Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

This is one of the most comprehensive guides on “how to start affiliate marketing for beginners”. So keep reading till the end to learn everything about it.

First things first! What is Affiliate Marketing?

Starting from the very basics, this is the first thing to answer! What does this term “affiliate marketing” even mean? So here’s the answer!

Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing in which you get paid for recommending products and services to others. In other words, you are given a certain amount of commission for recommending either products or services that someone has to offer to the readers or the viewers. 

How does this work?

If we explain in the simplest form, the process includes 5 major steps:

• Choose a product for promotion.

• Search for the product name affiliate program. 

• Sign up for the program. 

• You will get a link through which the merchant can track the number of purchases he gets through your recommendation.

• Whenever someone buys the product, you get a commission.

Basically, whenever someone buys a product through the affiliate link given by you, a small file or a cookie is stored in the computer of the user. Thus, upon purchase of the item, the merchant gets to see that the customer was referred by you and that is how you get paid for it. 

This is the most basic process, and now that the technology has become more advanced, new methods are coming into the market to keep track of the purchases done via affiliate links. However, for now, we will stay to the basic process only so that you know in detail what it is all about. 

How to Start Affiliate Marketing?

If you are looking to start affiliate marketing through a blog, here is what you have to do:

1. Create your blog or a website

2. Choose a specific niche

3. Do complete research on the products you can review

4. Open the Amazon affiliate program and sign up for it

5. Find other programs as well for the products you want to review

6. Create your content which can either be in the form of reviews, videos, tutorials, or resource pages. 

7. Use your affiliate link wherever required and necessary

8. Optimize your page and keep track of Google rankings

9. Keep a follow-up

All these steps will be covered in detail, so keep on reading to learn everything about it!

Choosing the right product

There are generally three things that you can offer to the customers. These include:

• Physical product or items

• Information product

• Services that someone provides

You have to be very careful while choosing any product and must always consider the following points:

• Will this be for the benefit of my audience?

• Is this something that the audience is looking for?

• Is the purchasing process easy?

• Is the commission rate good enough for me?

If the answer to all these questions is ‘yes”, then you can definitely go for the product. Now once you have chosen the product, here is how you can sign up from the affiliate program. 

Signing up for the Amazon Affiliate Program

For beginners, we always recommend the Amazon affiliate program as most people already know about it. Even if you don’t, nothing to worry about as we are here to help you!

Here is the link from where you can sign up and get links from the affiliate program immediately. 

Physical Products VS Information Products VS Services

Commission based on physical products is usually less as compared to the others and you have to do a lot of research to find out the products that you can be paid well for and are useful for the audience. Also, if we talk about Amazon, they have a 24-hour cookie.

This means that if within 24 hours, someone buys a thing based on your recommendation, only then you get your commission. This is a relatively short period. Compared to this, there are other programs, that pay for longer durations as well, which means that chances for you to get a commission is more.

Information products, on the other hand, is a better option because of the following reasons:

• Usually, the commission offered is more, as compared to the physical products. 

• Because there is often a personality behind them, you can trust them more. 

• Very often, full marketing funnels are aiding them in sales

• You get to provide solutions to the problems that the audience is looking for

For information products, you have to talk to the author directly as there is no specific place like Amazon. Also, it requires some more hard work as you have to gain trust from the creator regarding your services. 

Now coming towards affiliate marketing for services! Just like information services, this one pays you a good commission too, but along with that, there are often recurring commissions in this. For example, if you refer to a website optimizer, you can get a monthly commission out of it as well. 

Some of the Major Affiliate Programs that you must know

Here are some of the known affiliate programs that you must know if you are looking to start your affiliate marketing business:

1. Bluehost: This one pays $65 for every sign that is referred by you. The managers are really good and they provide really good services. 

2. BeRush: This program offers the SEO research tool SEMrush. It gives you all the resources that you need and the best part is that you get a recurring fee of about 40%! Isn’t that amazing?

3. Sumo: They also offer some of the best promos and you can choose any of your choices to earn a good commission. 

Okay, so now that you know how to choose the products and how to get the affiliate links, let’s now move to the next question which is “how to promote the affiliate link or offer”? Here is the answer to it.

How to promote an affiliate link or offer?

There are several options for this!

The basic one is marketing with a resource page. You can put together all your tools or resources on a page to create something shareable and useful.

The second option which most people recommend is through product reviews. You can generate a lot of sales once people began to acknowledge you and trust you for your reviews. There are some important considerations that you must always keep in mind if you choose affiliate marketing through product reviews.

• Always discuss both the pros and cons of the product. Never miss the drawbacks and always be upfront about them. People usually know that no item is perfect and purchase it anyway, but it adds to your loyalty with the audience.

• Make sure you use clear headlines and clear links from the top of the page to the bottom and add the keywords as required. 

• Adding a personal story or experience is always great, as the customer can relate more to it and there are more chances of sales that way. 

The third option can be affiliate marketing with tutorials. This can take a lot of your time and effort, but it is totally worth it. All you have to do is create a post showing people how to do something and add a certain product as the key components to achieve the goal. 

The fourth option, which is another great one, is affiliate marketing with comparison posts. Here you can talk about two or more products that are similar to each other. You can talk about the pros and cons of both so that people can have a better idea as to which is one they must buy. 

You can also use your email list to start affiliate marketing. For this, you need to have a long list of people (at least 1000), and you can make sales by promoting a product via a series of emails. This option is only better if you have a really long contact list and if you are getting a good commission for sending emails. 

Now once you have created content for affiliate marketing, the next step is to drive traffic to your website.

So let’s answer this question.

How to drive traffic to your website?

There are three ways to do it:

1.      Paid Traffic

As the name indicates, you have to pay for the traffic. You can use PPC ads to do it. The good part about it is that you start getting traffic as soon as you pay for it. However, the downside of this process is that you have to spend money even before you start making it. Also, if you stop paying for the ads, the traffic stops. So this can be a great idea for someone who is a part of a high-part program. However, if you are a beginner, this one might not be suitable for you. 

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The second option is to optimize your page so that it ranks high on Search Engines like Google. For this, you have to take care of the technical things while creating content so that your content ranks high on Google.

Some of these technical considerations include:

• Understanding what the audience wants

• Creating content using the right keywords

• Considering the right things (that include both on-page and off-page SEO) to bring the page on the top

3.      Through Email:

You can communicate with your audience anytime through your emails. This is a relatively easy process, and you simply have to let your readers know of every new content that you upload on your website. 

To build your email list, ask your audience to sign up. This is how you can get the list of your valuable readers and keep them updated with every new content. 

How to get more clicks on your affiliate link?

Now, this is something very important! No matter how good your content is, sometimes you might not get as many clicks as they must. There are numerous reasons for this.

1.      Link placement:

If you have attached the links at the very bottom of the page, chances are that people may not click it that much. Similarly, the links must not too close, or else the content will look spammy. Thus you need to know exactly where to place the link to get the most clicks. 

2.      Context:

You have to make sure that it makes sense. You have to link the right word so that people know exactly what will open when they open the link. 

3.      Callouts:

You can use eye-catching boxes or tables and buttons to attract the audience to click and open the link. 

Now once you know exactly how to get the maximum clicks, you are all set for the affiliate marketing business. 

The Endnote:

We have tried to cover every aspect of affiliate marketing and hope that this article helped to know exactly what it is all about!

Affiliate marketing is a vast field and it is growing day by day. You have to keep yourself updated constantly to try out everything new to make the maximum money out of it. Here, we have highlighted just the basic steps for beginners, but be sure that once you get into this, the process is never-ending and if you know exactly how to do it, you can earn a lot from it!.

We have a Free To Join Webinar that teaches you everything you need to know about Affiliate Marketing, and it's ideal for Newbies and Experienced Marketers.