If you want to learn how to make money online with affiliate marketing as a beginner, you have made the right choice to read this post.
Affiliate marketing is one of the best paths you could take when running an online business as it’s one of the most profitable ways to make money fast – or slow depending on your marketing efforts and strategy.
One is for sure, that affiliate marketing can earn you money without a lot of (or even none) upfront investment and it’s also the easiest to start up.
In this article, we are going to see how you can get started with this online business model and set you up for great returns.
With a little motivation and self-discipline, Affiliate Marketing can help you quit your day job and work from anywhere in the world
#1 How Much Can You Earn with Affiliate Marketing?
The more you work on it, the more you will make! The sky is the limit.
Think of it as steps of a ladder. The first step is to make your first dollar online. That first dollar is what you will remember as the stepping stone to thousands of dollars per month. Once you use the way that works best for you, you can replicate the process with more motivation which in turn will bring more money.
The next step of the lander is to x10 that original amount.
The next is x100 and so on.
But as soon as you make that first sale, you will have found a proven strategy that works and simply do more of it.
The key to success in affiliate marketing is mindset.
Yes, you may fail a few times. We all have in the past. But that’s life. When you find your groove, there is no stopping you.
Consistency in your efforts and unwillingness to give up is critical to this business model. The ones that succeeded (and made millions) have failed many times.
It is possible to however make a sale with your first promotion!
If you choose the product you want to promote correctly, do your research, and follow strategies that have worked for others, there's no reason why you can't succeed right away.
#2 Why Should You Do Affiliate Marketing?
Okay, I’ll be honest with you.
Not everyone makes a sale straight away. It does happen, yes. But I don't want to mislead you. To learn and master the whole process it's going to take a whole lot more than one article. I guess that’s why I have written plenty of them on the subject.
The reason to choose affiliate marketing is the extremely low barrier to entry.
What does this exactly mean?
Simply put, you can get started with less than $100 and almost no ongoing costs (if you choose to).
The returns on the other hand can be mind-blowing!
So let me show you how you can start, what offers to focus on, and give you some ideas on how you can succeed.
#3 How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
I am guessing that if you searched for this subject, you already know how. But I will cover the basics just in case.
Essentially, affiliate marketing works like this:
- You find a product or service to promote
- You sign up for the affiliate program of the product
- Get your unique link from the vendor
- Post the link you got from the vendor somewhere online, blog, video description, paid ads, or elsewhere
- When a customer clicks on your link and buys the product or service, you get a commission from the sale.
It’s quite straightforward, isn’t it? The trick to all this is to attract targeted traffic from users that are most likely to buy after clicking on your link.
Attracting potential buyers is key to making money with affiliate marketing.
#4 How to Find Products (or Service) to Promote?
When it comes to promoting a product or service, it will be easier to work on something that you are already interested in.
The reason for this is that you will need to write (if it’s a website) or talk (if it’s a video) about it.
If you write or talk about something you are not interested in or have no knowledge of, you will be bored to death, and eventually quit.
And guess what, your dream to make money online will perish…
Once you know what you are interested in, the question you need to ask yourself is: what is the size of the audience on this subject – how many people worldwide are interested in it as well?
If you are interested in something that is only popular among 10 citizens of an Amazon – the forest – tribe, well, there will be no products to promote and no sales to be made. Too extreme of an example but you get my point.
Of course, you could promote products that you know nothing about but you would need someone to do the content for you, or learn it yourself which will require extra time and effort.
If you are starting out, please keep it simple and choose something you are interested in and has a following (e.g. sports, shopping, investing, and many more).
It will be much easier and more pleasant for you, trust me.
What Affiliate Marketing Platforms Are Out There?
There are plenty of affiliate marketing platforms to find products you can promote.
The most popular ones are:
- ClickBank
- JVZoo
- Share-A-Shale
- Amazon Affiliates
- Market Health
Look into these platforms and search for a product you are interested in.
Pick only one or two – the less the better when you are starting out.
You will also get to see the interface of each platform and how they detail each offer and different commissions.
For example, if you want to solely promote products that are related to health & beauty, MarketHealth can be an option for you.
If you want to promote digital products like software, JVzoo might be more for you.
Clickbank however is the easiest one to use and has products across multiple niches including the examples mentioned above. And the best this is that you don't need approval to promote any of the products.
The other platforms might be a bit more difficult to get accepted, especially if you are a beginner. Clickbank is definitely the easiest and my personal favorite.
#5 Start a Youtube Channel or Build a Website?
Creating a YouTube channel and/or website need zero to less than $100 in order to get started.
We will talk about the free options first – YouTube.
So now that you have found your product from one of the platforms mentioned earlier, you will need to set up your channel.
If the product you want to promote is for example related to sports – more specifically ‘how to perfect dribbling in basketball’ – your channel should have a theme around basketball.
This way you can sell more related products rather than just naming your channel “Basketball Dribbling Channel” or something like that. It makes sense, right?
Let's use an offer that already exists on ClickBank as an example. The product is called “Vertical Jump Training: Vert Shock “.
When you pick your products on ClickBank, make sure that other affiliates are selling which in turn means that people are buying the product.
The way to do that is to check the Gravity score or “Grav” as it’s shown below.
Essentially, this means how many affiliates are currently promoting and selling the product.
If it's 0, simply stay away! The higher the number the more successful the product is, but it also means that there is a lot of competition. Something above 35 and below 100 will suffice if you are starting out.
So now that you picked your product, you need to click on promote.
I assume that you have already set up your ClickBank account but if not, register here and it will then allow you to grab your link.
Once you have your affiliate link (after clicking promote), you will need to make the link shorter and a bit prettier.
This step is key! The reason is that many websites and advertising platforms such as Facebook and Google Ads don’t like affiliate links (that look like affiliate links). You make get away with YouTube but shorten it just in case – and it’s also a good practice.
A website would be the alternative solution where you write about the product and pre-sell the customer through the info they read. This is essentially the “bridge” between the offer and the buyer where the buyer learns a bit more about the product instead of being presented with the sales page straight away.
In this case, your video will function in a similar manner.
Create Your Video
The first that you will need to decide upon when creating a video is what format and style you should adopt.
The most effective way to get your message across is to go on camera and talk about the product like it’s a testimonial, a product review as if you were the buyer.
What happens though if you don’t have the product in hand?
You could ask the vendor to provide a free copy so you can do a review and promote in your channel – the product creator doesn’t need to know how many followers you have (if you are just starting out) and it doesn’t hurt to simply ask.
If you can’t get a copy of the product, you can either buy and make the money back after a few sales or alternatively search the affiliate information that the vendor has produced and see if there are any existing reviews there. You can talk about the same benefits (and maybe a few cons) as other reviewers have done.
Also, searching online for other people’s reviews on the same product can provide you all the information you need to talk about it in your video.
Note that if you don’t want to show your face, you can instead use images and/or a video of your screen while talking in the background.
We are not going to cover all the details on how to create a video as there plenty of Youtubers that explain the process in detail and can help with this. I just want you to know the mechanics of the starting process.
When it comes to choosing a video production software, Camtasia or Movavi have free versions you can use but any related software can produce the same results. Just try out a couple and see what’s the best fit for you.
How Can You Get Subscribers and Views to Your YouTube Channel?
Now that you have created your video it’s time to upload it and share it with the world.
Let’s first cover how you can get views to your video(s).
Make sure that the title of your video is named after the keyword you want to target. In other words, the title should be what other users will be searching for on YouTube or Google.
For example, using the search bar you can try a few alternatives and see what the suggestions are.
A possible title could be “How to my improve my jump – Vert Shock Review” or “Vert Shock Review – Is it worth it?”.
Try to be specific in what the title is or even what you talk about in the video.
It’s better to be really specific on one aspect of the product and create multiple videos (and multiple videos) rather than having a generic video or title.
Being too broad tends to push your video away from the first page as big channels take all the positions because of the authority they have gathered over the years.
In your description, the first two sentences should include a couple of keyword-optimised sentences talking about the product and what your video is about.
Make sure that you include your affiliate link in the description. As mentioned earlier, you would want to shorten your link. You can use Bitly or TinyUrl to do that.
Both link shorteners are easy to use, just drop your ClickBank ID in and it will shorten it. You can also customize it with your own text to something related or more professional if possible.
Please make sure that your link is visible in the description in your video.
Here's an example of a product review you can check out in order to replicate the process.
Once you have done all this and upload it, the views will come.
Now, how do you get subscribers?
This may take some time but the way to do this is to follow the same process we mentioned above every single time.
Yes, every single time. Your video content, title, and description would need to be keyword optimized and be specific to one aspect of the product (you can go broad as soon as you get a good number of subscribers).
The next and most important trick is consistency! Simple as that.
You need to be consistent in uploading videos. Every one or two weeks, upload a new product video – the videos can be on other products you want to promote (don’t forget to include your affiliate links).
If you maintain consistency, the Youtube algorithm will eventually pick up your channel (as it likes new content on a regular basis) and start suggesting to people that watch videos of the same nature.
The Alternative and Better Option – Build a Website
You can still do Youtube, but nothing beats building a website.
Even if you build a channel to a million subscribers, you will eventually need to have a website.
The reason for this is that the website will yours. In other words, you will own this asset!
With Youtube or any other platform, your content can be taken down for whatever reason or maybe your shortened link could stop working and so on.
Not saying that this is a common phenomenon, but it has happened in the past.
You will want to build a website for your affiliate business.
The reason is that you have full control of it and can build it up for years to come. It can become like one of those websites you regularly visit and admire.
Not only that but when your readers find your content helpful, they will subscribe to your list and in that way, you can let them know of other affiliate products you like or have used.
The format for building your site is similar to Youtube.
If your target topic/niche is sports or specifically basketball, then the name of your site should contain the same keyword (e.g. basketball) in it.
For example, don't build a general website around Sports. You'll get swallowed up by large authority sites and it will take years to rank. This is a massive ranking factor for Google if SEO is the route you will want to take.
You can try something like “Basketball tricks and tips” or something like that. This way you will certainly increase your chances of success.
I have created a detailed article that shows you how to create a blog/website step by step.
Feel free to check it out so can get started straight away.
So, I will assume that you have created your blog already. Then, your first few posts will be around the topic of your target niche. In this case, we'd write a few articles around basketball, like top news discussion, training regimes of top players, entry requirements to the field etc. Make sure to research your topics effectively.
There are a few ways you can promote the “Vert Shock” product. One is to mention it in the content of your posts using a hyperlink, you could write a review about the product itself or compare it with a similar product.
The latter would ideally be a comparison (e.g. pros and cons) of two products that you have affiliate links for.
Your articles would be named exactly to what most users would search for, something like “Vert Shock Review”. You can expand on the title if you wish, but make sure it starts off like that. Your url would need to be as short as possible, for example, yourdomain(dot)com/vert-shock-review – a great SEO tip there!
Use a Landing Page Builder to Promote Products
Landing page builders are great software solutions that can create attractive and high converting pages. They are not free but it’s something you will want to explore and use down the road.
A landing page builder can help you create nice looking sales pages that have one sole purpose – either to make the user opt in to your mailing list or sell a product/service that you may be offering (in this case, the affiliate product).
If you have a collected a number of emails via your website, you can send out an email campaign that promotes the product for sale right on the sales page. We will also cover email marketing a bit later in this post.
Alternatively, you can use paid advertising to a sales page that talks about the product you want to promote, ask for the users’ email (so you can add it to your list), and then send them straight to the affiliate offer.
This is a bit more advanced and will require an additional budget for testing.
The way to create a sales or optin-in page is with the use of Clickfunnels which has become quite popular with a big community over the years.
I did a full review on Clickfunnels and its capabilities which you can read here.
Of course, there are other sales page builders that are cheaper than Clickfunnels. One of my favorite ones (and the one I am using across multiple websites) is Thrive Themes.
If you want however to see more solutions that can offer you the same results, feel free to read about them in my article on alternatives to Clickfunnels.
How to Use Social Media for Affiliate Marketing
Along with your website, you will want to create accounts across multiple social media platforms in order to further promote products.
Depending on your niche, you can have a Facebook Page, a Twitter account, Instagram, and/or Pinterest. LinkedIn and others can come later. Just make sure to create the two for starters.
When creating the social accounts, you would need to point them to the URL of your website and make them have a similar theme to your website and target niche.
You don't need to upload a post every day, but it’s a good idea to frequently post your articles and possibly other news within your niche every now and then.
Once again, consistency is key!
Promote Amazon Products as an Affiliate
Many people think that in order to make money from Amazon you need to sell your own products – that’s simply not true.
You can create a free Amazon Associates account which you can use to promote just about any product seen on the Amazon marketplace.
Similar to your ClickBank links, if someone clicks on your Amazon affiliate link and makes a purchase, you will get a commission.
Amazon commissions vary from 2%-10% depending on the niche.
Yes, I know. The commission is very low when compared to other networks. However, everyone knows Amazon, and people that have bought from it before trust it. People love to buy products on Amazon.
Not only that, if someone an additional product to what you are promoting, you still get a commission for that product so it can really multiply. And Amazon is great when it comes to upselling products or increasing the average order value.
You can find more specifics on the program by checking out their commission payouts and rules.
If you want to get a free associates account with Amazon, click here.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Improve Rankings of Your Website
One of the best ways to get free traffic to your website (or Youtube channel) is SEO. Once you understand how it works and what Google likes, your rankings will increase over time.
The traffic converts extremely well because people are already interested in the topic you have written about – and that’s why that search for it.
Even though it attracts higher quality clicks than paid traffic, it's not an easy or quick skill to master.
Advantages of SEO
The advantage of Search Engine Optimization is that the traffic you will receive in your website is extremely targeted.
For example, if you rank for the key term “How to surf like a pro” and your website is themed around surfing and water-related activities, coaching products that have an affiliate program on surfing can earn you a lot of money.
You don't really need to convince someone to take up surfing – they are already passionate about the idea and will want to see the solution you are providing to their problem.
Remember: Providing a solution to a problem is the foundation of affiliate marketing
Disadvantages of SEO
The biggest disadvantage of SEO is that it takes time.
In other words, to see your website or posts on the top 10 results of Google (or any other search engine), it may take some time.
Of course, there are exceptions. If you wrote about something that has virtually no competition, you could be on the first page in a day.
To be frank, this is not common in the affiliate marketing space. You will want to promote products that you know they convert (e.g. sell) which means other people are also promoting them – thus, there will be competition.
One of the most important things to remember is that your website needs to at least be search engine friendly.
For example, quick to load, mobile friendly, and including useful content without any errors popping up.
That way, the Google bot (which works like a spider crawling through the web) will crawl your posts and index them accordingly. If there are issues with your site you won't rank very well.
Having your site or posts shared on social media can help, along with backlinks to your site.
Essentially, you would need other sites, blogs, and social accounts to mention your site on theirs, which in the eyes of Google will mean that people like your content and will rank it higher so that more people see it.
SEO is indeed a complicated subject to master but once you understand the basics, it's quite simple to get you running.
There is much to talk about when it comes to SEO but for the purposes of this article, this is all you need to know. If you want to further improve your skills, feel free to check out this article I wrote on How To Do Search Engine Optimisation.
How to Use Paid Traffic to Promote Affiliate Marketing Products
Paid traffic can work great for those that want instant results.
It's a relatively easy and quick way to get visitors to your website in a very short time which can lead to sales. It does come at a price though since you will be using paid advertising platforms.
However, if you test and target the right audiences properly, your ads could definitely be profitable.
When it comes to affiliate marketing there are a plethora of sources you can use to run ads on including, Facebook, Google Ads, Taboola and Solo Ads. For the purpose of simplicity, we will cover the first two.
Facebook Ads
By using Facebook Ads you will be targeting people that may be interested in what your offer.
The way that the Facebook algorithm works is that if someone searches for a product similar to yours online (or even a product with the same name), Facebook will add them to a bucket, or a specific audience, which you can use to show your advertisements on.
In other words, your prospective buyer may have not yet made a decision and that’s where your advertising comes in. You would market your offer and try to ‘convince’ the user to choose your offer.
Of course, this logic doesn’t apply across all the different types of campaigns Facebook has to offer but it’s usually true when it comes to simply driving traffic to your website.
I have written an in-depth article on the different Facebook campaigns for affiliate marketing here.
In our “Vert Shock Review” example, you would create several images and/or video ads (best would be a man jumping close to the basket) then choose the gender of the audience to be male – since the majority of the audience that follows basketball is male – location and interests.
For interests, please use your logic.
In specific, you could choose things around basketball, basketball players, football, basketball magazines, basketball teams, etc. You could also target people that have an interest in other big e-commerce brands that sell basketball only products.
The idea is that if they are interested in improving their basketball technique and they see your ad, there's a bigger chance of them clicking on it. It makes sense, right?
This is key for setting and spending your budget: at the beginning, you are buying data!
In other words, you will be creating a campaign with multiple ad sets where each of them has one interest. Remember, one interest only per ad set as if you put more, you will not know which interest the sale came from.
Each interest can have different versions of description or different versions of videos etc. Each time try to test one simple element in order to see what works best – for example, videos a versus video b and so on as testing multiple elements won’t be easy to analyze.
Now, you remember what we said about buying data, yes? After your campaign has spent some money, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have an immediate profit.
This is definitely no reason to despair and quit this model.
What you have achieved, is to buy data that you can analyze and see what works and whatnot. For example, you can raise the budget on ad sets that brought a sale and ‘kill’ the ones that didn’t.
This simple tip can make you thousands of dollars: ‘killing’ ad sets (or creatives) that don’t work and increasing the budget on the ones that do bring a profit.
You can also see this article I wrote which is an in-depth guide to running sales campaigns on Facebook.
Google Ads
The way that the Google Ads algorithm works is more straight forward than Facebook. In essence, you are making a bid on keywords or phrases that people already search for.
What this means is that people are already interested in buying the product you offer and they either want to know more before they buy or find an attractive offer that works for them.
With Google Ads, you will need a Google Adwords account and it's free to sign up.
Once you sign up and while using the same example, if you have a review on the affiliate product you want to promote, you would bid on the keyword “Vert Shock Review” and other variations of the same phrase.
Looking at the example image, we can see that our search term gets about XXXX number searches a month and the cost per click is $2.84.
The cost of the bid that you see is made up of the demand for that keyword. In other words, if there are many people trying to bid on that keyword, it’s going to cost more. My tip here is to also include ‘long-tail’ keywords e.g. longer sentences, as they are going to be cheaper. Yes, the volume of traffic may be lower but it will be cheaper.
However you choose to go about it, you should be making a decent commission,
Using our case example, if you get a sale after 5 clicks, your commission is $XXXX – average sale minus 5 clicks at $XXX which is $XXX. So your profit here would be $XXX. Not bad for instant traffic.
If you successfully do this 10x a day (considering you have the cash flow), you could be making just over $XXX per day.
This is hypothetical of course – you could do much better or even worse. It's all about testing locations, keywords, creatives while scaling successfully.
As with Facebook, once you find a campaign or keywords that work, increase your budget incrementally.
Yes, try to increase the budget in stages – in other words, from $10 ad spend a day go to 15, then 20, then 30, then 50 and so on. Start off slow and watch your results carefully as if you increase the budget X10 straight away, you may simply ‘break’ the campaign.
By the way, the tools I use for my keyword research are Google AdWords Planner and Keysearch.
I have written an article where I review Keysearch so feel free to check it out.
I mostly use them for SEO purposes but they are both really good when it comes to seeing estimated traffic per keyword.
So, this concludes our paid ads section. As you would expect, there's a lot more to discuss on this but it would be a whole course.
I will however suggest some resources that you can look into at the end of the article which I would recommend you get your hands on if you want to know all the specifics of what we discussed above.
Email Marketing
There are many gurus out there preaching that the ‘money is in your email list’ and most probably true.
If you have a list of 10,000 people that was created from your blog on sports and basketball and you try to send them an email about the “Vert Shock Review” you are most likely to get a ton of sales.
This actually makes perfect sense. Your readers will subscribe to your content if they find what you write about useful or relevant to their interests.
Readers will subscribe to your list in return for valuable content!
That content shouldn’t always be paid promotions as no one likes to be sold with different stuff one after another. You would need to give away your best advice, best content, best tips and tricks before you try to promote an affiliate offer.
You would of course want to offer a service or product that you know it works or tested it yourself. If you try to promote things that don’t work because you get a big commission you will end up losing the trust of your readers and they will eventually unsubscribe.
Now, remember what we send about the nature of the blog. If your blog is themed around basketball, your email should talk about or promote products relevant to basketball.
If you try to promote an offer to a list of 100,000 people that are interested in cryptocurrency investment for example, your email campaign will suck big time.
In this case, a list of just 1,000 people interest in basketball would be much more effective than the 100,000+ list in a different niche.
To build your list and send out emails you will need an autoresponder.
I strongly suggest GetResponse but there are also many others out there that more or less do the same thing.
I say ‘more or less’ because some platforms like Mailchimp don't allow affiliate. GetResponse is affiliate marketing friendly and I use is myself on most of my sites.
Of course, you will need this only when you create your website but when you do you get the 30-day free trial to test it out.
GetResponse will have different types of email forms and they have even included their own version of funnels which makes things much easier.
Another reason to have an email list is that you would want to capture your customers before they leave your website. Once they leave, they will most probably not come back. With a list, you can stay in touch and market to them for as long as you like.
Remember: the main thing to focus on is to provide value.
Provide valuable content and every now and then suggest a product that can truly be of help. That's the best approach and your readers will appreciate your suggestions!
The best part is that you will make money from your honest recommendations. If you have that approach with your marketing, you will do well.
Final Thoughts and Next Steps
I know this was a lot to read but I do hope you found the content useful and understand how it all works.
If you think this is the path you would take and want to get started with affiliate marketing, then I would strongly suggest you check out this course which I have personally taken and in my opinion is the best affiliate marketing course at the moment.
The course is Super Affiliate System, created by John Crestani. You may have heard of him before or watched some of his videos on YouTube. He's an expert coach in both affiliate and e-commerce.
I did a review on Super Affiliates System and my own experience with it so feel free to check it out.
You'll see what you will be getting as I bought the course myself and give you a sneak peek from inside. The strategies are legit and up to date and the training has helped me make more money in my businesses online. I am sure it will do the same for you.
There are around 200 videos that will teach you all you need to know from beginner to expert in no time.
You'll also get a 30-day money-back guarantee in case you don’t find the content valuable so there is no risk.
Trying to do this all alone will take a lot of time and effort. Getting a good course will give you a head start and help you make the right decisions while avoiding costly mistakes.
Option #2
Another course you can take a look at is The Authority Site System created by the guys at Authority Hacker Pro.
This course is similar to Savage Affiliates but it mainly focuses on researching and building an authority website that generates passive income.
Get to know more about the course by reading my review.
Feel free to also watch this free webinar by Authority Hacker Pro. It will change the way you think about making money online and you're going to learn some valuable information on building an authority website that can generate 5, 6 figures, or more.
Lastly, feel free to check out my best affiliate marketing courses page which I update from time to time with my top picks.
If you liked this post please share! If you have any questions, feel free to comment and I will get back to you.
