Introduction to Affiliate Marketing (Made simple for beginners)

 

You must have heard of the term “Affiliate marketing” on the internet. This post is an Introduction to Affiliate Marketing (Made simple for beginners). But, at first let us go over the definition of Affiliate Marketing. 

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In simplest words, Affiliate marketing is when you are promoting product of some companies. And when people buy that product through your affiliate link. You get a commission.

 

Mainly you are salesperson for that product of their company. You are helping them to sell their product. In return, they are paying you. The best part of being an affiliate marketer is that you can promote products from many different companies and earn commission for all of them. On the other hand, a salesperson can sell product of only one company.

As the topic is Introduction to Affiliate Marketing (Made simple for beginners). Let me demonstrate how affiliate marketing works.  

How does affiliate marketing work?

The merchant or the company of the product you are selling will provide each affiliate marketer with a unique link. So, they can track who was responsible for the sale their product.

When a person clicks on your link, the link will take them to their website. And a small file named a cookie will get stored on their device. The cookie stays active for a certain amount of time, mostly 30 days. But it can be longer. If the person who clicked your link buys, product from their website you get commission because it’s your link that sent them to your website.

The question every Beginner Affiliate Marketer asks, 

How much money can I make as an affiliate marketer?

Recently a poll was held on the STM Forum (I recommend you to join) asking, “How much do you earn in a year?”

Here is the result,

Image Credit to STM Forum

The simple answer to this question is “there is no limit to that”. How much money you will earn depends on your niche and the amount of dedication, work you are putting in. The most successful affiliate marketers earn six or even seven figures a month.

If you are looking examples,

• Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income had made over $100,000 in affiliate commissions in December 2017.
• Ryan Robinson, another affiliate marketer, reported over $19,000 in affiliate revenue in October 2019. 
• Another successful affiliate website—The Wirecutter—made an estimated $10 million in revenue, and was eventually sold to the New York Times for $30 million.

Do Keep in mind that these people have done an excellent job building their brand. It has taken them years of hard work to reach this level.

Now, you know what is affiliate marketing and how does it work. The First part of Introduction to Affiliate Marketing (Made simple for beginners) is done. Let’s discuss the second and most crucial part of the topic.  

How to get started with affiliate marketing?

I will explain affiliate marketing step by step. And I will also provide you with the resources you need. 

To get started with affiliate marketing you must follow these seven basic steps.

• Decide on a platform
• Choose your niche
• Find affiliate programs to join
• Create great content
• Drive traffic to your affiliate site
• Get clicks on your affiliate links

Step #1: Decide on a platform

Basically, you can do affiliate marketing on any social platform such as facebook, Instagram, pinterest. But it would be easier to build an audience and it will also allow you to increase your affiliate sales if you use one of these two ideas.

1) Blogging

Starting a blog nowadays is much easy and cheap. You will find plenty of blogging platforms and they will cost you only a few dollars a month. Not, to mention you will find plenty of tutorials that will guide you how to get started. 

Once your site is ready for work, the second step is to optimize your site for search engines to get a better ranking.  From there you can add the affiliate links to your contents.

WordPress.org – Best for Self-Hosted Blogs

WordPress.com – Best for Free Blogs

Wix.com – Best for Small Websites

Joomla.com - Best for Small Websites

Medium.com – Best for Free Blogs

Ghost.org. – Best for Self-Hosted Blogs

Squarespace.com – Best for Drag & Drop Feature

Weebly.com – Also Best for its Interface

Blogger.com – Best for its completely free feature

Tumblr.com – Best for personal and micro blogging

2) YouTube

Another platform is YouTube. YouTube is free. Creating and uploading video content to YouTube don’t require any costs.  After uploading optimize your videos for SEO, add affiliate links in your description.

BookTube is one of the best examples, where various YouTubers review books.

Do keep in note that you must need to disclose the fact that you are including Affiliate links. FTC (The Federal Commissions) wants you to be transparent when you are receiving income from an endorsement.

Step #2: Choose your niche

In the second step of Introduction to Affiliate Marketing (Made simple for beginners) I will suggest you to choose your niche perfectly. When starting a blog or youtube channel the first thing you should keep in your mind to choose a perfect niche. If you want to do health do health, if you want to do foods do foods. Choose a specific topic. Choose a topic that focuses on a specific category.

Keeping your topics tight can help you build a more focused audience and potentially help you rank higher in search engines. Later on, as you are covering the bulk of this category and build traffic to these pages, you can expand into other topics. To handle an affiliate site, you must have consistency. If you have a topic that you are passionate about, it will be much easier to carry on for you.

It doesn’t matter if you are not an expert in the field. The only thing you should keep in mind, that you are just documenting. Documenting what you have learned can make great content and if you present it nicely it will be able to enough to attract the people who are interested. If you are outsourcing the content of your sites then it’s better to work with experts in that niche. 

Step #3: Find affiliate programs to join

The most important step of affiliate marketing for beginner is to choose his affiliate program wisely. 

There are mainly three types of affiliate programs to choose from.

1) High-paying, low-volume affiliate programs

These are the affiliate programs for niche products with high payouts. They are also tending to be more competitive because you have to compete against powerful marketer with deep resources. And not to mention the affiliate programs for high payout products contains limited number of buyers.

For example, ConvertKit’s affiliate program pays almost $700 per month if you send just 80 customers their way. 

2) Low-paying, high-volume affiliate programs

These are the affiliate programs for products with low payouts but mass appeal. Programs of these kind usually offers tons of products to sell. The good thing is you will often get commission on the entire value of the purchase not just for the product you recommended. But to make these types of affiliate programs pay you. Your site will need lots of traffic. 

For example. You can earn up to 10% commissions on almost anything Amazon sells.

3) High-paying, high-volume affiliate programs

These are affiliate programs for products with mass appeal, and they also pay high commissions. The downside of these type of affiliate programs are that the affiliate marketers who are engaged in such programs have lot of expertise and not to mention they wouldn’t mind to use their resources to get into competition. Some of them also uses some spammy tactics that you cannot just compete with.  

One example is credit cards.

For now, just be aware that these programs exist. If you to choose a program that depends on your niche and level of expertise. 

If you’re targeting consumers, go with the second model of low commissions and higher sales volume.

If you’re going after a business audience, go for the first model: high-paying and low volume. The most popular programs here are for software and web hosting-related products.

And, if you want to promote a product without a public affiliate program. You should reach out to the company asking if they are willing to build an affiliate relationship with you. 

Step #4: Create great content

Now, for the fourth step of Introduction to Affiliate Marketing (Made simple for beginners) I will suggest every beginner to create great content.  It is very crucial to create great content.You need to create high quality content in such way so that your affiliate links fit naturally. That is one of the keys to success. Don’t just blindly present products from Amazon’s best seller.  Make sure your content solves the problem of your visitors. If you are reviewing products. Actually, purchase and test it.

 

I am recommending you to read Legitimate ways to make money online from home (No Experience)

Step #5: Drive traffic to your affiliate site

If you have great content. The next step of affiliate marketing for beginners would be to drive traffic to your site. You need more people to read it, so they will click on the affiliate links you are providing. 

There are three traffic strategies you should consider. 

1) Paid traffic

The advantage of using paid traffic it gets you traffic instantly. The downsides are it will dig into your profits.  And when you stop paying the traffic will stop. It’s a great strategy but only when you are part of a high- paying affiliate program. You can do this using Pay Per Click ads. For a new comer it might not be the good idea to use paid traffic.

 

2) Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is when you optimize your page to rank in search engine. To rank high in the search engine your target must be to use specific keywords. SEO is understanding what exactly your targeted customers are searching for. Then, creating content about those topics and try to push your pages higher int the search engines. 

3) Build an email list

E-mail list allows you to communicate with your readers and customers anytime you want. Try to collect the e-mail your readers and then in near future sent them promotion e-mails directly. Eventually that can lead to more affiliate sales. Offer them something valuable and pursue them to sign up on your sites to get their e-mail address.

Step #6: Get clicks on your affiliate links

The most important part of affiliate marketing for beginner is to get people click on your affiliate links. 

Having amazing content on your website is not always enough to get people to click on your affiliate link. There are somethings you need to consider and some tricks you must use.

A. Link placement

Don’t keep all of your links at the bottom of your page. People rarely scroll down. Your link placement should be balanced and also adequate. Don’t let your reader think it’s spam.

B. Context

When you are reviewing a product have context in your speech. Don’t just instruct a product. Compare it with others of the same kind. Or introduce the product in a casual way.

C. Callouts

Use callout boxes, buttons and tables in your sites.  It’s all about grabbing your readers attention.

For example, the Wirecutter uses eye-catching boxes with product links anytime they share a top pick.

You can visit their site and have view by yourself.

Final thoughts

The Introduction to Affiliate Marketing (Made simple for beginners) is over. The steps I stated above are the fundamental step you should take when you are starting for affiliate marketing. Don’t expect that you will start incoming huge amount of money from the very beginning. It takes time and lot of hard work. That will be all today. Good luck & Thank you.