How to start with affiliate marketing for beginners? How much will starting affiliate marketing as a beginner cost me?
Those are the 2 main questions you ask before venturing into affiliate marketing.
This guide will show you all the steps required how to get started with affiliate marketing for beginners, the second question is basically it will cost you about the price of your local daily coffee.
If you choose to not pay with your money how to get started with affiliate marketing you’ll pay with your time.
First, you need to choose the kind of affiliate marketing blog you’d like to start, opting for the free route limits your options.
Most people instantly think of blogging as a hobby but rest assured, there are plenty of bloggers earning millions. One of the most famous is ProBlogger.
Later, we’ll go into monetization, but for now…
You need a website! (this discussed later)
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is basically the practice of promoting the products or services of another person or company in exchange for a commission on the resulting sale.
Publishers can make money through affiliate marketing by employing an affiliate link to promote goods or services that are sold by other businesses. The affiliate partner receives payment for helping the shop or advertiser reach their goal.
Usually, a sale is an outcome. But, some affiliate marketing organizations can pay you for leads, free-trial users, website clicks, or app downloads.
Affiliate marketers join affiliate programs, find reputable affiliate products to promote, and then share those products with their audiences.
You don’t have to worry about expensive setup charges because most affiliate programs are typically free to join. If done correctly, an efficient affiliate marketing approach can transform from a side gig into a lucrative online company concept by bringing in a respectable amount of money.
Affiliate marketing is one of the quickest and most effortless approaches for beginners to make money online.
Your primary undertaking will consistently be traffic (for example driving possibilities to the dealer’s site utilizing your special “affiliate link”.
If you don’t have any cash you can begin by discovering approaches to get free traffic to your site, including blogging, visitor posting on different sites, and presenting via web-based networking media destinations like Facebook, Instagram, and so on.
If you have a spending budget you can drive traffic considerably quicker with paid promoting strategies.
- Facebook Ads
- Solo Ads
- YouTube Ads
Free traffic is extraordinary because it’s free, however, once you have enough cash begin utilizing paid advertisements to develop your business rapidly.
Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: How does it Work?:
Here’s a graphic illustration of how the Affiliate Marketing Business works;
- When an affiliate joins the merchant’s program, he or she is given a unique ID and a specific URL to use when promoting the company’s product.
- The affiliate includes the link in their blog content and/or via their email marketing efforts and invites readers to click it to find out more.
- When a potential buyer clicks on the link to visit the affiliate partners’ site, a cookie identifying the affiliate is placed on their computer.
- The cookie ensures that the publisher is credited with the referral sale even if it occurs days or even weeks later.
- Whenever a buyer completes the sale process, the merchant checks the sales record for a cookie identifying the source of the referral.
- If the merchant finds a cookie with an affiliate ID, the affiliate is credited with the sale.
- The merchant makes reports available so that the affiliate can see their referrals (clicks) and sales.
- The merchant pays the affiliate commission at the end of each payment period (i.e. revenue sharing).
Step # 1: Building Your Website & Hosting:
To start an affiliate marketing blog as a beginner, you’ll need a website where your readers can come and read your words.
This will also be an essential tool to create revenue for your affiliate marketing business.
There are a few ways to start a free website, but to earn money, the best one is Bluehost.
Powering over 2 million websites worldwide, Bluehost is a recognized brand name in bargain web hosting. By doing a large volume of business they’re able to offer steep price discounts.
In addition to offering a full range of web hosting services, Bluehost provides marketing training, SEO services, social media marketing, content creation, graphic design services, email, domain names, and local business listings to grow traffic.
They cater to everyone: from beginning affiliate marketers and bloggers to established e-commerce and more.
Bluehost was founded in 2003 and has since grown to become one of the world’s largest providers of reliable and cheap web hosting.
Bluehost offers a range of products and services to help you get started with your website or online shop:
From shared and WordPress hosting to website builder tools.
They have a special focus on meeting the digital marketing and training needs of small businesses.
Their value-priced hosting packages come with unmetered bandwidth, free global CDN and SSL certificates, and free daily, weekly, and monthly backups on a powerful and proven platform that is built to scale and optimized for speed and security. Their cheapest hosting plan is $3.95/mo.
Click here to Create your First Website:
Create a Blog for your Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
To create a blog for affiliate marketing as a beginner follow these steps:
- Sign up for web hosting (we recommend Bluehost).
- Choose a hosting plan.
- Pick a domain name for your blog.
- Complete your hosting registration.
- Install WordPress. (FREE with BLUEHOST)
- Log in and write your first blog post.
None of these steps require in-depth technical knowledge.
Once you get your blog up and running, you’ll probably want to start writing and likely tweak its appearance/functionality. To help you do that, we’ll also show you how to:
- ⭐ Write your first blog post using the WordPress Editor How to start a blog article
- ⭐ Change how your WordPress blog looks Guide on how to add Images to WordPress Blog
- ⭐ WordPress Homepage Click Here
While themes are mostly about appearances, plugins are more focused on helping you add functionality to your blog.
When you first create a WordPress blog, you pretty much only have the ability to write blog posts and create pages.
Plugins are what allow you to add more advanced functionality like:
- Contact forms
- Social network buttons
- Backups
- Improved SEO
- And lots, lots more
The WordPress community offers over 50,000 free plugins, plus there are thousands of premium plugins.
see our guide here on how to get your blog posts to show up on Google searches
Choose Affiliate Networks For Your Affiliate Marketing Blog:
The fit must be right between you and the merchant who is going to benefit from your promotional efforts, or it simply won’t work.
The easiest way to begin with affiliate marketing is to select an affiliate network.
Many affiliate networks exist, some of which are tied to well-known companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, while others specialize in specific types of products and services.
You may have heard of ClickBank, one of the oldest and most popular affiliate networks. A billion-dollar company, ClickBank specializes in digital products like e-books and software, as well as membership sites.
If you haven’t considered selling digital information products, then you should seriously consider doing so considering all the benefits.
Digital information products
- offer much higher commissions (anywhere from 10 to 75%+)
- physical products which usually only offer commissions under 5%.
- digital information products can be easier to sell in many cases because people can get instant access and immediate gratification when purchasing a digital information product.
Another network you should consider when it comes to promoting products as an affiliate is Amazon.com.
As you may already know, just about any physical product can be sold on Amazon.com.
Though products on Amazon generally offer lower commissions than their digital product counterparts,
- Selling Products on Amazon can result in a much higher volume.
- Most people trust Amazon as a merchant.
Selecting the Right Affiliate Products For Your Affiliate Marketing Blog as a Beginner:
A sound product strategy is a must for new affiliate marketers. Ideally, you should choose a niche that you can make money online with, and that has a lot of product vendors.
This will give you a wide selection of products to offer your online community.
However, when you’re just getting started you should limit yourself to two or three products at a time.
This will allow you to become an expert on the products you are promoting which can be helpful when it comes to marketing those products (such as writing product reviews).
How to Set Yourself Up as an Affiliate:
Whether you work directly with a merchant or through a network, you’ll have to apply, be approved, and provide certain information so that you can be paid through your affiliate marketing business as a beginner.
At a minimum you’ll need to provide:
- Personal/business contact information for tax and reporting purposes.
- Your bank account where commissions will be sent.
In turn, the merchant must provide you with:
- An affiliate link. Whenever you post about the product, you’ll use this trackable link. It will have a long tag at the end of each link that includes your affiliate ID.
Here’s what some typical affiliate text links look like:
You’ll also usually get some tips and useful assets for marketing the product (often found in a welcome guide or on the affiliate website).
These could include:
- An affiliate guide as well as instructions on how to use the platform and a summary of policies such as payouts.
- Online marketing tools like banners and sidebar graphics.
- Sample email/webpage swipe copy.
- Ongoing communications from the merchant about promotions, new products, etc.
If you use a network like Amazon, you’ll get your link for each of the specific products you promote.
Be sure to check your specific network’s help or support pages for more information.
How to Market Products on your Website/Blog:
- 1: Create a Website or A Blog. (recommend starting with BlueHost) and you get WordPress Free
- 2: Choose an Industry, and then Niche Down
- 3: Research Products in Your Niche that You Can Review
- 4: Sign Up for the Amazon Affiliate Program
- 5: Find affiliate programs for the other products you want to review
- 6: Create content in the form of tutorials, review posts, resource pages, or emails, and use your affiliate link
- 7: Optimize the page and track your rankings on Google
- 8: Rinse and Repeat!
How to Add affiliate links to your content:
One great way to get paid a commission without appearing to sell anything is to add affiliate links within your content. That way, when people click on the link, they’re taken to the company site and, if they buy, you’ll earn a commission.
- For example, if you’re writing about decor that includes purple comforters, make the phrase “purple comforters” a link to Amazon’s site that shows people only comforters that are offered in purple. Your readers can browse through Amazon’s offerings and maybe purchase an item that they like.
- Good news: Companies make it very easy to get links to their site. The way that you get those links varies from company to company, but it’s usually very easy to find a link to the product or products that you’re looking for.
- If you buy anything through Amazon Through my links I will receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
Include visual ads in your sidebar:
Your website, like most websites, probably has a sidebar. That’s a great place to include visual ads for products relevant to your niche.
- Once again, you’ll find that companies with affiliate programs make it very easy for you to obtain the images and links you need to get your visitors back to their sites. It’s almost always just as easy as copying and pasting code into your sidebar.
Continue producing content relevant to your niche:
You want to keep people coming back to your website, don’t you? If so, then you need to keep on producing original content that’s of value to your visitors.
- Good content keeps visitors coming back. That means that they might eventually click on your affiliate links and purchase something.
- You can also use your content to include affiliate links as mentioned above. The more content you produce, the more affiliate links you have. The law of averages eventually kicks in and you’ll start selling.
Step # 2: Set up an Email Autoresponder For Your Affiliate Marketing Blog:
So you set up your blog/website, you started creating content on the niche you picked, and now you need to create an opt-in or landing page to collect emails from people that are interested in your niche.
The one I’ve been using and highly recommend is Getresponse
Getresponse is an email marketing app that allows you to:
create a mailing list and capture data onto it
create newsletters that can be sent to the subscribers on your mailing list
automate your emails to subscribers via the use of ‘autoresponders’
View and analyze statistics related to your email marketing campaigns – open rate, click-through, forwards, etc.
Recently, however, Getresponse’s feature set has evolved quite a bit, to the point where it has become more of an ‘all-in-one’ marketing solution.
In addition to email marketing, it now also provides webinar hosting, landing pages, and automated sales funnels.
Getresponse has been in business since 1998; and, according to the company, 350,000 individuals and businesses now use the platform for their email marketing.
GetResponse Pricing Plans:
There are four Getresponse pricing plans: There is a Free Trial
Basic — starting at $15 per month to send an unlimited number of emails to up to 1,000 subscribers
Plus — starting at $49 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers
Professional — starting at $99 per month for up to 1,000 subscribers
Enterprise — starting at $1,199 per month for lists exceeding 100,000
Click Here for my review of GetResponse
Getresponse features:
By comparison with other email marketing tools, Getresponse’s feature set is one of the most comprehensive available.
Not only does Getresponse provide all the key stuff you’d expect from an email marketing platform like;
- list hosting
- autoresponders
- analytics
- templates
The question is whether all this makes the product a jack of all trades and master of none — so let’s drill down into its key features to find out.
Autoresponders:
Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your subscribers at intervals of your choosing.
For example, you can set them up so that immediately after somebody signs up for your mailing list, they receive a welcome message from your business.
A week later they could receive a discount offer for some of your products or services.
Three weeks later they could receive encouragement to follow you on social media. And so on.
Getresponse’s autoresponder functionality is a key selling point — the product provides some of the most comprehensive autoresponder functionality available.
You can send either time-based or action-based messages; time-based options include cycles such as the example above, and action-based messages can be triggered by user actions or information, for example:
opens
clicks
subscriptions to particular lists
changes in contact preferences
completed transactions/goals
birthdays
changes in user data
Marketing Automation:
Recently Getresponse launched a new version of their new autoresponder functionality, called ‘Marketing Automation.’
This allows you to create automation workflows using a drag-and-drop builder — you set up an ‘automation flowchart’ that instructs Getresponse what to do if a user opens a particular offer, clicks on a certain link, etc.
This kind of functionality goes considerably beyond what’s traditionally been on offer from autoresponders and allows you to create a user journey that can be customized to the nth degree.
Conclusion:
That dream you’ve had of starting affiliate marketing as a beginner and making passive income isn’t just a silly fantasy. It’s a completely achievable reality.
Sure, it’s not as easy as pushing a magic button or throwing Google Adsense all over your site, but with a little knowledge and persistence, you can definitely do it and even turn it into an online business.
Once you’ve gained a respectable following, affiliate marketing is one of the best business models for making money.
And the best news is that it’s so easy to get started. All the steps for how to start affiliate marketing for beginners are spelled out in this post.
Simply identify the one big thing everyone in your audience needs to reach their goals and start there.
Choose a great digital product from an online business you believe in. Share it. Tell the story of your successes.
Provide lots of valuable content that helps and educates your readers.
Be upfront, honest, and transparent. Nurture the trust that readers place in you.
And finally, be patient.
To Your Success
Juan Villar
Disclaimer: My posts may contain affiliate links! Moreover, if you buy something through one of my links, you won’t pay a penny more, but I will get a small commission, which helps keep the lights on, thanks