How to Get Started in Affiliate Marketing Step by Step

Would you like to know what affiliate marketing is? Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular tactics to boost sales and generate revenue, which benefits both brands and affiliates. According to Saasscout, annual affiliate marketing spending is estimated at US$12 billion.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get started with affiliate marketing in six steps:

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is primarily based on a relationship between a merchant (i.e. a retailer) and the affiliate/publisher and a connection between the affiliate/publisher and the consumers.

When you promote the merchant’s product or service offerings (on your blog, website, social media feed, etc.) and a consumer buys a branded product/service based on your promotion, the merchant pays you a share of the revenue from the sale that you helped generate.

Remuneration can include membership bonuses, special discounts, or one-off offers to help you learn more about the merchant’s brand, giveaways, rewards for articles published on your blog, and commissions.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

In Affiliate marketing, generally, a unique link is assigned to each affiliate by the merchant so that he can find out who was responsible for a sale. A small ” cookie ” file is stored on the merchant’s device when someone clicks on this link.

This cookie usually contains an expiration date, so you get paid even if the buyer delays his purchase.

Who Are Affiliates?

Affiliates can be individual bloggers, publishers, and influencers as well as companies. Here are a few examples:

Content/blogging sites: Creating a blog has become much easier in recent years, and, as a new blogger, you can take advantage of the many free blog sites to create websites without ever having to learn how to code.

Coupon sites are online advertising sites that use direct marketing to facilitate group purchases. They develop large databases of customers by collecting the name, contact information, and location of each person who buys from them.

LikeRakuten, Ibotta (a couponing and cashback application that can help you save money with ease).

Deal sites is an e-commerce business model in which a website offers a single product at a discounted price to the consumer for 24 to 36 hours while generating a profit from the number of goods sold.(i.e Groupon, LivingSocial )

Loyalty/reward sites: These sites encourage shoppers whit Loyalty programs to return to stores where they make frequent purchases. Incentives include early access to new products, additional discounts, or sometimes free merchandise. Customers typically register their personal information with the company and are given a unique identifier, such as a digital ID or membership card. They use this identifier when making a purchase(i.e.Target, Nordstrom ).

Influencer networks: social media influencers network is a marketplace where retailers can find influencers to partner in a campaign to influence people to buy an item.

How do Affiliates Get Paid?

Affiliates can be compensated in different ways, which the merchant determines. Affiliates are only compensated when their promotional efforts result in a transaction. Most often, all payments earned by affiliates are made through the third-party network on which the program is hosted.

The three most common ways to make money through affiliate marketing are:

Payment by sale: This is a commission-based payment method where you earn a fixed commission based on each sale from a visitor to your website who referred you. The more sales you generate for the merchant, the more money you earn.
Pay per lead: Merchants pay you every time you bring a lead to the company. This method is used when a user signs up for any program – trial, demo, newsletter, Etc. – and is paid by the merchant.
Pay-per-click: Affiliate marketing pays you every time a visitor clicks on the merchant’s ad on your blog. However, not every click becomes a sale and can become quite expensive, which is why merchants rarely offer pay-per-click.

Pros of affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is ideal for bloggers, coaches, information entrepreneurs, and those who create and maintain digital properties, such as YouTube channels. Many aspects of affiliate marketing make it an excellent home-based business model.

Low overhead costs: Most affiliate programs are free, so your costs are usually related to your sponsorship and marketing methods.

No physical products: you don’t need to create a product or service because you choose one that already exists. You do not need to stock or ship products.

Flexibility: You can work anytime and anywhere as long as you have access to the internet.

Additional income: There is a potential for passive income, depending on how you market your affiliate programs. It can be added to your existing home-based business to create an additional income stream.

Cons of affiliate marketing.

Like any business model, affiliate marketing also has drawbacks and challenges, including

Time: it takes commitment and experimentation over a long period to generate the amount of traffic needed to generate revenue.

Loss of payments: Affiliate diversion can occur when you are not credited for your referral.
Lack of control: You have no control over the companies’ execution of a given product or service. A lousy recommendation from an affiliate can ruin your credibility with your customers. It is therefore essential that you seek out and select quality companies.
Competition: Affiliate marketing is very competitive. Many affiliates promote the same products and compete for the same traffic and customers. Getting approved as an affiliate for popular companies or products can be difficult.
Lack of ownership: Customers belong to the merchant. Your statistics will tell you how many sales were made for which product, but in most cases, you will have no information about who made the purchase. This can make it challenging to exploit recurring sales.

Read More:

How to Start CPA Marketing in 5 Steps?

11 Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Generate Sales

40 Best Affiliate Marketing Tools to Build a Successful Online Business

How to Get Started With Affiliate Marketing

Step 1: Decide on a platform.

It is much easier to do affiliate marketing, build an audience and increase sales via a blog or YouTube channel. Creating a blog today is relatively easy and inexpensive. It will probably only cost you a few dollars a month.

How to Create your website?

Creating your website is the best choice if you are a dedicated blogger looking to make money from your blogs. This way, you have complete control over the design and customization; you have your personalized URL and the ability to use the ads and affiliate links as you wish.

But don’t forget that it’s not free. You must pay for your domain name (URL) and hosting. Creating your website can seem scary if you’re not particularly good at technology. But it’s relatively easy to do, and you can create one in just 20 minutes.

Choose a web host

You must have a web host for your blog. A web host is a company that stores all the files of your blog and provides them to the user when he types your domain name.

There are many web hosting companies that offer different products and services. I propose Wealthy Affiliate. By joining Wealthy Affiliate, you will have access to:

free training
two free websites (WordPress hosting)
a keyword search tool and
unlimited support from a community of helpful and caring online marketers

Prices: Beginner Member (free), Premium Member ($49/month or $ $495/year)

Build your site with Wealthy Affiliate

Wealthy affiliate is a community of marketers and experts who encourage, support and advise you. All the training materials and tools you may need are provided free of charge to help you get your online business up and running. The entire community is here to help you grow.

Kyle conducts the training, Co-Founder of Wealthy Affiliate, and is easy to understand. As you progress through the training, you will be amazed at your progress as there are assigned tasks to keep you on track, and by taking the training and completing each lesson, you will be surprised at what you just did!

One of the things you will appreciate, besides the free training, unlimited support, and free tools to get started, is the daily blogs posted by members where you can read about their successes, achievements, tips, Etc.

That will keep you motivated and satisfied with what you are doing.

==> Click here to take FREE Affiliate Marketing Training!

Once your site is online, you can add affiliate links to your content. But it would help if you also worked on SEO to optimize your site’s content and technical structure to improve search engine rankings and increase organic traffic.

You can create and upload free content to your YouTube channel and include affiliate links in your description on the YouTube platform.

It is essential to disclose the fact that you are including affiliate links. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires that you be transparent when you receive revenue from affiliate marketing.

If you’re using a blog, create a standalone page for affiliate disclosure, or include it in the footer of your website.

Step 2: Choose a Perfect Niche for Your Blog

It would help to position yourself in a niche to have the best chance of success. Launching your blog can be the most accessible or most challenging part. The most important thing at this stage is to choose a niche where you can see yourself as an authority.

To start and manage a blog successfully, you must select the right slot for your blog.

First, make sure you choose the niche that interests you most, the one you are passionate about. That way, you can follow your passion and enjoy your blogging journey. Don’t worry if you’re not an expert in the field.

If you are passionate about a topic, it will be much easier for you to continue for years to come.

Second, you need to choose a niche that generates enough interest from the public. Choosing your niche will also consider the niche’s size, the competition level, and your place’s monetization potential.

Choose a topic that focuses on a specific category. For example, “health” is a vast category. Rather than addressing this topic, try something more specific, such as “healthy foods.”

What you need to consider as a new blogger is to launch a blog by doing something surprising or different to succeed.

To find a topic for the new blog, you can:

Look at other blogs

What’s worked before? More importantly, what’s missing? Find the gaps in the market.

Use Google

What are people looking for? Use Google’s suggested searches and auto-typing to find what people are looking for. If they are looking for it, it shows a demand. Before you start, take a good look at the income possibilities.

Search the forums for common FAQs

When people can’t find answers to their questions, they go to forums like Quora (a question-and-answer community) or Reddit (a collection of social information on the web). You can find out what they are asking for and what they need advice on? This allows you to discover what people are interested in and what information they miss.

Monitoring current trends

Knowing what’s in the media right now allows you to build on a trend immediately. This way, you can quickly establish yourself as an expert on the subject before anyone else. Google Alerts allows you to track trends based on your chosen keywords. They help you discover online the most relevant new documents for your industry, including blogs, news, groups, videos and even search terms.

Google Trends is also a tool that helps you monitor a search term and get an in-depth analysis of who is searching for the specified keywords and phrases.

Think about different types of content

Could you do tutorials/hands-on guides? Reviews? Interviews? Lists? It may not be what you write about, but how you write sets you apart.

Identify your interests and passions.

As I mentioned above, there’s no point in blogging about something you’re not interested in. You’ll get bored quickly, and people will notice your lack of enthusiasm. Write about something that you care about.

Keeping your topics in mind can build a more targeted audience and help you get better search engine rankings.

Step 3: Find Affiliate Programs to Join

There are thousands of online merchants who have affiliate programs. For affiliate marketers looking to enter a niche market or simply promote products online in general, the easiest way to find companies that have affiliate programs is to join an affiliate network and start looking for the company’s affiliate programs.

==> Join Wealthy Affiliate the most popular online affiliate programs

Step 4: Start Writing Your Blog

If you want your affiliate site to succeed, you need to create high-quality content where your affiliate links integrate naturally. When you create content for your affiliate site, make an extra effort to ensure that your content solves the visitor’s problem.

12 Best Tips for Creating SEO-friendly Content

What Is Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers?

Affiliate marketing for bloggers is most effective when you, the blogger, have a large audience that relies on you for reliable information. Building your audience is a crucial element of success through affiliate marketing.

Admittedly, blogging is not the easiest way to make money. But the great thing is that anyone can do it, and it shows on your resume. Some people consider blogging a hobby. But, if you do it right, you can turn it into a nice source of income.

You just need to have something interesting to say and have enough patience and dedication to create traffic and an audience. Some successful bloggers make a good living from their blogs.

Start Blogging

Starting a blog may seem complicated, especially if you don’t have much technical knowledge.

Being a good blogger isn’t just about writing. You also need to read other blogs to stay informed about what’s popular and find new ideas for your blog. You can visit a blog and see that it has an excellent plugin that you want on your site Etc.

You can use a free blog platform or create your website.

Free blogging platforms

Many platforms will allow you to create a blog for free and are straightforward. If you want to blog informally at the beginning, that can be fine. The advantage of these platforms is that they are super easy to set up and accessible.

But there are limitations. You cannot personalize and upload videos and images. Often it is not possible to place ads or use affiliate links, it is impossible to create a custom URL, and the platform reserves the right to delete your blog. Most free blogging platforms also don’t allow you to place banner ads or affiliate links on your site, which are essential sources of income for most bloggers.

These platforms are for you if you want to blog occasionally or do not intend to make money with your blogs.

Here is a quick overview of the best free online blogging platforms.

WordPress :

This is a free and easy-to-use basic blog hosting service. You will be responsible for WordPress ads and branding unless you pay a monthly fee, and you will not be able to put ads on your site. There are also limited customization and extension options.

Blogger: Google’s free blog hosting service, Blogger, is very easy to use. But the customization and design options are very limited and there are not many options if you want to add new features.

Medium: With Medium, the emphasis is on writing rather than design, which many journalists, editors, and experts use. It’s a great way to share your work with a particular community, but you can’t advertise, and creating your brand is challenging.

Step 5: How to Drive Traffic to Your Site?

Once you’ve created your website, found an exciting blog topic, and published your first articles, it’s time to find readers. Your blog can hugely impact your business by attracting traffic to your site, helping you build a social media audience, and making a good impression on your prospects and customers. But getting more people to read your blog requires some work.

You must make sure that people find your blog and start reading it. Many bloggers have experienced the frustration of trying to gain readers. It takes much work to build an audience.

Here are some strategies that can help you get more readers and traffic for your blog:

Paid traffic

You can do this by using PPC ads. The advantage of paid traffic is that the moment you start paying, you get traffic. But it has some disadvantages too. First of all, ads will increase your costs.

Secondly, once you stop paying for ads, your traffic will stop. Ads are a great traffic strategy if you are part of a high-paying affiliate program and can make the numbers work.

But if you are entirely new to paid marketing and don’t have a marketing budget, or you work with low commission programs like that, then it may not be such a good idea.

Top 10 Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Site

Create a mailing list

Email lists allow you to communicate with your readers at any time. Email lists let your fans know about new content and keep them coming back to your site for more information. This increases clicks and affiliate sales.

You can even email promotions directly to your list. To create a mailing list, you need to persuade your site’s readers to subscribe to it. This means that you need to offer them something valuable.

11 Most Important Email Marketing KPIs to Measure the Success of Your Email Campaign

Promote your blog on social media

You should know that promoting your blog is as important as creating it, maybe even more so. You can share your blog on social media, email it to influential people, or write articles on guest blogs. You can even consider paid promotions like Facebook ads.

You can create pages/accounts for your blog on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even LinkedIn. Create these accounts in a similar color/theme to your blog so that your brand is consistent and easily recognizable.

Use them to share new articles and brand other bloggers, influencers, or companies that might share your content and help it reach an even wider audience.

You can also use paid advertising to help your blog reach a wider audience or organize a contest to generate more visitors. Once you have followers, keep them interested by posting regularly.

Get in touch with other bloggers.

Make yourself known to others who blog on similar topics. Although you are technically a competitor, you will probably be pleasantly surprised by the support the blogging community can provide.

Many bloggers even have a “links” page on their site to connect with many friends in the community in exchange for a link on their blog. This will help you tremendously with your SEO (search engine optimization) and the likelihood of your blog appearing in Google searches.

If you engage with other bloggers and share their content, they will probably return the favor – you might even work on some collaborations!

Respond to news on your blog

Suppose you are interested in a hot topic. In that case, you can go on social media to contribute with relevant hashtags, participate in discussions and even contact journalists to let them know you are available for comment.

Create viral content

Creating viral content (content that reaches a high level of awareness through sharing and exposure on social media networks) will help you get a new market and thus increase your readership.

This may be easier said than done, but the key to creating viral content is to exploit the controversial or hotly debated topics related to your niche blog area. You can post an opinion that people will want to read, share and talk about.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, generally consists of keyword research and link building. Link building is acquiring links to your site from other sites to improve your ranking in search engines.

SEO helps you optimize your content to better position for specific keywords in search results like Google. As long as you can get good rankings for your target keywords, you will get consistent organic traffic.

To improve your SEO, you need to understand what your target customers are looking for and then create content around those topics.

When choosing the keywords you want to target for your blog, it’s best to choose from the top 10 results and do everything possible to create your best post. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to see the volume and difficulty of keyword searching.

Create links to improve your ranking

One of the most vital indicators of Google’s ranking of your site is the return links to your website. This requires much work. It’s all about networking, building solid relationships, and targeting your content to people who can provide links. To do so, you must first create quality content.

Once you have quality content, contact the people you have referred to in your article. They are most likely to share it and create links since they have a vested interest in doing so.

Google then uses backlinks to determine the relevance of your site for specific keywords. If the links come from areas with irrelevant content, your links will be considered lower quality. On the other hand, if they are on a site similar to yours, the links will be regarded as better quality and more relevant.

To automate this process, you can use an email outreach tool such as MailShake[17]. But the most important thing is to create a good quality article first.

Use internal links

Internal links are essential for your blog’s SEO and help your readers move through your blog. It is also a great way to get new readers to read old content. They are simply links from one page of your site to another page of your site, while an external link is a link from one page of your site to another site.

In addition, when you have a blog article that is well ranked in search engines and has many backlinks, any internal link from that page to your other pages will help improve the ranking of your other pages.

Guest Blog

Guest blogging is a strategy to get backlinks from another authoritative blog to your site. First, you need to find a blog you would like to write for. Look for people who are industry leaders in your niche or a very related niche.

Using social media to generate more traffic

Simply building your blog or website online does not guarantee your success. After that, you also need to find a way to make people discover your content.

That’s where the different promotion methods come into play. Google is one of the most effective sources of web traffic. But getting a good position at Google is not that easy. There are many factors to take into account. One of the most important is the backlinks. In other words, if you want traffic from Google, you must first get backlinks pointing to your site.

Step 6: Get Clicks On Your Affiliate Links

It would help if you learned where and how to attract clicks to generate revenue from your content. Here are some things to consider when placing links on your content:

Link placement You must balance the order of links in your content. If all your affiliate links are at the bottom of the page, there will be few clicks because people rarely scroll.

On the other hand, if you place a two-word link in your introduction, your content will look spammy.

Call to action

Call to action like buttons, tables, and boxes can help attract your readers’ attention.

Make related post grids for an affiliate product.

Conclusion

I hope this has been helpful to you. Now you know how affiliate marketing works and what are strategies with which you can earn a good income. Get started now and build your site.

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