Affiliate Marketing: Stop Dreaming And Start Doing

Affiliate Marketing: What Is It and How Does It Work?

Affiliate marketing is a way for you (the affiliate) to earn a commission for recommending products or services to your friends or readers.

To simplify it, here’s the 5 step process for how to start affiliate marketing:

1. You find a product you want to promote
2. Do a search for “product name” affiliate program. If it’s on Amazon, you can also promote it
3. Sign up for their affiliate program
4. You get a special link that allows the merchant to track the people who clicked your link
5. If they buy the product, you get a commission.

Pretty simple, right?

As an affiliate marketer, you will promote a company’s products or services and receive a commission for every purchase your audience makes.

It’s one of the best online business ideas you can start since it’s quick to set up, there are zero barriers to entry, and you can get started with no money. For example, you don’t need to invest time and money in customer service or other activities since you’re not selling any products or services directly — you’re only promoting them.

Consequently, your only real investment will be time. And the risk of failure is extremely low — it’s almost guaranteed you will make at least some profit by following our guide.

Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that you can do it at scale. That means you can promote products from multiple companies and keep receiving a regular passive income.

How Much Money Can You Make as an Affiliate Marketer?

According to ZipRecruiter, as an affiliate marketer, you can make about $154,700 a year in potential income, while according to Glassdoor, you can make anywhere from $42,000 to $83,000.

Having said that, the amount of money you can make depends on various factors. Some of the most famous affiliate marketers, like Pat Flynn, managed to make more than $100,000 in just a month through affiliate marketing,

As a beginner affiliate marketer, that’s not the kind of money you’ll be able to see right away. It takes time to build an online presence.

But don’t let that discourage you. With patience and the right knowledge, you, too, will manage to achieve great results. So follow our steps to get started with affiliate marketing.

Step One: Pick a niche and review products

Think of the product you are already using in your day-to-day life. Is there one you are particularly interested in?

This could be a book, a kitchen gadget, or hair styling tools.

You can look around for the exact product or something similar in affiliate marketing networks.

One of the places with a wide variety of products is Amazon Associates.

Make sure that your product recommendations are genuine and authentic, that way people will not be thinking that you are just trying to make some quick money off of your audience.

When writing blog reviews, you can use affiliate links. Affiliate links are the links to the products you are recommending. They usually follow a regular URL with “/ref…” at the end.

However, as you can see, relying on other people would require a large amount of traffic to actually make a good amount of money. This leads us to step two.

Step Two: Building an email list

Email marketing is still one of the best channels these days. It is also a great way to start affiliate marketing for beginners. Here are 3 ways you can do this on your website.

Header Bar

A tool we recommend is Hello Bar.

This will put up a call to action at the very top of your website. Offering an incentive such as an ebook that includes your product reviews or sending your audience to an email of the product review video will help as part of your marketing strategy.

Exit Intent Pop-up

Hello Bar can also be used for this.

An exit intent pop-up will show up on the screen when visitors show signs of leaving your website such as moving the mouse towards the “X” button. You can use it as a way to offer some kind of resource your audience will be interested in as an exchange for their email.

Sidebar Widget

When it comes to sidebars, affiliate marketers must make sure that the ones on their website are not overly cluttered. Having only one call to action is enough. This should also provide some kind of value to your audience in exchange for their emails.

Some tips in affiliate marketing for beginners are to send your audience an update once a week. It is important to not make all of your emails about sales. Only when you create a new product-reviewing post.

Step Three: Live Webinars

This step can be done once you have gathered a few contacts.

These are much more engaging content that is very helpful in higher ticket items. Your audience are likely to prefer watching a live presentation much more than reading a blog review.

LeadPages is a popular tool that you can use to create a simple landing page for your audience to sign up for your webinar. Don’t forget to promote it on your social media to inform your followers one  week ahead of the event!

These can be hosted on Google Hangouts for free or on Zoom as well.

Use this opportunity to talk all about your product as well as answering your audiences’ questions about it.

If you can get your merchant to provide you with a deal or bundle especially for your audience, it will serve as a great incentive for people to buy.

Step Four: Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Once your affiliate marketing starts to take off, it is time to move up to paid advertising.

Although this can be a bit of a learning curve, your affiliate marketing business can scale much more with this step. You can use PPC to:

• Grow your email list
• Grow your sales
• Get more people to sign up for your webinars

When more people sign up for your email list, you will be able to market to them again. This will grow your chances of sales because they have shown interest in your content and are more likely to trust your recommendations.

An efficient and time-saving method of email marketing is to set up your own autoresponder that markets to your email list in an email sequence. There are various tools to help you with this, one we recommend is i-AutoResponder.

How to Choose an Affiliate Program

Many affiliate marketing beginners go straight to finding programs with higher commissions, but it’s important to look at many other factors that will impact your ability to succeed and make profits.

For example, a product with very high commissions but that doesn’t sell could be less profitable than a low commission product with a high conversion rate.

Here are the main factors to consider when choosing an affiliate program:

• Personal use: Only recommend products or services that you’ve personally tried.
• Niche and audience fit: Make sure the product or service is a good fit for your niche and audience.
• Product popularity and acceptance: Before you promote a product, search online and look for reviews and opinions about this product.
• Conversion rate: Since most affiliate programs have a cost-per-sale (CPS) compensation model, make sure the program you choose has a high conversion rate if you want real profits. Known and trusted brands are usually safer bets and are more likely to turn visitors into sales.
• Commissions: Consider the following: will you get a one-time payment or recurring payments?; what is the compensation model (CPS is the standard in the industry, but some programs work with a pay-per-lead or pay-per-click model); will you receive second tier-commissions (percentage of sales from affiliates that you refer).
• Cookie duration: This refers to how long you’re eligible to receive commissions for a referred customer. Obviously, you want the cookie duration to be longer to maximize your profits.
• Support and brand reputation: Since issues might arise, we recommend working with established and trustworthy brands. Try looking for other affiliates’ reviews. The best affiliate programs provide tools and resources like banner ads, creatives, email templates, and client testimonials to help out affiliates.

Choose products you use yourself or think will be valuable to your readers. Also, make sure you can integrate these organically into your content, without making it look like an advertisement. For example, if you have a tech blog and you write an article about internet security, it might make sense to include an affiliate link for antivirus software.

To start, just go to one of your favorite companies’ websites and search for an affiliate program page. If you don’t find it, try searching for BRAND NAME + AFFILIATE on Google.

Most affiliate networks also provide conversion metrics, which will help you understand which merchants convert visitors to sales best.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself when choosing an affiliate network:

• What is the cost? Some affiliate networks will require a starting or fixed monthly fee. Since the main advantage of affiliate marketing is that it doesn’t require startup costs, you should avoid these.
• Does it fit with your niche and audience interests? To find this out, scroll through the list of companies and see if there are many in your industry

Does it offer customer support? Try to choose a network that offers various customer support options.

Best Affiliate Networks for Beginners

Since there are many affiliate networks, we put together a list of the most reliable ones that usually work best for affiliate marketing beginners. We suggest you sign up for some of these and find products that would be good fits for your audience.

ClickBank

Clickbank is a good affiliate network option for beginners since it offers more than six million unique affiliate products. The downside of that is that there are also a lot of bad products, so it might take a while to sort through them to find the best ones.

To get started, you can just sign up and start browsing through the different categories (e.g., health & fitness, games, etc.). Once you click on a product, you’ll be able to see details like:

• Avg $/sale: The average revenue other affiliates are making from this.
• Gravity: The higher the gravity, the easier it is to promote the product. Keep in mind that if the number is too high, there might be a lot of competition. A sweet spot we suggest is about 80 for gravity.

Clickbank is the best option if you want millions of options to choose from or if you want to promote mainly digital products. Just make sure you do your research, and only promote products you genuinely like and trust.

ShareASale

With thousands of products and services in 40 different categories, ShareASale is the most used affiliate network.

Because of the large number of options, when you sign up, you can start doing a brand or product search by using the keyword search feature.

One of the main reasons you might want to choose ShareASale is that many companies, including WP Engine and OptinMonster, only do affiliate marketing through this platform. That’s important to keep in mind because you might not be able to promote products or services from these or other brands unless you join ShareASale.

Rakuten Affiliate

Rakuten Affiliate is the third most used affiliate marketing network, and it’s a great choice for beginners.

That’s due to its ease of use — just click on ‘Programs’ and ‘Categories,’ and start browsing through the different programs. Once you find one that might work, you can easily apply and you’ll then be able to create affiliate links fast.

Paid Traffic vs. Free Traffic

Paid traffic is a great way to complement your efforts for a successful affiliate marketing strategy. In particular, it can be worth it for high-paying affiliate programs.

But if you’re a beginner, you probably have a limited marketing budget, and you’ll want to start with low commission affiliate programs.

In these cases, paid traffic is probably not a great idea, and you’ll want to start getting traffic through search engine optimization (SEO), which consists of optimizing pages to rank high in search engines like Google.

If you manage to do this, you’ll get free, consistent traffic to your blog.

Promote Your Content

Once you have high-quality content on your blog, it’s time to promote your content to increase visibility. If your content is high-quality, informative, and well-written, it will gain attention automatically. But in the beginning, promotion is needed to help speed up the process.

You have many options when it comes to promotion.

As a starting point, you can promote your content on social media or in a newsletter (if you don’t have one, we suggest you consider creating one). For channels like these, you can turn your content into an infographic or interesting image, and invite users to read the full article.

You can also repurpose your content into YouTube videos.

Consider guest posting — writing articles for other blogs — to promote your content and also build a backlink portfolio. Since this can take a lot of time, make sure you create content that will make readers want to learn more about your blog or website and click on your links.

If you’re in the B2B space, you can use LinkedIn to repurpose your content into a new article and allow users to share it on LinkedIn and other social networks.

Conclusion

To sum up how to start affiliate marketing, there are two paths that you can choose. As a merchant or as an affiliate. Although becoming an affiliate is somewhat of an easier path compared to merchants. The two routes are equally worthwhile. It all depends on your preference as well as your current knowledge.

As this guide is about affiliate marketing for beginners, we hope this step-by-step process has been helpful! Now go out there and make it happen.

Finally, make sure you fully understand the payment terms and methods, and the marketing terms and conditions that the affiliate program you’re looking at offers.

If you own a business or are currently looking for ways to increase your sales, let WebTargetedTraffic help you. Get a free consultation for your digital marketing strategy today!