How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

You may be on this page because you are looking for how to make money with affiliate marketing for beginners.

In my recent post, 16 Real Ways That You Can $200 Fast In One Day, I touched on the subject of affiliate marketing and promised that I would go a bit more in depth on this topic.

Affiliate marketing is a lucrative way to earn extra money but only if you know what you are doing. And that’s where I come in.😉

I thought it would be a good idea to share some things that I know to help you decide whether affiliate marketing is for you. To be honest it is the easiest concept to understand to make money but truthfully you can mess this up so badly that you make no money or you waste your own money. 

So learn from my mistakes!

By the end of this article you will learn:

• What is affiliate marketing?
• How to choose your affiliate program or network
• How to promote affiliate products
• Earning money with affiliate marketing

If you want to be better than good with affiliate marketing, then I urge you to read this entire article as I will cover topics that many amateur marketers skip over which provide very little results.

Then they wonder why affiliate marketing did not work for them.

I hope that this post helps clear up any doubts that you may have about affiliate marketing and that if you decide to give it a shot, that you will get some valuable tips to help you along the way.

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s products for a commission.

Most in house programs have products that they want to sell.

Instead of using their own advertising means, they allow affiliates to “spread the word” about their products so that they can acquire new customers through these affiliates.

In return and as a thank you, they pay the affiliate a commission from the sale of the product.

How to choose your affiliate program, network and product?

When choosing affiliate products to promote, you want to choose a product that will pay you a high return. So it is important that you research the company and its compensation plan before joining the program.

To save you the hassle, I have actually written an article on the 10 Top Places To Find High Paying Affiliate Programs. It’s a great read and will help you cut out the research time. Thank me later! 😉

|Niche Selection

You should also pay attention to the niche that you want to start. Your niche is the area of topic that you want to market in. So wealth, health and wellness, romance and dating are all niches.

Head on over to my article 6 Most Profitable Niche Markets For Affiliate Marketers and Bloggers to understand more about this topic.

When you read it, you will get a better idea where not to waste your time and where you should invest your time. 

|Product Selection

Any company that pays over $20 per affiliate sale, is worth my time and effort, in my opinion.

This just means that if I wanted to earn, let’s say $1000 from a campaign, that it would take me 50 sales to make my desired income.

50 x $20 = $1000

If my campaign converts at a rate of 2-3% then I would need at most 2500 people to see my offer to make 50 sales.

2500 x 2% = 50 sales

If you worked with a company that paid any less per referral sale, then you would need to spend more time promoting your offer to more people to make $1000.

There are many programs that pay more than $20 per referral sale and as a beginner you want to consider joining either an affiliate program or network to get started.

Related Articles: 

• Top 10 Places To Find High Paying Affiliate Programs For Marketers And Bloggers 
• 6 Most Profitable Niche Markets For Affiliate Marketers And Bloggers

|Difference between affiliate program and affiliate network

Be careful how you use the terms, affiliate program and affiliate network.  They both mean different things but essentially achieve the same outcome.

An affiliate program is an individual company or product that you can promote to earn money. An affiliate network is a company that houses many affiliate programs so you can easily select which program you want to join to earn money.

When you join a network, you still need to join a specific program to start earning money.

Some of my favourite affiliate networks are:

• ShareASale
• Panthera Network
• Amazon Associates 
• Ebay Partner Network
• Rakuten Marketing 
• CJ Affiliate by Conversant formerly Commission Junction 
• Clickbank 

The above affiliate networks are all free to join but as I mentioned before, once you join the network you must then apply to join a specific program depending on your niche. 

Some of my fav affiliate programs and products in the wealth niche are:

• Aweber email marketing software
• GetResponse email marketing software
• Clickfunnels sales funnel marketing tool
• Bluehost webhosting provider
• WP Engine WordPress webhosting provider
• Godaddy webhosting provider
• Teachable online platform for course creation
• Grammarly online grammar checker
• Picmonkey design and picture tool
• Udemy provider of any type of online course  
• Shopify online eCommerce platform to build online stores

How to promote affiliate products?

This is one of the most important things that you will do as an affiliate marketer so make sure and take your time when reading it.

There are many ways to promote affiliate products but you want to promote them in a way that produces the best results for you.

There are so many affiliates who think that promoting a product and generating a sale from that product is easy. I mean some companies who have the budget to do it get excellent results because they are promoting on a wide scale.

But if you are new to affiliate marketing and you want to be careful with your budget, then you need to watch out for the best marketing methods which I discuss as follows.

|The Blog Or Website Approach

Before starting a blog or website, you need a niche and a product. Previously I outlined a few good places that you can find products and showed you how to select a good niche.

With that out of the way, you need to decide how you are going to promote your product.

The blog or website approach is a lengthy process because this way takes time. But! It is soooo worth it!

It takes time to make it searchable in the search engines like Google and Bing. But there are quicker ways of getting traffic to your blog and I will speak about that later. 

It also takes time to write the content.

But when you have everything put together here are a few benefits of why creating a blog or website is good for you:

• A blog helps you to automate the way in which you make money. It’s pretty much a set it and forget it thing where you write content, drive traffic and get paid.
• A blog helps you to make as little or as much money as you want.
• When done well you can become a digital nomad, quit your job and work from anywhere in the world 
• You can create any content that you want on your blog
• Your blog is your home on the internet and can be seen by millions of people. Put the right content on it and it becomes a passive stream of income 
• You can make a hobby out of your blog but to cash in I suggest you treat it like a business
• Many more reasons I can give to fill up this post but I will leave it right here

Perfect! There are the cons and pros of blogging!

If none of that scares you and you are ready to put the work in, then jump on over to my article The Complete Beginner’s Guide To Starting A Successful Blog where I walk you through step by step, how to create a blog or website using WordPress and Bluehost. You can actually start a blog or website for as low as $3.95 a month with Bluehost.  

What content to write?

You can write any content that you want on the product and niche of your choice, but the best way is to write for your audience and incorporate your product as a solution to a problem.

How to articles and list articles that solve a problem are always great. For example, How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without A Blog Or Website or 25 Best Online Passive Income Streams And Opportunities

It actually is very simple to find topics to write about for your audience.

A great way is to use Google and see what other people are searching for. Let’s head on over to Google and I will show you.

Let’s suppose you want to start a sail boat blog. By using the keywords, how to sail a sailboat, Google gives me four other keywords that people are searching for.

When I scroll down to the bottom of the search results page, Google gives me eight more keywords to add to my notes. Awesome!

This is a great start for the topics that I want to write but you want to go a step further. 

I am going to use the Keysearch Tool so I can find the best keyword to write about. Ideally I would like to write a topic that people are searching for a lot but where there is little competition with other marketers in the marketplace. Let’s head there now.

How To Sail A Catamaran sounds like a pretty good topic.

So whilst I am in the Keysearch tool I plug that keyword into the search field like so…

These are the results that Keysearch gives to me. They tell me that this keyword is a moderately searched-for keyword and there is moderate competition in the marketplace. It’s ok BUT… when I look further into the results I see that people are also searching for how to sail a sailboat and how to sail a dinghy and they both have good search volume and are low competition keywords. Perfect!! 

So my next topic will be How To Sail A Sailboat For Beginners. I will therefore find affiliate products or services that my audience can use and recommend it to them in this article.

And that is how you find out what topic to write! 🙌 

If you are interested in doing affiliate marketing with niche websites, then check out my interview here with Leon Angus who creates and makes money from niche affiliate marketing websites.

If you do not want to use the blog or website approach then check out my article How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without A Blog Or Website.

|The Direct Linking Approach

Direct linking is another approach where you do not use a blog or website but rather you promote your affiliate links directly to your audience. 

This is a faster way of getting started with affiliate marketing but it is very important that you do it correctly.

To start you will need a few tools:

• A product and niche (which has already been covered above)
• A capture page builder
• An email autoresponder
• Traffic sources

Capture Page Builder

This is a marketing tool that helps you to capture your target audience’s contact details so that you can market to them later through email marketing.

Some great capture page builders include:

• Aweber
• GetResponse 
• Clickfunnels
• LeadPages

In my article 4 Best Lead Capture Page Builders With Free Trial Offers, I did a review of each of these products so you can go there and check it out.

An Email Autoresponder

Once you have captured your target audience’s details you will be able to follow up with them through email and even continue the sales process by recommending products to them.

It is important that when you start affiliate marketing that you start to build your email list as this will be your biggest income asset. In my article How To Build Your First Email List From Scratch I discuss why this part is super important and why you need to get it right from the beginning.

Some great email autoresponders include:

• Aweber free 30 day trial and 500 contacts for $19/month
• GetResponse free 30 day trial and 1000 contacts for $15/month
• Clickfunnels free 14 day trial and unlimited contacts for $297/month

Traffic Sources

Traffic is basically people. You and me are traffic. It is a marketing term used to describe human beings. Traffic sources simply mean places where you can advertise your product.

1. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

As the phrase says, you are paying for every click that you get to your website. Every click equates to a visitor.

Some pay-per-click platforms are:

• Google Adwords
• Bing Ads
• Facebook Ads

Pay-per-click advertising works when you tell the provider, what keywords or interests you want to target to bring visitors to your website.

For example, with the hair care product, we have already identified several keywords that you can use to target people who are searching for a solution to growing hair quickly.

Once you know which keywords you want to target, you need to create a well designed capture page which will link to the affiliate product.

My video on How To Create A Lead Capture Page Using Clickfunnels is useful to show you how it is done.

When your lead capture page is all set up, you can now drive traffic to the lead capture page using specific keywords that people will search for.

A few key tips for your lead capture page:

• The content should be short and to the point. You want to add content that will essentially bribe your audience so they can willingly hand over their contact details. Therefore a headline like This One Thing Will Help Grow Your Hair Within Weeks. Enter Your Details To Get The Free Report To Your Inbox. If you are not too savvy on creating headlines use the Free Headline Generator to get ideas and improve your headline creativity.
• Ask for the bare minimum on your capture page. Therefore you do not need the person’s telephone number, address or social security number. That will turn off a visitor. I usually ask for a name and email address or simply an email address will do.
• Get legal. If you are collecting someone’s email address ensure that you have the appropriate legal disclaimers on your capture page. At most you need terms and conditions and a privacy policy. You can use this Free Privacy Policy template and Free Terms And Conditions template. Read the policies to make sure that they are suitable for you and your niche.

If you would like to use pay per click advertising as a way to advertise your affiliate product, then it is important that you understand how to do it. I would therefore strongly recommend the following courses to get you started:

• Google Ads Pay-Per-Click 101: Intro to Google & Facebook Advertising
• Bing Ads Forget Google; Bing Pay-Per-Click Advertising Traffic Course
• Facebook Ads Facebook Social Traffic Blueprint Facebook Ads Course

Related Topics

• How To Get More Sales By Using A Bridge Page  

2. Solo Ads

Solo ads are email ads that are sent to someone’s email list of subscribers.

Using the direct linking approach once you have your lead capture page set up, you will compose an email message, then contact the owner of the email list so that they can send your email containing your promotion.

Your email ad can be as simple as:

Hey my name is Dawn-Marie. I would like to introduce you to this one thing that will grow your hair faster and healthier than any other product. Check it out here [capture page website link]  

When using solo ads, ensure that the owner of the email list is in the same niche as you are. Therefore do not contact a solo ad provider in the weight loss niche, with a product in the hair care niche.

Odd right?!

When contacting solo ad providers a few questions you will want to ask are:

• How do they build their list?
• How often do they refresh their list?
• Have they promoted X product in the past?
• Do they write their own email message or will they accept yours?
• When will they send out your email message?

My fav solo ad providers in the wealth niche are:

• Udimi solo ads 
• MLM Leads 
• Herculist

3. YouTube Video Marketing

Many people use YouTube to build up subscribers and gain video views on their channel for the sole purpose of earning an income from YouTube Ad Revenue.

This is not the best way to earn an income from YouTube. If you have a YouTube channel your aim should be to secure as many subscribers as you can by delivering valuable content.

Once you have enough subscribers you can then promote an affiliate product to the audience.

So you may do a review of a product or a how-to video and point the viewers to the description box where your affiliate link will be contained.

The great thing about YouTube is that you can create a video once and it continues to gain views to it over and over without you doing anymore work.

That means that if your affiliate link is placed within the narrative box of the video, your website will continue to get tons of traffic to it, without much effort on your part.

4. Email Marketing

As I mentioned before, the minute you start any type of online business, you want to start building your email list.

I know that you probably skipped over what I just said, so I will say it again.

The first thing you MUST do is start building your email list!

It was one of my biggest regrets when I started online three years ago and wished I had started sooner.

When you start building an email list, you are building a list of loyal subscribers who look forward to your content.

You can also promote any product to your list including your affiliate products.

Building an email list is as simple as placing a contact form within a website or blog using tools such as Aweber Email Marketing or creating a capture page with tools such as Clickfunnels or the LeadPages.

Once you have built a list of subscribers to talk to you can email them with offers or products that you are promoting.

Related Article: 

• How To Start Your First Email List From Scratch

Earning money with affiliate marketing

With the different ways of promoting affiliate products and knowing where to find them, you can now start earning money with affiliate marketing.

There are a few things that you need to remember however:

• To make good money you need a profitable niche
• Affiliate programs and networks are unpredictable so it is never a good thing to rely on just one program. Choose several programs to promote within your niche.
• Affiliate programs and networks require you to comply with their rules and regulations when promoting their products.
• When promoting affiliate products you can use free methods but it is always best to incorporate paid methods.
• Patience is required to test which affiliate programs convert the best.

Before You Go…

Hey, before you go, if affiliate marketing is something you would like to try your hands at, then it is so important that you get some training as there is so much more to learn beyond what I have outlined here in this post.

I mean you can take months to research affiliate marketing and not have any structure to what you are learning, or you can take mere days or weeks to learn affiliate marketing with streamlined training that teaches you everything from one source.

This is exactly how I learned affiliate marketing but it’s only so much I can cover with you on this blog. There is so much more that you need to understand like split testing, conversion rates, how to write the perfect ad copy to make sure that you do not waste money.

The one training platform that prepared me for this niche is the Super Affiliate System by John Crestani.

It is an amazing step by step training course that will help beginners understand how affiliate marketing works. It’s also useful for those who have a bit more knowledge as you can learn some great marketing strategies that you will not learn anywhere else.

Click here to join the free webinar.

Cheers,

P.S Any other affiliate marketing tips you have found useful? Leave them in the comments below.

P.P.S Why have you not subscribed to my awesome YouTube Channel where I give more free and valuable content to help you with your online marketing journey? Subscribe here!