Self-supporting or not, students like you do need money! Aside from tuition and other miscellaneous schooling expenses, there are other things that you’d need money for: projects and other school requirements, educational trips, books and gadgets that can help make studying a lot easier, etc. You don’t want to bother mom and dad who also have other expenditures to worry about, and you don’t have time to get a part time job. Still, YOU JUST NEED THE MONEY!

Well then, thanks to the Internet, there’s a perfect solution for you: AFFILIATE MARKETING.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Well basically, you just sell somebody else’s product’s or service’s online and get commission from the sales. You promote a certain site or product and get paid for every referral you get. As long as you’re using various affiliate marketing tools and earning money for every sale, click, download, registration or any other action, you are doing affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a practice that involves a publisher or third party referred to as an “affiliate”, who promotes a merchant’s product online and gets paid only for actual conversions. It makes use of various tools depending on the approach or marketing model used: pay per click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, e-mail marketing, etc.

Now don’t get intimidated with all the terms. Learning this lucrative source of semi-passive income is quite easy, if you follow these steps:

1. Find A Unique Niche

A niche is a segment of the entire market population that you want to focus on. In this context, it’s a group or place where online users share common interests and similar behavior as consumers. Focusing on a niche lets you focus on the ins and outs of affiliate marketing on one particular consumer group, allowing you to maximize your results for less effort—that, compared with marketing in many different niches.

In choosing your niche, it is best to pick one that you are passionate about, interest in, or knowledgeable of. This will make it easier for you to promote to that particular market segment and create a reputation within the community. You’d also want to consider the product demand, competition and profitability of products in the said niche.

2. Do Your Research

Check out consumer behavior in the said niche, especially their “language”. By “language”, it means that you find out the exact words (keywords) that they use when searching for products through a method called keyword research. Google, currently the top search engine on the web, has free tools to help online marketers on this.

3. Set Up Your Website Or Blog

To become a publisher or affiliate, you’d need a website—an online portal that would serve as a store where you sell other people’s products. Choose a good, appropriate and easy-to-remember domain name and set up your website as the base of your affiliate marketing activities. (Check out our article on starting your own blog.)

4. Pick An Appropriate Approach

As mentioned earlier, there are various approaches to affiliate marketing and it’s up to you to pick which one or combinations to use. You may easily scour the Internet for them. Don’t be scared to try out different strategies as it is one of the most effective ways to find out the best method’s for your niche or product’s. Should you go for content marketing, it is better to supplement it with social media marketing to maximize your exposure. Just don’t forget to use the keywords from your research for your articles.

5. Generate Traffic And Monetize Your Site

Of course, you’ll need to have an audience; otherwise, you wouldn’t have people to promote to. You can use various strategies to generate traffic to your site like uploading quality articles that search engines would consider worth the read and online users would want to read and share. You can also participate in forums, SEO, post appropriate videos on YouTube,  social bookmarking and networking, or write news articles, among many other techniques.

The thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to monitor it the whole time, yet it can still generate income. You can optimize your strategies and work on your marketing methods during your free time, so it doesn’t have to get in the way of your studies. It’s like having a source of income in a setup and schedule that best works for you. That is one of the reasons why affiliate marketing is such a good money-making opportunity for students!

What do you think?  Do you use affiliate marketing on your website/blog?  Please leave your comments below.