Is it worth starting a business from home with AliExpress?

When one hears affiliate marketing, the first affiliate programs that come to mind are none other than Amazon, Ebay and Aliexpress affiliate programs. In the web it has been thoroughly written on the Ebay and Amazon affiliate programs due to their market maturity and good promotion. From the first blick it may seem like the subject is exhausted, but it is not the case. AliExpress is a very new program and unfortunately has been insufficiently covered and discussed in the media. Only a small bunch of real AliExpress webstore owners told their success and failure stories. General public needs to hear their voices and opinions, because only they can answer the question “Is it worth starting a business from home with AliExpress?”.

Yes, it is.

It makes sense. AliExpress is one of the largest online shopping websites that touts having thousands of affordable products and services. The most distinguishing characteristics are the prices of the goods that are extremely low in comparison to other giant ecommerce portals and the size of the catalogues that are so enormous that require using special plugins to import the products’ affiliate links onto the affiliate website, such as a Wordpress-based Aliplugin.

That is probably one of the most important factors that needs to be accounted for. With AliExpress Affiliate Program, you can earn up to 50 % commission. The more products are on your website, the higher the possibility that you can get more sales. The more sales you generate, the more you will earn. If you add great SEO techniques that increase the possibility of each and every product being clicked and later bought, you can get pretty good results. It is just a simple equation.

Shall we get into it?

Products

AliExpress affiliate program has a great potential, because it operates worldwide and offers good commissions. However, it's not so popular in US yet. If you want to join the program, it is recommended: target such countries as Spain, Brazil, Russia, Eastern Europe, Australia. They can produce unbelievable results! It is extremely popular there, because people there can not afford buying expensive goods. Amazon or Ebay goods’ delivery is not as good as that of AliExpress in those regions. Due to the conscious and persistent efforts of AliExpress regional representatives, the delivery of AliExpress products is getting better every day which attracts more and more new customers and makes creating AliExpress webstore worthwhile.

If you wonder how to create regional Aliexpress affiliate websites, here is a ready solution for you. Now you can start building AliExpress affiliate sites for your own country in your own language. AliPlugin got a great new feature – importing products in different languages. Once you selected a desired language in AliPlugin settings, all the products data including titles and descriptions will be automatically translated and imported in your site. Just in one click!

Commissions

The majority of the challenges with AliExpress revolve around its big catalogues. An affiliate marketer needs a tool that could range all the products by commissions and sort/filter products in order to import only best-paying ones. The job of AliPlugin is to perform all those functions and even more. Besides one needs remember Aliexpress basics on commissions:

• Locking Period: Actions lock 60 days after event date.
• Cookie lifespan: AliExpress affiliate cookie's lifespan is 30 days. This is much longer than Amazon’s, which is valid for only 24 hours.
• AliExpress pays commissions with a month delay.

SEO

You can not sit still and wait that products convert on their own. It might have been a great strategy in the past when affiliate marketers were seeing the first light of the day, but definitely not now. Affiliate business is too competitive now and one has to be a clever salesperson to earn a good income on AliExpress Affiliate Program. In this context, a great but unfortunately underused technique by affiliates such as SEO comes to the fore. SEO is the best solution for ordinary commercial websites as well as affiliate websites. AliExpress allows getting very high commissions up to 50%, but on average the commissions are quite measly (4% - 15%). This means you will get a very modest equation outcome, if one of your parameters is as low as that. Get in touch with a professional company or do SEO on your own. There are a lot of simple guides there. But remember: you need to edit the content of then pages to create original non-duplicate materials and manage blog if you want to come at the top of the search pages. All posts should be over 1,000 words in depth. You can do some translations if you want some cheap but original content. Considering the fact that Google hates bad-quality affiliate websites, enjoying residual income for years to come without lifting a finger is now just an unrealistic dream. You have to provide intellectual work on the affiliate website.

Marketing

Think about the phrase “Affiliate Marketing”. The word “marketing” is part of the phrase affiliate marketing, but by and large, your responsibility as an affiliate is not to sell — that is the responsibility of the original page your affiliate links refer the visitor to.

At the very beginning of affiliate marketing journey, many affiliate marketers are overcome by completely stupid thoughts and desires to stuff the website pages with sentences and banners that yelled “PURCHASE THIS NOW!”. They do not try to give a friendly hand to the website visitor and solve their problems using Affiliate products. They only wish people would hit a link which could hopefully produce a commission for them.

Generally customers need to hear human advice when making a decision to purchase something or not — that’s the reason the products reviews were created in the first place. Such reviews were meant to be an authentic reaction from real buyers who generally do not pursue any commercial interests when write it.

Try talking more like an impartial reviewer rather than a fiercely competitive businessman and consider doing some research on the products to select only the good-quality ones, and eventually you will reap great rewards from this simple act of kindness by getting more purchases and returning customers seeking your advice.

Another great converting technique that can greatly help affiliate marketers is writing good blog posts in the form of comparison boards when promoting hot affiliate products with high commissions. You can choose the “key” product for a start and select several other similar products to compare with by placing alongside.

When customers are on a shopping spree, they have a tendency to prioritize and give high importance to various comparisons and countdowns which creates an illusion that half work is already done. You solved some of their worries by comparing things and making sales more probable.

By writing “5 Top Gadgets For _______” articles, you can not only help your visitors at such a difficult stage of decision making, but also facilitate sales and promotion of SEVERAL products simultaneously instead on only one.

Comparison web pages are not only very smart technique that can help your website's visitors a lot, they prove to be extremely profitable for you.

Website design and usability

In a nutshell, as an AliExpress affiliate marketer you offer a user a website to interact with. You have to pay a lot of attention to providing great UX, which is not so easy when you have a gigantic catalogue of AliExpress affiliate products that need to be presented in such a way that visitors can easily search, compare and learn about them. By creating HTML webpage and manually adding products you can produce something utterly ugly and cumbersome. You can not wield any authority when your website looks like rubbish.

Instead you can use simple tools like Wordpress or other CMS platforms and suitable plugins for managing AliExpress products. There is a unique AliExpress Wordpress plugin that is called Aliplugin. It allows leveraging all the tools that AliExpress provide and optimizing your campaigns for the best performance. AliExpress affiliate tools include banner ads, text links, and stats. Besides providing different import options such as bulk, selective and scheduled, AliPlugin gives you a great opportunity to customize the ecommerce themes and enjoy owning a real webstore. Creating a clean and beautiful web design for an AliExpress affiliate webstore have never been easier!