There’s no reason to write your own product or create your own marketing content, you might think.

Vendors and merchants provide you with any and all marketing materials you’ll ever need, and there are plenty of affiliate marketers making money right now without writing their own stuff.

So why should I have to do it?

This may be true... but you could be even more successful if you create your own promotional material to go along with the products and services available from the vendors in your industry of choice!

figuring out what to sell – Most people starting out in affiliate marketing pick their product first, but it’s actually more effective to do it backward.

If you start with a product in mind, then you might spend all your time researching that one thing and never make any money because none of your competitors are offering anything similar. Instead, find an industry that you think is worth promoting (not the next Facebook, which doesn’t exist) and come up with several ideas for products or content within that industry.

Once you have at least three good options, choose one and develop a website around it.

Affiliate marketing is popular for a reason. You can easily make a lot of money by promoting other people’s products, including many that are very expensive or hard to find in stores.

When you become an affiliate for these high-value items, you can earn as much as 50% commissions on every sale. That means getting paid to promote companies like Amazon and Apple!

It’s also possible to build your own product and then use affiliate links in your content to make commissions off sales from it. This is called affiliate marketing, but there are lots of different ways to use it since all you need is some sort of link that refers back to whatever you want (website, social media post, etc.). Affiliate marketing is great because anyone with a computer can do it.

You can start a free site on Squarespace, WordPress, or Bluehost and get your affiliate website up and running quickly.

Then all you need to do is pick a few vendors to partner with (Niche Pursuits provides some suggestions) and start writing about their product.

If you want to make money as an affiliate without any initial investment, there are two ways to do it: paid advertising or contextual advertising. Paid advertising methods include Google Adwords and Facebook Ads; contextual advertisers use blogs.

When deciding whether or not to use paid or contextual advertising for affiliate marketing, consider that contextual is often less expensive because it's more straightforward (as opposed to purchasing keywords), but it depends on your goals.

The easiest way for you to create an affiliate site that is versatile, and works great for any business is right here.

Yes, you’ll have to come up with your own sales copy. No worries, though; if you do a little digging around on Google and YouTube, you’ll quickly figure out everything you need to know about affiliate marketing.

It just takes a little research, but once you've got a plan in place it's easy to promote products online. You'll want to make sure that whatever product(s) you're promoting is actually well-matched for your audience (and for your skillset).

On one hand, it doesn't matter what products or services you're promoting; people buy stuff because they want solutions.

Affiliate marketing has one major advantage over other types of sales and marketing—it’s easy.

What that means for you, as a business owner, is there’s no need to come up with your own product or marketing content. Instead, you can partner with an affiliate program to market their products for you. As an affiliate, you don’t need to invest in costly inventory; instead, you can help promote other companies products and services while earning a commission on all sales they generate.

While that freedom can be a big benefit (after all, who doesn’t like making money without having to carry inventory?), it also means that your job as a business owner is slightly different than if you had created your own product or service. Instead of producing content and selling it directly to customers, you are serving more as a middleman: promoting someone else’s goods and generating revenue from each sale.

The internet makes that very possible indeed: If you have any interest in photography at all, then Vistaprint is probably already on your radar. The company provides everything from promotional materials (stickers! T-shirts! Banners!) to wedding invitations at affordable prices—and often next-day delivery too.

So what makes Vistaprint so popular? Well, for one thing, they really do offer some awesome deals; but beyond that, it’s their ability to reach customers on an incredibly personal level thanks to their online marketing tools.

Anyone can create a custom design from scratch using click and drag technology; there are also pre-designed templates with tons of options and preset text fields for things like addresses and dates.

They even have a tool where customers can upload their own images or photographs—but they’re not just limited to turning them into prints; Vistaprint also allows them to customize pretty much anything else as well!

Affiliate links are an integral part of affiliate marketing, but you should use them only when it’s relevant.

In other words, if you wouldn’t be comfortable making a recommendation without promoting a product or service with an affiliate link, then go ahead and include one in your content. You don’t want to overuse affiliate links or place them in a way that doesn’t make sense for your audience—it makes your recommendations look insincere and can negatively impact credibility (and sales!).

We advise keeping track of which products you are legitimately interested in and would recommend to friends, as well as tracking all of your clicks/purchases/etc. on services like Google Analytics. That will give you a better idea about how many affiliate links you should be using per post and where they might fit into your content schedule.

Even though we might tout our favorite products from time to time, The Team Really Doesn't endorse any specific program or company. We're here to help educate you on what's out there so that YOU can decide what's best for YOUR business! 🙂 -Lamar

Websites like Long Tail Pro and SpyFu can help you find keywords related to your niche that people are actually searching for.

Ahrefs is a tool that not only shows you how much traffic your competitor’s websites are getting, but it also gives you a list of similar websites, so you can see what they’re doing right.

SEMRush will show you how much traffic your competitors are getting, as well as which ads they’re using to get it.

It will also show you what keywords they’re targeting to get that traffic, along with their conversion rates and other important metrics.

Finally, RunYourSite has a fantastic Affiliate Software Reviews series where it shows product comparisons between all of its top affiliate software picks.