 The way I think about affiliate marketing is that the internet has turned the world into one small global village. So you will be operating targeting your traffic from the US because they are the people who are known to buy only at the most but you are actually seated in your bed, sitting somewhere in the resample. So it's that concept. The world is a global village so you can do business with the Americans who are still in Kenya. So that is how we work in affiliate marketing. So forgetting the clickbait title about insider secrets because they are actually no secrets to making money with affiliate marketing. Let me first start by trying to explain who I am. So who is Patrick? I'm a young man as you can see but I'm married. I graduated in college in 2012 with a degree in mass communication and journalism. From 2012 I termed until the early 2013 when I got a job. I got employed for one year and then I was like nah this thing is not for me. So from 2014 when I quit my job came to 2014. I started my first niche website which unfortunately was never successful. I earned like $15 only for the lifetime of the website which was like one year. So I registered the domain name like April of 2014. Tried to make this thing called affiliate marketing work. I couldn't hack it so by 2015 I dropped the domain name but I didn't drop the vision of being an affiliate marketer. Of being my own employee sitting at home and making your own money. So continued learning from 2014, 2015. Come 2016 I started another niche website. So those were two straight years of learning. It was not easy. It was a lot of hustle. You're not employed, you're trying to make ends meet, trying this and that. But in 2016 I had my first major break with affiliate marketing. I started a website after learning for two years. Those two years had instilled in me the knowledge that I needed to successfully make affiliate marketing work. Unfortunately it's that knowledge although a little bit of it that I want to share with you today. And we will start by defining affiliate marketing. For those who are still wondering maybe what is this animal that we are calling affiliate marketing. So what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is simply a system of business where a merchant say this is the merchant. We will give him a name, maybe Ken, the English name that was dropped. Then the merchant has some products that he needs to sell. But then he cannot make a lot of sales by their own. So they need you, they need you to push the products in the market. So they get to another person, the middle person here called an affiliate network. An affiliate network is simply a group of a kind of a company that now connects the merchant with you. You as the publisher, the guy who is running your website on WordPress or your blog on WordPress, you are a publisher. Then there is the merchant, there is the affiliate network and there is you. So you as an affiliate, you produce content, you reveal maybe these products that you want to affiliate with. Products from the merchant connected by the affiliate network. Then you put this content on your blog. Maybe you are reviewing this pen. What do we call this kind of pen? It's a mark or a felt pen. So maybe you are this huge fan of marker pens. Maybe you work with marker pens and felt pens and you really want guys to know which is the best marker pen to buy. So maybe you review a list of them. And you publish that content on your blog. On that content, you have a special link that you've been given by the affiliate network to work with. So when a person comes and clicks on this link, it will take them to the merchant's website where they go and buy this pen and you get a commission from that. So that's the basic concept of affiliate marketing. But it gets interesting. You don't know anybody with a question about affiliate marketing up to there? So the history of affiliate marketing dates back from way back in 1996 only in affiliate marketing. That was when Amazon, the big giant e-commerce website Amazon, they popularized the idea of affiliate marketing back in 1996. And it has grown so many other companies have picked it up. There are so many affiliate networks that exist. And next year we are estimating that they spend on affiliate marketing. Money that will be paid to affiliates, guys who publish content will be in the range of $13 billion. I don't know what kind of a stake you will get from that. But there's a lot of money from affiliate marketing. And there are so many affiliate marketing programs. I'll get to them later. Also, one thing is when you're running into this field of affiliate marketing, you will find them refiled by different names. You will be associated program, internet affiliate marketing, direct marketing, performance marketing, partner marketing, paper performance marketing, and of course the popular referral program. Some of the affiliate marketing already went through that. So where do you come in? So where do you come in as an affiliate marketing? I already went through that. You come in because you are a publisher. You have a site. You review products or you just write general content. Maybe you're speaking about the adventures that you had in Samburu and the kind of camera that you are using. And when you mention a camera, maybe it's a Nikon or Canon, you have a link back to that product. Maybe on the merchant site. And if a person comes and clicks on that special link and goes and buys that camera, you get a commission. So that's where you come in as an affiliate. You are a publisher. You basically publish content. And when people read the content, like it, maybe trust you, they buy through your links, you get a commission. So what's the advantages of affiliate marketing? You want to become an affiliate marketer as opposed to maybe other lines of online work. For one, it's one of the best ways of making money online. Seriously, it's passive. It gets to a point where it's totally passive. Right here when I was yesterday, I think I have made around $300. Just seated in this conference hall. Because I have my website, which is already there, it's ranking. People are coming, they are reading content. They are getting interested in the content. They are clicking over to merchant sites and money is trickling down into your account. So it's one of the best ways of making money online. I don't know how many of us are in self-employment. How many work online? Quite a number of us. So I don't know what you do online, but I won't force you to become an affiliate marketer. It takes passion and it takes a lot of time, a lot of time. It's so at first, but you get to enjoy the fruits later. So you also get to work from home and then it has a low starting capital. Like if you want to get started with affiliate marketing, all you will ever need is maybe your laptop, which is 99 cents and maybe hosting, which can get very cheap nowadays. So the startup capital is really small. You won't see it trying to raise capital to get started. Affiliate programs are free to join. Most affiliate programs you will never pay to join an affiliate program. The only capital you need is the capital to get started as a web publisher, as a trusted web publisher. If you can't write, maybe you will need to hire content developers. So really the capital should not be an issue. Then there are examples of affiliate marketing sites so that you can see when we are talking about an each site, when we are talking about an affiliate marketing site, what kind of a website are we talking about? How do you start it? Are these like some really out of these world websites all? What kind of websites are they? So I have examples here which you can maybe jot down if you are writing notes. The first example I have there is called doublestrollercenter.com. I have another example, babygealab.com. There is sweethome.com, the sweethome.com, and there is thewaiakata.com. The last two examples are really huge publishers which you can learn from if you really want to grow big in affiliate marketing. They are quite huge in the space. They write reviews about almost everything and then they are owned by these big media companies. I don't know whether anybody has been following these. Steven, maybe you can help me. There were kata plus the sweethome, who owns them? New York Times. Yes, they were bought by New York Times. They were started as small websites but then they grew and they were bought for a lot of money, billions of shillings. Just from the guys who had started them, writing reviews for products here and there. The other two examples are really like what we would be doing as the normal guys maybe when you're just starting, you just put yourself in a niche, a very specific niche. We are at the Dabustrura Center.com. It's about these strawras for babies. That's a guy who has started a website, a niche website. We call them niche websites. I'm affiliate niche sites. He has decided to focus on only one topic about these Dabustruras. I don't know exactly what they are. Maybe it's the wheels that they are called Dabu. Then we have baby gear lab. That's another example of a very specific niche website that only reviews things to do with babies. Getting an insight, you don't have to have something that is out of this world. Then some of the best known affiliate marketing network is there to affiliate networks out there. We have a CPA marketing called Max Bounty. There's a company called Max Bounty. There's another company called LinkShare. There's Amazon Associates, which is the most popular and the one that I would recommend you guys if you feel like you would like to get into this. I recommend starting off with Amazon Associates because there are a few advantages to starting with Amazon Associates. It's the conversion rate. There's something we call the conversion rate. The number of items that people will go and buy when you send people over to a march and to websites, how likely are they to buy? That's what we call the conversion rate. Amazon Associates has really worked on their conversion. They really know what they're doing as much as it comes to converting site visitors into buyers. They really do very well with conversions. The other affiliate network is called CJ, Commission Junction. That's an affiliate network called Commission Junction. Those are a few of the examples and all of them are free to join. If you have a good site, you write content and you'd like to monetize that content using affiliate marketing. These are some of the most recommended networks that you should join. I'm going to throw most of it because I think my brother did a very good job explaining most of it. They're affiliate marketing cycle, still trying to explain the whole concept of affiliate marketing. Buy and looking for products. Buy and somewhere looking for products. Most of us go to the internet to do research before we can buy anything. I don't know when was the last time you bought something without first of all maybe doing some research, maybe if you were shopping online. So maybe you would say an example of a product that goes really well is maybe you want a bed for your baby. So when you're wondering maybe you want to shop online. So maybe to Google and type something like best toddler beds. So that's a buyer looking for a product. This is a person that is very ready to buy a product, the product that you recommend. So in case you've written about best toddler beds on your site, maybe you love babies. You can't just be able to see the baby sleeping on a bad bed and you write an article about best toddler beds, toddler beds, best baby mattresses and all that. Those are called keywords. The one I mentioned best is they are called keywords and they come in when people are looking for products. So a buyer would look for a product. Then your site will appear. When they Google for that product, when they're looking for that product, the best they can buy. Fortunately, if you have optimized your site well enough, there's something called such engine optimization. If your site is well optimized, then the buyer will come to your, the person looking for the product will come to your website and then you will redirect them to who they are, the product is being sold. Then you will get a commission. The buyer will buy the product and you get a commission. Bia looking for product, your site where they affiliate, you have affiliate links, redirect it to the product page, the merchant website, buys the product, you get a commission. Straight forward, right? Yes. Let me get to the second part of this. The first part was mostly about explaining what an affiliate program is so the part two, how do you actually get now to the physical bit, how do you start your site and get into these affiliate marketing thing. So it's really simple, it's a three step thing. The first one, we call it niche and keyword research. You have to research your keywords and the niche that you will get to. A niche is that circle, that area of specialization where as a publisher you specialize that I'll mostly be writing on my blog about this. You may decide that I'll mostly be writing about when racks. I'm a bakery racks or something else. That is your niche. You have to research. There's so much that goes into researching, like you have to weigh the competition, how competitive is this niche? Who are the other people who are writing the same content as I am? How do you beat them in this game? That is part of nature research. You want to go where there is literal competition. You want to find that the people who are publishing information in that space are not the big brands. They're not the likes of Forbes, they're not the likes of NY Times, they're not the likes of Huffington Post. You want to find sites that are weak. There's so much that goes into that. We don't have enough time to go into details about it. You have to do your research. The best niches will usually be one where there are accessories available. If maybe you want to talk about water purification that could be a niche by itself. You want to talk about water purification and their accessories. How many products can I write on this niche? How many products can I review? How much information does this niche actually have? You have to get a niche that has accessories available and maybe you can write a lot of content about it. The bigger industry that ties into that and then you have to get a niche that is not seasonal and a niche that is actually growing. Niches grow and niches fade. You can get into something where you can find that it was a hype like the Bitcoin thing. Then it comes sliding all the way down. So we have to find a niche that will actually be growing. Something that has potential to grow. Something that's not a fund. Something that will not come today and then tomorrow. You also have to avoid seasonal niches. If you want to make money all year round you will have to avoid seasonal niches are those where maybe the products are on demand in winter or summer. So what happens when it's out in spring or it's not winter and you're writing about winter products or it's not summer and you're writing about summer products. So you have to avoid seasonal niches if you would like to make money all year round. But if you don't mind making money during winter only or during summer only you can go ahead and write, get a niche in those seasonal markets. So the next step that was the first step about getting started the field marketing doing niche research. The next step is about setting up your site which is really easy. I hope if you are developing the house you probably know this. You have to get a good domain name and hosting very basic. You have to create incredible long form content. Nowadays and especially if you want to win over in this game of affiliate marketing. You cannot do with short article pieces maybe 500 words. A thousand words is still short in some markets so you really have to create incredible content. Content that people want to read but also make it long Gugu's favoring long form content over short pieces of content. The best way to know whether you're writing content if you get into these is maybe you're writing about the best basketball shoes. Try to see the first person the sites that are ranking on the first page of Google when you type like best basketball shoes how many words are those sites the content on that page, on those pages how many words is it. Try to match that or even go deeper than that. Then in setting up your site also optimize your site for the keywords you are targeting like your content must be backed up by keywords. There's something that we call keywords and there are tools to find what are keywords there. There are words that people use over and over again. People in a certain niche, in a certain market when they're looking for information online they will always almost always use the same kind of words. Almost always use the same kind of words. So if it's about best camera for nature photography you'll find that that is a keyword on its own. People who are interested in that type of gadgets will always use those words. So you'll find that maybe in a month we have people typing that same keyword. People from different locations like 5000 people typed into Google best best camera for nature photography 5000, 10,000 they are called keywords and you have to really know what keywords you are targeting and make sure that your content is well optimized for them. Then the final step into this journey is to promote your site rank and of course bank. So the reason why we are doing this so how do you promote your site? Amos I believe that is his name. The guy was here talked about creating backlinks for your content. There are various ways to create backlinks for your content. I want to go so much deep into that so if you really need to promote your site rank and bank ranking by ranking we are referring to the fact that if guy is typed a certain keyword your page will be the number 1 2 3 position up there on the Google search results. Google has a way of grouping those and it's usually through what we call SEO and the main part of SEO and the most effective part of SEO is called link building building backlinks back to your site getting somebody maybe you have a blog eye contact you link to me and other strategies that my brother there talked about then you can also share your content on social media and also if you are in some really good niches with some big money you can consider paid advertising for your content you can do Facebook advertising Google AdWords advertising Bing ads there are so many channels of advertising that are available nowadays so if you gauge your content your niche and see that it can pay back it can give me return on investment for the money or spend on advertising it's the easiest route to take but it's also one that can think you very easily and make you bankrupt so if you don't have deep data on the industry that you're getting into maybe consider SEO link building and social media sharing I think that will be mark the end of my short presentation