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How Working Professionals can earn extra Income thru Affiliate Marketing

Published On : February 1, 2024 Category(s) : Digital Marketing

Can Working Individuals make Extra income via Affiliate Marketing?

Have you ever felt like the income that you earn from your 9 to 5 job is not sufficient enough to meet your needs and wants? We’ve all been there! It feels like you’re putting your best foot forward at your workplace everyday and still you’re getting paid peanuts for your efforts. But you can’t quit either because you’ve got bills to pay. Don’t get disheartened though because you can generate extra income through side hustle. 

For starters you need to have three things, and i.e. confidence, determination and a skill that you can monetize. It’s not necessary that the skills that you monetize through your full time job works in case of side hustle too. So, you need to find a skill that doesn’t consume much of your time during the learning phase and that can also fetch you great income through side hustle. You can find these two qualities in affiliate marketing.  Since affiliate marketing is a field that can help you earn money online while sitting at home.

Before hopping onto the tips and tricks let’s first find out what is the basic process of starting out as an affiliate marketer. 

• Find a niche that aligns with your interests and that is profitable too. 
• Research for your competition, keywords and profitable affiliate program in your niche.
• Decide one platform through which you want to promote products. You can create your own blogging website, leverage social media platforms or go for email marketing. 
• While looking for the affiliate programs you need to consider factors like, the company’s reputation, commission rates, and whether their products resonate with your niche or not. 
• Once you find a profitable affiliate program, start creating high quality content related to the product that you will promote. The content should be helpful to the audience. Try solving the user’s problems through your content. 
• Build an audience around your niche. Share your work on social media platforms and optimize your content for SEO, so that it boosts your visibility.
  
  In the coming section, we will provide you with some essential tips that can help you start earning through affiliate marketing without hampering your performance at work. 

Hacks to earn through Affiliate Marketing as a Working Professional

Focus on micro-niches

The world of affiliate marketing niches is pretty vast. If you are going to target a wider niche, let’s say, health and fitness then it will become difficult for you to grow quickly. And since you don’t have enough time, you should cut down on the sub-niches. What we mean by sub niches is that instead of targeting the entire fitness niche go for specific fitness goals like, muscle building for beginners and fat loss for busy professionals.
This way, you will be able to attract a more engaging audience that are looking for specific fitness solutions. It will also help you to grow your affiliate marketing business in no time.

Here’s how you can achieve your goals of targeting specific audience:

• During your research phase you can devote at least 30 minutes to researching sub niches that align with your interest.
  
• Once you find a sub niche, you can go around looking for some discussion groups on social media platforms like Facebook. Look for those people who are interested in your niche. Try to understand their pain-points. Use those pain points in your content to attract a wider chunk of audience.
  
• For example:  If you are targeting a fitness niche then you can target some underserved categories. Like there are less healthy snacking options out there for gym people. So, you can try tapping into that category. The idea here is to be unique and promote products in the form of problem solving. This way you will be able to build a loyal audience.  (Onohosting vs Hostinger)
  

Save time on content creation

We understand how difficult it gets sometimes to create content when you’ve got such a busy schedule. Especially when you’ve chosen the path of written content creation. It consumes your brain and can also lead to burn out. In such a case, you can go for short but effective content creation. Because these days users have become lazy that they don’t have time to read your long stories. Neither do you have time to write long stories. So, it is a win-win situation on both ends.
Consider writing in 500 words or so. You can go for small product descriptions or some actionable tips that add value to the reader’s time. 

You can devote a minimum of one hour to writing blog posts. You can use platforms like Medium, twitter, LinkedIn pulse for posting short content. From ranking purposes too, these platforms are good. 

Here are some example of short but effective content topics in the fitness niche:

• 3 healthy and tasty lunch meals for busy professionals
• Top 3 running shoes that fits every foot and budget
• 10 minutes glute workout exercises
  

These are some short and effective ideas that you can create your content around. You can find some similar content ideas for your niche. The content ideas should be crisp and attention grabbing.

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Social Media Scheduling 

When you are in a 9-5 job your entire schedule feels like it’s stuck in a loop. It feels like you are living the same day everyday and when you become so restricted, missing out on important things becomes pretty normal. So, it’s really important that you create a content buffer and schedule it for the entire week or a month. This will save you from the stress of creating content last minute and you don’t have to make the effort of posting every single day.

Here’s a dummy action-plan for scheduling posts for social media:

• From Monday to Friday, you’re busy with your job. So, weekdays are definitely not the right time for scheduling. 

• You can block Fridays for this task. Since on Fridays there is no pressure of rushing to the office the next day. You can schedule posts for the next week till friday and on next friday you repeat the same thing. 

• You can utilize your weekends to create engaging content for social media. Write engaging captions and add affiliate links.
  
• You can use buffer’s “best time to post tool” to attract better leads and conversions.  This tool will help you schedule your posts on those timings of the days when a large number of users are active on social media platforms. 

The idea is to stay consistent because if you will engage with your audience everyday, then it will be helpful for you to attract quick growth. 

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Take help of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence can be your best friend on those days when you don’t even have time to breathe. You can leverage AI tools to get some of your work done in less time. 

Below we’ll mention some AI tools to ease your work.

For Email Marketing:

• You can use tools like Mailchamp, convert kit or Active campaign. 
• These tools can help you generate emails informing people about your niche or simply driving them to purchase. 
• You can drive new subscribers by creating email content around helpful tips and adding affiliate links naturally in your content. 

For Social Media: 

• You can leverage tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout social. These tools will help you save valuable time.

• These tools will help schedule your posts for a week or month. This way you will not have to spend your work hours scheduling posts and you don’t have to juggle between your full time job and side hustle responsibilities.  (How do I Unlock More Lens on Snapchat?)

• You can create engaging captions and simply put youtube affiliate links into the caption organically. 

For Content Writing:

• There are many AI tools that can help you write good content for your affiliate products. You can simply give it a command about what kind of content you want, the format of the content and the main points that you want it to cover.
• Use Bard, ChatGPT, Bing chatbot  or SurfersAI to generate content. 

CAUTION: Use these tools in moderation if you don’t want Google to penalize your website. Since Google appreciates content that is written for humans not robots!

Conclusion

So, to all the 9-5 hustlers, do not settle for less! Do not let your job restrict you to the cubicles. Find your passion and start working passionately towards it. It is really important to have a backup these days. Aside from your job, make a road map for your side hustle and start earning extra income through Affiliate marketing. Initially, you will have to devote more time but with time things will become easy for you. And who knows you might be the next successful affiliate marketer.