Affiliate marketing is one of the great online business models to add additional revenue to your current one.
The cost of starting affiliate marketing is relatively low, meaning it costs little or no investment to get started and that’s a profit for you.
Affiliate marketing offers a very high reward compared to other online businesses, especially when you have huge clients, followers, subscribers, or an online audience.
That said, the easiest way to get started doing affiliate marketing is:
- Pick a niche you’re interested in
- Research and join an affiliate program related to your niche
- Find your affiliate links
- Helps people in your target market by creating useful information
- Advertise your affiliate links
In the following article, I went into more detail on how to start affiliate marketing as a beginner. Make sure you read to the end.
Table of Contents
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a process or marketing strategy by which you (an affiliate) earn a commission for promoting or marketing a product created by another person to a company.
The affiliate (you) searches for products they like or have used before, then promotes that product to their audience and earns a profit for each sale they generate.
Does It Cost To Start Affiliate?
You can start affiliate marketing for free without any initial investment. However, if your goal is to run a real affiliate business I recommend you put in some investment around $100 to cover essential parts like:
- Domain name
- HostingTheme
- Email marketing services
- Affiliate marketing courses, etc.
NB: Starting for free is not recommended because it can slow or hinder your progress or growth.
- Recommend Reading: Does It Cost To Start Affiliate Marketing
How Much Can You As An Affiliate?
There’s no specific amount of money designed to generate doing affiliate marketing – earnings are endless depending on your niche, product, and overall marketing strategies.
- Recommended Reading: How Much Money Do Affiliates Make
How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is not overnight success or get-rich-quick kind of something. It takes years of hard work and dedication to see results. For me, it took me 2 years to get my first affiliate sales.
- Recommended Reading: How Long To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
- PS. I wrote another article where I went into more detail on what affiliate marketing is and how it works. You can check it out here.
What Is The Easiest Way To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing?
Step #1: Choose your niche
Everything starts with choosing a niche. A niche is a topic you’re going to be writing content around for a very long time.
If you’re going to be the person who’s going to do all the content writing, it’s very important you choose something you’re passionate about or interested in or want to learn about.
That way, you can be able to stick with it for the long-haul if the going gets tough. Many affiliate sites don’t succeed simply because of the inability to take action.
Building an online business requires consistency.
Now, the best possible chance to succeed in the niche you pick is to narrow the niche down till it hurts.
What do you mean by that?
What I mean is that you should focus on one aspect of the topic.
For example, if you’re in the “Make Money Online niche” this is a very huge and competitive niche.
Going for a niche like that as a beginner, you’ll find it hard to rank your content in search engines.
But you can niche down and try something more specific like:
- Affiliate marketing
- How to build an online business
- Work at home
- Niche website building for beginners
- Investmentment for beginners, etc.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to be an expert in this field. Just go and learn about the topic, implement it, and then turn around and teach it.
If you take this path, you’ll attract more interested people to you, who will like you for who you are.
Don’t try to be what you are not, be real you.
Step # 2: Find an affiliate program to join
As you have selected your niche, the next thing you need to do is to pick an affiliate program you believe in or more importantly the one you have used yourself.
Make sure it’s congruent with your niche. You can’t promote dog food to cat owners, promote a product that matches the niche you are in.
There are three main affiliate programs to choose from:
- High-Paying, Low-Volume Affiliate Programs: These are affiliate programs with high ticket products and pay high commissions but it’s not in high demand.
- Low-Paying, High-Volume Affiliate Programs: These are programs with low payment but have high interest rates.
- High-Paying, High-Volume Affiliate Programs: These are programs that are in high demand, and also pay high commissions.
All of these programs exist and deciding which one to join depends on your niche and your experience level.
If your plan is to target buyers and acquire a customer to which you can market different products to, then choosing the second option will be very much profitable.
- RECOMMENDED READING: How To Choose A Profitable Affiliate Program
Step #4: Choose a platform/ Traffic Source
Now, that your product is ready, the next step you should take is to pick a traffic source where you’re going to promote that product.
Traffic is the most essential part when it comes to making money with affiliate marketing.
That means without eyeballs (traffic) on your affiliate link or offer, clicks, and no earnings.
There are tons of traffic sources out there online but not all of them are good sources. Choose a place where your target audience mostly hangs around online.
Here are some good traffic sources:
- Blog
- YouTube
- Forum Marketing
- Social Media, etc
There are so many of them, but when you’re just starting out just focus on a single platform until you have enough attraction with it before moving to another one.
I recommend you start a blog or a YouTube channel. If possible, start both, with these two platforms it’s much easier to build targeted audiences and increase your sales and income.
Blogging
Starting a blog nowadays is very easy and inexpensive. And it’s probably one of the best methods when it comes to affiliate marketing.
If you enjoy writing, then blogging is your best bet. There are tons of tutorials out there online that will walk you step by step on how to start a blog.
If you’re ready to start your own blog check out this post on how to start a successful blog step-by-step.
NOTE: To start a blog, costs a few dollars a month. You have to pay for domain and hosting.
Now…
Once, your blog is up and running, you need to write content that people want to read and then optimize it for search engines (SEO) so people can find your post and actually click on it and read it.
And from there, you can add your affiliate link to the part of your content that makes sense.
NB: It has to be natural, not in a spamming way.
In my opinion, blogging is by far one of the best ways to promote affiliate links, as long as you own the domain, pay for your hosting packages, keep adding more valuable content, and keep your site updated.
REMEMBER: Blogging is a long-term plan but it will surely grow to where you want it to be if you don’t quit.
YouTube
Apart from Google, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world.
It works like blogging when it comes to SEO and creating content, but with YouTube, you create videos instead of articles.
Creating a YouTube channel and uploading videos to YouTube is absolutely free, if you have a Google account, you automatically have a YouTube channel.
Creating YouTube videos can be a little bit quicker than blog posts and you can also earn more money from YouTube when you allow ads from Adsense to be run on your videos.
In the internet marketing world now, video marketing is now the best and fastest way to build the Know, Like, and Trust factor with an audience.
The reason is that you’re going to show your face on camera and if people see and know you’re a real person, they will be able to connect with you more.
If you don’t mind being on camera, then starting video marketing can be a little bit profitable for your business.
My recommendation is to start both a blog and a YouTube channel.
Step #4: Know Your Audience
People didn’t visit your site to read about what you eat today, they came there to learn about something or need an answer to their problem.
You need to put yourself into the shoes of your audiences to understand:
- Why do they come to your site or view your videos?
- What problems and challenges are they facing?
- How can I help them solve their problems?
- Can my product help them solve their pain?
- Why do they need my product?
When you understand your audience, you’re able to speak directly to their interest, desires, challenges, problems, and pain points.
It helps you promote the right product and also create the right content that speaks the language of your ideal customers and generates more clicks on your content and offers.
Step #5: Create great content
Have you ever heard this saying before, ‘Online, content is king’? And that’s absolutely true. But quality content is indeed king.
You don’t get to become that 10k business owner without first doing the work and online that work is content creation.
As you understand what your targeted audience wants or is looking for, you need to take a step back and focus on that.
Creating valuable, relevant, high-quality content that educates, teaches, or helps your audience in one way or the other is what will help you win.
If you ever want your affiliate marketing business or affiliate site to be successful, then make it your number one priority to focus on creating high-quality content.
Step #6: Capture and Build A List
The big mistake I see most affiliates make, I also make this mistake when I first get started is that they send people directly to a raw affiliate link without bridging a gap between the product.
What do you mean by that?
What I mean is that they don’t create landing pages to first capture visitors’ email addresses before sending them to the product.
If you’re directly linking people from your content to a product sales page, you are leaving yourself out of the equation.
For example, If that person didn’t buy the product, which majority of them will not at their first exposure. Do you guess? You lose a customer with whom you can do a repeated market with.
If you’re listening to the sound of my voice today, please, whatever product you’re promoting, don’t send people directly to that product.
You’re leaving huge money on the table doing that.
Instead, create a landing page to first capture their email address before sending them to the actual product.
And if they decide not to purchase the product, you still have them on your email list and you can remarket the product to them over and over again till they decide to buy.
If they still haven’t purchased the product after you promoted it to them, maybe they need a few extra emails for you or more information about the product
Or they want to know more about you. And this is where the power of email marketing comes into place.
You have to follow-up with them through an email autoresponder on a daily basis and in your email, you should try to provide value before trying to sell to them.
Email marketing has so many benefits.
One important of building an email list is that you can promote other products to your list if someone doesn’t like the first or the original product.
You can also create your own product in the future and promote it to them.
That’s called leverage!
There are tons of landing page builders out there, I suggest Getresponse, it’s free for 30 days, and they also have an effective autoresponder to follow up with your leads and sell your product.
Step #7: Be Consistent
Whatever promotional method you choose to promote your product, you’ve got to be consistent, especially with YouTube and blogging.
With these two platforms, the more content you get out there or have, the more people you’re going to reach and the more chances your offer is going to be seen by a handful of people.
If you have 200 videos or blog posts, you probably have 200 chances for your videos to go viral or 200 keywords that can start ranking on Google, compared to 3 or 5 posts.
If among your 200 posts, one manages to bring in about 1,000 views, you have 1,000 chances to sell your product.
The Easiest Way To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing – Summery!
The easiest way to start affiliate marketing as a beginner is by following a few simple steps.
First, pick a niche that you’re interested in, passionate about, or know something about. This makes it easier to find the right products to promote.
Next, sign up for an affiliate program that fits your niche, like Amazon Associates or ShareASale, which are beginner-friendly.
After that, create content around the products you’re promoting. You can start a blog, or YouTube channel, or use social media to share your affiliate links.
Make sure your content is helpful and builds trust with your audience.
Finally, focus on free traffic sources, like SEO and social media, so you don’t have to spend money upfront.
NB: It might take time, but with consistent effort, you can start earning commissions.
This is a simple, low-cost way to begin as a new affiliate marketer.
Related Questions
1. What is the easiest way to start affiliate marketing?
Answer: The easiest way to start is to choose a niche you’re interested in, sign up for an affiliate program like Amazon Associates, and create content to promote products. Focus on using free traffic sources like social media or blogging to share your affiliate links.
2. Do I need a website to start affiliate marketing?
Answer: No, you don’t need a website to start. You can promote affiliate links on social media, YouTube, or even through email. However, having a website can help build trust and give you more control over your content.
3. How long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing?
It varies, but it usually takes time. You’ll need to build an audience and gain their trust before you start seeing sales. Consistent effort and good content will help you see results faster.
4. How much does it cost to start affiliate marketing?
You can start for free by using social media or a free blog platform to share your affiliate links. If you want to invest, you could pay for a website domain or ads, but it’s not necessary to get started.
5. What should I promote as a beginner in affiliate marketing?
Start by promoting products in a niche you know or are interested in. It’s easier to create content and gain trust when you’re knowledgeable about the products. Programs like Amazon Associates have a wide range of products, making it easier for beginners to find something to promote.
