If you are interested in making money with affiliate marketing but do not really know how to get started, this guide is for you!

In this article, we will share with you everything you need to know regarding making money with affiliate marketing. So, without further delay, let’s get started!

First Things First; What Basically Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing, as the name indicates, is a type of online marketing in which you earn commission from the sales generated through your referral. It is a process in which an online retailer gives you a certain amount of commission every time someone buys a product or service referred to them by you. It is a great new way of marketing, because instead of putting up advertisements on your website, you simply embed a certain link in your content. The viewers, then, open up the link recommended by you, which either generates traffic or produces sale for the retailer.

Now you must be thinking that affiliate marketing simply means creating a website and putting in a lot of affiliate links? Well, that is not true! The process of affiliate marketing is not that simple and you need to know some of the basics. So let’s answer this question now!

How Affiliate Marketing Works?

Affiliate marketing can be divided into three major steps:

●       First, you refer a product or service (through an affiliate link) to your viewers or followers on the blog, website or email list.

●       The followers open the affiliate link referred by you and purchase the product.

●       You get a certain amount of commission from the sales generated through your link.

Now let’s discuss each of these steps in detail. But before that, you must know how to get started with affiliate marketing. So let’s have a look at this.

How to Get Started?

Before getting started, you have to work on these two things:

●       Creating a blog or website where can refer the products or services through your affiliate links

●       Choosing the affiliate products that you want to promote through your website or blog

Here’s how to do it!

●       Creating a Blog or a Website

For making money through affiliate marketing, you must have a website.

There are many options for creating a website, but WordPress is the easiest one. On WordPress, you can quickly make a really nice-looking website within minutes. It has many tools that can make your website look very user friendly and can give a good user experience to the viewers. Thus, if you want to make money, go for WordPress for website building.

Once the website is built according to the niche of your choice, next comes choosing the products for your affiliate links. So let’s discuss this now.

●       Choosing the Affiliate Products for Promotion

Once you have chosen the niche of your choice, now is the time to choose the products that you want to promote. It is always good to choose the products that fit well with your niche and people can relate them with your content.

To choose the products, you can join any affiliate network. Affiliate networks work by connecting the merchants and the marketers so that they can work together to generate sales and earn money. You can use these networks for good product selections on your website.

Talking about the affiliate networks, some of the popular ones include. CJ Affiliate, ShareASale, and Amazon Associates.

The best thing about affiliate networks is that they have a good data compiled regarding how the well a certain product generates sale. Thus, you can use this date to generate a good profit from these products. With these networks, you can optimize the affiliate strategies on your website anytime you want through the data-driven decisions.

Now that you have your own website and you have chosen the affiliate products of your choice; it is the right time to start making money out of it.

Making Money with Affiliate Marketing

After having your own website, this is how you can make money with affiliate marketing.

1. Make content that generates revenue

Now this is a very important step! Many beginners make this mistake of publishing random content with affiliate links and hope to make money out of it. This strategy is not right as it may not always work. If you want to generate good revenue, you have to make sure that your content is relevant and it specifically targets the right audience. Remember to target the audience you actually want to buy the product but not sure if it is worth it or not. They may not even know if it will fulfil their needs or not.

Thus, as an affiliate marketer, you have to make sure that you have a high-quality content that targets the right audience and convinces them to buy the product. For that, you must know how to use the right keywords. These keywords are the ones that the audience use to search for the product on Google, if they are looking for it to purchase through an online store. Using the right keywords, therefore, directs a lot of audience on your website that are actually looking to buy a certain product or service.

2. Promote the products through affiliate links

Now that you know what type of content you must have to target the right audience, let’s discuss how to promote products through the affiliate links.

Remember that inserting the affiliate links in a content entirely depends on the type of article you have written. For example, while writing a product review, you cannot definitely insert links of 5 different products. Instead, you can only add one affiliate link of the respective product. Similarly, if you are writing an article that tells about the comparison of different products or list of the best sellers, then you can add the affiliate links of several products which can increase the chance of sales.

This means that adding links totally depend on the type of content you are writing. You cannot add affiliate links randomly, but you have to add them strategically.

Some of the tips for adding the right affiliate links are given below:

●       Add only where appropriate:

Do not add the links that do not fit well in the content. This will have a negative impact on the user experience and you will not get enough sales.

●       Add links early in the article:

This is another tip while adding the affiliate links. Add links early in an article because users might not get time to read the entire article. Very often, users don’t get time to read the entire article, so if you have added them early, there are good chances that the reader might open the link and buy the product.

●       Add links out of the site’s space:

Add affiliate links using inline banners, floating bars or side bar widgets. This improves the overall impact of your content and increases sales. Try to promote as many links as you can, but make sure they do not look “too much” to the user.

Also, if you are adding too many affiliate links on your website, make sure you get an affiliate link plug in. An affiliate plugin helps you sort out and update all the links on your website so that you know which one has expired. Without this plugin, you wouldn’t know if the affiliate link you have added on your website is no longer working, and thus can lead you to a lot of wasted profit.

One of the popular affiliate plugin is Pretty Links. It helps you keep a good track of all the affiliate links on your website. The setup is easy to install and it is very user friendly. Also, it helps you put the marketing on auto. You can also cloak the affiliate links with the help of this plugin. With this, the links look neat and short, and you can easily share them on social media or through the mails. Also, you can update the old affiliate links and if ever, some problem occurs, the system has a really good support system to help you through each step.

Now once you have added the affiliate links as and where requires, now is the time to target the audience and make them your affiliate customers.

3. Turn your viewers into customers

Many of the beginners think that they need 5x traffic to make 5x profit. This is actually not true. Instead, it totally depends on the affiliate conversion rate. Now you must be wondering what affiliate conversion rate is? Affiliate conversion rate simply means how many visitors convert into your actual affiliate customers.

For example, if your conversion rate is 5%, this means that out of 100 visitors, 5 visitors buy the product/service recommended by you. For this, you must know how to calculate the CPC. CPC is basically the cost per click, which can be calculated as total revenue generated by affiliate links divided by the total traffic sent. CPC value is important as you can increase the affiliate revenue if you know the CPC value. Doing this is actually not very difficult and several software's are available to help you with this.

One of the popular conversion optimization software is OptinMonster. It helps you increase the revenue by converting your existing traffic into your affiliate customers.

4. Increase revenue by optimizing your traffic

Have you heard about the 80/20 rule? Well, this strategy is driven by this rule in which 20% of your content produces 80% of the profit. Even though it’s not an exact estimation but it holds the basic principle: identify the content with highest conversion rate and use it for affiliate campaign at 1st priority.

Once you find out a particular video or post that is more popular in your viewers, you can initiate targeted campaign to increase sales with OptinMonster.

This selective technique provides much better result compared to the blind campaign promotion on every page of your site.

The question is how to get started?

Answer is simple, first of all you go to your google analytic dashboard. After that you have to identify the article that attract the most traffic for you. Finally, using those URLs, make a targeted campaign.

5. Use your email list to generate revenue

The best way to make passive income is by use of email marketing. Every other method to produce income has one or more flaw.

SEO is a great way to boost your revenue but only as long as google doesn’t change its algorithm which will affect your google ranking. Paid advertisement is a good option but only if you have enough funds to sustain any failures. Even then they require continuous maintenance to bring good results.

The traffic attracted by your email list is always yours. It mostly consists of people who are interested in your content and have already interacted with your material. The only downside to email marketing is that it requires your list to grow before it can prove beneficial. That is why a lot of businesses make an effort to increase their email list before reaching the point of monetization. Whether you are directly sending the user to your affiliate link or you are attracting traffic by using your email list, email marketing is a highly effective way to increase your revenues.

So, there you go! That is all you need to know before starting to make money with affiliate marketing. Just make sure that your content is relevant, you choose the right keywords, and know where to place the relevant affiliate links in your article. Also, make use of the relevant software's and plugins to optimize and keep in track the sales and revenue generated through the links. With the right strategy, earning money with affiliate marketing becomes very easy and you can earn good profit with just a little effort.

So what are you waiting for?

Start now!