What is Affiliate Marketing? – How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

 

 

What is Affiliate Marketing and What does it Involve?

Affiliate marketing is promoting another business’ products or services in exchange for a commission. The affiliate marketer can promote the products or services through a variety of channels, such as their website, social media, or email marketing.

When a customer clicks on the marketer’s affiliate link obtained from the company and makes a purchase, the affiliate marketer earns a commission and/or an ongoing residual payment.

The amount of the commission varies depending on the affiliate program. Some affiliate programs pay a fixed commission, while others pay a percentage of the sale price.

Affiliate marketing is a popular way to make money online because it is a low-cost and low-risk way to start a business.  

In this article, I will guide you through the basics of affiliate marketing and help you get started with affiliate marketing as a beginner.

 

Types of Affiliate Marketing Programs

Pay Per Lead, Click, or Sale

There are many types of affiliate marketing programs, such as pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, and pay-per-sale. Pay-per-click programs pay you when someone clicks on your affiliate link. Pay-per-lead programs pay you when someone fills out a form or signs up for a free trial. Pay-per-sale programs pay you when someone purchases through your affiliate link

Passive Income through Residual Affiliate Programs

Residual affiliate programs are a great way to earn passive income. These programs pay you a commission for each recurring sale, which means you can earn money even when you’re not actively promoting products.

To be successful in residual affiliate programs, you need to promote products that have a monthly subscription or recurring payments. You also need to build a strong relationship with your audience and provide value to them.

 

So how would you Promote Products over the Internet?

Create a Blog for your Niche

Blogging is content you would use to promote affiliate products or content.

Both platforms allow you to create content and promote affiliate products to your audience by placing Affiliate Links in your blog content with Anchor Keywords (these are words that are part of your blog but if clicked can provide more information on that subject or send the person to a product page where that Anchor text is discussed or content created for it.)

To be successful in affiliate marketing through Blogging and YouTube, you need to create high-quality relevant content that provides value to your audience, shows that you have some knowledge and authority about your subject, and meets the search queries of the readers and potential customers. You also need to promote your content and build a following.

Create Video Content for your Niche

Videos are highly engaging and can help you promote your affiliate products to your audience.  In fact many podcasts are now being aired on YouTube and they are a great way of reaching your audience.

To create video content for affiliate marketing, you need to identify your target audience, research the topics they’re interested in using keyword research, and create videos that provide value to them.

 

Create Digital Products for your Niche

Digital products are one of the easiest ways to create customer loyalty by providing free gifts and creating products that set you as an authority in your niche. 

They are also one of the easiest types of content to deliver apart from web content as there is no shipping or handling involved and they can be downloaded immediately.

Promote Affiliate Links on Social Media through Reels and Posts

Social media is a great way to promote your affiliate links and reach a larger audience. You can promote your affiliate links on social media by sharing your content and engaging with your audience.

To be successful in promoting your affiliate links on social media, you need to create high-quality content and engage with your audience. You also need to be transparent about your affiliate links and disclose that you’re promoting products.

 

Courses and Webinars establish you as an Authority in your Niche

Course creation can be used to engage customers into your email list or used as a lead magnet.  It may just be one topic of your overall course. 

Webinars can be used in the same way to highlight a topic within a larger course and can encourage people to watch your topic which then engages them for the affiliate course you are offering.

 

Create Display Advertising Campaigns

Display Ad campaigns can be made in Google Ads which advertise your content wherever your target audience is searching or watching content.  It may be on YouTube, Blog sites, Apps or even specific websites or specific videos of the audiences you would like to targe.  Google has ways…..ah ah ah of reaching everyone with your message.  They also have a way to Retarget your audience with campaigns should they not be able to complete transactions or it times out.

 

Affiliate Marketing Reality Check

The website and digital marketing world including Affiliate Marketing has numerous programs to be learnt and you can choose to specialise in a specific content and still succeed such as blogging rather than blogging and video.  The greater profits will always increase if you have different content types that appeals to different audience needs.

So what does this mean for you?

It means there are multiple ways to create content and each way has its own program to use.  For videos you might want to specialise in YouTube videos and in Blogging you may want to specialise in Website Creation.

There are Google Keyword Search programs to learn and Graphic Design Programs and Photo Shop or the Affinity Photo and Designer programs you may want to use to help create better design effects for your content.

Canva is a marvellous program that can do most things from creating video, reels, stories, templates, thumbnails etc and is a wonderful program that complements all content creation.

And we haven’t even started to get to any Advertising yet or how to create Lead Magnets that can be offered for free in return for a product or newsletter subscriber which gets added to your email list.

 

Affiliate Marketing is a cog in the wheel of the larger Digital Marketing Wilderness.

The cogs that make up the Digital Marketing industry are:-

  • Affiliate Marketing – the promotion of another business’ products
  • Content Marketing – promoting your own content and derivative products
  • Email Marketing – the collection of customer emails that can be retargetted introducing newer content or other products.
  • Social Media Marketing – including Influencer Marketing

 

A great affiliate marketer has the ability to use all these types of marketing to achieve their goals and get their content to their consumer.  Starting with one form of Affiliate Marketing is a good place to launch and then build up your skills from there. 

Try not to move on to other types of marketing before you have mastered one.  Many find that they started in this place and when they found it took more effort than they thought, they moved on to another idea of entrepreneurship. 

Most ways of marketing for entrepreneurs involve one or all these components so moving on is not necessarily the answer.

 

Even if one decides to use platforms like Gumroad, Amazon, Etsy or Kindle Publishing, platforms with a lot of traffic, know they can still get minimal sales. 

This is because these platforms are so saturated with people who don’t wish to master digital marketing and many do not realise that certain SEO techniques and social media and paid ads campaigns help the best sellers to profit the most on these platforms. 

I want to encourage you to take a long view and see this discipline like a university course only much cheaper.  The cost will be the hours you put in.  The reward will be a truly passive income that can be had through free optimised content and paid advertising.

 

Great courses on Marketing can be found at:-

Google Digital Garage

Udemy

And courses by your favourite influencers.

 

Some of these subjects are:-

Email Marketing

Content Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

 

Some courses and Programs that will help you learn Web Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation using Keyword Research

Google Trends

Google Analytics

 

Courses or Programs that will help you with Content Creation including video, pdf and books.

Canva – for video, ebooks, stationery, pdf books, reels and stories and much more

Affinity Photo and Designer

Photoshop

After Effects for Motion Graphics

Placeit.net for Mockups and Video Intros and Outros

 

Affiliate Marketing Tools for Beginners

Bluehost

WordPress

AHREFS

Keysearch

Google Keyword Planner

Bard.ai – to create blogs

Chat GPT – to create all types of content

Grammarly – to correct content and check for plagiarism

Canva

How to Start Affiliate Marketing (for Beginners)

 

Choosing a niche for affiliate marketing

The first step in getting started with affiliate marketing is to choose a niche. A niche is a specific topic or market that you want to focus on. Choosing a niche is important because it helps you target a specific audience and therefore provides you with a clear direction for your marketing content.

When choosing a niche, consider your interests, skills, and expertise. You want to choose a niche that you’re passionate about and that you can provide value to your audience as your content will include these topics and sub topics.

 

Setting up your Website for Affiliate Marketing

To choose your niche for affiliate marketing use a keyword search tool such as Keysearch, Google Keyword Planner or AHREFS to find keywords that have high global volume but low competition.  This is very important.  

Competing with larger higher ranking companies who have extensive content will be difficult to rank on the Google Search page.  Finding less competitive keywords ranks content more easily.

There will be less traffic going through your content with lower competitive words which  means there will be less companies competing for the highest position on a Google search page. 

Aim to be as closest to the first business on the page and at the least on the first page when you enter your keyword into Google Search.

 

Setting up your website for affiliate marketing

To promote affiliate products, you need a website or a social media account such as YouTube, Instagram etc. So if you are not ready to learn how to put a website up yet you can use your social media account on your mobile phone. 

Your website is also an online storefront and the place where you will promote your affiliate products. Setting up a website is easy, and you can do it in a few simple steps.

  • Purchase a domain name using your keysearch tool that you will use for a blog/website. Search for a  relevant and popularly searched keyword for best results.   You can purchase these domains from GoDaddy or Namecheap.  You do not need to pay for the extra protection on the domain names because they already protect your information as an owner of the domain.

 

  • Get your hosting through Bluehost.  Customers store their website pages and files on a Hosting service.  Bluehost allows you to create up to 100 websites using WordPress themes from its platform for free.  See Bluehost pricing plans here.  Domain names are not a website.  They are the name for a website and the hosting will hold the content.

 

  • Assign your domain to Bluehost through the Bluehost dashboard.  Change the nameservers for the url on your Go Daddy or Namecheap to bluehost1 and bluehost2.  See the below video on how to do this.

 

  • Log into WordPress for your domain URL and create your web pages.

 

Click tutorials for the following:- 

Assign Domain to Bluehost

Change Nameservers on GoDaddy

Change Nameservers on Namecheap

 

Choosing the Right WordPress Theme for Your Content

WordPress themes are a great way to customize your website and make it look professional. Affiliate marketers have specific themes designed for their use.

When choosing a WordPress theme for affiliate marketing, choose a theme that is responsive or viewable for mobile screens.  Affiliate marketing plugins should be compatible with the themes then you can optimise grammar and keywords on your site and editing is user friendly.

To optimize your website for search engines, you need to focus on 

  • Keyword research, 
  • On-page optimization, and 
  • Link building. 

Keyword research helps you identify the keywords that your audience is searching for, on-page optimization helps you optimize your content for those keywords, and link building helps you build high-quality backlinks to your website.

 

Finding the Right Affiliate Products to Promote

To be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to promote products that are relevant to your audience, that are high-quality and have a good reputation.  Wherever possible it is best to use the products you promote so that you are writing content with experiential authority.

This will be a good practice by following the FTC Guidelines for Advertising.

Research the products and the companies that offer them. Read reviews, try them out for yourself and check out affiliate marketplaces, such as Clickbank, Offer Vault, ShareASale, and Commission Junction.

 

Creating a Content Creation Strategy for Affiliate Marketing

Content is king in affiliate marketing. To be successful, you need to create high-quality content consumers will want to link to.  This improves the ranking of your site and provides value to your audience. Forming a content strategy which addresses the type of content (blogs, video, podcast etc.) , the search intent of your potential customers (such as searching to buy or searching to research), will increase the receptivity of your customer.

Providing value to the customer involves identifying topics the target audience cares about and creating a content strategy to deliver solutions to them. 

 

Keys to Success as an Affiliate Marketer

The keys to your success will be the focus on creating high-quality content, building a strong relationship with your audience, and promoting products that are relevant and valuable to them.

It will require the mastery of a few key digital marketing skills and learning a couple of content creation programs along with website creation.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn passive income and with patience and persistence, you can build a successful affiliate marketing business and long term income stream.

We wish you the very best!

Enjoy! 

 

See the Links Below for Some of Our Favourite Courses

https://grindboss.com/how-to-get-into-affiliate-marketing