The Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

If you’re wondering how to start affiliate marketing, the best affiliate programs or even the meaning of affiliate marketing – you’ve come to the right place! This free guide to Affiliate Marketing for beginners will teach you how to earn a passive and profitable income by affiliate marketing valuable products people already want to buy whether that’s for themselves personally, or for their businesses.

This post is all about Affiliate Marketing for Beginners.

What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work?

The definition of Affiliate Marketing is a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer or service pays a commission or flat amount to an external partner for sales generated from its referrals.

Are you curious about the potential of earning income online? Have you heard about affiliate marketing and want to know more about what it is and how it works? In this Affiliate Marketing for Beginners, we’ll break down the basics of affiliate marketing and explain how to get started. You’ll also learn the strategies you can use to maximize your affiliate revenue.

To get started, there are three main types of affiliates, so let’s quickly review the different types of Affiliate Marketing that there are!

Three types of Affiliate Marketing:

– Related Affiliate Marketing

This is where you have some sort of presence online, whether it’s through a blog, a podcast, videos, or on social media—and you have affiliate links to products related to your niche, but they’re for products you don’t actually use.

– Unrelated Affiliate Marketing

These are your basic pay-per-click affiliate marketing campaigns where you have no presence and no authority in the niche of the product you’re promoting. There’s no connection between you and the end consumer, and all you’re doing is putting an affiliate link in front of someone via Google Adwords, Facebook ads, etc. in the hopes that they’ll click on your link, buy the product, and earn a commission.

– Involved Affiliate Marketing

Involved affiliate marketing is where you’ve used a product or service, truly believe in it, and personally recommend it to your audience. This is where selecting your niche will be so important. People who are Involved Affiliate Marketers earn 4x as much as Related and Unrelated. It’s your involvement and experience with the product that makes that offer so attractive. 

Why You Want to Be an Affiliate Marketer

– As an affiliate marketer, you are selling other people’s products. You don’t have to create a product to sell. Consider yourself as the go-between here. You don’t need to worry about the physical stock, logistics of order, packaging, delivery, etc.

– Since there’s no cost to join affiliate programs, you can start making money with an established affiliate product or service without any upfront investment. Affiliate marketing generates relatively passive income through commission—the ideal money-making scenario.

– Low barrier of entry – You do not need any specific degree or work experience. All you need is a laptop or smartphone to create and edit content and the basic skills necessary to maintain a website, social profile profile, upload your content and market it.

– As an affiliate marketer, you are your own boss! You decide your working hours. You can even choose where you work from and what you are working on. You have complete freedom to choose the kind of products you want to market and change it as per your wish. 

– The average annual salary for affiliate marketing is between $150,000 and $175,0000, and it’s mainly passive. 

Remember: This is not guaranteed. You get out what you put into it!

Choosing Your Niche for Affiliate Marketing

This is the most important step in how to start Affiliate Marketing. Choosing a specific niche for affiliate marketing is important as you can narrow down your targeting efforts. This will help you promote your products or services, as well as target your audience more effectively. 

Make sure you’re passionate about your niche!

When you can speak naturally about a product or service that you love, it’s going to be that much easier for you to sell! A successful affiliate niche combines several key elements that make it well-suited for affiliate marketing success. So make sure to select a niche based on your area of interest and expertise. This will make it easier for you to create relatable content and build your reputation. 

How to Choose a Niche

– Make sure your niche is broad enough to grow, but small enough for you to appeal to your audience. A good affiliate marketing niche is a balance between competition and opportunity, with profitable commissions or payouts for affiliates.

– If you already have a social following, email list, blog or platform (YouTube, LinkedIn) that you have a group of people following you on for a specific topic – no need to figure out your niche! You obviously already have the audience so you can skip this step.

– If you don’t have an audience, or platform, and are in the beginning stages of Affiliate Marketing, then let’s get to brainstorming! AND — don’t fear — in most cases you do NOT need to have followers in order to apply to be an affiliate for programs. 

BRAINSTORM STEPS

1. Get out your notebook!
2. Start brain dumping every single possible niche/topic that interests you. Don’t hold back! Write down every single topic that excites you.
3. For each niche/ topic, ask yourself, “Is this something that I would be excited about talking about?” Circle the ones that are a YES. 

Affiliate Marketing Niche Ideas

• Modern Art
• Vegan Food
• Healthy Relationships
• Travel Abroad
• Baking
• Fitness
• Cats
• Health
• Personal Finance

 

Selecting Your Affiliate Marketing Programs

Selecting your affiliate marketing programs is fairly straight forward. When selecting products, think about your target audience (the people most interested in your niche!) and create a list of problems and needs that your target audience may potentially have. Then, list all the products and services that would solve their problems or answer their needs. You will then select the products or services that you will market to your followers, subscribers, clients and more based on the products and service that solve their problems or answer their needs.

Example:

Let’s say you’re a Real Estate Agent.

Your niche will be Real Estate.

Your customers/audience are people buying and selling homes, or people interested in buying or selling a home. 

Their problems are:

• Finding a Lender
• Hiring a Home Inspector
• Finding a place to live short term
• Finding a Lawyer for Legal Advice
• Hiring a Moving Company

You would create affiliate relationships with Lenders, Home Inspectors, VRBO (short term rentals), Online Legal Advice, and Moving Companies.

You would market these businesses to all your current clients and potential clients.

You would then earn an Affiliate Commission from these businesses every time a sale is made from one of your links!

$$$$$$$$ that’s called PASSIVE INCOME.

Types of Affiliate Marketing Compensation

and How to Get Paid

Below we will dive into the different types of affiliate marketing compensation and how you can start getting paid today. From cost-per-click to cost-per-action, you’ll learn about the most common forms of affiliate marketing payouts and how to determine the best option for you. Plus, you’ll learn the exact steps on how to get started and start earning money with affiliate marketing.

Low Ticket High Volume Affiliate Programs and Products

These are the most common affiliate programs that allow you to earn a commission percentage of sales. For example, Walmart is a low ticket high volume affiliate platform where you can earn between 4 – 8 % commission on all sales when directly linked to a specific product. This also includes platforms like LiketoKnow.it and Amazon, which are set up similarly.

High Ticket Affiliate Programs and Products

These are affiliate programs or products that pay a particularly high commission or flat rate, like $100 – $200 per sale or sign up. These are my favorite as they are usually products or services with an extremely high order value, like coaching programs, or high end products.

Monthly Recurring Affiliate Programs and Products

These are affiliate programs that allow you to earn a monthly passive income from customers you bring to the product or program. You only need to make the first sale, then you will be paid over and over again. You can earn lifetime recurring commissions if the customer sticks around.

Finding Affiliate Marketing Programs

Now that you have your niche, it’s time to find those Affiliate Marketing Programs and Partners! The easiest way to figure out if a business or product you love has an Affiliate Program is to simply Google:

Business or Product Name PLUS Affiliate Program, hit enter and you should see right away if there is a program available for you to apply for.

Next just head to the link for the Affiliate Program, read all the Terms & Conditions to make sure you meet the terms to apply AND understand the acceptable ways to use their affiliate program. This part is incredibly important because you want to make sure you follow their terms & conditions so you can get PAID!

Generally, once you apply you’ll be accepted right away and receive your affiliate link immediately. Worst case scenario is that it takes a few days for your affiliate links to be emailed to you. 

Besides applying directly with the program or product’s affiliate program, there are also Affiliate Marketplaces that offer hundreds and hundreds of Affiliate Programs. I love these Marketplaces because your payments get rolled up under one umbrella and it’s easy to “shop” the Marketplaces for Affiliate Programs.

Click here to get my FREE GUIDE to The Best Affiliate Marketing Programs & Marketplaces!

Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

Now that you have your niche, you’ve applied for your Affiliate Marketing Programs and have been accepted– You’re now ready to drive those sales to your affiliate links! This is easily the best part of Affiliate Marketing as this is where you will create the content to promote your products or programs. Consider creating evergreen content that you link directly in your bio on social media, on your website on the homepage, or emails you send out to customers. 

Evergreen content is anything you create for your website, blog, or social media that has sustained interest overtime. And unlike trendier content, it isn’t impacted by seasonality — it’s timeless and relevant long after its publication.

The Final Steps to Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Creating timeless, continuous content is key to begin to seeing passive sales happen when you’re sleeping, grocery shopping, traveling…because someone will be watching your video, opening your email, clicking that link in bio and purchasing through your affiliate links! That’s why you want to make sure to take these final steps in becoming an Affiliate Marketer.

First you want to

• Create a Sales Funnel  and Email Sequence  <– you can either use these two platforms, which offer the most robust model

OR

• You can set up an Email Sequence and Landing Pages through this platform.

From there, you can also consider

• Getting a domain and setting up a website to really start making more sales OR using your social media accounts to begin driving traffic to your affiliate links.

 

The Last Step….

I even watched THIS VIDEO and took the 15 Day Challenge to get me on the right track launching and becoming profitable at affiliate marketing. I highly recommend you not only follow all the tips and tricks I share above, but that you also take this $7 course!

This was a lot of information, but I know you can do this! 

I spent SO MUCH time doubting I could leave my job and build a blog, social platform and build a business that fully replaced my corporate income…but once I decided to DIG IN, doors started opening and I was able to fully replace my corporate income very quickly! 

I want that same freedom for you. I want you to have the ability to spend time with family, travel, see the world and not grind away at a job that doesn’t fuel you! So, take the course below, dive right in and start building the life you actually want!

>>>> CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE COURSE >>>>>>>

 

If at ANY TIME you have questions, please reach out! 

This post was all about Affiliate Marketing for Beginners.

 

** Disclaimer: I earn comission from qualifying purchases as well as other affiliate links found in this guide. Which means if you make a qualified purchase, I will earn a small commission.

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