Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: The Ultimate Steps

by Gabriel Emubenjere AFFILIATE MARKETER

It seems ideal, doesn’t it? You set up a website, add a few affiliate links, and start earning the passive income you’ve always dreamed of.

Many bloggers are earning top dollar this way. For example, Ryan Robinson over to makes a mid-five figures every month.

Blogging isn’t the only way of making money from affiliate marketing, though. Microsites, email lists, and video marketing are just a few methods people use to generate an online income.

Although not everyone is making six figures from affiliate marketing, there are tips and strategies you can use to improve your site and increase your income

Ready to find out more? Let’s start with the basics—what it is and who uses it.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s products in return for a small commission for each sale. You’ve probably seen headings marked “affiliate link” or “sponsored post” on many of the websites you visit; or maybe you’ve already taken the first step and signed up for an affiliate network.

If you are new to affiliate marketing, let’s cover how it works.

First, you find an affiliate program or network that you are interested in. Look at the program overview, including the type of products or services, payment methods, and commissions they offer.

If it appeals to you, sign up and wait for confirmation of your acceptance. Then, start creating content, adding the custom links the program provides. Those links track when one of your users makes a purchase, and you’ll earn a small commission.

You can work with individual companies or affiliate networks, where you register and choose the programs that interest you. The programs are generally divided into categories to make selections easier. Once approved, start promoting your affiliate links on your website—in newsletters, on social media, and anywhere else you’re permitted to share links.

The network sends you a payment when you’ve reached the minimum payment level. Payment methods vary and usually include PayPal, bank transfers, and checks.

But there are a few key components of an affiliate marketing system. Let’s break them down.

The Merchant

Sometimes also known as the creator, the seller, the brand, the retailer, or the vendor, this is the party that creates the product. It can be a big company, like Dyson, which produces vacuum cleaners. From solo entrepreneurs to start-ups to massive Fortune 500 companies, anyone could be the merchant behind an affiliate marketing program.

The Affiliate Marketers

This party is sometimes also known as the publisher. Affiliates can also range from single individuals to entire companies.

An affiliate promotes one or multiple affiliate products and tries to attract and convince potential customers of the value of the merchant’s product so that they end up buying it.

This can be achieved by running a review blog of the merchant’s products. For example:

It could also be an entire site dedicated to finding cool products related to certain topics and promoting those affiliate products.

The Consumer

The customer or consumer makes the affiliate system go ’round. Without sales, there aren’t any commissions to hand out and no revenue to be shared.

The affiliate will try to market to the consumer on whatever channel they see fit, whether that’s a social network, digital billboards, or through a search engine using content marketing on a blog.

The Affiliate Network

Only some consider the network part of the affiliate marketing equation. However, I believe that an affiliate marketing guide needs to include networks, because, in many cases, a network works as an intermediary between the affiliate and the merchant.

The affiliate network then also serves as a database of lots of products, out of which the affiliate marketer can choose which to promote.

In the case of promoting consumer products, like tools, books, toys, and household items, the biggest affiliate network, by far, is Amazon.

Their Amazon Associates affiliate program lets you promote any item that is sold on their platform.

 

Anyone can sign up and then generate a custom affiliate link to Amazon products. If someone purchases through your link, you earn a small commission.

While most people start by taking the affiliate route and it definitely is the easier path to take, building enough traffic to make a meaningful income just from affiliate sales isn’t quick or easy.

How to Become an Affiliate Merchant

If you want to become an affiliate program merchant and then make money by having affiliates sell your product, here are the steps to follow. These are the best places to get started since they typically only require your time and little or no money.

Step 1: Coming Up with an Affiliate Product Idea

If you want to make money with an affiliate marketing business, you can’t be attached to your idea.

Instead, just look at what products and services are already out there. Consider how you can improve upon them, by delivering something that solves the problems with those products.

Another way to do research is to use a tool called Buzzsumo, which shows you what’s popular, based on social shares.

Even if you’re into building sandcastles, you can instantly see what content has been recently popular.

If you go on YouTube and search for ‘build a sandcastle,’ you’ll find thousands of results.

Apparently, people really want to know how to build cool sandcastles. So, what could you do?

Record a series of videos where you show people, step-by-step, how to build 5 very specific, epic sandcastles.

Or, you can do a write-up of all of the tools you need to build epic sandcastles.

You could even come up with some forms or stencils that people can use to make building epic sandcastles a whole lot easier.

The question is…will people pay for it?

Step 2: Validate Your Idea

In order to not end up doing a great series of sandcastle videos that no one wants to buy, you have to first validate your idea.

How do you do that?

Simple: You ask people to pay you for it.

How do you find these people? Easy.

Take the URL from one of the sandcastle posts on Buzzsumo and plug it into a tool like Keyhole.

 

They’ll give you a list of people who tweeted a link or about specific topics.

You can then directly tell them about your idea, by hitting the reply button…

Make sure to ask them whether or not they would buy your idea — not just if they like it.

Anyone will say that they like something just to be nice.

If they respond with a yes, you need to directly follow up with an  ask to buy. Saying they will spend money is not the same as spending it.

When people are interested in your product, give them a chance to buy. You can simply use PayPal and say you’re going to build it if you get a certain amount of orders.

Once you cross your threshold and make sure that people want it, you can start creating the product.

Step 3: Create the Product

There are a ton of steps to follow for creating a product and this isn’t an entrepreneurship guide, but I want to point you to some good starters.

Online courses:

·         How To Create and Launch Your First Online Course

·         How To Create & Sell Your Online Course The Right Way

·         SPI 136: How to Build an Online Course that Sells with David Siteman Garland

E-books:

 

·         How to Publish a Stellar E-Book [9-Step Method]

·         How to (Really) Make $1,000,000 Selling E-Books – Real-World Case Studies

·         How to Start to Write an eBook and Actually Finish it in 30 Days

Podcast/Audio:

·         Podcasting for Beginners: The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Podcasts

·         How to Start a Podcast – Pat’s Complete Step-By-Step Podcasting Tutorial

·         How To Podcast: The Ultimate Guide to Podcasting

These are good starting points. Creating digital products is a lot easier, since it just takes time and sometimes a little financial investment, but usually not more than a service fee or a one-time price for software.

Once you have the product created and delivered to your initial buyers, it’s time

 

to open up the affiliate network.

Step 4: Finding Affiliate Program Partners

The tech part is the easy thing here.

With tools like Gumroad or Digital Product Delivery, you can easily set up affiliate program partners and allow them to collect commissions.

 

Another great affiliate marketing tool is Everflow. Not only does it help you recruit affiliates, but you can also use it to:

·         optimize and structure your affiliate campaigns

·         manage and track revenue and spend

·         manage and track performance, and optimize campaigns immediately based on data

·         automate your processes

 

 

·         oject manage your campaigns and assign tasks

After you select a platform comes the tough part: finding partners that have an audience that is interested in what you have to sell.

The more niche your product is, the easier it will be to pitch to fellow merchants, which offer classes on the subject:

You can simply send them an email, introduce yourself and your product and ask them if they want to partner on a sale together, where you’ll share revenue.

Pro tip: Affiliate commissions of 50 percent or higher are very common with digital products because you have no cost of replication. Don’t be greedy here, split the pot evenly and everyone wins.

Googling “toy review blog” also gives plenty of results, where people write toy reviews.

 

What’s more, lots of YouTube channels review specific categories of toys. If you find one that reviews kids’ toys, they’d probably also be a good fit for your affiliate product.

 

Just try finding one person to partner up with and start your first affiliate promotion. You can adjust commissions and details later, the important part is to get started. Or if you need help, you can always work with an affiliate marketing agency that can help you kick-start things.

However, you could also start the journey on the other side of the fence and just become an affiliate yourself.

4 Steps to Become an Online Affiliate Marketer

 

 

Similarly to becoming a merchant, there are also four steps to start your journey as an affiliate marketer.

First, you need to start reviewing products in your niche. That can be done on a YouTube channel, on a blog, or even just using live streams.

Step 1: Review Products in Your Niche

It’s easier to get started as an affiliate because you’re skipping the ‘have an idea’ and ‘creating an idea’ parts of becoming a merchant.

You already use and like plenty of products, so all you have to do to get started is to publicly talk about them.

Whatever you’re reviewing, make sure you are honest and even-handed.

If your reviews aren’t genuinely helpful, people will sense immediately that you’re just trying to make a quick buck.

Note: This is a little different for consumer products than it is for online courses or books created by individuals. If you’ve known a person for a long time and trust them and know their work is great, then that’s a different thing.

When you write reviews on your blog, you can use an affiliate link to Link to the products you promote.

You can recognize them on other blogs by the long “/ref…” tail, at the end of the regular link.

This is usually the first step to start making commissions.

Simply sign up to Amazon Associates and you can then proceed to get your own affiliate link to any product on Amazon.

Just go to the product page and click on “Share affiliate link.” You’ll get a link that’ll give you a commission if people purchase through it.

However, if you only rely on people using the affiliate links in your reviews, you need lots of traffic to start making serious money.

If you can contact your audience directly, you can market to them whenever you like, not just when they come to your website.

This is where step two comes in.

Step 2: Build an Email List of Your Prospects

 

Second, you have to collect emails, so you can connect with your audience at any time you want and don’t have to hope for them to see your content.

Email is still one of the best marketing channels today, so don’t miss out on it.

I’ll show you a few super easy ways to collect email addresses from your website visitors.

Since you’re collecting email addresses around a very specific topic, such as finding the best straightening iron, juice maker, mini-oven, etc., you don’t need a lot of them to make the email list worth your time.

Even with less than 500 people on your list, you can create significant sales.

Just make sure to keep your audience engaged, by sending them regular updates, ideally once a week.

Don’t make it all sales. Just let them know when you have a new review up.