Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online. It’s a source of income for many publishers. Almost all websites that are focused on producing content make money through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing in South Africa is still in its infancy, there are not many affiliate programs in South Africa and a lot of people are just learning the idea of affiliate marketing. On this post we will cover how to make money with affiliate marketing in South Africa.
This is because affiliate marketing is a bit complex, you will need to put in some hard work to be able to see substantial income. It’s easy to join most affiliate programs, most of them are free. The difficult part starts when you have to market the products or services.
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What is affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is basically marketing goods or services for a brand/business and get paid each time someone buys as a result of your marketing efforts. At most times this payment is a commission, it’s a win-win for you and the brand. The nice thing about this is that you are not responsible for anything outside of marketing, the business is the one responsible for making sure that the transaction is smooth.
Let’s say you join an affiliate program for an online clothing shop. All you have to do is advertise their products and they will handle everything from there. It sounds simple enough but is it?
Reality facing aspiring affiliate marketers
The truth is it’s not that easy, to be at a level where you make full time income from affiliate marketing you need to put a lot of hard work. The hard work doesn’t go into promoting the products but into laying the foundation for a successful campaign. Who are you going to promote these products to? That’s the most important question, will it be to your WhatsApp friends, Facebook friends, Family? How long will it take before they get annoyed of your adverts or completely ignore them?
In order to be successful with affiliate marketing in South Africa you will need to have a huge audience. You can’t expect to make any money from the few people you know, it doesn’t work like that. You need to have access to thousands of people.
Building an audience
There is a difference between joining an affiliate program and knowing how to make money with affiliate marketing in South Africa. You won’t make it in affiliate marketing without an audience. An audience is the people you have the power to reach on all your marketing campaigns. Getting an audience is not that difficult when you put in time and effort.
You can build an audience on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, through a blog and other platforms. The best ones to accommodate affiliate marketing in this list is YouTube and blogging. Instagram would be a very good option but it doesn’t allow users to caption images with links, which is how you advertise products. After signing up for an affiliate program you will receive a referral link. People have to click on this link in order to be tracked, the only place you can leave a link on Instagram is on your bio. You can place links in the description on every YouTube video and you can encourage people to click them during the video.
Pinterest is perfect for this too as you can place links on literally every image. Your main goal as an affiliate marketer is to get people to click on links, nothing does that better than a hobby blog. Not just any random blog about your family issues but a hobby blog. Which brings us to the next important thing; content. You won’t make money with affiliate marketing in South Africa without an audience.
Content: How to make money with affiliate marketing in South Africa
In order to attract an audience, you have to be a content creator. You have to develop content that people will love. The good part about this is that the range for content that you can develop is huge. You can develop a blog or YouTube about Real estate, fashion, sports, product reviews, anything. You can even create content about your hobbies, which the direction the industry is moving towards.
You can make a blog or YouTube channel about Camping if you are into camping, then provide content that your audience loves. This includes answering some of their questions, try to answer every possible question about your hobby and provide the best content. You will attract an audience that you can monetize with affiliate marketing, all hobbies work, there are websites that only produce content about birds and they make hundreds of thousands per month.
This is the hard part, this the part that most people don’t like but it gets easier and more enjoyable. Your hobby blog can bring in hundreds of thousands of visitors in a month. Imagine the number of people who can click on your link with that massive audience. There are websites that only talk about tea that are receiving massive traffic and have a huge audience. It’s best to start with your hobby. Open a YouTube channel or a blog and start producing content, personally I would advise you to go with YouTube because blogging is brutal to most beginners.
How to find success with affiliate marketing in South Africa
An audience is the key to your success, I’m writing this article from a perspective of someone who attracts a huge audience on a monthly basis. Realistically speaking, it can take you anywhere between 3 to 12 months to develop a strong audience. My best advice is that you should go with something you know really well or a hobby, then you will be able to attract an audience quicker. Most content creators start seeing an increase in audience at around 6 months. You can make full-time passive income with affiliate marketing in South Africa.
There are a few affiliate programs you can join, the Promta Web Services affiliate program pays anywhere between R180 and R900 for a single successful referral.
Conclusion
The purpose of this post was to educate on how to make money with affiliate marketing in South Africa. You will need to create an audience for that and there is no way around it, creating an audience takes time but it gets easier with time. Good luck on your affiliate marketing journey, do you have any thoughts or questions? Comment below.
Sthembiso Mkhwanazi
15 Sep 2021I don’t know you, but o bosso, I like you ! Thanks for the info, helps a lot and brings reality home especially for network marketers as well. It ain’t easy, but with effort, it’s worth it. As long as they don’t run like Bamboo… Oh yini na?!
sibabalwe
15 Sep 2021Thank you so much Sthembiso, it means a lot to me 🙂