Are you curious about making money online with affiliate marketing?
A bit about me and why you can follow my suggestions to get started with affiliate marketing and building your own online business.
I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over 10+ years and it’s made me a good amount of money since starting, but I’ve been doing it as a second focus, so more on the side, where my main focus is building digital products (WP themes and plugins) and listing them on WordPress, and with the free traffic that I receive from WordPress I recommend other products that I enjoy using and think are useful along side my digital products.
I’ve also worked as a business advisor for a company called Legendary Marketer where I helped people to enroll in their education and start an affiliate marketing business.
One great thing about affiliate marketing is that you can start it on the side of any other projects you have, or 9 – 5 jobs you have, you just need to put in a bit of time to get it up and going… And anyway, it’s always fun and beneficial to learn new skills!
So this step-by-step guide is for anyone wanting to get started with affiliate marketing, anyone wanting to add affiliate marketing with current work on the go or anyone wanting to make affiliate marketing a full time income to replace your job.
In this guide I’ll explain and walk you through the basics of affiliate marketing and show you how to get started!
The hardest part is starting!
Being a business advisor for affiliate marketing, I often hear excuses such as… “I’m not the person to post on social media so much” or “I’m too shy to post videos of myself” or “I don’t want to show my face on camera” or something similar… The hardest part of this business is getting out of your comfort zone and starting something new!
But I can tell you… It’s something you get over very quickly and it only gets easier and easier… Because like anything you do in life, it’s just a set of new skills you need to learn, and you’ll learn them quickly and get better and better!
Also… There are ways to do affiliate marketing without showing your face.
Ok, lets get Started with Affiliate Marketing
I want to break this down and make it as simple and clear as possible.
Whether you’ve already jumped into the digital marketing space or you’re an absolute beginner and have zero knowledge of affiliate marketing, I am hoping to help you get started with affiliate marketing and build an online business of your own.
Please read through this article step-by-step and lets get started with affiliate marketing! Lets go!
Step 1: Understanding what Affiliate Marketing is
Put simply, affiliate marketing is a way to earn money online by promoting products or services of other companies.
Here’s how affiliate marketing works:
- Choose a Product or Service to Promote: As an affiliate, you select products (or services) from a company that you think your audience would be interested in. These products could be anything from online software or products, electronics, clothes, books or anything else that users can purchase. It’s safe to say almost all companies online will have an affiliate system. Go to their website, scroll down to the footer at the bottom of their website, and see if they have any links that say “Affiliate Program”, “Affiliate Partners”, “Partner Program” or something similar.
- Apply and get an Affiliate Link: Usually you need to apply to be an affiliate, and often they would like to see some sort of online setup such as a website or funnel, or social profiles. This is to prove you are human and not a bot or script roaming the internet. After being approved, the company gives you a unique link or code. This link with code is unique to you, and it tracks anyone who clicks on it and makes a purchase.
- Share the Link: You share this link with others, usually through a blog, social media, a YouTube channel, or an email newsletter. The idea is to encourage people to buy the product or service using your unique link, and when they do, the company knows that you sent them.
- Earn Commissions: When someone buys something using your link, you earn a commission. This commission is a percentage of the sale price and varies depending on the company and the products offered. It’s usually good to have one or 2 high-ticket products that you recommend.
- Repeat and Scale: As you get more successful and your online business grows, you keep sharing more products and earning more commissions. If or when successful, you can quite easily turn this into a significant income stream.
Step 2: Choose a niche
Choosing a niche is like choosing a specific topic or category that you want to focus on.
Why choosing a niche matters
Choosing a niche in affiliate marketing is important because you can target a specific audience more effectively and establish yourself as an expert in that area, and it will make your promotions more relevant and more effective. This approach leads to better engagement and more success in your affiliate marketing efforts.
How to choose an affiliate marketing niche
Think of something you know enough about just to be able to advise other people on good products in that topic, and by gaining trusting users and collecting their emails, you will build a successful business.
The best affiliate marketing niches
What makes a certain niche the “best niche” or a niche you’d want to go into… Well, lets be honest, the reason you want to get started with affiliate marketing is because you want to create a business and make money with affiliate marketing, so you definitely want to do something that is interesting, and something that will make money!
Top niches to go into and why:
- Health and Wellness: People are always willing to pay to improve their health, eat better and get fitter.
- Wealth: Or “Making money online” is one of the most popular niches, because people are always looking for ways to make more money online.
- Relationships: “Relationship advice”, “Self-Help and Personal Development”, “Love and Romance Products”, etc are all popular niches where people are wanting more help and advice with.
- Travel: Everyone wants travel tips, advice or simply seeing photos of the most beautiful places and dreaming to go there.
- Beauty and Skincare: This niche is very popular, particularly with the rise of influencer marketing. The beauty niche is very profitable because of its large audience, very diverse range of products, and the regular launch of new products.
- Pets: People just love to see cute pet pictures and are always willing to pay for the health and wellness of their fur babies.
- Moms & Babies: I always say “If the baby looks cute it in then the price doesn’t matter to the mom“, so moms and babies are a good niche because parents are always willing to spend on their little ones.
These niches are often profitable because they have a broad appeal, people are ready to spend money in these areas, and they have the opportunity for affiliates to recommend a wide range of products.
You can also go for a sub-niche, or niche within a niche and target a more specific group of people such as “Stay-At-Home moms making money online“, “Mental wellness for working Dads“, “Nurses making more money online“, “Making money online while Traveling“… You can get creative with who to target and teach.
Step 3: Find affiliate marketing programs that fit your niche
Most companies on the internet nowadays have an affiliate system, As mentioned above, just go to their website and look for “Affiliates”, “Affiliate Program” or something similar in the footer of their website and apply to become an affiliate for their products.
See what their affiliate system consists of and have a look at their commission rates.
While all types of affiliate commissions count, as they all add up… There are 2 main affiliate programs you definitely want to look for to promote… High-ticket affiliate programs, and Recurring Affiliate Programs.
Types of affiliate programs
Normal affiliate programs: Most companies offer usually 10% tot 30% commissions for being an affiliate… These are companies like Amazon, Lululemon or most other companies. These do add up and are worth applying for.
High-ticket affiliate programs: Ideally you want to find some high-ticket products to promote. This means they are more expensive products and offer good commissions, and so your commissions are anywhere from $200 – over $1000, or even as high as $5000 per sale. This increases your earnings by a lot.
Recurring Affiliate Programs: These are usually offered by software that users pay for every month. The company that makes the software will pay you, the affiliate a share of these monthly payments for as long as the customer is using and paying for their software. These recurring payments add up and increase your earnings nicely.
How the tech side of it all works:
Step 4: Build your business sales funnel or website
When you get started with affiliate marketing, a big part of your new online business is the tech side of it, and setting up your sales funnel to promote your products on. Nowadays, there are quite a few sales funnel platforms to use when building your affiliate marketing business.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a simple website, more like a landing page, which is designed to guide your customers through the funnel stages, capture their email address, and ultimately leading them to become paying customers for the products you’re promoting.
Step 5: Capturing Emails as an Affiliate Marketer
The “free ebook for your email address” is a popular strategy you’ll use when you get started with affiliate marketing… it is a popular method for building an email list while also providing value to your customers. If you provide someone with valuable information, in a free ebook or PDF, you will gain more trust in them and with what products you have to offer.
With your sales funnel, you will either have an email marketing system built in, or connect an external email marketing platform to collect leads email addresses (in exchange for your free ebook), and you will also learn to run email campaigns to generate more income further down the line be emailing your database.
Collecting emails is a very valuable step in your affiliate marketing business, because once you have the numbers (followers & emails), there are multiple ways to monetize them later down the line by creating email campaigns and sending regular emails.
Step 6: Create a lead magnet or free eBook to offer
So… How do you go about creating your lead magnet (or free ebook or PDF) to offer in exchange for your visitors email address?
You can easily get an eBook or PDF made on Fiverr for a small fee, but nowadays this has also become much easier to do yourself by leveraging AI and free online platforms like Canva or similar.
Step 7: Create quality content to drive traffic to your funnel
I’m for you know what traffic means, but just incase you don’t… It is leads or customers that are viewing your content and your sales funnel (or website)… And where are you getting your leads from? There are a few ways to get leads from the internet.
Different ways to get traffic
Once you get started with affiliate marketing and have built a funnel, there are a few ways to get traffic to your website. I’m going to list all the different ways and give my opinion on them.
- Warm Outreach – This is contacting friends & extended friends, it can be a good source for starting with some traffic but I’m not a fan of doing this myself. For this you can go through mobile lists & your social profile lists and collect all emails there.
- Cold Outreach – I hate cold calls coming to me so lets not even talk about this.
- Referrals: – Referrals are always a good source of traffic because if it’s word-of-mouth, there is a high level of trust there when products are recommended by family, friends or someone you know.
- Paid Ads: – Paid ads are very good for getting traffic as you can target very specific people and get them clicking through to your site for a small fee.
- Affiliates: – This is what you are learning in this post, so getting other people to recommend you products for a commission is a great source of traffic.
- Free Traffic: – This involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage specific audiences, with the ultimate goal of driving them to your funnel or website. This includes email marketing campaigns and regular emails to drive all your collected emails back to your funnel or to other pages where you promote products.
The best traffic sources for affiliate marketing
Content Marketing or SEO Marketing: Creating valuable SEO content like blog posts, videos, infographics, or podcasts can attract and engage an good audience. This helps in building trust and directing traffic to your sales funnel.
Social Media Platforms: Using your social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest to share valuable content and engage with your audience. They’re very effective for driving traffic to your website or sales funnel.
Email Marketing: As we’ve already gone over… Building an email list and sending regular newsletters with valuable content and affiliate links can be a direct way to generate traffic and sales.
Step 8: Track your progress and improve
Tracking and improve your efforts can really help to improve your conversion rates with affiliate marketing.
Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor traffic, clicks, and sales. Analyze this data to see what’s working and what isn’t. I recommend always tweaking and improving your content and marketing tactics.
Remember, affiliate marketing needs continuous updates and adjustments to keep up with changing trends and audience needs. By constantly learning and always adapting, you can boost your success in affiliate marketing.
Take it to the next level
Take the LEARN, LAUNCH, LEAD Challenge with Legendary Marketer, for only $5 (USD) and learn, launch and lead with all the skills that you’ll need to start your own online business, or generate new traffic to your current business.
It’s a 5 day challenge, for only $5… What have you got to lose? This is the company I worked for, and I still recommend them!
If you’re new to all of this and are looking for a straightforward, effective way to get started with affiliate marketing, or generate traffic to your existing business, then I highly recommend checking out Legendary Marketer. These are skills that can be applied to almost any business!
Listed on Inc. 5000 as the fastest growing private education company, Legendary Marketer offer a 15-Day Challenge that brilliantly simplifies the learning process.
Through this challenge, you’ll be guided step-by-step with engaging and informative video content, carefully crafted to teach you all the essentials of digital marketing. The beauty of Legendary Marketer’s approach lies in its simplicity and practicality, making it exceptionally easy for beginners to grasp the concepts and start applying them.
Conclusion:
Affiliate marketing is a lucrative and very accessible opportunity for anyone looking to get started and add to their income streams or build an online business.
As outlined in this guide, to get started with affiliate marketing, you need an understanding of the basics, choosing the right niche, finding suitable affiliate programs, and setting up an effective sales funnel.
It’s important to remember that success in affiliate marketing doesn’t happen overnight. It requires dedication, continuous learning, and the ability to adapt to changing market trends.
Whether you’re a beginner wanting to get started with affiliate marketing, or you are looking to scale your existing efforts, affiliate marketing offers a flexible and rewarding path. So, embrace the challenge, stay committed, and start your journey towards building a successful online business with affiliate marketing.
My advice… Take the leap! and see where this exciting venture takes you!
Leave a Reply