You’ve decided to start an affiliate marketing journey. Great ! Yet, you don’t know how to start. Nobody can blame you. The internet is filled with so much information that you may end up not taking action due to the analysis paralysis effect.
And for good reason, most of the contents on socials are meant to drag you into funnels or turn you into fans not to help you.
That’s how the game is played.
In this post, I want to cut through all the noise and help you get started with what I think are the 10 best tips for any beginner that wants to get started into affiliate marketing. Whether as a side hustle or a full time occupation.
What is Affiliate Marketing ?
Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing that involves three parts : the vendor, the middle man and the customer.
The vendor is the one creating the product. And as an affiliate your role is to make the customer buy the vendor’s product and as a reward, the vendor will pay you a commission on what he just made.
It’s a win-win equation.
In hindsight, affiliate marketing is the fact that you, as an affiliate, will promote a product or service using a tracker that will be unique to you so that all your results are monitored and you can get paid after each sale.
Now this is where things become interesting. The commission you make are not fixed which means that you can make from a few bucks to thousands of dollar per sale generated (we’re talking about high-ticket products here.) It will depend on many factors specially, the network or the you choose to work with. But generally, you can earn from a few hundreds dollars to more than $100K per month, depending on how implicated you are.
10 Ways To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
In this list of 10 tips, I made my best to curate the best ways the most successful affiliate marketers are using to make huge numbers with affiliate marketing.
Create a curating blog
Medias come and go. But if there is one thing you always need to keep in mind is your ability to help out.That’s the main reason why creating a blog is so huge. By creating a blog, you create a library where people will come to to learn specific things about the product you want to lead them in.
The keyword here is : specific.
If you want to make it big with affiliate marketing using blogging, you need to create blogs that are very specific, that way you won’t have a hard time trying to finesse your way to the top pages of Google.
And the second benefit of creating a highly specific blog is that it creates trust and your products promotion won’t sound scammy.
Vary your traffic sources
Many beginners make the mistake of trying to focus big on one social media or traffic source. Even though it’s claimed by many gurus out there, I think it’s a mistake.
The reason is simple. You want to be wherever your audience is gathering and that means trying different types of traffic sources until finding the ones that offer 80% of the results you’re looking for and then double down on them.
You can’t do that if you don’t experiment.
Be Aware Of The Affiliate Program You Choose
Almost all companies and products offer affiliate programs. For good reasons. They will be more likely to touch audiences they would never touch otherwise.
Now, the main problem with that amount of choice is that you may end up promoting products that are most likely not good enough or which payouts are not great.
Just like you need to choose the type of blog you will create, you also need to be picky about the type of products you will promote to your audience.
Here are three key factors you need to take into account before applying to promote a product :
- Is the product eligible for monthly revenue income ?
- Can you renegotiate the commission ?
- Is it something that people already want ?
Try to tick all the boxes before choosing to be an affiliate for a product or service. At the very least, make sure to tick two of the three.
Create Ads that convert
Once you’ve created your blog, added content and ensured its relevancy to Google and other social platforms. The next step is to create ads. Basically, there are two ways you can make money with affiliate marketing : the natural way and the forced way.
The natural way involves you creating a ton of content and patiently waiting for it to clim Google’s algorithm ladder. With this strategy, you’ll focus a lot on SEO and blog optimization so that your blog rank higher.
The second way is the forced way. With this method, you’re paying advertisers like Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Youtube Ads, to show your ads to your audience. That way, you’ll generate a lot more views in less time and will have a lot more feedback faster. Creating ads requires some finesse and the use of trends to stay on top of your game and convert your visitors.
Down the road, you’ll have to refine your ads, your image and copy to stay relevant. It’s not a one-and-done thing. It needs constant reviewing.
Don’t be a scam
Ultimately, people will want to see your post and your recommendation because of one important thing : trust. That’s a bery important concept, you need to take into account when getting into affiliate marketing.
Even though, we all want to make money with affiliate marketing, you need to make sure to be as trustworthy as possible. Don’t promote products just for the sake of promoting and making money.
It may make you money in the short term. But you don’t want to use that strategy because i twill certainly backfire at some point in your life. Make sure to only promote products that you trust and that you think are relevant to your industry. In the best case scenario, you will want to promote products you have already tested.
Cost-Per-Action Marketing
CPA marketing is the easiest affiliate marketing model you can use to generate money fast online without “expertise”.
Essentially, it’s a fancy way of saying that you get paid for driving traffic to someone else’s website and getting people to do something, like sign up for a free trial or buy a product. It’s a pretty sweet deal if you can get the hang of it, and you don’t even need to own a website or product to get started.
It only consists on making your audience perform certain types of actions on a website or an app. Each time the action is performed, you get paid a commission.
Get targeted traffics from Google
Whenever you want to put out some content, you need it to be relevant, accurate and on point.
There is no better way to make sure of the value of your topics then to use Google. One of the free ways you can use Google is to write a topic then look for the « People are also searching for » section.
But you can also use Paid tools like ahrefs to make sure that you’re working with enough data in order to make an informed decision.
All in all, if you want your website to show up on Google, you’ll have to create content that are appealing to Google and its visitors.
Share knowledge
If you have a thorough knowledge about a certain topic and, more importantly, have already built an audience, blogging can be utterly rewarding with affiliate marketing. Yet blogging is not the only way to do it.
Personal branding is trending right now, for a good reason. People are making millions with their brands sharing their knowledge and unique perspectives on industries.
You don’t even need a website to share your knowledge thanks to social media like Twitter or Reddit and Youtube. Once you can build your audience, you can start sharing affiliate links to products.
Spark Curiosity with videos
More than half of the world population is of the visual type. Plus a study has shown that people’s attention span has shrunk from hours to mere seconds.
What does it mean for someone who wants to start affiliate marketing ?
The use of short video platform like TikTok and Youtube Shorts to put yourself out there and promote affiliate links is paramount when you’re just starting out.
Why is that ?
Tiktok is the main cause of that slight shift of the big social companies. And for that reason, the likes of Youtube and Instagram/Facebook’s algorithms are pushing hard short video contents to try to compete with Tiktok.
Make big money With Affiliate Marketing Using webinars
Webinars are everywhere nowadays and for good reason. Companies, affiliates and content creators are using webinars to connect with their audiences while sharing promotion links and making money along the way.
There are a lot of ways you can use webinars to make money with affiliate marketing and the easiest one is to make offers that will relate to the products that you’ll want to promote.
That way, you’ll decrease the likelihood of your audience not buying and you’ll increase the trust they have in you. Killing two birds with one stone. A pretty good reward huh ?
Build audience with courses
The last tip that you can use is to create your own course that will relate to the products that you want to promote.
The reason you want to create a course is that i twill consolidate your authority in the niche as an expert.
The more people see you as an expert the more likely they will be willing to click on the links you will send them.
Another positive side effect of creating a course is that you’ll be building your email list.
As the saying goes, the money is on the list. Ever heard of Spencer Mecham ? Probably not. Yet, he’s made millions of dollars with affiliate marketing using this technique.
So by building a list you’re making sure to have a leverage that you can use to make recurring income.
What’s Up Next ?
There we go. Now, you know what you can do to start making money with Affiliate marketing : Be genuinely active on helping people, know what is selling and promote it and be eager to be on top of your game. And most importantly, be patient. Know that it’s not a get rich quick scheme. That’s how you will win it big time. If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, I’ve made a guide on Affiliate marketing 101 or you can learn about the skills you need to become a millionaire.
