Do you want to make money online? If yes, then this guide is only for you. I am going to tell you everything about Affiliate Marketing, from what it is to how you can start earning money? I will also discuss some tools that will help you to get started from scratch.
According to Statista research, the market for affiliate marketing is increasing day-by-day. The affiliate marketing spend is expected to rise from $5.5 billion in 2017 to $8.2 billion by the year 2022.
So, now let get started with this comprehensive beginner’s guide to Affiliate Marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is the process in which businesses pay the affiliate (that’s you) some amount of commission for every successful sale.
In other words, you will get a commission whenever someone buys something through your affiliate link.
The commission may vary on the basis of affiliate networks. For example, sometimes you get 30% or 50% or maybe higher than that, this totally depends on the affiliate networks.
There are many ad types available in the market which works based on views or clicks like AdSense, but affiliate marketing works on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or cost-per-lead (CPL) basis. It means that you will get the commission whenever someone performs an action, such as buying or signing for the product)
Also, affiliate marketing is the best alternative to the other ad network that is AdSense, Ezoic, and others. It is also best to practice to monetize your blog or website in terms of earning money as affiliate marketing has less or no risk at all.
Affiliate marketing includes various steps. You have to research a niche and find a product that fits your website visitors (audience). After that, you also have to check the commission of the product so that you start earning money by promoting that product on your website.
You also have to find out how or where to promote yourself so that your audience can see the product and buy it from you that will earn you money.
It seems very difficult. Right? But don’t worry because I am here to help you start with your first ever affiliate marketing project. I am going to teach every step of affiliate marketing in easy to digest manner.
Advantages of Affiliate Marketing
There are many reasons why you should use affiliate marketing for an extra source of income.
Below are some of the major benefits of affiliate marketing:
- The number one benefit of affiliate marketing is that you don’t need your own product, service, or anything to make money online; that’s why I feel like it is the best way to earn money online with zero risks. It allows you to sell someone else’s products and get a fat commission like up to 90% on some affiliate networks (I even saw some products with 100% Commission, LOL).
- You don’t have to deal with payment gateways and refunds. With affiliate marketing, you get painless and hassle-free payouts.
- Unlimited earning, you can even make it $100 a day passive income as soon as you set everything up the right way and start driving traffic to the products that you’re promoting. It means you can make money during sleep. For this, you have to invest both your time and money and after some dedicated work, you can automate your affiliate business and earn decent money.
- No restriction, unlimited potential of financial growth, and you’re free to promote any product you want in as many niches as you want. It means you are not restricted to any one niche or product, and you can pick any product from the market and promote it to your audience.
- Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that it is super beginner-friendly. You don’t need to do any hard work; all you have to do is set everything up, create valuable content, and see commission coming to your way. It is ok if you are a beginner, you don’t need any special expertise. Also, it’s free to use, which makes it very beginner-friendly.
- With affiliate marketing, you don’t need to deal with consumers or customers who purchase the product. It means, like other businesses where they deal with their customers and provide them the support of 24/7 for any problem. Your job is only selling a product after that the company or advertiser will handle the support part.
- Want to work from home? Thanks to affiliate marketing. Are you like me who hates 9 to 5 jobs, I know its very frustrating when you have to go to the office daily and spend hours in front of a computer all day. But affiliate marketing helps you earn money with comfort while working from home.
- It is a budget-friendly business. Means you don’t need to spend thousands of dollar like other business where you have to hire employees, set up an office, and spend money on other things. When compared to other businesses, you don’t need huge capital in your pocket. You just need two things to start that is a computer/laptop/smartphone and an internet connection.
- It can be your extra source of income. It means that you don’t have to quit your current job to start affiliate marketing; you can start this as a part-time business. You can check how much you made working as a side project, and you can turn this into a full-time job whenever you are comfortable. Think about it! If you turn part-time as a full time, then it can double your income with no doubts.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing?
You can start affiliate marketing in various ways, and it totally depends on which platform you are comfortable to work with.
Here are the steps to start affiliating marketing and earn your first dollar online:
1. Choose your platform
As I said, there are various ways to start affiliate marketing. Let’s take a look at these platforms:
1.1 – Social Media
You can start affiliate marketing using any social media platform, and one of the most popular platforms is Instagram. You can set up an Instagram profile free of cost and then publish content consistently (it’s the key). You should only post content related to your niche.
For example, if you are in the health niche, you should only post content related to health & fitness. That’s how you build your audience’s trust.
Once you achieve a good number of followers, then the next step is to promote products; for this, you need to do some research to find a good product that also fits your audience.
You can recommend products in your profile bio, stories, or posts. But, don’t start promoting products with fewer followers. First, build your audience trust by providing informative content and then convert those followers into a money-making machine.
1.2 – Blog or Website
Creating a blog is the best and easiest way to start affiliate marketing. It is also one of the best platforms for affiliates because you can increase your affiliate sales as much as you want.
Moreover, you can even start a WordPress website to start making good money from affiliate marketing.
You need two things to create a blog or start a website. First is a domain and second is the hosting. For domain, I recommend GoDaddy, where you can grab a domain as low as $9 (grab at $0.99 for new users). Now for hosting, there are tons of providers available in the market. My recommendation is Bluehost which starts at $2.75 a month only.
After that, you just have to install WordPress CMS to your hosting (most of the hosting provides one-click install).
Voila! You have successfully set up your website. Now just publish quality content related to your niche and grab a good amount of traffic by ranking your website on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. [See: Complete SEO Guide to Promote Your Website and the WordPress SEO Guide].
Create a review article where you can put your affiliate link, and when someone purchases that product using your affiliate link, you will receive a commission.
1.3 – YouTube
My second recommended method is YouTube. In this method, you have to start a new YouTube channel and start publishing content in the form of videos. Similar to Instagram and Website, you have to post videos under your niche and build audience trust.
Now, on YouTube, you have to add your link in the description of videos, you can add as many links you want in the description, but my recommendation is not to add tons of links as it looks very spammy.
Refer to the below image of channel “10BestOnes”, here you can see amazon affiliate links in the description of laptops.
When someone clicks on the link, they will be referred to Amazon, and if they buy a product, then the owner of the channel earns a commission from Amazon.
2. Niche Selection
In this step, you will choose your niche in which you want to work. In simple words, the niche is a topic or category such as Health, Music, Pet, Food, etc.
Choosing a niche is also important because it will decrease the competition, assume you have to build a general blog where you post content related to tech, games, politics, etc. On the other hand, if you start a blog on Gaming, there is less competition, and you also don’t need to create tons of content every day compared to a general niche. So, that’s why choosing a niche is crucial for affiliate marketing success.
Assume you pick Games as a topic, and now you can divide Games in various sub-topic and create websites on specialized niches like Android Games, iOS Games, or PC Games. You can pick anyone from these sub-topics as your niche.
Have you selected your niche? If yes, the next step is to post content consistently. Have you ever heard someone say, “Content is King”? It’s right. Content is king for your website. The more quality content you provide to your audience, the more trust you can build.
3. Find An Affiliate Program or Product in Your Niche
For this step, you have to do some research to find profitable products in your niche and signup for the various affiliate programs of those products.
As an example, let’s assume you are promoting hosting web products on your blog. You can create a review or guide about the hosting provider you are promoting and can include your affiliate link somewhere in the content.
Below you can see that “Siteground” is offering $100 per sale to their affiliate partners if you are able to make 11-20 sales.
To make it easy, you can search for the below query to find your niche related affiliate program:
- Keyword + “become an affiliate” (Ex. hosting + “become an affiliate”)
4. Drive Traffic To Your Site
It is the most important step to get conversions and sales. You have done everything from setting up a website to creating quality content. But if you are unable to get traffic to your affiliate site, then you will not be going to get any commissions and sales.
Traffic is very important for every type of website, and here are some strategies to get thousands of visitors to your site.
4.1 – Paid Traffic
It is the easiest way to drive traffic to your website but to get it to start; you need to have some budget in your pocket. You can achieve this by leveraging the power of the best PPC ad networks like Adwords or Facebook ads.
The advantage of PPC ads is that you will instantly get traffic; all you need to do is to create ads, set your budget, and get the ad live on Google. BOOM! You start acquiring visitors to your site.
But wait, running PPC campaigns is not so easy. There are some downsides of paid traffic like you have to optimize your ad copy, need to get your ad approved by Google, and many times I have seen that your investment can vanish if ads are not optimized properly. So, this method is only for those who have experience in running ads or have a big budget.
4.2 – Organic Traffic
Here comes my best method for website traffic. You can achieve organic traffic using SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The best part of this method is that you don’t need to invest any money to get started.
SEO is the practice in which you optimize your website by various techniques to get higher ranking on search engines like Google. Higher rankings mean more conversions.
4.3 – Email Marketing
The third and last strategy to drive traffic is to use the power of email marketing by building an email list using your website. Here are some of the top email marketing services you can use to send emails to your subscribers. If you are short of budget, then here are some free tools for email marketing. Moreover, you can find the email address of anyone using an email finder service like Hunter.io.
By building an email list, you can directly communicate with your audience and provide your newly created content or recommend products directly to their inbox.
You can build an email list by providing some valuable content or information to your visitors. That’s how visitors will signup on your site, and you will get their name and email address, which you can use anytime you want. Have a look at the below image.
5. Get Clicks And Sales On Affiliate Links
Now, when you have successfully driven traffic to your affiliate site, the next and final step is to get clicks on the affiliate links you are putting in your content and convert these clicks into sales.
For getting clicks and sales, you need to create high quality and informative content on your site. Another important factor in getting lots of affiliate clicks is “link placement.” It means you have to smartly place your affiliate link under your content so that visitors can easily navigate to the link and click on it.
You can link to various related anchor texts like the below image.
Or you can also use stunning tables in your content like the below table.
I would recommend you to check out this guide on the best affiliate marketing strategies to earn more money to learn more tricks of affiliate marketing.
How Much Money Can You Make As An Affiliate Marketer?
It is a question that lots of people think before starting affiliate marketing. “How much money can you make per month?”. So, there is a very simple answer to this question is, it depends on your effort, niche, and affiliate program. Yes, you heard it right!
How much money you can earn from affiliate marketing depends on various factors like:
- What’s your niche?
- What’s your affiliate program?
- How much commission you are getting on every sale?
- How much traffic your website is getting?
Maybe you can earn 100 dollars a month or 100k dollars per month, depending on your efforts. I have seen people who earn $100 or even $1000 or more on a single day.
As an example, take a look at the earning report of December 2017 from “Smart Passive Income” website, Pat Flynn made over $100k in a single month only from affiliate marketing.
But don’t think that you will also get these much of commission in a single night, it took years of hard work to get this type of success. Take this as a motivation.
How Long Does It Take To Make Money From Affiliate Marketing?
This question arrives in every beginner’s mind, who is just starting with affiliate marketing. So, “how much time does it take to make the first dollar online.”
The simple answer depends on your work, maybe it takes one month, one year or longer than this. But as per my experience, you can start getting success after six months of dedicated work.
Now assume you have completed every step from registering the domain and hosting, to creating a website, writing content, and driving traffic. There are only two things, the first one is how much sales you are getting, and the second is the commission you are getting on every sale.
Let’s understand this by using two examples below. I am assuming that you want to generate $500 a month as a start.
Example 1:
Assume you are promoting products under the headphone niche, then you will get around 2.5% commission on every sale as per the Amazon commission structure.
So, the average cost of headphone is $80, and if you are getting around 100 sales each month then you will make,
(80/100*2.5) * 100 = $200 a month
By the way, let me tell you that it’s a very impressive start as a beginner.
Example 2:
This time, assume you are promoting kitchen juicer, and commission for this product is 5% per sale.
So, let’s say the average cost of juicer is $100 and you are getting around 100 sales then you will make,
(100/100*5) * 100 = $500
According to example 2, you can see that you can easily make $500 via affiliate marketing.
So, the point of using these examples is to make you understand that income from affiliate marketing depends on the number of sales and commission rates.
Top Ideas For Affiliate Marketing
There are many niches or topics that you can pick to start your affiliate website or blog, but there are some most profitable niches that exist in the market.
The best niche ideas for affiliate marketing are:
- Health Products (diets, etc.)
- Electronics (headphones, laptops, etc.)
- Relationship
- Web Hosting Affiliate
- Gaming (consoles, games, etc.)
- Travel (traveling bags, etc.)
- Fashion & Beauty (watches, shoes, etc.)
- Sports (golf, tennis, etc.)
- Wealth (make money online)
- Pets (dogs, cats, etc.)
These ten niches are the most profitable and famous niches. There are many affiliates who are making six-figure income every month. You can do some research by yourself to find some untapped niches with low competition.
Affiliate Marketing Success Rate
Affiliate marketing is a huge market, and many marketers are only dependent on affiliate marketing. And the success rate varies from person to person, maybe you got a 50% success in your affiliate website, or someone even gets 80% or more success rate. So, it depends on your hard work.
There are plenty of people who are earning more than 1000 dollars per day, and many people can’t even make 10 dollars a day.
ClickBank Affiliate Marketing
ClickBank is the most popular and biggest affiliate network in the world. Many big affiliates are working on ClickBank like Pat Flynn. It is a marketplace where you can find lots of products from various vendors for promoting to your audience. They offer every category like health, Softwares, games, and a lot more.
ClickBank is easy to use and a very beginner-friendly platform. Below are the steps you can follow to get started with ClickBank affiliate marketing.
Step 1: Register free account
The first step is to sign up for a new ClickBank account by clicking here. Enter your details like name, country, phone, etc.
Step 2: Just confirm your account by clicking on the link sent to your email id.
Step 3: Choosing the product
In this step, you will choose a product according to your website niche. For this, just go to ClickBank Marketplace.
In the marketplace, you will get lots of products sorted by categories, popularity, and other filters.
For example, I am choosing software & services from the category.
Step 4: Getting an affiliate link
The next and final step is to get a link from the vendor of the product. To do this, you have to click on the “PROMOTE” button, and after clicking, a new window will open, as seen in the image below. Just type in your account name and tracking ID and wait for the approval. After approval, you will get a hoplink that you can use to track your sales.
So, that’s how you can start affiliate marketing with ClickBank.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing
Amazon doesn’t need any introduction; we all have used it for online shopping. Amazon also runs an affiliate program called “Amazon Associates” in which you can register to promote millions of products and earn impressive commissions.
Amazon Associates Program is one of the biggest and popular affiliate programs around the world. Amazon served its services to 13 countries worldwide.
Just follow the below steps to get started with Amazon Associates and start earning massive money.
Step 1: Register free account
Register on amazon associate by clicking on this link and click on the “Join” button.
Step 2: Completing the profile
After clicking on the join button, you will get redirected to the new page, where you will see a screen like an image below. On this page, you have to fill all the account details like name, address, etc.
Step 3: Confirm account:
Now, you just have to confirm your amazon affiliate account by click on the link sent to your Gmail account.
This way, you can easily start affiliate marketing using Amazon.
Need more affiliate programs? Check out this list of the top 25 affiliate programs.
Top Tools For Doing Affiliate Marketing
After launching the website, you need some tools that can help you in various ways. If you are using WordPress to build your website, then I will recommend some tools or plugins to manage things easily.
And the best part is that all these plugins are free to use, you don’t need to pay any single penny to use them.
Here are the best tools for doing affiliate marketing:
1. ThirstyAffiliates
If you want to be a serial affiliate marketer, then this tool is very important for you. You are going to insert hundreds of affiliate links on your website, and when you grow, the number of links also increases. So, this can be a big problem for you.
But ThirstyAffiliates can also help you in this situation. It is a type of link management tool available as a plugin in WordPress that provides you the feature of inserting affiliate links in the content with ease.
Apart from this, it also comes with an option in which you can convert your keywords into affiliate links, which will increase your sales and revenue.
2. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is a must-have tool for every blogger or webmaster. It allows the webmaster to track and see the website visitors like from where visitors are coming and the user’s behavior on the site.
With this tool, you don’t have to go to your Google Analytics dashboard, again and again, you will get all the details on your WordPress dashboard. I think every beginner affiliate marketer should use this tool.
3. SEMRush
If you are starting a website, then you must have to do keyword research. Keyword research allows you to find highly profitable and low competitive keywords.
SEMRush is the best keywords research tool available in the marketer. You can find tons of keywords using this tool and also can import these keywords list in an excel file for future use.
Not only keywords, but you can also do competitor analysis using this tool, just put your competitor URL on the search bar and it will show you how much traffic is coming to the site, backlinks, number of ranking keywords, and a lot more.
4. Yoast SEO
I have already said that SEO is very important if you don’t have a budget for running ads. And for optimizing your website, you need a tool. In this case, Yoast is the best fit for your requirement.
Yoast is an all-in-one SEO tool that will help you in every SEO task such as adding website title, optimizing post title, and description, sitemap creation, meta robots updation, etc.
Yoast SEO is free to use. It is a beginner-friendly SEO plugin for WordPress.
5. Grammarly
To grow your website, you have to publish lots of content on your website, and for this, you need a tool that can help you in writing content, and for this, Grammarly is best.
Grammarly is the only tool you need for better writing. It will check your content and suggest various edits like grammatical errors, punctuation, etc.
Grammarly is a free tool, but you can upgrade it if you need some extra features. It also has a google chrome extension, which you can install on your browser.
6. RafflePress
RafflePress is the best giveaway WordPress plugin. It allows you to create giveaways or contests for your website. This tool will help you to drive tons of free traffic to your website.
It is very easy to use drag and drop builder to build creative and engaging giveaways. You can also use RafflePress to build your email list. I recommend this tool to every beginner to get initial free traffic.
7. Constant Contact
Email marketing is very important and effective in affiliate marketing. If you want to increase your revenue, then you must have to build the email list from day one and to achieve this, you have to use a tool.
Constant Contact is the only tool you need to start capturing emails of your website visitors. By using this tool, you can create various email campaigns, create a newsletter, and many other email types. It is a drag and drops email builder with lots of features and templates.
8. TablePress
TablePress is a tool that helps you create beautiful and responsive tables for your website.
Sometimes, you will create content that needs a table. For example, if you are creating a post on “Top 10 Bluetooth Earbuds”, then you must include a comparison table with details like product name, price, image, and buying link. TablePress is a tool that allows you to create this type of table.
Best Affiliate Marketing Examples
There are many successful affiliate marketing websites on the internet that earn over six-figure income per month.
Here are some of the best affiliate marketing website examples which are performing very well in the market:
1. The Wirecutter
The Wirecutter is the best online review website where you can find lots of product reviews related to home, electronics, and other categories.
It was started in 2011 by Brian Lam, who is the founder of this website. They have included every best product review on their website.
Stats:
Domain Authority (DA): 80
Referring Domains: 18,000
Alexa Rank: 5,041
Age: 9 years
Estimated Visitors: 4M/month
Estimated income: $10M
2. This Is Why I’m Broke
This Is Why I’m Broke is one of the best affiliate websites available on the internet. It is working on a “gift items” niche.
Stats:
Domain Authority (DA): 72
Referring Domains: 5,000
Alexa Rank: 15,734
Age: 8 years
Estimated Visitors: 900k/month
Estimated income: $1M
3. Nerdwallet
Nerdwallet is the best website for finance-related information. Like other websites, Nerdwallet is also a review website of financial products like credit cards, mortgages, etc.
Stats:
Domain Authority (DA): 79
Referring Domains: 34,000
Alexa Rank: 2,046
Age: 11 years
Estimated Visitors: 10M/month
Estimated income: $100M
4. PC Part Picker
PC Part Picker is the best affiliate website for electronics and gadgets. It is basically a website that helps you in building your PC from scratch, and it will suggest various equipment such as RAM, CPU, keyboard, etc.
Stats:
Domain Authority (DA): 73
Referring Domains: 7,600
Alexa Rank: 1,934
Age: 10 years
Estimated Visitors: 3.3M/month
Estimated Income: N/A
5. Dog Food Advisor
Dog Food Advisor is the best website related to pets and animals. This website helps pet owners to buy the best food for their pets.
Stats:
Domain Authority (DA): 58
Referring Domains: 4,500
Alexa Rank: 70,430
Age: 11 years
Estimated Visitors: 550k/month
Estimated Income: N/A
Final Words
I hope this in-depth beginner’s affiliate marketing guide will help you to build your first affiliate website so that you can start making money online. I have included every step that you can follow to become an affiliate marketer.
But please don’t expect that you get rich or become a top affiliate marketer overnight. It takes time and hard work to be in that position where you can quit your 9 to 5 job. So, just focus on the quality work and grow your affiliate marketing journey.
Thanks for reading!
