Affiliate Marketing takes a lot of work and in this Affiliate Marketing Store with WooCommerce Guide will help to cut down some of that work.
This guide is for affiliate marketers that already went through basic affiliate marketing steps to create their website after choosing a niche.
If you have not already chosen your niche or built your website I recommend starting with my guide “Affiliate Marketing for Beginners Guide.”
In the “Affiliate Marketing for Beginners Guide,” you will learn what is affiliate marketing, how to choose a niche, and how to build your website.
If you have already built your website, let us move on to building an affiliate marketing store with WooCommerce below.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform that allows you to sell physical, digital, and affiliate marketing products. WooCommerce has lots of features that allow business owners to run a successful business online no matter the niche you choose. In this guide, we will be focusing only on affiliate marketing products with the use of your affiliate link for the product.
WooCommerce is free to use and no need to purchase additional services to have a professional-looking eCommerce store.
We personally have six different affiliate marketing eCommerce stores with different niches, and we use WooCommerce.
Installing the WooCommerce Plugin!
In your WordPress Admin dashboard scroll down to Plugins, Add New, and in the keyword, search block enters WooCommerce. The option as shown in the picture below should be showing for you, as mine is the first option.
By us already having WooCommerce installed, it is greyed out and staying active. However, yours should say install now, which you need to install and then activate. Do not worry about the other plugins that are showing, you do not need them.
Now go to the WooCommerce menu found in your WordPress admin menu and complete the setup process. WooCommerce setup is an extremely easy process and they walk you through the setup. You do not need to worry about setting up shipping, taxes, and payment options unless you are selling your own physical products or digital products.
Screenshot Software Services
You will need to take screenshots of products, as you cannot right-click to save products from merchants without their permission. You can take screenshots through your settings on your computer or down a windows app to make it easier. We use the Apowersoft Screen Capture windows app to take our screenshots as it gives many options to use.
Adding Your Affiliate Marketing Products
Now that you have a WooCommerce setup, it is time to add your affiliate marketing products.
In your WordPress admin dashboard, click on products under WooCommerce and add new.
Your screen should look like the image below!
To Start off with the demonstration of adding products we are going to use Amazon. As an affiliate marketer with Amazon you are giving them tools to use for free to add products to your website.
Pick a product, in this demo, am going to use a book. Most products already have a description and you will need to reword that description.
Add the title of the product in your product adding option as shown here.
Next is adding your reworded product description.
In the screenshot image above, you now see our reworded description added.
Next is getting your Amazon Affiliate link to the product and added it to WooCommerce.
To add your Amazon affiliate link, click on the text on Amazon SiteStripe bar and copy the highlighted link as shown in the image above.
Next, go back to your WordPress dashboard adding the product, scroll down to product data as shown in the image below.
Where it says Simple Product, you need to change that option to External Affiliate Product. Paste your affiliate marketing link in product URL, the button text is set by default as buy now and you can set the text as you wish. In this example, I use button text as Buy on Amazon along with the current price. See the image below to see updated product information for link and price.
Next is adding your screenshot image of the product.
Scroll back up to the title and copy your title text. Next scroll back down to the right side to the product image, click on the set product image. Select the product image from your computer and upload it. Where it says Alt Text, paste your product title in that box. The image below shows what your product image should look like when pasting the title. Once this is done, click on the button that says set product image.
You might be wondering why to copy the title of the product and paste it in the alt text of setting images. This is an important SEO process, as it helps with getting ranked on search engines like Google. For example, when you do a search on Google and click on images you will be taken to that website that the image returned results for. If no alt text set, then Google will not show your product to the people searching for that product.
Setting your SEO Description and Keywords in All-in-One SEO.
If using All-IN-One SEO or other plugins paste your product title in the proper section, paste the first sentence or two in the description, and your researched keywords related to your product in the keyword section.
If you need to research keywords, use the provided tool below to research keywords for your products. You can also view this lesson “Understanding Keywords” to get better understanding on keywords that need to be used in each product.
After everything looks good, scroll up click on publish the product. Click on view product after publishing to see how customers see your product.
The image above shows how the product used in the guide is shown to customers. If you look carefully you will notice an error our part, and that is not setting a category. When we published the product, it was set automatically to uncategorized. Now we need to fix this.
To fix is easy, just simply click on edit product, and set a new category on the right under categories and hit update.
Affiliate Disclosure Message
The affiliate disclosure message shown above our product is automatically set when we publish new posts or products with the use of a simple plugin called “FMTC Affiliate Disclosure.” This plugin saves me time on having to type out the affiliate disclosure each time a new product is added. If affiliate disclosure is not listed with each product, the affiliate partner like Amazon can suspend your account and you will not earn commissions.
Use with Other Affiliate Marketing Partners
Now you might be wondering if you can use it with other affiliate marketing partners like LinkShare, Commission Junction, eBay, Walmart, Target, ClickBank, and JvZoo. Yes, you can use the same steps as shown above in this guide to add the products to your WooCommerce Affiliate Marketing Store.
In the text option of adding your affiliate link, you can put buy at the merchant like Macy’s or Kohls. Make sure not to use the affiliate network name like LinkShare or Commission Junction, as you want your visitors to buy the product and not become an affiliate.
Final Words
Now that you have learned how to add affiliate marketing products in this “Build Affiliate Marketing Store with WooCommerce Guide” take the time to add several products to give your audience multiple buying options.
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