The Best Way to Do Affiliate Marketing in Kenya

• You should ensure to only market the products you understand and use
• Opportunities in affiliate marketing can only grow in future
• Affiliate marketing is a good way to grow your passive income

Affiliate marketing in Kenya is becoming popular mostly due to the rise both in uptake and usage of the internet in the country. What if I tell you today that affiliate marketing can become a full-time job? Would it interest you?

Naturally, we all want some extra income to help us in achieving our financial goals and ambitions. Thus, affiliate marketing is a proven way to achieve this goal. Let me tell you a secret, you don’t need a huge investment to succeed in Affiliate marketing.

However, most people who start affiliate marketing give up along the way. This is because they approach the whole process wrongly. The desire and need to make quick money make them forget success in this sector is a process. It requires consistency and hard work to reward well.

Allow me to guess that if you are reading this article this far, you have some interest in Affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate marketing?

I choose to call it the modern way of sales. This is because you are only paid by successfully selling a product or a service. The only difference with the traditional sales method is affiliate marketing is fully online.

As long you have an online presence, you can successfully become an affiliate marketer. An online presence means having a blog or a social media site. With billions of users visiting online sites daily, it has become the right space for businesses to push sales.

To achieve success, they partner with individuals that have a good online following and are influential in their areas of interest. Some key examples include having a blog that attracts a lot of visitors. Secondly, you can have a social media site that is very active and has a lot of followers.

Because affiliate marketing happens online, you need to find a way to have some presence there.  You can either start by creating a blog/website. If this is not your strength, you can do it through a social media account. The media doesn’t matter as long as you have a good number of potential customers that you can convert.

Benefits of Affiliate marketing

Now that you understand what affiliate marketing is, let us look at some of its benefits

It is a low-risk Investment– The nature of this business requires little capital to start and expand. There is also no loss of income as you are paid only when you sell. This makes it less risky in comparison with other businesses such as financial investments.

Low startup capital- In most cases, it is almost free to open a social media account. It also requires less than 10,000 shilling to create and run a blog making it possible for almost everyone to join the program

Ready market – Affiliate marketing involves targeting customers already on your blog or social media site ensuring there is a ready market to sell to. The only challenge comes during the first days when you are trying to grow your followers.

Flexibility – Affiliate marketing has no limitation in factors such as time and location. As long as your platforms are online, sales can happen at any time of the day. That’s is why it among the best ways to make passive income.

No income limit -Unlike a salary that has a set amount, there is no set income in this form of marketing. The commission is based on sales. Hence, the more you sell, the more you make.

Challenges of Affiliate Marketing

There is no doubt you are going to encounter some challenges when doing affiliate marketing. Just like every other business, it has its fair share of difficulties. Some of these are within your control such as quality content while others are external such as competition. 

Below are some examples of the major challenges facing the affiliate marketing business.

Lack of guaranteed income– Affiliate income is based on the number of conversions. Hence, if you don’t make any sales, there will be no guaranteed income. This also happens if your site is offline because you can’t reach your customers. This is different from other incomes such as a salary where the pay is guaranteed.

Takes time to create a market— For starters, the initial days are challenging due to the lack of a reliable and adequate customer base. It requires deep patience and persistence before you get a good market command. In most cases, this process could take years to do.

Competition- There is a lot of competition in affiliate marketing from well-established blogs and social media sites. This makes it a challenge for a beginner due to a lack of adequate resources and market presence. To overcome this challenge, you need to create competitive content that continues to attract a wide customer base.

The best way to do affiliate marketing in Kenya

Now that you understand the benefits of Affiliate marketing, let us review the best ways how to do affiliate marketing.

Step 1: Choose the right platform

Your platform choice will play a key role in the success of this business. Hence, you should ensure you are using you have competitive strength.

As an example, if you are a good writer, you can choose to create a blog. The same applies if you can make good videos. Use different video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok to target your audience. There are also those good at growing social media followers on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Hence, choosing the right platform is a critical first process to succeeding in affiliate marketing

Step 2: Determine the Area of Specialization

Specializing in your sales comes from the fact that you can’t sell everything. Hence, there is a need to sell goods and services that you know better about.

The key determinant of what to specialize in depends on the nature of your selling channels. As an example, if you are dealing with a finance blog, you should target to do affiliate marketing closely related to finance. The same happens to someone creating food content.

Another factor to consider when specializing in the followers. If you have a site that does food content, the followers and fans are most likely to have an interest in food as well. Hence, it is only reasonable to sell them content that is close to food such as recipes and spices.

Specialization also helps build trust with your customers as confidence in the long term.

Step 3: Select the affiliate to use

It is also impossible to market all the affiliates in the market even though you specialize. Hence, this creates a need to settle on the specific affiliates to market.

You should target affiliates that are easy to sell and customers can associate. This highly depends on the brand you are selling. Bigger and well-known brands are easier to market than smaller and unknown ones. Some of the biggest brands in Kenya doing affiliate marketing include Safaricom and Jumia.

Another factor to consider when choosing an affiliate is commissions. Remember that affiliate marketing is a business and hence you should only settle on the programs that give the best value for money.  To get more on this, check out my earlier article on the Top 10 affiliate marketing programs in Kenya.

Step 4: Grow traffic on your site

The more traffic you get on your site, the higher your chances of selling making traffic growth a priority. There are various ways through which you can grow your traffic including;

• Consistent site activity
• Creation of quality content. It should also be relevant to your readers.
• Marketing your site

It is also good to note that it takes time to grow a page and get adequate traffic. A process that could take years to do. Hence, if you are a beginner, you should be aware of this to avoid giving up along the way.

Marketing Is a continuous process if you want to make more. In case you have some extra capital, you can opt to pay for site marketing. This helps get more visitors to your site.

Step 5: Focus on Conversions

Remember you will only make commissions if you make a sale. Hence, getting traffic on your site is not enough if you are not converting. This could happen because of many factors such as selling the affiliates to the wrong customers.

If your affiliates are not selling, you need to go back to the drawing board and consider changing them. It is more like trial and error until you find the best-selling ones.

Step 6: Sell what you understand

Make it a habit to sell products and services that you consume. This makes it easier as you only give your customers products that work. Not all partners offer genuine products. Remember this is a business of trust. If you market substandard products, you will lose customer confidence impacting negatively your future sales.

Conclusion

I hope you have seen success in affiliate marketing depends on many factors. The only good thing is that the trade is very marketable if you get it correct.

The above steps are some of the best ways how to do affiliate marketing in Kenya. As more Kenyans embrace online presence, there will be more affiliate programs coming online in the future.

This expansion will translate to more opportunities for affiliate marketers.

Do not fear starting as long as you have the passion and will to put in the necessary work. Just like other businesses, gets better with time as you familiarize yourself with the market. The more you grow, the easier it will become and the more opportunities will come your way.

Happy selling.