancy. A simple WordPress website will work. You need some articles on your website. These articles will consist of reviews about Top 10 products in any category you like. It should not be plagiarized. And then you need to fill up some details to sign up with AAP. They will take a couple of days or so to review your application and website. They will approve it and Voila, you are into the program.
Building Ecommarket.in
That was the easy part. Here comes the hard part. It takes a lot of patience and persistence to generate revenue through affiliate marketing. To be honest it is almost like a full time job. You need to make sure you’ve picked up a correct product niche. You need to target the correct keywords. Make sure they are not the most competitive ones. Also, make sure they are not the ones which are not being searched by users. Otherwise, there will be no traffic coming to your website. Taking care of search engine optimization (SEO), to rank your post in the specific keyword category you’ve chosen. And writing quality content which provides value to the user and helps them in finding what they need.
Ecommarket Team
Dipu, Subham and me were the first team. Later it quickly became a team of 6 people. Mayukh, Sushant(my cousin, now he is working in Amazon. I’m kinda proud of him, he has come a long way in his journey.) and Rajeev (Dipu’s childhood friend). As a team we published around 100+ articles over a span of 18 months.
We were working as a proper team, everyone playing their role. We had a sprint of 1 week. Having daily evening stand-ups(DSM). The team gave a lot of suggestions and improvements through out the journey. Our articles went from a simple review blog to something as a one stop solution for a product genre. Having product comparisons, better structure of information, FAQs, etc.
Every product in the article had a Buy on Amazon button which redirected to Amazon website. Now there is a catch. All the links embedded in the button had a special code. This code helped Amazon find out if the user landed on the website from a Partner’s referral. In turn, if any sales were successful, we would get commission.
Takeaway Experience
We didn’t earn much, but it was a good experience. Learned a lot about Copy-Writing, Digital Marketing, SEO, Word Press, Google Ads, etc. This experience helped a lot later down the line to work with other clients.
Overall it was a great experience. If someone consistently works on this over a span of a couple of years, it can become a side income. This is possible if they target the correct product niche. Nonetheless, it can’t become a main source of income. For it to become a main source of income it would take a full time of the day.
