The multibillion-dollar affiliate marketing industry offers exciting prospects for creators. With 79% of internet businesses reportedly using affiliates, it has become a standard strategy for online businesses to market their goods and services.
Starting an affiliate marketing business doesn’t cost much because the top programs are sometimes free to join. Many entrepreneurs often start affiliate marketing as a side gig then gradually expand their companies.
This affiliate marketing beginner’s tutorial aims to get you started quickly and effectively. It will show you how to identify an affiliate program, generate affiliate links, and begin making money as a partner.
Table of Contents
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate marketing occurs when a company pays third parties to promote its products or services. These third paties include social media influencers, podcasters, youtubers, and bloggers.
Every time your favorite influencer urges you to buy a product, chances are they’re profiting from it.
Affiliate partners get paid a commission for any sales resulting from their endorsements of goods and services to their audiences.
Once you sign up to an affiliate marketing program, you’ll receive a special link that enables your program manager to track each referral. You’ll then receive a commission every time a purchase occurs through your link.
You can sign up to an affiliate program either directly on the company’s website or through a network that manages affiliate programs for hundreds or thousands of companies. Whatever option you pick, this is the standard procedure that all affiliate programs follow:
- Promote company ABC’s product on your blog, website, or social media channels.
- Someone clicks your affiliate link to store ABC.
- They buy from store ABC.
- The company or affiliate network records the transaction.
- Store ABC confirms the transaction
- You receive your affiliate commission.
What’s a cookie window or cookie period?
A cookie window refers to the period during which all clicks attributed to your unique referral code are considered valid for commissions. Most cookies have a 30-day period.
That means you’ll earn a commission on all purchases made within thirty days of clicking on the link. Any purchases made after 30 days won’t be eligible for commissions. Depending on the type of affiliate promotion, some cookies might have longer windows, such as 90 days or even 180 days.
Why you should consider affiliate marketing
There are four good reasons to start affiliate marketing:
- It’s a low-cost and low-risk investment: Affiliate marketing doesn’t require huge upfront costs such as rent, employee salaries, and product purchases.
- Affiliate marketing has attractive passive income potential: Once your affiliate marketing gig takes off, you can earn thousands of dollars monthly with minimal additional input.
- Affiliate marketing is flexible: All you need to start is a computer with internet connection. You can work from any part of the world.
- Affiliate marketing is easily scalable: Once you earn the first 10 or so dollars, it’s possible to increase it to thousands of dollars within months by doing more of the same.
How to start affiliate marketing
Follow these comprehensive steps to launch your affiliate marketing gig:
Pick a niche
A unique niche makes it easier to attract and convert a focused audience. Instead of marketing a broad topic such as food, pick a narrower option such as coffee roasting. The most effective niche is one that you’re passionate about and won’t get bored of fast.
Identify appropriate marketing channels
Affiliate marketing can thrive on any online platform, including email, blogs, Youtube, social media channels, and podcasts. The best option for a beginner is building a website and promoting it through SEO strategies. Once it ranks higher on search engines, you’ll be receiving consistent traffic and clicks on the embedded affiliate links.
Find relevant affiliate marketing programs
There are three major types of affiliate marketing programs:
- High-paying, low volume: Mostly found in the B2B space where one successful sale can be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
- Low-paying, high volume: Suitable for products with mass appeal, such as those found on Amazon and similar online retailers.
- High-paying, high volume: Applies to costly products with mass appeal, such as credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, and SaaS apps.
Your target program depends on your niche and skill level.
Create valuable content
The most successful affiliate marketers don’t create websites with the aim of making money. They first create valuable content that’s beneficial to visitors, who happily click on the embedded affiliate links. Reviewing a product you’ve actually used makes the article more authentic, which easily convinces the reader to buy it. High quality content also attracts organic traffic to your site, which ranks it higher in in SERPs.
Drive traffic to your affiliate site
Other than organic traffic, these three strategies will help attract potential buyers to your site:
- Paid traffic: Although ads increase your marketing budget, they also drive highly targeted traffic to your website.
- SEO: Optimizing your website pages increases the likelihood of customers finding it, which also increases their likelihood of clicking on affiliate links.
- Email list: Email marketing remains one of the highest converting methods for converting leads.
Convert clicks to sales
Link placement plays a key role in getting clicks. For instance, you’ll receive fewer clicks if you place affiliate links towards the end of a blog post because chances are most people won’t read to that section. It also makes sense to make the links attractive by placing buttons, tables, and boxes that stand out from the text-based content.
Affiliate marketing examples and tools
Wirecutter is one of the most popular affiliate marketing examples. The site does thorough reviews of various electronics, accessories, and appliances, including links to Amazon and other ecommerce sites. Wirecutter ranks highly on Google for millions of keywords. Other examples of successful affiliate websites are NerdWallet, Skyscanner, and Safewise.
The most important tools for budding affiliate marketers include:
- Ahrefs: An all-around SEO solution that helps with keyword research, website auditing, competitor research, and content ideas.
- Flippa: A website bidding marketplace that helps you skip the painstaking process of building an affiliate site from scratch. Here, you can buy an already successful affiliate website and scale it.
- Google Analytics: This platform collects insights on website performance to help you create better-performing content. It measures website traffic, tracks marketing campaigns, analyzes user interactions, and helps you meet business objectives.
- Google Search Console (GSC): This free tool helps you analyze, maintain, and improve your website’s performance in Google search results.
- Rank Math: This WordPress SEO plugin helps webmasters optimize their sites to ensure compliance with widely-accepted best practices.
- SEMRush: This all-in-one tool suite helps improve online visibility by optimizing keyword research, social media engagement, campaign management, and competitor research.
- Grammarly: In addition to checking grammar, this tool helps with punctuation, vocabulary, style and clarity, coherence, consistency, plagiarism, tone, and paraphrasing.
- Quillbot: A paraphrasing tool that allows you to churn out new articles regularly. The premium version is also affordable.
- ClickBank: A huge affiliate network that connects you with the best marketers for your niche.
- CJ Affiliate: Affiliate marketplace similar to ClickBank. It smoothens the process of identifying affiliate marketing opportunities.
- Canva: A comprehensive and quite affordable graphic design platform that allows you to edit any media; including text, images, video, pdfs, social media posts, e-books, logos, graphs, posters, among others. Believe us, Canva gives the best value for money.
FAQs about affiliate marketing
What is EPC in affiliate marketing?
EPC refers to earnings per click. It is the average revenue you receive when a user clicks on one of your affiliate links. Here’s how it’s calculated:
EPC= Total commissions earned divided by the number of clicks on your affiliate links.
What does cookie duration mean?
Cookie duration is the length of time the affiliate program assigns the purchases to your unique link. Typically, the cookie length is set to 30 days. This implies that you will receive the affiliate commission if a customer clicks on your link and makes a purchase during the 30-day period. You won’t get credit for the sale if the customer clicks on your affiliate link but purchases after 30 days.
Can I do affiliate marketing without a website?
You can do affiliate marketing without a website as long as you can drive traffic to your affiliate links. For instance, a lot of people use Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms to convince people to click on their affiliate links.
Is affiliate marketing worth it for beginners?
Affiliate marketing is worthwhile for beginners because you can start with little capital and learn as you go along. You may advertise your affiliate products on free platforms such as Facebook, Tiktok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Whatsapp, then scale and invest in premium tools as you start earning commissions.
Final thoughts
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to earn extra money.
Yes, you can get started with minimal capital. However, the more money you put into high quality affiliate marketing tools, the higher your likelihood of success.
The most important consideration is whether you’re prepared to invest the necessary time and energy to make it succeed. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a get-rich-quick plan.
Developing your brand and producing great content requires consistency. Additionally, promote your affiliate links by growing your reputation and then scaling from there.
You can succeed as an affiliate marketer if you follow these tips and possess an excellent mindset!
