Introduction to Affiliate Marketing.
One of the easiest and fastest ways to earn money online is through affiliate marketing. In this Ultimate Guide to affiliate marketing for beginners, I will walk you through how to start your online business with affiliate marketing and earn your first revenue today.
Honestly speaking, I don’t make 6 figures as an affiliate every month, but I do make good recurring revenue, and the best part is that it’s almost 99% passive.
What do I mean by passive income?
Having passive income means I earn a couple of thousand dollars a month without doing anything. In summary, even if I were to take the entire month off, I would still earn almost the same number every month. Nice Right?
In this guide, I will explain what I do exactly and provide you with some tips that might help you to start with affiliate marketing, and then I will show you how to scale and reach 5–6 figures after a year or so.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of marketing or promoting products and services for other people and companies in exchange for commissions per sale.
OR
You can also define affiliate marketing as a performance-based marketing strategy. Brands reward affiliate publishers for sending traffic to their sites and helping them make sales.
Let’s start by breaking affiliate marketing down into its four major parts:
Affiliates — Individuals or companies who help advertisers generate clicks, leads and sales in return get a commission. Alternatively, they are called publishers or partners.
Advertisers — Those companies that reward affiliates who drive traffic to their site with commissions. Also referred to as brands, merchants, and enterprises.
Consumers — These are the end-users or potential customers who click on an affiliate link. The consumer visits an advertiser’s site and signs up or purchases a product or service.
Affiliate platforms —These are platforms that have the technology that helps affiliates and advertisers connect. It typically offers tracking, reporting, contracting, and payment capabilities.
How does affiliate marketing work?
At first, affiliate marketing may seem hard to understand, so let’s look at it in more detail.
Whenever an affiliate (partner/publisher) joins a brand’s affiliate program, the brand provides that affiliate access to unique tracking links.
Through these links, the affiliate promotes the brand’s products or services. Affiliates can include the affiliate link on their websites, social profiles, email campaigns, and other promotional channels.
When consumers click on these links, they are taken directly to the company’s website to make purchases. When a consumer makes a purchase, the affiliate receives a commission from the brand.
So, the great thing about it is that you don’t have to create or buy products, you just promote a product that already exists.
That’s why it’s so simple to start. You can even start with a $0 budget, as you will see later.
Affiliate marketing is a great option for anyone who wants to start a business online and make money without investing or having that much experience.
Let’s Start!
Simply, affiliate marketing consists of two components:
- Selecting the correct product to promote.
- Promoting the product.
The process is simple, select a product, promote it, and earn money!
Let’s begin with the first part, which is selecting the right product.
1. Select the right product to promote:
When deciding which product or service to promote, it is extremely important to understand and learn how to do it, because, with the same amount of effort and time, you will earn much more if you choose the right product.
For instance, you are selling or promoting a service for $200 and your commission is 60%. As a result of marketing this service, you were able to get around 50 sales each month
Simple calculations:
50$ * (200*0.6) = 6000$ per month. Nice right?
In the event that you run paid Ads, your advertising costs are 3000$. Then you earn 3000$ every month.
The cost of a year is 3000 $ * 12 months = 40000 $
That’s awesome! However, you will need to promote every month, pay for advertising every month, and put in a lot of time and effort every month! Yes?!
NOW, Let’s Tweak the scenario!
We chose a product at the same price of 200$. Your commission is 40%, not 60%.
But here’s the thing: the product you chose gives recurring commissions, which means you’ll earn 40% each month without having to promote it every month.
Let’s imagine you promoted this service and were able to get 50 sales within a month.
Simple calculations:
If you have 50 sales each month:
The amount of $50 * (200*0.4) = 4000$ / the first month
For example, if you spent 3000$ on advertising, then you only made 1000$ in the first month.
Then 4000$ for the next months without any advertising or effort (It’s recurring!) Did You Get It?
So in the next few months, you can earn 4000$ without having to do anything!
Per year: 1000$ + ( 4000$ * 11) = 45000 $ requiring a lot less effort and time!
Which scenario will you go with??
Obviously, you will opt for the second option (recurring commission), which will make you 90% passive with the same revenue or even more!
As an affiliate marketer, this is an example of why selecting the right product (even with a lower commission) may be critical.
Of course, I am not saying you shouldn’t go with 1-time commission products. NO.
I’m showing you how important it is to select the correct product to work with and how it may be reflected in your work.
Here’s a little advice: Choose at least two products to promote, one with a recurring commission, and one with a one-time commission.
Top Affiliate Products And Networks to choose from.
Okay, friend, now that you know the importance of picking a good affiliate product, the next question is: “Where can I find affiliate products to promote?”.
To make things simple, I will discuss more than 10 affiliate programs and products that anyone can join, even as a complete beginner. In addition, I will show you products and services that pay recurring commissions and single commissions.
Affiliate Products with single commission.
Let me share with you what I think are the top 5 affiliate networks that you can start with and find different products to promote.
1. ClickBank: You may have heard of ClickBank, it is not a product, it is an affiliate network where you can find thousands of products to promote.
There is only one slight downside here, that it isn’t available in every country.
2. CJAffiliate:
The CJ Affiliate Network is one of the largest affiliate networks available on the Internet. I work with CJ and promote some Web hosting services such as Contabo and other products.
3. JVZoo: JVZoo is a large trusted affiliate marketing network that has thousands of affiliate products to choose from. This service provides sellers with an easy way to list, promote, and sell their products, it also makes it easier for affiliate marketers to find interesting products at great prices to promote.
4. Warrior Plus: In 2006, Mike Lantz founded WarriorsPlus, a platform for buying and selling digital products related to online business. Using WarriorPlus, you can sell “digital products” such as eBooks, online courses, paid memberships, or software. Warrior Plus is an excellent choice for beginners since it is easy to sign up for and is available worldwide.
5. Envato Market: The Envato Marketplace is a pioneering global online community for creative assets, tools, and talent. There are millions of users on Envato around the world who buy and sell creative assets, use smart design templates, learn how to create things, or even hire freelancers. the Envato marketplace is one of my favorite networks and I already make a couple of hundred dollars with it each month (100% passive).
This company offers digital assets such as audio and video templates, source codes, website themes, and more. You can check it here to find the products you want to promote.
For affiliate networks, this should be enough. Next, let’s move on to my preferred affiliate products and services that generate recurring commissions.
Affiliate products with recurring commissions.
As with a single-payment offer, a recurring commission is just referring a customer, but, like a single-payment offer, this customer will pay on a monthly basis for the subscription plan, so you can earn on a monthly basis when the customer subscribes
What’s even better is that you can earn 10X more money per year with the same amount of effort by using recurring commission products!
1. ClickFunnels: For a SAAS (Software as a Service) company, Clickfunnels offers one of the most generous affiliate programs. The Clickfunnels affiliate program pays out 40% lifetime commissions on all sales
In addition, they have something called a “sticky cookie,” which is a bonus for affiliates because if you share your link with someone, it follows them across multiple devices. Regardless of their location, the people you refer remain connected to your affiliate account.
Apart from their software, Clickfunnels constantly comes up with new products that you can also make money from, such as live events and training courses.
2. SEMRUSH: It also has a 40% commission rate, so it’s a great service to promote. SEMRUSH is an SEO tool company that helps anyone rank their website and get huge amounts of free organic traffic.
3. Tube Buddy: You can receive recurring commissions of up to 50% when you refer people to Tube Buddy. Tube Buddy works with content creators, brands, and networks to save time and grow their channels. So to help content creators grow their YouTube channels, you can advertise and market the TubeBuddy platform to them.
4. Get Response: One of the best-known email marketing services out there, with an awesome affiliate program.
You can see that it offers two programs, one of which is a single 100$ commission per sale. The other is a 33% recurring commission per month.
A nice aspect of GetResponse and similar services is it’s hard for users to leave them, since all their mailing lists, data, and analytics will be kept in the system, so switching will be somehow difficult.
If you think of it in terms of recurring commission, it’s great since 95% of the time, the person you refer will be a long-term customer.
In any case, almost all products and services have an affiliate network, so you can check any product or service you wish, contact the company, and ask about their affiliate program.
How to Promote Affiliate Product.
Having learned about affiliate programs and the importance of choosing the right products to promote, I showed you some of the best affiliate networks and programs to start with. Now it’s time to get down to business! This is where it gets interesting.
It may take you 10 minutes to choose the product or service or even a couple of days at most. Now what is crucial is how to promote! It’s all about marketing.
We have two paths to follow when it comes to marketing:
- Free Advertising.
- Paid Advertising.
Free Advertising.
First, we’ll look at free promotion, and see how we can use it to promote affiliate products and services.
1. SEO: Search Engine Optimization.
In terms of affiliate marketing, SEO is the best method to market affiliate products and turn this online business into almost 99% passive income. But why?
To begin, let me briefly explain SEO.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique to help you rank your articles and websites at the top of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
People usually search for things on the internet using search engines, and they open the results from the first page only when looking for something on the Internet.
Therefore, your goal with SEO is to rank on the first page for certain search terms or keywords. Through SEO, you can generate a lot of organic traffic to your website.
Let’s take a simple example. You wrote an article on your website about an affiliate product, for example, “Top 10 Vlogging cameras for YouTubers” and you got it ranked on the first page of Google.
You can imagine how much money you will be able to make with the Amazon affiliate program. Imagine how much money you will be able to make by promoting “camera affiliate links” on Amazon and getting free Google traffic as an Amazon affiliate. You can imagine how much money you can make. You are making money on autopilot!
I hear you saying, OK, great! I’m curious, however, how do we rank our articles? In other words, what the heck is SEO anyway?!! And how do we implement it?
Of course, discussing SEO in detail would be out of scope for this article. Nevertheless, I will do my best to show you how you can start and work with SEO in just a few lines. Don’t worry I wouldn’t let you go out of here missing anything!
The idea is simple. Basically, there are three steps that we follow in order to rank your articles:
- Get to know what people are searching for (Keyword Research)
- Optimize your article based on these keywords (On-Page SEO)
- Off-Page SEO (Building Trust, Social Signals, and Link Building…)
So how did I do this?
Firstly, I wanted to write a full guide on “ Make Money with these 10 Affiliate Marketing Tips“. So I simply wrote it!
While I was writing the article, I optimized it for certain keywords, so you can see in the title they are:
Keywords like “affiliate marketing tips”, “make money”, “marketing tips”,
This is a simple example of On-page optimization, such as mentioning the keywords in the post title, which will be the H1 tag on your website.
If you read this article, you will notice that I have mentioned these keywords several times, so Google can understand that it is about this topic.
You may ask, where do I get these keywords from, and how do I know which keywords are best? SIMPLE! Research keyword ideas with keywords tools.
You can use free keyword research tools like WordStream, ahrefs, H-supertools, Google keyword planner, or even some advanced SEO tools like SEMRUSH.
So open the H-supertools free keyword research tool or any other tool you wish to use for your keyword research
Enter your topic in the box, then click the search button. Here is an example:
Using this tool, you can easily find out what keywords have the most search volume and pick the right ones.
Lastly, you need to deal with off-page SEO, which is getting backlinks and social signals directed at your website. As an example, I link to my blog from my Quora space and my social media profiles.
I hope this gives you a better understanding of how SEO works and how to get started with it. Let’s now move on to the next strategy in promoting affiliate links, which is YouTube!
2. Promote Affiliate products & services with YouTube.
One of the best places to promote anything is on YouTube! Not just affiliate services. Creating your own videos about your affiliate product and linking back to it is quite easy.
Now the Big Question is: How can you grow your YouTube channel and gain more viewers?
Generally, there are two ways to grow your channel.
1. YouTube suggestions: This is where YouTube recommends your video among other popular videos.
Ex: You create a high-quality video of a trending video, and you optimize the metadata (Title, Thumbnail, Description, and Tags)
2. Video SEO: YouTube optimization is where you optimize your title and metadata for a specific keyword to rank your videos on top of the search results. Tools like Tubebuddy, Vidiq, H-supertools, and others can help you build your YouTube channel.
3. Q&A and Forums Sites.
Find forums relevant to your content and share what you know and link to your article or webpage where you are promoting the offer (PLEASE DO NOT SPAM).
Also, don’t forget, Reddit, an excellent source of free traffic.
In addition, Quora Q&A is one of the quickest ways to get traffic. The process involves answering questions and linking to your site.
(I receive thousands of views on Quora every month because of my answers. It works)
My Quora Profile
5. Social Media
Having some followers on Facebook, perhaps in Facebook groups, LinkedIn or Twitter can help get you more traffic. (If you would like to automate posting across all platforms, you can use social media management software. I recommend Content Studio. I personally use this tool. You can get lifetime access with this special offer here).
When I say social media, I do not mean to spam groups or individuals; rather, I mean to build relationships, provide value, build trust, and then you can link back to your website.
6. Free Ebooks and Courses
There are also ways to create free ebooks and publish them on ebook sites like this. For example, you can create a free course on Udemy with millions of students and link back to your site.
7. Email Marketing.
In Email Marketing, you should always build your email list, which will be one of the top sources of traffic for your website when you send newsletters to your Subscribers.
Paid Advertising.
In terms of paid advertising, we have a number of networks and platforms to market on, like:
To go through this diffrent platforms for advertising would require a 300-page book each! In order to get you started, I will briefly summarize each of them.
Using Facebook and Google Ads to promote affiliate products
You should keep the following in mind if you’re planning on promoting affiliate products with Facebook or Google Ads:
First:
Don’t advertise directly to your affiliate link. Facebook and Google tend to dislike affiliate links, and doing so could result in your advertising account being shut down.
Instead, you want to direct them to your landing page between the Ad and the Affiliate product page.
Secondly: Ensure all your landing pages adhere to Facebook’s and Google’s guidelines.
Create Your Landing Page.
Creating your landing page is the next step. It could be a simple landing page where you announce whatever you’re promoting…whether it’s pre-launch content or the sales page…and invite them to click through to download it.
Alternatively, you can use this as an opportunity to turn them into subscribers to YOUR list, and then send them on to the content or offer you are promoting.
Run your Campaign.
A small note to consider, Please remember when you are starting your campaign always remember to pick the correct audience and narrow it down as much as you can to target specific people. In addition to paid ads, you can also use AD retargeting, which is a powerful tool.
You should also start your campaign with low bids and different Ad sets to test, and then decide which one is best for scaling.
Promote Affiliate products with Native Ads.
In affiliate marketing, native ad networks like Outbrain, Taboola, Mgid, among others, are ideal platforms proven to deliver great results.
Advertisements on search engines (like Google) and social networks (Like Facebook) aren’t the same as native ad networks. Why?
The reason is that scrolling a social feed, making research on something specific on Google, or browsing your favorite news website (where Native ads appear) are very different. When users browse news sites, they are in discovery mode.
As a result, they are more likely to discover content that interests them.
Promote Affiliate products with Quora Ads.
As I explained above, I recommend starting on Quora as a free source of traffic by answering and sharing your knowledge. But you can also run paid ads on Quora.
Hopefully, this article gave you all the information you need to start your online business journey as an affiliate marketer.
Do you have any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments section 🙂