Want to make handsome money in the multi-billion digital marketing industry anytime from anywhere, affiliate marketing could be the right option for you. In this article, we will try to learn how to start affiliate marketing for beginners from scratch. Also, we will explore the world of affiliate marketing, its benefits, effective strategies, what are affiliate rules, and how anyone can get started on this exciting journey.
Introduction to Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
This article is dedicated to affiliate marketing for beginners. Affiliate marketing is also called referral marketing, performance marketing, associate marketing, and partner marketing. It is a type of sales strategy in which a publisher or a content creator promotes another business or a brand/product and in turn gets a part of the revenue (earned by that particular brand) for which promotion is done.
It is similar to the commission paid to a salesman for every sale he makes. Find the product or the service that is useful for the users and promote it. The more products you sell, the higher the percentage of commission you earn. The commission earned can range from a few cents to thousands of dollars.
The person involved in affiliate marketing is called an Affiliate marketer. Websites provide affiliate links with a specific tracking ID to track sales made by the affiliate marketing websites.
The affiliate marketing industry has a huge earning potential for professional content creators. On the other hand, it has become a popular way for eCommerce brands to market their products.
Certainly, a good way to generate a significant passive income in affiliate marketing for beginners as well as experienced bloggers. Affiliate marketing is the new trend to drive sales. It is beneficial both for publishers and brands.
Let us see how to start affiliate marketing with no money. Following these concepts will be very helpful to start affiliate marketing for beginners.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate marketing is a type of sales strategy in which a fixed amount of commission is paid to a website promoting a product of the retailer. Usually, three parties are involved in affiliate marketing, the affiliate, the merchant or the retailer, and the consumer.
1) Affiliate:
The affiliate is the publisher or the content creator that promotes the products. It can either be an individual or it can be a company that sells the products to the customers.
The role of the affiliate marketer is to attract and convince the user about the product’s value so that the user ultimately ends up buying it. This can be achieved by writing review blogs about that product, putting banner ads, email newsletters, etc. Review blogs are very popular and a boon to start affiliate marketing for beginners.
2) Merchant:
The merchant is a vendor, retailer, Product seller, or product creator who pays for affiliate marketing. It can be a solo entrepreneur or a big enterprise. The product can be physical like some goods, or it can be some kind of service may be in the form of tutorials, or it can be a digital product like some software.
The company involved may be an eCommerce company willing to sell its physical products or a Saas company wanting to sell some software.
The merchant need not be actively involved in the marketing of the product. Instead, it pays affiliate sites to promote its product.
3) Consumer:
The end-user of the product or the customer makes this whole system go around. without an end-user, there would be no sales and hence no commission to the affiliate.
The affiliate marketer promotes the product through different marketing channels like social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn), blogs, or YouTube videos and if the consumers find the product useful, then they click on the affiliate link provided and reach the merchant’s website.
If the consumer purchases the product, the affiliate marketer receives part of the revenue made from that product.
Here make sure that the consumer is aware that you are receiving a commission for that product.
This is the policy of the Federal Trade Commission, that you must mention your relationship to the actual retailer.
A Disclaimer mentioning the relationship between the affiliate and the merchant must be given. Let the viewers decide whether they want to buy the affiliate product or not.
Below is the basic concept of affiliate or referral marketing. It works in the following way:
- Users visit your blog on the best vlog camera.
- They land on your page and click on the affiliate link provided by you.
- They purchase the recommended product.
- You get a commission for the purchase made by the users.
Types of Affiliate Marketing
An affiliate may promote the product which they may or may not be using themselves. Depending upon the association with the product or the services promoted, affiliate marketing was categorized into three types, unattached, related, and involved by Pat Flynn in 2009.
1. Unattached affiliate marketing:
In this business model, an affiliate marketer does not have any connection with the product or the service they promote. They do not have any expertise in the niche of the product. They never make claims about its use.
Affiliates simply promote a particular product by running PPC campaigns. If a user lands on a merchant’s site through their affiliate link, they get the commission. For example, a gym blog may feature gaming software.
This type of affiliate is those who simply want to generate money without investing relationship with the product or the customer. This model may not be suitable for starting affiliate marketing for beginners.
2. Attached or involved affiliate marketing:
In this type, affiliates are closely associated with the product or the service and they have the authority and can make claims about the use of the product they are promoting. They are experts in their niche and they give recommendations based on their personal experience about the product.
Of course in this type of affiliate marketing, affiliates have to work hard and require much time to build credibility, but in the end, it results in greater payoffs.
3. Related affiliate marketing:
This is a mix of the above two types and has the partial authority of the niche. It involves promoting a relevant product/service without making direct claims.
In this type, affiliates do not use the product themselves but they influence the niche. They have an established following and therefore can offer some authority.
An example of this type may be an affiliate promoting a clothing brand through a fashion blog or social media channels without actually using that brand.
The disadvantage of this type is that an affiliate may risk promoting a bad product and thus may lose the trust of the audience resulting in a bad reputation. Therefore, this model may also not be beneficial to start affiliate marketing for beginners.
How Does an Affiliate Marketer Get Paid?
A big advantage of affiliate marketing is that an affiliate marketer may get paid even if the user does not always buy the product. An affiliate marketer gets a commission if a user lands on the page and takes an action in the form of a click, form submission, or making a purchase.
Some of the common affiliate marketing models are:
1. Pay-per-click (PPC)
Affiliate marketing is all about diverting traffic to the website or page and getting the user to click and take action. To get maximum traffic, SEO (search engine optimization) plays an important role. Affiliate marketing virtually depends on SEO. So knowledge of SEO is a must for starting affiliate marketing for beginners.
Organic SEO although very much helpful, can’t solve the purpose because the affiliate market is much saturated. That is why most affiliate marketers use PPC.
In this method, the commission is calculated based on the traffic brought to the merchant’s website. The more users click on the affiliate links, the higher the commission the affiliate marketer gets.
PPC has two common concepts:
Cost per acquisition (CPA): In this model, the commission is paid to the affiliate when the merchant acquires a lead. The lead can be in the form of subscribing to the email list or a newsletter or filling out the “Contact Us” form.
Earning per click: This is the average earning per 100 clicks for all affiliates in a merchant’s affiliate program.
2. Pay-per-sale
As the name implies, in this model commission is paid as a percentage of the sale price of the product when a consumer purchases through an affiliate link. Therefore an affiliate must encourage the user to invest in the affiliate product to get commission.
3. Pay-per-install
The affiliate gets a commission for directing the user to the merchant’s website and resulting in installing some product like a mobile app or some software.
Advantages of Affiliate Marketing
Here are the main advantages of affiliate marketing.
1) Passive income
The biggest advantage of affiliate marketing is its potential to generate passive income. Once you set up your affiliate links and establish an audience, you can earn commissions even when asleep.
2) Cost-effective and risk-free
Starting a business requires an investment in equipment, rent, staff, inventory, etc. In affiliate marketing, all you need is only a website or blog. If you fail, you have only wasted your time devoted and a little bit of money. But if you fail in business, a lot of money is wasted.
3) Mass appeal
If you work in a company, you will promote only the products of that particular company. In affiliate marketing, you can promote the products of multiple companies simultaneously and get a commission from them. Also, you can target mass customers as compared to traditional marketing.
How to Get Started With Affiliate Marketing
Below are the 10 various steps to be followed to start affiliate marketing for beginners.
- Choose the Right Niche
- Choose an Affiliate Channel/Platform
- Find Relevant Affiliate Programs
- Join Affiliate Networks
- Create Unique High-Quality Valuable Content
- Drive Traffic to Your Site
- Acquire Clicks on Your Affiliate Links
- Cloaking Affiliate Links
- Convert Clicks into Sales
- Tools and plugins
1. Choose the Right Niche:
The first necessary step in affiliate marketing is to choose the best niche for affiliate marketing. The niche is the category or segment of the larger market you want to promote.
The choice of niche is a very important strategic business decision. It should always be designed to serve a specific customer base. It establishes a loyal audience and encourages them to buy your products instead of your competitors. Being niche-specific also helps in SEO.
Ask yourself a few questions before selecting a niche:
- What you are good at?
- Do you find your niche interesting?
- How much you are curious about the niche?
- What do the others say you are good at?
- Have a closer look at your hobbies.
To be a successful affiliate marketer, you have to create a lot of content. That means if you do not select the niche according to your interest, you will soon get fed up and may not be able to continue for a long time. So you must choose the niche wisely.
You may have a look at some of the top trending affiliate marketing niches to be considered for affiliate marketing:
- Health and lifestyle
- Finance
- Beauty and fashion
- Pet care
- Technology
- Travel
- Education
- Gaming
- Parenting
There are many more options available. Have a look and decide which suits you most.
2. Choose an Affiliate Channel/Platform:
- Website blogs
- Social media
- Newsletter
- Youtube videos
- Podcasts
3. Find Relevant Affiliate Programs:
Keeping in mind the target audience and content publishing platform, the next step is finding and joining the best affiliate program that fits your niche. Do not just focus on the affiliate programs that are high paying, but try to choose the affiliate products that appeal to your audience.
Usually, there are three main types of affiliate programs namely:
Low volume, high commission
These are the niche products with a lesser number of buyers but the commission rate is very high. You can generate more revenue with even lower sales. Examples are luxury products, antiques, photography products (camera equipment), and fashion products.
High volume, low commission
These are the products that have mass appeal but the commission rate is very low. These types of programs have a wide range of affiliate products. To reach the revenue goal in this type of program, you have to create a lot of content and traffic to your affiliate link. An example is Amazon’s affiliate program. It pays only up to 10% commission but has a tremendous range of products.
High volume, High Commission
This affiliate program includes expensive products with mass appeal. These programs have high earning potential, but they have high competition too. Examples are Financial affiliate programs like credit cards and bank accounts and SaaS affiliate programs like web hosting and email marketing tools. A deep expertise in the subject is required to run such type of program.
Choosing the right program depends on your niche your level of expertise and also the category of the target audience. To target consumers, you can go for high volume, low commission. For businesses, you can choose low volume high commission.
4. Join Affiliate Networks:
Let’s first understand the difference between affiliate programs and affiliate networks. Affiliate programs are the individual companies that provide affiliate tracking links to the website or blog owners, after signing with them.
Affiliate networks are the common marketplace of multiple companies where affiliate marketers can join without signing with individual companies separately. They act as a middleman between the affiliate marketer and the merchant company.
Merchant companies, provide a platform to list their products, and affiliate marketers, offer their platform to search for different products and sign up as an affiliate. Some of the popular affiliate networks are CJ Affiliate, Clickbank, Amazon affiliates, ShareASale, Shopify, eBay, etc.
Do proper research before joining the appropriate affiliate network that best suits your affiliate needs,
5. Create Unique High-Quality Valuable Content:
To be successful in affiliate marketing, you have to create valuable content for the promotion of your products. Your content should be Unique, original, and informative and must solve the problems of the user.
Reports show that people spend an average of 6 hours and 40 minutes on the Internet daily all over the world. Day by day, people are consuming more content. There is an increase of 0.8% in 2023. So there is an excellent opportunity to succeed in affiliate marketing.
Blogs are a popular way to build traffic on the website. Reports are that 65% of affiliate marketers generate revenue through blogging. So if you have a blog, you can make good revenue with affiliate marketing. For that, you have to do proper research on the content, insert relevant keywords in the blog post, and optimize it with the help of SEO tools to rank your blog on Google’s SERP.
Here are a few examples of high-converting affiliate marketing content to be considered.
Types of Affiliate Content
Product Reviews: Most buyers prefer product reviews before making any purchase. So creating a review blog is most popular among affiliate marketers. Simply write a blog about a product and describe the pros and cons and you have done it.
Product comparison: You have to compare similar products and mention the advantages and disadvantages so that the buyer can make the right decision.
Product roundup: This is almost similar to product comparison. In this type of blog, you have to evaluate several products in the same category. Roundups engage different users with relevant products. So you can generate diversified revenue with a single click.
eBooks: Even a blog may have some limitations. Sometimes writing a blog on some product or service may not be sufficient as it may require more in-depth discussion. That is where eBooks come into the picture. Detailed descriptions about a product can be written and compiled in the form of an eBook. eBooks also help to build an email list.
Tutorials: Explain the working of the product or the service to be promoted in a step-by-step process, so that the user understands easily. Once trust is built, they are likely to buy it.
Resource pages: Resource pages consist of different tools and resources that help solve the problems of the user. This type of content can help build your authority as an expert.
Affiliate content is given the name commerce content, so it is compulsory to include an affiliate disclosure mentioning that you are earning a commission from your affiliate link.
6. Drive Traffic to Your Site:
Now after publishing the content, the next task is to divert traffic to your website to engage potential users and generate leads. The idea is that more users read the blog and click on your affiliate links.
Your site should rank high on Google to get high traffic. The more traffic, the more the chances of clicks. For this, an effective strategy has to be followed. Mainly two types of strategies are followed, organic and paid.
1) Organic:
In the organic strategy, you can do the following things:
a) SEO: SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing the blog post in such a way that it ranks high in Google’s SERP. In SEO, we do keyword research, keyword optimization, link building, optimizing page speed, etc, and make the site user-friendly.
Analyze your target customers, create content according to their needs, make sure that Google understands your page, create high-quality backlinks, promote your page on various platforms, and get the page indexed by Google.
b) email list building: Several email marketing tools are available that help in building an email list of potential users. Having an email list allows you to communicate with the targeted users anytime. You can use an email newsletter to send emails whenever you publish new content regarding product recommendations or limited offers, updates, etc. Use a custom email address having your website name instead of a regular email address to have a good impact on the customer’s mind.
c) Social media sharing: According to recent studies, people spend an average of 2 to 3 hours daily on social media globally. Social media is a very powerful tool to increase your brand awareness. Optimize your content with different hashtags to increase follower engagement.
Of course, you have to keep in mind user demographics while deciding which social media platform to choose. For example, users between the age group of 15 to 20, mostly use TikTok. Therefore, fashion bloggers who want to target female teenagers should use TikTok to share their products.
2) Paid Advertisement:
7. Acquire Clicks on Your Affiliate Links:
Simply creating good content is not sufficient in affiliate marketing. You must get clicks on your affiliate links. To get maximum clicks to get a potential commission from the sales made, you have to follow these powerful strategies:
1. Link placement:
The placement of affiliate links in the content should be done in such a way that they look like a natural part of the content. Merge them into the text of the blog or the videos wisely.
The focus should be to provide valuable and genuine information to the audience to make them eager to click on your affiliate links.
Here keep one thing in mind, if your affiliate links are at the end of the content, people will rarely scroll down, and you may not get enough clicks.
On the other hand, if you put links at the beginning or in the introduction, that may look spammy. So a well-balanced and contextual placement of links is most important.
2. CTA (call to action):
Call-to-action phrases like “Discover more”, “Grab the offer”, and “Learn more”, etc create curiosity and excitement among the audience compelling them to make clicks. Using callouts in the form of buttons, tables, or boxes gathers the attention of the user.
3. Visuals:
Visuals always have an upper hand over plain text. You can use product images, graphics, or videos for the promotion of your products or services. Clicks on visually appealing buttons are much more than simple text.
8. Cloaking Affiliate Links:
Most affiliate marketers are not aware of Link Cloaking due to which they sometimes suffer a great loss. Link cloaking is the practice of hiding your affiliate ID from the URL by redirecting it to a different page of the website.
The biggest security risk in affiliate marketing is link hijacking. Link cloaking is used to prevent link hijacking. It happens when some other affiliates replace their ID with yours and steal your commission. See the two affiliate links below:
www.affiliateprogram.com/?affiliateid/=123qwerty*
www.abc.com/affiliate-product
The lower link is more secure as it tells the user where to click. Besides it is easier to remember and also it helps to increase brand awareness.
WordPress plugins like Thirsty Affiliates and Pretty Links can be used for link cloaking.
9. Convert clicks into sales:
Two types of conversion are required to make money in affiliate marketing, one is getting the clicks on the affiliate links, and the other is the visitor making the purchase.
You have full control of yourself in the first type. So you can use different strategies to increase the chances of getting the clicks. In the second conversion, merchant has the full control of the checkouts. So you have to find out the merchants with the programs that convert well.
10. Tools and Plugins for affiliate marketing:
As your blog keeps growing with time, you have to recommend a lot of products. You may find it difficult to manage all the affiliate links and ads on your website.
Let us see what affiliate marketing tools and WordPress plugins can help manage all these.
1. ThirstyAffiliates
Adding links manually to your website content becomes difficult as your site grows. You have to copy the URL with your affiliate ID and paste it into WordPress every time. ThirstyAffiliate is an affiliate management plugin that helps you add affiliate links in WordPress.
This plugin also shortens the long affiliate links into short and cloaked links which are easy to remember. ThirstyAffiliate can also replace keywords with affiliate links which can help boost affiliate revenue.
2. Monsterinsights
It is a Google Analytics plugin that allows you to check where your users are coming from and what action they are taking while on your website. MonstersInsights can track your outbound affiliate links using Google Analytics. That means you can always check which affiliate links are being clicked more often.
MonsterInsights is also able to detect whether you are using ThirstyAffiliates to manage your affiliate links. Thus, it can detect all your affiliate links irrespective of the prefixes you are using.
3. Google Search Console
It is used to find and fix technical errors on the website and submit a sitemap. You can monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your website performance with the help of Google search console.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is used to track different activities on the website like session duration, page session, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
There are many more tools and plugins available that are very helpful for beginners. Search them and find which suits you most.
Tips to Follow
Do not forget to follow these tips to be a successful affiliate.
#1: Find out the relevant programs, that fit naturally into your business and are less competitive. Also, look for the brand reputation, commission rates, and resources provided.
#2: Remember content is the king. Always post quality content that is valuable for your audience.
#3: Maintain trust and credibility among your audience. Do not forget to mention your affiliate relationship with your partner company.
#4: Be patient. Remember Rome was not built in a day. Success in affiliate marketing takes time. Grow your audience, build trust and you can expect significant outcomes.
I hope this article can provide information about how to start affiliate marketing for beginners. If you liked this article or want more detailed information on affiliate marketing, please mention your concern in the comment section.
