What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of recommending other people’s products and services. When a customer takes a certain action, normally a purchase then as an affiliate you will get paid an agreed amount or percentage depending on the company.
Unique Links
When you join and promote affiliate programs you are given a unique affiliate link that is then tracked back to you. That way when someone clicks on your link the company knows that you are the one that will be credited if the customer goes on to purchase.
Cookies
A cookie is a small piece of tracking code that is placed on the buyers’ PC, laptop or device. This ties your unique link to this person. Cookies can range in time across individual companies.
For example, the cookie for Amazon affiliates is just 24 hours, so if someone clicks on your link, visits Amazon but doesn’t buy straight away as long as they return within 24 hours and make a purchase you will still be rewarded with the commission. Another great thing about the Amazon affiliate program is that it doesn’t have to be the product they originally clicked on it can be any product or even more than one product.
You get the commissions on them all.
With some companies, cookies can last 30-60 days and in some cases a whole year. Check out the company in the video below which has a cookie lasting 365 days and if someone buys a product or service the cookie is renewed… That’s cool!
Why Affiliate Marketing
Apart from being super simple to start, and with low costs initially here are some figures that tell their own story.
Look at this from Google trends as you can see in the last 5 years affiliate marketing has been growing steadily and it is showing no sign of stopping.
In fact, affiliate marketing is a global industry that is worth over $12 BILLION. Although the USA ($4.5 billion) and the United Kingdom ($1.7 billion) lead the way nearly half is generated in other countries across the world.
The top product niche is fashion resulting in 18%
Lastly, there is no age limit to affiliate marketing with a massive 82% being from the 25-54 age bracket. Not forgetting us more mature affiliates as the over 55’s make up an impressive 12%
As you can see these stats are pretty impressive and well worth getting involved with.
How Much Money Can You Make With Affiliate Marketing
Before I show you some examples of what real people are earning with affiliate marketing let me give you a reality check. Many affiliates earn very little and some even zero income from affiliate marketing. This may be for various reasons but I am obliged to point this out.
But, that could also be the case with any business in any industry.
That said there are plenty of affiliates that are earning great money every single month many of which are doing this full time. Here are some examples from a site a belong to called Wealthy Affiliate.
$1000 Profit!
Six-Figure Business
$1738 and Growing
Over $100k Part-Time
There are many others I could add here but you get it, proof you can earn money from affiliate marketing and BIG money at that.
Check out my success with affiliate marketing here
Plus watch this video where I recently reached over $2600… without doing any selling myself. That’s why I love this system.
Things You Need To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing
The first thing you will need is a platform to promote your affiliate links there are two main ways I would recommend doing this.
Build A Blog
Blogging is an amazing platform to use in conjunction with affiliate marketing, it’s fairly cheap to start with the main cost being your hosting and domain name purchase.
These days you don’t have to have any technical skills to build a blog in fact watch the video below where I show you how to get your blog up and running and live on the internet in about 10 minutes.
For more information about the best website hosting read this post
When creating a blog choosing a niche about what to write can be the first obstacle. Truth said to choose a niche and NOT an industry, and it helps to start with something you have knowledge about and are interested in.
EG. Instead of choosing food or cooking, niche down and choose vegan recipes, or go gluten-free. This will help you do two things.
- Create a more focused audience for your blogs
- Give you a better chance of ranking higher in the search engines with your content.
More of that later…
Also more about blogging and affiliate marketing here
Create A YouTube Channel
Setting up a YouTube channel takes just a few clicks, especially if you already have a Gmail account (most people have one) If not head to Google and search and set up a Gmail account.
Creating videos is so easy these days. You can even start by shooting videos on your mobile phone and then uploading them to YouTube. Once you have done this you can then add your affiliate links in the video description… Simple!
I make money with my YouTube channel every single day now and have a subscriber base of over 11,000… Be sure to subscribe yourself for even more ways to make money online.
Here are 5 tips to be successful with affiliate marketing on YouTube
Once you have one or both of these platforms in place you could add another
Email Marketing
There is an additional way you can make affiliate commissions and that is Email Marketing ideally done in conjunction with either or both of the aforementioned ways.
You will need a quality email service provider such as AWeber, you can grab a free account, no credit card needed. This will enable you to capture email details by giving visitors something of value that solves a problem in return for their details.
You can then set up email campaigns that will then automatically be sent out to everyone who registers for the free gift. Within these emails, you can place your affiliate links.
Read 7 secrets to building a successfully targeted email list
What Affiliate Programs To Join
These fall into a few categories…
- High Paying Low Volume Affiliate Programs – These are programs that pay $100 – $1000 + per sale. These do have high competition and you will have to compete with experienced marketers. Products and services would include, software, website hosting, and investments
- Low Paying High Volume Affiliate Programs – Aimed more at the end-user, with the advantage of an abundance of products to promote, especially through affiliate programs such as Amazon, Target and Wallmart. The problem is commissions are much lower so high volume is needed to make a serious profit.
- High Paying High Volume Affiliate Programs – This will be one to aim for as you get more experienced as an affiliate marketer.
Affiliate Marketing Blue Print To Success
Ther is a simple blueprint that will ensure success with affiliate marketing but miss out one part and you are doomed to fail.
Let’s run through them one by one…
Traffic
By far and away from the most important factor when it comes to success in any business. Whether you are an offline cafe or and online marketer traffic will be critical. Some people get this totally wrong which is strange as there is an abundance of people waiting to visit the offers you just need to get in front of them.
I will break this down into four sections. In time you should be getting traffic from all these.
- Buying Traffic – This is by far the quickest way to get traffic to your website, blog, landing page or affiliate offers. Most platforms these days offer paid ads, but the most common ones are Google Ads, Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads) Facebook Ads, and Linkedin Ads. You can also find ads on platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter too. This sort of traffic is better suited to products with higher commissions as you will need to factor in the cost of the ad campaign against the sales you make. In fact, some marketers actually lose money when thy first tackle paid ads so proceed with caution if you are just beginning affiliate marketing.
- Social Platforms – Sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter all provide a haven of potential visitors for your affiliate offers. The one thing you will need to have on all these networks are followers. Traffic on social networks tends to spike when you first post and then subsides very quickly, so regular sharing of content will need to be done. Also, take note that some networks do not take kindly to you linking directly to affiliate offers, but sharing your latest blog post with affiliate links in it is a great way to get around this. If going down this route for traffic join all the social networks you can but concentrate on just one, to begin with. Grow this then move to a second one.
- SEO Search Engine Optimization – Using your blog posts to rank high in the search engines and gain organic traffic. This method will generate an ongoing supply of traffic. Choosing the right keywords can prove vital in your success especially if you are just getting started. Using keyword research tools such as Jaaxy will help you. Researching topics with long-tail keywords is the best plan it will produce a lower volume of traffic but you will have a much better chance at ranking on the first page and grabbing this traffic. Repeating this through loads of blog posts will, in turn, gain you a flood of free traffic over time.
Read how to optimize your blogs using my SEO checklist
- Email Marketing – What I call owned traffic. By building an email list of targeted potential customers for your affiliate offers you can then direct them where ever you like. To your latest blog post, your YouTube video and directly to affiliate offers. This traffic is probably the most targeted and results can be amazing. In order to start building an email list, you will need an email marketing service provider. AWeber has recently added a free account, which enables you to start building your email list today.
- Sign Up for the new AWeber free account
Clicks
It’s okay driving traffic to your blogs, but now you need to get them to click and visit your offers. Link placement is vital to maximizing this don’t stuff your blog posts with affiliate links, I would recommend 2 -3 links one in the middle of the article and one to two towards the end. Always try to add your links naturally within your post no one likes to be sold to. You can also add images, banners, and buttons with more of a direct call to action again one well-placed call to action is better than adding loads.
Conversions
Once they have clicked through, you are then passing the conversions over to the product owner. Choose products that you know already convert well. On Amazon, this can be seen by the number of sales made and positive reviews written, on other affiliate networks such as Clickbank you can look for a good gravity score which denotes that affiliates are making sales and an affiliate resource page for email, banners, and images to help you promote
When you join many affiliate networks you are allocated an affiliate manager feel free to ask them questions about the best products to promote and what promotional tools to use. They are speaking with many affiliates and will be happy to pass on their knowledge.
Go Do It…
You now have a complete guide to starting affiliate marketing in 2022. Now it is over to you to take action and get started I can’t help you until you help yourself!
What I have found over the years working online is that it is far easier to find others that have already done what I want to do and get them to help… When I started my affiliate marketing journey I discovered a whole community of willing helpers that are all at different stages and I am still there today helping others start their affiliate marketing businesses. The site is called Wealthy Affiliate and has over 1 million members I am currently ranked 88th in the top helper category. I can join WA as a starter member and for taking action I will personally connect with you and help you succeed just like others have done for me.
Join me on OLSP where I have generated over $2800 so far…
Discover More about Wealthy Affiliate first
Whether you do it alone or join me and others on Wealthy Affiliate I wish you every success on your journey.
Disclosure:- Affiliate links may be used within this post. This means that if you purchase
through my site after clicking a link then I get a small commission, at NO extra charge to yourself. This helps
me to continue giving great free content. Thanks
Thanks for the summary of what is affiliate marketing. I am not making loads of money yet from my affiliate link, it is a learning process but the most important part in my opinion is to never give up and keep leaning more about affiliate marketing as much as I can. I think knowledge is the key here and there is no better place to get that at WA. I love the live training classes from Jay and the people in the community are so helpful as well.
Good luck everyone and take action now.
You have a great ethos and I am sure you will very successful in time, like you say never give up 🙂
Hi there Bashir, your article is very informative. I interested and want to join affiliate marketing training program.I am a newbie on the internet, can i be coming in affiliate marketing. And how much time required for learning?
I see your 5-Tips video on you tube its very helpful, I bookmark your site for visit in future.
Thanks for informative collection for newbies.
Your learning will be ongoing as things on the internet are always changing.