This is an easy and complete step-by-step guide on how to do affiliate marketing for beginners. Learn how to do something once and make money over and over.
I clearly remember when I looked at my emails and there it was. I made my first sale of $40.61 USD May 14, 2017.
I know it’s not much but it meant a lot to me. Finally, I was taking the right steps.
Then another email arrived and congratulated me for making $287.32 CDN August 2017.
I was so excited I was doing the ‘happy dance’…what a feeling it was to know this thing, this process of affiliate marketing really works.
My hard work was finally paying off. My sales which come from my dive site have so far put me into the 4 digit figure a month.
The site you’re on now is my second site which I recently created.
I’ve been doing affiliate marketing now for a little over 2 years and I absolutely cannot wait to tell you about the process.
What you’re about to read here could change your lifestyle to the freedom you’ve been looking for.
Table of Contents
The Meaning of Affiliate Marketing in Layman Terms
According to Wikipedia, affiliate marketing is “a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts”.
Ok now let me explain this in layman’s term.
Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting other companies’ products. When you make the sale, you earn a commission.
This means finding a product you’re passionate about, you promote it, your visitors purchase it and you make a commission for each sale.
I’ll use an example …
Let’s say you’re looking for an underwater camera and you don’t know what you want.
Where’s the first place you go to look?
You go to your computer and do some research and maybe enter something like ‘best underwater camera for scuba diving’.
After researching on YouTube and reading some reviews, you finally find what you want. It’s a SeaLife Macro 2.0.
And so you buy it online. PS: This is my camera!
That affiliate marketer is happy because he/she made a commission as a result of your purchase.
How Affiliate Marketing Works
Let’s go back to the action that took place on the underwater camera.
You did research on the internet, and read reviews, perhaps you also looked up the manufacturer, or maybe you went to a local store to see what other types of underwater cameras were available.
Ultimately, it was the reviews that convinced you to purchase.
That particular review you read that was helpful was most likely written by an affiliate marketer and somewhere in it was an offer, an action you would have taken….like ’click here’
When you clicked on it, that action has the affiliate marketer’s hidden unique link.
This is how the company (the seller) knows which affiliate marketer receives credit.
The amount you paid for the underwater camera goes to the company which in turn pays the affiliate marketer a percentage of that price which is the affiliate’s commission.
The beauty of affiliate marketing is this process will never change.
The review on the underwater camera which led you to purchase will always make money 24/7 for the affiliate marketer.
If I was the affiliate marketer promoting that underwater camera on this post, I could be making money on it while I sleep, 24/7.
The internet never sleeps and there are billions of people all over the world who are buying online.
What if you could do something just once and get paid over and over again? This, my friend, is affiliate marketing at its BEST!!
This is how it works! The power of Affiliate Marketing will continue now and in the future!
Why Do Affiliate Marketing?
Want to do something once and get paid over and over again??
Did you know there are over 550 million products online you could sell and make money on?
AND There are over 4 billion potential customers.
As of April 2019, according to Scrapehero.com, Amazon alone has a total of 119, 928, 851 products.
According to Statista.com by 2021, there will be approximately 2.14 billion people worldwide expected to purchase online.
If this isn’t enough to convince you that affiliate marketing is the best online business type to make money on, here are…
5 Benefits of Doing Affiliate Marketing
1.No Face-To-Face Promoting (No Chasing People)
If you’ve done any MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) or Direct Sales and have been to any social parties, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
I did Direct Marketing before and I was uncomfortable trying to convince my friends and family members to bring their friends. When they did, I had to face them to do my product presentation.
I made a bit of sale and quite frankly it was not fun because I’m an introvert.
With affiliate marketing, the only thing you’re going to be facing is your computer.
This is because your website is going to be making sales while you sleep.
2. Be Your Own Boss
While learning the affiliate marketing process you may have to still work part-time or keep your full-time job… but this is just the beginning.
As your online affiliate business grows, you’ll be able to ‘fire’ your boss.
Work your own hours at home or anywhere in the world as long as you have access to the internet and a computer.
3. Potential To Earn Passive Income Long-Term
Do you remember I mentioned doing something once and making money over and over again?
This is what passive income is. You write your quality blog post once.
But that doesn’t end with just 1 post, you need to write lots. Do you see the potential?
Vacation with your family and friends, and sleep while your online business works for you 24/7.
Your 9 to-5 job can’t do this for you
4.No Inventory and No Shipping
Can you imagine what it would cost to have inventory? Not only that, there’s always the hassle of employees having to handle the packaging and shipping.
Let’s not forget consumer complaints…oh and yes, there’s rent to pay if you don’t own the building.
Do want a business like this?
With affiliate marketing, the owner (company) of the product looks after everything for you. You don’t even touch the product.
What does all this mean?
- Your start-up cost is low.
- Your business is at minimal risk.
- You can sell anything you want anywhere in the world.
- No employees
- You have no inventory and therefore no shipping
- No consumer complaints
5.No Experience Required
Yup, it’s true!
Anyone can have a successful, profitable and long-term online affiliate marketing business. You don’t even have to know how to sell. You don’t even have to chase people like the way I did as a Direct Marketer.
Did you know you can build a website in 5 minutes or less?
You don’t need to be a computer expert. You don’t have to know computer coding.
I’ve been doing affiliate marketing since early 2016 and I still don’t know how to code.
If you don’t believe me, give this a try for FREE… no credit card asked. CLICK HERE to try it out.
The place I’m taking you to is my #1 RECOMMENDED affiliate marketing training platform. It’s also the largest and friendliest community of over 1.4 million people from all over the world.
People like you and me are learning on that platform and making money while they sleep and when they’re on holiday and at home.
I am a proud member and inside their platform, they have one of the most powerful website builders in the world.
Who Is Affiliate Marketing Best For?
So now you know you don’t need to be a computer geek or have sales experience.
You know that affiliate marketing is for anyone and you can earn passive income for as long as you want with your online affiliate marketing business.
You can work whenever you want wherever you are. Affiliate marketing is long-term.
When you quit your 9 to 5 job for whatever reason, that pay cheque you always worked for will stop. That is short-term.
With affiliate marketing, you must have certain personal attributes.
You must be committed to working hard, and have patience, and perseverance to earn your passive income stream for your long-term dream lifestyle.
If you have these attributes, there’s that AMAZING COMMUNITY of over 1.4 million friendly entrepreneurs who will help and welcome you and that includes me too.
How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
There are lots of ways you can generate money with affiliate marketing.
If you have already been doing some research, you might have received some kind of offer come to your email, sales funnels, or social media for instance.
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed right now, don’t worry. I’m looking after you here…
The method of making money that I’m going to be talking about is search engine optimization (SEO).
When people look for information, they will go to the internet. This is the way the internet works.
According to Internet Live Stats, there is an average of over 40,000 search queries per second. Translate this and it comes to a stunning 3.5 billion searches/day. Worldwide, it comes to around 1.2 trillion searches/yr.
This means more people are using search engines to find reliable and helpful competing information to make decisions. This is why search engine optimization (SEO) is vitally important.
You really need to learn SEO. In other words, it’s important to SEO your website (more on that below).
Soooo, the focus here will now be on SEO, the process of getting FREE traffic from FREE search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo via content marketing (blog posts).
One of the first things you’ll want to do is find an affiliate program.
There are many places you can find affiliate network programs with literally thousands of products you can promote and join as an affiliate:
There are thousands of other affiliate network programs you can join.
Go ahead and click on any of these if you like.
Legitimate affiliate network programs are FREE to join so don’t let anyone fool you into paying.
To join any of these network programs, there’s a catch…
You need to have a professional-looking website with some traffic (audience, visitors) coming in. I have you covered on that.
The reason is, there will be a form you have to fill out with network programs and you’ll have to give them your website name and traffic information.
DON’T PANIC… remember I mentioned anyone can do affiliate marketing!
Read this next section… it’s for Beginners and Any Affiliate Marketer Who Wants To Be Successful In Making Passive Income
Step-By-Step Guide To Affiliate Marketing – Beginners
Please note, this is an overview. There is more step-by-step detailed training inside Wealthy Affiliate. It will ask for your email address but no credit card information is asked. Click on the button below for your FREE Starter Membership…
Step 1: Choose Your Niche
A niche is a specific group of an audience looking for something specific that will help solve their need or issues.
Most people will choose their niche from something they’re passionate about. They’ll be comfortable talking about what they like doing because they are an authority over it
So this group of the audience are people who like what you like.
You also don’t have to be an expert on the niche. In fact, there are many people making money on stuff they didn’t know about, but learned about it.
Let’s touch a bit on the ‘specific’…
Let’s say you’re really into health. You want your niche to be a group of people who want to be healthy. Well, that could be anything like vitamins, exercise, getting more sleep, eating better, and so on.
You can already see health is too broad. How do you target all these people? Not only that but your competition is massive on health.
If you look at my definition of what a niche is, health is not specific.
Some good examples of a targeted niche would be:
- A group of people who are experiencing back pain.
- It could be a group of people who are looking for certain types of footwear to support their arches or people who have flat feet.
- A group of people who are experiencing hair loss for men.
- A group of people who are experiencing gout.
Your website will focus on the niche you choose and your products need to be relevant to help your specific group of people.
This is what you will learn in the Wealthy Affiliate’s training platform.
Step 2: Devise (Create) A Plan
You might have a full-time or a part-time job and that’s ok.
But like any business, you still need to commit to yourself a certain amount of work hours a day to help you stay focused.
This time management is extremely important.
I suggest you spend a minimum of 2 hours a day… 4 hours a day is even better.
There are different strategies to promote your online affiliate marketing business. The one I strongly recommend is content marketing.
Why?
- It will save a lot of money because you’re getting FREE organic traffic to your website.
- It can increase sales thru search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Search engines love quality content marketing and so your site will rank higher.
- Your customers will get a better user experience because you’re giving them helpful information to solve their needs. They’ll trust, follow you, and purchase your solutions.
As you can see, it’s all about having quality content which resides on your website.
Quality content, it’s the present and the future of online affiliate marketing, in fact, on the internet.
Content marketing for you as an affiliate marketer will mean creating consistent readable content that converts into a sale.
Wait… you don’t have to be a great writer.
In fact, you’ll be a better writer by writing about something you’re passionate about and helping others with it.
For more information on content marketing, you’ll learn about this thru the training in Wealthy Affiliate.
Getting back to the plan, you will want to set a goal and even break them down into mini-weekly goals which is what I do. Include how many blog posts you want to write a week.
In summary, there are at least 2 things you need in your plan. Time and how many posts in a week will you commit to writing?
Step 3: Build a Website
Building a website is NOT scary at all. In fact, this is one of the most exciting steps you’ll want to take.
As I mentioned before, you don’t have to know any coding at all to do this. In fact, I still don’t.
I also said earlier, Wealthy Affiliate has one of the most powerful website builders in the world. It’s called SiteRubix and you can build your very own website in 5 minutes or less. In fact, it’s been proven that people can do this in 30 seconds!
CLICK HERE or on the image below to watch a video.
Step 4: Research Affiliate Products
When people search on the internet, it’s because they’re looking for something that will help solve their problem or need. What you’re doing is giving them solutions.
Finding relevant products to promote for your specific group of people is extremely important. These products must help them.
There’s no point in marketing products if you can’t monetize it so just promoting any kind of products you like will be useless.
When you’re researching here keep in mind, you’re not purchasing anything. The whole point of affiliate marketing is not to carry any inventory.
There are places like eBay or Amazon’s Best Seller List that will give you some great product ideas.
Step 5: Getting the Targeted Audience To Your Website
Now that you know what affiliate product you want to promote and that it is relevant, the next thing is to get your specific group of people to come to your website.
You do this thru a product review (content marketing) you’ve written or on a landing page with your unique affiliate link.
Definition of landing page: This is a page that describes an offer, like a free eBook, free trial, coupon, etc. It’s part of your website but you won’t see any navigation buttons.
Don’t worry, you will learn this inside Wealthy Affiliate too!
The purpose of the landing page is to encourage the reader to take action on your offer in order to get leads or sales.
While there are many ways of getting traffic, there are 3 main ways I like:
- Free (organic) traffic – This is the audience that comes to your website as a result of their searching on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
- Paid traffic – You pay to bring traffic to your website thru advertisements. This can be very expensive but it’s a process you learn later after you first generate free traffic.
- Offer – This is the product you’re attempting to promote.
Step 6: Generate Sales
This is the part you start to make money… yea!!
So here’s the thing… as long as you have tempting helpful offers, and have lots of targeted audience traffic, you will make money. There’s no doubt about this.
We’ve gone thru all the steps and I hope they all make sense.
Here’s an overview image of the affiliate marketing process on what we just covered in the 4 main stages:
How Much Money Can You Make Thru Affiliate Marketing?
I get asked this question all the time and my response is ‘the sky’s the limit’!!
You can make whatever amount you want if you believe it.
The only requirements you need are:
- Believe in yourself
- Work hard
- Never ever give up
- Persevere
- Patience
- Learn, learn, and learn
These are the attributes I find in successful affiliate marketers and non-online entrepreneurs. They put blood, sweat, and tears into their business.
Are you ready to do that?
Ok, so you want some figures, do you??
Pat Flynn is considered the richest affiliate marketer. This is what he made in 2017 a whopping $2 million…
Now if you want to be as successful as Pat Flynn, your very first move is to find a proven online affiliate marketing training platform.
Take a look at these…
This is Eric. CLICK HERE to read his success story.
This is RD40. CLICK HERE to read his success story.
These don’t look like anything compared to Pat’s, BUT you can say the people who are making this type of income are on the way to becoming as great as Pat.
You have to begin somewhere… and that place is to get proper training with Wealthy Affiliate.
So start from the bottom and work your way up. TAKE NO SHORTCUTS – they simply don’t work. Having someone tell you they did all the work for you doesn’t work.
How Long Will It Take To Make That Kind Of Money?
Affiliate marketing is not a fast get rich scheme!
From my personal experience, it will take 3 -6 months to start making a little bit of money depending on how hard you work.
Realistically, 2 years to really make a passive income of around $5,000 a month.
You might think this is not much, BUT what’s a couple of years of hard work when you think about actually being able to live your dream lifestyle.
2 years go fast, and people who are making money as affiliate marketers will tell you this is a no-brainer…
If you are totally committed to learning everything you need to know about affiliate marketing and follow your goals, you can definitely be making $100,000+ a year.
Like I said earlier, any successful business entrepreneur will tell you, it takes hard work, sacrifice, and perseverance.
I’m not even going to guarantee you’re going to make any money.
How many times have you heard people say they haven’t made any money online?
If people don’t put the effort in, well, there’s this saying “What you put into life is what you get out of it” by Clint Eastwood.
Read this next section…
Follow These Tips If You Want To REALLY Want to Double or TRIPLE Your Affiliate Marketing Success
1. It’s A Real Business
Too many people don’t treat their online affiliate marketing business as a real business.
Say you started a new local business and invested thousands of dollars into it to purchase inventory, hire employees… well, wouldn’t you work hard to get your return back and more?
Your online business IS A REAL BUSINESS!
If you put half the effort in, that’s what you’ll get.
2. Put Your Plan (Goals) Into Action
2 years ago, I joined an exercise Bootcamp Workout. The surprising thing I found was so many members were not committed. They’ll show up for 2 or 3 days a week (maybe) and wonder why the program is not working for them.
Have consistency and stick with your goals. Challenge yourself.
3. Strong Personal Attributes
So many times, I’ve read profiles of affiliate marketers who said they had quit and some years later came back to learn more about affiliate marketing… they had regrets about leaving.
They knew that had they been patient and persevered they would be living their dream lifestyle now instead of starting over again.
AFFILIATE MARKETING IS NOT A GET RICH SCHEME, RATHER IT’s A LONG-TERM PASSIVE INCOME CREATION.
4. One Website
Too many people end up with more than 1 website and they get overwhelmed.
They lose their focus. They’re unable to follow their goals = FAILURE!
You can’t write consistent quality content if you have more than 1 website. Trust me, I’ve tried that!
Remember the more quality content you consistently write brings traffic and Google will love you and rank you higher so your audience can find your site.
5. Find a Mentor
What do successful business people do?
They follow, learn and copy (not duplicate content) the strategies of successful affiliate marketers. Make them your mentors!
Finding a mentor is not expensive. In fact, it’s FREE, if you want to join the friendly community I hang out in.
I’ve made friends with experienced and successful online affiliate marketers in the community who hold me accountable. Even the newbies are after me to keep my mojo going.
I built this website as a result of the online affiliate marketing training platform, Wealthy Affiliate, and followed their step-by-step lessons. This is how you found me.
They have this community of over 1.4 million like-minded people with all different skills and niches. There are over 1800 experienced affiliate marketers. They have thousands of mentors.
The exciting part is you can join FREE to be a Starter Member and I will be your mentor and coach too!
Conclusion
E-Commerce is here permanently. It will keep growing.
According to Statista, the sales of online physical goods are expected to exceed $700 billion dollars by 2022.
It’s the way of the future and because of that, affiliate marketing will grow and prosper.
Sooooo.. Are You Ready To Make Money Online?
- Make money while you sleep, 24/7
- Make money over and over again on something you did just once
- Travel anywhere in the world
- Schedule your own work hours
- Spend more time with your family and friends
What have you to lose when it is FREE to join with no credit card information asked?
I’ll see you on the other side! I would be honoured to welcome you and be your coach and mentor.
I hope I was able to give you helpful information. I know there was a lot of information covered here. If you have any questions or comments, I really would like to hear from you.
Thanks for reading,
Monica
Thanks for your article! 1. What does a premium membership cost on siterubix? Do you perhaps know? 2. Could I use an existing website in the program?
Oh yes and lastly could you send me a link to your chief affiliate account perhaps?
Hi Cecile,
Thank you for your questions.
To be a Premium Member…
Monthly = $49 per month ($1.62 per day) The first month is $19 (very cool discount)
Yearly = $359 per year ($0.98 per day!) Less than a cup a coffee a day.
The yearly option gives you a Premium membership for under $1 per day. The yearly is a much better deal in my opinion. I always go yearly.
For more information on the Premium membership, you can click here… the blog is from Kyle (Co-Founder of Wealthy Affiliate)
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/kyle/blog/the-premium-membership-in-a-league-of-its-own/a_aid/0068722c
Thank you for asking… here is my affiliate link https://www.wealthyaffiliate.com?a_aid=0068722c
Yes, you can use siterubix site and still be a Premium member and later when you’re ready, you can always move it over (inside Wealthy Affiliate) and get your own domain for as little as around $14.00 US a year.
If you have websites hosted elsewhere like Hostgater for example, you can also move it over to Wealthy Affiliate.
I hope this information helps you and please let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks again ?!!
Kind Regards,
Monica Bouteiller