How to Sell Wine Online as an Affiliate Marketer

The wine industry is a big market and it’s expected to be worth US$303 billion in 2016. Imagine earning just a small percentage from this figure – what a lucrative business it would be.

So, if you are thinking about how to sell wine online as an affiliate marketer, you’ve come to the right page. In this article, I’ll walk you through the basic setups and foundation that will make your business a success.

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Why become an affiliate marketer when people can buy wine from the local stores? Well, I am sure you can relate to some of these scenarios;

• Not all salespeople are knowledgeable about their products.
• Some wines (especially the good ones) are not easy to get at local stores.
• Even when directed to eCommerce sites, choosing the right wine can be quite confusing for online shoppers.

Buying wines is like finding the right pair of shoes. You want something that fits, something with the right color and most importantly, something that’s worth your money. People have a lot of questions when it comes to choosing wine so it’s fairly common that they would go online first to search for more information. 

As an affiliate marketer, you can provide them with this information which will place you as a better reference than those clueless salesperson or the cluttered-looking online store. It would certainly offer people a better buying experience. 

Besides that, it’s way more affordable to create a business website than having to manage several hectares of land. Imagine how much faster you can work with different brands and market a product online. 

How to Sell Wine Online as an Affiliate Marketer?

1) Identify Your Niche

A niche is simply a group of people with the same intention and in this case, your niche is a group of people who are interested in buying wines online. Right off the top of your head, what type of audience do you think would fit into this niche? Here are some examples to get your hamster wheel running.

• People who are interested in food pairing.
• People who want to buy wine as gifts.
• People who drink wine for health reasons.
• People who buy wine for cooking.
• People who simply want to learn more about wine.

And the list could go on. When you think about how people would use wine in their daily lives, you’ll eventually find yourself a niche or sub-niche. From there, you can guide people on what type of wine to buy through your product review page. 

2) Build a Website

Building a website nowadays is very easy and I can assure you that it’s nothing technically challenging. Firstly, you’ll need to create a domain which is basically the URL of a website and this can either be keyword-rich or brandable names.

At SiteRubix hosting platform, you can purchase them for $13.99/year for .com and $15.99/year for the .org and .net extensions. See the examples below;

Keyword-rich domain

Brandable domain

After buying the domain name, you just need to connect it to SiteRubix hosting and a WordPress website will be created within minutes. It’s that simple. Now, let’s talk a bit about content creation.

3) Create Main Content

Just like any business, you want to provide some introduction to your customers before you sell them something. In WordPress, this type of content usually sits in the pages, as opposed to a blog that sits on posts. Here is some main content that I would recommend you write about first.

• An About Me Page – People like to know who they are buying or getting a referral from. Therefore, share with the audience a little bit about yourself or what makes you get involved in the wine niche. Tips – posting a picture of yourself in a vineyard can boost their level of trust towards you.  
• A Contact Page – This page allows people to contact you if they want to know more information.
• Evergreen Pages – Useful information that you’ll always refer the readers to. They are usually topics that will never grow out of trend (hence the term evergreen) and are quite comprehensive (about 1500 words or so). Here are some evergreen ideas that you can write about;  
  • How to Select a Good Wine
  • How to Select Red Wine
  • How to Choose White Wine

4) Write Blog Posts

In order to get people to visit/read your site from the search engines, you’ll need to create content and one of the most fundamental ways to do this is to write blog articles. Within a blog post, you are going to target a certain keyphrase which means the more articles you produce, the more audience you are going to attract to your website. 

Now, where can you find blog ideas to write about? I usually start mine with Google Search by using the Alphabet Soup Technique. I like this method because it’s easy and it reflects what’s trending on the current searches.

Look at what Google suggests for the ‘food pairing’ niche.

Here are other suggestions for the ‘wine for health’ niche.

And some interesting terms for the ‘wine for beginners’ niche.

Next, we’ll need to search for key phrases that have low competition so that it’s easier to rank on the search results page. Here is where keyword research comes into play. With the help of Jaaxy, I just need to type in the term, click search and check the level of competition (look at the metric called QSR) for each keyphrase. The lower the QSR value, the lesser competitors you’ll be facing.

For the term ‘best wine to go with turkey’, our QSR is 15. So that one is a good topic that can potentially rank.

For the term ‘is wine good for your heart’, the QSR is fairly high. But if you scroll down the keyword list, you’ll discover other terms that have much lower QSR values (see ✔) but are still relevant to our initial keyphrase.

In a nutshell, that’s how you come up with blog ideas and perform keyword research on them.

5) Search for Affiliate Programs

Now for the big question; how much can you make through a wine blog? Obviously, you need to be part of an affiliate program to earn sales commissions. Here are some programs that you can consider.

• Wine.com – 5%
• Wine Library – 5%
• Wine Tasting Network – 8%  

Say, if you are affiliated with the Wine Tasting Network, you can use text, product and/or banner links on your blog to point customers to their eCommerce site (which I think is very nicely done) 🙂

So, if the customer buys one bottle of “Vinum Cellars 2000” following your good product review, you’ll be making about $6 from one sale transaction. As you get more traffic to your review page, you could have 10 or 100 people buying through your recommendation.

If you do the math, that puts your profit range between $60 to $600 and that’s just from one single blog post. Imagine how much you can potentially earn from 100 over blog posts. That’s why it’s important that you keep churning high quality and relevant content on your website. 

You Don’t Need to Own a Vineyard…

To be able to learn how to sell wine online. All you need is a website and a large dose of passion/knowledge and you can attract every wine reader on the globe to buy through your affiliate blog. Just remember to adhere to these key points;

1. Understand the behaviors of the niche that you are targeting.
2. Research and brainstorm your keyword ideas. 
3. Write helpful content on a regular basis.
4. Search for companies with good commission rates and brand reputations.

I hope this article has gotten you excited about how to sell wine online. If you like to learn more in detail, please follow my recommended training site to get started. I’ll be there to guide you through so just reach out, okay.

Do you have any thoughts or questions about this topic? Feel free to leave them in the space below and I’ll get back to you.