How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Learning how to start affiliate marketing is one of the best things you could do when it comes to increasing your side income! Today we are talking all about it!

How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

So what exactly is affiliate income?

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

Pretty cool, right? To simplify it, here is a quick way on how to start affiliate marketing:

  1. You find a product you want to promote or just like
  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.

It can get much more advanced, but in this post, we’re just going to start with the fundamentals and get you to the point where you’re ready to make your first commission.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

There are many different ways to track affiliates these days, but all are based on someone clicking your special tracking link.

This is mostly done via a cookie.

When your affiliate link is clicked, a small file called a cookie is stored on the user’s computer. Then they buy a product, the merchant can see that they were referred by you.

There are also more advanced methods based on the email used or IP address but let’s leave that for now…

How to Choose the Right Affiliate Network

The easiest way to begin with affiliate marketing is to select an affiliate network.

There are so affiliate networks to choose from, some of which are tied to great companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, while others specialize in specific types of products and services.

ClickBank as an Affiliate Network

Another great one is ClickBank which is one of the oldest and most popular affiliate networks.
It is a billion-dollar company which specializes in digital products like e-books and software, as well as membership sites.
If you haven’t think about selling digital information products, then you should seriously consider doing so considering all the benefits.
Digital information products offer much higher commissions (anywhere from 10 to 75%+) than physical products which usually only offer commissions under 5%.

Also digital information products and can be easier to sell due to the fact that people can get instant access and immediate gratification when purchasing a digital information product.

So, you should seriously consider selling digital information products as an affiliate, as they often offer much higher commissions than physical products.

Amazon as an Affiliate Network

Another network you should consider when it comes to promoting products as an affiliate is Amazon.com. As you may already know, just about any physical product can be sold on Amazon.com. Though products on Amazon generally offer lower commissions than their digital product counterparts, selling products on Amazon as an affiliate can be a much higher volume business and most people trust Amazon as a merchant, making it easier to sell products as an affiliate.

Finally, in some cases, you may work with a company or individual directly as an affiliate; rather than going through a network. Entrepreneurs or companies may run their own affiliate program and you can apply directly to them to promote their products and services.

If you see a product that you would like to promote as an affiliate and the company doesn’t offer a formal affiliate program, you can always reach out to them to work out a private deal as well (I’ve tried that, some worked and some didnt).

Here’s How to Start Affiliate Marketing on Your Blog in 8 Steps:

  • Step 1: Create a Website or A Blog
  • Step 2: Choose an Industry, and then Niche Down
  • Step 3: Research Products in Your Niche that You Can Review
  • Step 4: Sign Up for the Amazon Affiliate Program
  • Step 5: Find affiliate programs for the other products you want to review
  • Step 6: Create content in the form of tutorials, review posts, resource pages or emails and use your affiliate link
  • Step 7: Optimize the page and track your rankings in Google
  • Step 8: Do it over and over again… and Repeat!

We’ll cover all of these steps (and more) in detail in this post, but it’s important to understand the general process from the beginning.

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How Much Money Can You Make With Affiliate Marketing?

The amount you can make will vary wildly – it honestly falls somewhere between zero and millions.

Your income will be directly related to the type of offers you promote, how much traffic you get to the site, and your grasp of other online marketing skills like email marketing and SEO.

But in this post you’ll get a pretty good sense of the earning potential from different types of promotions.

How Do You Become an Affiliate Marketer?

Here’s the thing, you can pick just about any product that you can and want to buy online, and there will be an affiliate program that will pay you a finders fee for referring a sale.

However, just because you can promote anything, doesn’t mean you should. 

The most important thing to know when selecting a product to market is, “is it relevant to your audience?”

For instance, for me to try and advertise for dumbbells on Location Rebel probably isn’t the smartest thing, because 99% of my audience could care less about them.

Questions to Ask Before Promoting an Affiliate Product

When you are trying to decide what to promote you should always ask yourself the following questions:

  • Do I use this product?
  • Will the vast majority of my readers benefit from using this product?
  • Is the buying process easy?
  • Is there a good affiliate commission rate? (Not always necessary)

If I answer yes to each of these questions, then it’s probably a good fit and worth promoting.

Action Item: Make a list of products that you use that you think your blog audience would benefit from using as well. Try to think of as many as you can.

And remember, these can include complementary products as well. If you write about travel, for instance, you can include tons of complementary products like luggage, headphones, backpacks, and clothing too.

Start Affiliate Marketing: Physical Products vs. Information Products vs. Services

Ok, you should have an idea of which products you might want to promote – now it’s time to decide which of those are the best fit for you and your audience.

There are three different types of affiliate products you can promote:

  1. Physical Products
  2. Information Products
  3. Services

Each of these has pros and cons, and we’re going to look at those now.

How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

There you have it, How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Have you dive into the Affiliate Marketing World?

What to read next? 

Xo, Sisi

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