Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

What's affiliates marketing?

In affiliate marketing, you promote another company's product or service. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you earn a commission. These commissions are usually a percentage of the sale price or a fixed amount.

Why should you do affiliate marketing?

Here are two reasons why you should consider affiliate marketing:

1. Inexpensive and low risk

Starting a business can be risky and expensive with startup costs for products, employees, equipment, rent, etc. With affiliate marketing, all you need is a website. If that doesn't work, you've simply wasted your time and some money.

2. Easy to scale

A typical vendor sells the products of a single company. As an affiliate, you can promote the products of many different companies and earn commissions from each.

How does affiliate marketing work?

When you join an affiliate program, you receive a unique link that includes a tracking ID. This way, the retailer can know if you have referred customers to them.

People who click on your link also receive a small file called a cookie that is stored on their device. This (usually) comes with an expiration date, so you get paid even if you delay the purchase for a while.

Here's an example of how it works:

Someone visits your article on the best winter jackets.

You click on the Amazon affiliate link for one of your recommendations.

You close your browser to pick up your son from school.

The next day, they return to Amazon to review the product.

You buy the recommended product with the ski equipment.

Thanks to the affiliate cookie stored on this person's device, you earn a commission on the recommended product and ski equipment.

How much money do affiliate marketers make?

Most affiliate marketers earn less than $10,000 per year. This is the result of a survey carried out by the Influencer Marketing Hub.

However, about one in six (16.87%) earn $50,000 a year or more.

Matt Giovanisci is a good example of a high income affiliate. His website, Swim University, generated $149,991 in affiliate commissions in 2021.

However, remember that these people have done a great job of building your brand. It took him years of hard work to get to this level.

If you're just starting out, your checks may look more like this for a while:

You have to manage your expectations. You won't make a lot of money right away, but don't let that discourage you.

The success of others tells you that with hard work, time, and the right knowledge, you too can achieve those levels.

How to get started with affiliate marketing

Follow these seven easy steps:

Step 1 – Choose your niche

Your niche is the category you are talking about and want to promote.

To stand out from the myriad of other websites today, my advice is to be specific. Instead of tackling a broad niche like food, go for something narrower like grilling. This helps you build a more targeted audience and can also help with search engine optimization.

Here are four questions to ask yourself in order to find a good niche:

What am I good at?

What do I like to do?

What am I curious about?

What do others tell me I'm good at?

It's hard to overstate the importance of choosing something you're passionate about. You need to create a lot of content to be successful with affiliate marketing. If you decide to do something you hate, you'll have a hard time sticking with it when the going gets tough.

So when I created my first website, I decided to talk about one of my hobbies: breakdancing. And even though I didn't know anything about marketing, I increased that to about 2000 monthly visits.

Step 2: Decide on a content platform

You can do affiliate marketing on any platform. This contains:

website

Youtube

Social networks (for example, Instagram, TikTok)

Newsletter

podcast

Which method you choose will depend on your preferences and sometimes your niche preferences. For example, people who are learning to breakdance will prefer videos. Even if you prefer to write, having a YouTube channel may be a better option.

Other than that, we recommend that you build a website and use search engine optimization (SEO) to rank your content on the top of Google. This allows us to consistently generate passive search traffic, which also means consistent clicks on affiliate links.