In this article, we will talk about what you need to know about affiliate marketing and how to get started.
Affiliate Marketing is one of the most popular online businesses out there for many people. A lot of people are actually now millionaires as a result of this particular business called affiliate marketing.
When people ask me what they should do to start a business or how they could make money online , I always recommend affiliate marketing and there’s a reason for this. With affiliate marketing , it is not necessary to have any startup capital. You don’t have to worry about business expenses and you also don’t have to worry about profitability or profit margins because with affiliate marketing, you really don’t have many expenses so you can get started with this business with almost zero dollars.
I would however recommend maybe having a budget of like a hundred dollars because you might want to start a website for your affiliate marketing business or maybe buy a camera or a few equipment to kind of jump start you a little bit.
In other words, you can start this business with zero dollars or decide on a couple hundred dollars if you really want to put some money into it. The choice is yours.
What exactly is the Affiliate Marketing Business all about?
Affiliate marketing simply means marketing products for a company which you obviously did not create and earning commissions in the process. So I’ll give you an example here and hopefully this can really help explain it better.
For example, let’s say Nike sells shoes and clothing. What we do as affiliate marketers is to market these Nike products on our website, youtube channel, facebook group or tik tok or any other platform.
We are able to market products for other businesses by getting special links or custom links from those businesses that are specific to the individual only and that tracks when people click on them and are directed to that business. If that person buys from that business we then get a commission or a piece of the pie from that company.
So that’s basically how affiliate marketing works and what’s great about this is that apart from using a youtube channel or a blog, there are a lot of different ways to basically get link clicks and get conversions through your special link that you get from a company.
Now you might be asking: how do I get this link from a company? I’ll show you how to do that.
There are different ways to do that but what we call these companies are affiliate networks. They are basically websites or companies that give affiliate marketers the opportunity to promote their products through the specific link given to them.
One more great benefit of affiliate marketing is that we don’t have to deal with some of the things that most businesses deal with, like dealing with customers who may be unhappy with a product, return and refund issues, customer service etc.
As an affiliate marketer, our goal here is to just market the product for the business, send the customer over there and once the customer is at the company, then the company’s team takes it up from there.
So we’ve talked about why affiliate marketing can be a great opportunity and we’ve also identified what affiliate marketing is right?
So now let’s talk about how to find products.
How to find a niche or niches, what types of products to promote and also how much we can actually expect to make money with affiliate marketing.
So let’s start off with understanding the different types of products that we can promote and the big easy answer here is that most companies or most products have an affiliate program.
I would say that probably 80% of the companies out there that do B2C which is basically just for consumers will have some type of affiliate program.
The best way to find this out is to just do a quick google search. So for example, you can just google ‘Nike affiliate program’ or ‘Adidas affiliate program’ , go through their website and see if their products are okay for you to promote. Alternatively you can use affiliate networks.
Affiliate Networks
There are three different affiliate networks out there that I want to share with you in this article and that I use on a daily basis to find new products to promote and they are:
- Amazon associates
- Bluehost affiliate program
- CJ.com
Each one of these affiliate networks have products you can promote. Let’s get a better understanding of the whole landscape that we’re looking at and also look at the amount of money we can make with affiliate marketing.
- Amazon Associates:
Let’s start with amazon associates. I really think this is sort of like a right of passage for any affiliate marketer. This is the first affiliate program I joined and it has a lot of products you can choose to promote and earn a commission on.
To get started, you can simply sign up on amazon associates and get a special link that is specific to you which can also be to any amazon product at all.
The way this works is that, you find a product on amazon that you would like to promote, and then you get a link directly to that product through your amazon associates dashboard, so when people click on it you can make money if they buy anything on amazon within the next 24 hours because they clicked on your link and it is usually tracked by cookies.
You can check the fee schedule for the products, so that you know what you can make with amazon associates. It however varies based on the type of product and the category . So if for example somebody buys a physical book through your unique amazon link, then you can get four and a half percent commission from the sale of that book.
So four and a half percent of maybe a $20 book would be a commission of 80 cents from selling that book. Now that doesn’t seem like a lot of money but if we can get thousands of people to buy this book, then it starts to add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
We can look at the different products and see what we can actually make from amazon associates. If we’re selling beauty products like luxury beauty products, we can end up getting a 10% commission from getting people to buy those products.
So if somebody clicked on your link and bought a thousand dollars worth of luxury beauty products on amazon we could get a 10% commission on that which would be $100 in our pocket. And that’s really cool right?
So I highly recommend signing up for amazon associates because it’s probably one of the best ways to get your feet wet with affiliate marketing. To kickstart your affiliate marketing business, you can just go ahead and sign up.
Amazon associates is a really good affiliate program to make money from and I don’t think you want to miss out on something like this and it’s totally free to get signed up . So once again you know you don’t have to worry about spending money on anything.
Besides amazon associates, there are two other affiliate networks that also have thousands of different products and from what I found, they actually pay a lot more in commissions.
- Impact Radius
Let’s take a look at Impact radius. This is just another affiliate platform where you can find different companies’ products.
To get started, head over to www.impact.com, create a free account and take a look at their products.
When you visit the Impact Radius marketplace, you will see different categories of products that you can promote. I would recommend just going through and finding different products that you know your audience would like. You can then find a way to promote them by using any of these two methods: organic traffic or paid traffic that is if you have extra funds for that.
One of my favorites is education which I think is a good one. However, if for example you have some type of publication like a website where you talk about being sustainable and making sure that you stay healthy, then you can go through the Impact Radius marketplace and search for products that align with your website niche so that you can promote them.
An important factor you also need to consider when choosing a product to promote is the cookie length which simply means how many days it would take for a purchase to pay you commission through your unique affiliate link even if the buyer doesn’t purchase the product immediately. Cookies usually last from 24 hours to a few days or even a month before they expire.
Now let’s say the cookies of a product have a validity of thirty days. What this means is that if somebody clicks on your link and they don’t buy the product right away but on day twenty-nine they decide to come back and buy that product through your link, you will still get paid, because the product has a thirty day cookie period.
If they buy something on day 29 which is about a month after they clicked your link, you can still get commission for that sale because it was within the 30 day window allowed on that product .
Cookie length can also be dependent on the company. Amazon associates affiliates links only have a 24-hour cookie length versus some of these other companies that might have a 30-day cookie length or a 90-day cookie length as mentioned earlier which determines how long after somebody clicks on your link you are still eligible to get credit for that sale. Pretty cool right?
I would suggest you go through and look at the different amounts of money that are being offered for some of these different products and see if something really aligns with your industry or niche.
There’s one particular product I like a lot and it’s ‘ Five star nutrition’. Let’s say you have a fitness youtube channel or you have a fitness website or a fitness facebook group, five star nutrition is a great one because it aligns with your niche since it is a great fit for the fitness industry.
If we look at the different rates of products on Impact Radius, you will see that they offer between 10 and 20 percent commission for sales that you get through them with a 30-day cookie window on their affiliate program.
We can also see the average of 30-day earnings per click for the affiliates who are already working with the company and then we can see that the average earnings per click is two dollars and two cents which sounds great.
So this means that if the average affiliate with five star nutrition gets a hundred clicks, they might end up getting $202 dollars in total because they’ve driven 100 clicks.
It obviously varies depending on the type of traffic that you are getting . So you want to think about who you’re promoting products to as well making sure that you’re targeting the correct audience so that you can get high earnings per click.
So you should go and search through Impact Radius, find some different brands that you think are pretty cool that maybe perhaps you could promote and then if you find them you just click apply and you go through and apply for their affiliate program.
Affiliate marketing is relatively easy to start, however an important point to note is that some affiliate programs require you to own a website or you tube channel which they will check before you actually get accepted as an affiliate .They want to see the type of traffic you are generating. There are many other affiliate programs that don’t require that so as a beginner, you register with those ones and build up as you gain experience.
3.Commission junction(CJ)
The third affiliate network I want to mention is called CJ. CJ is an abbreviation of Commission Junction and their website URL is www.cj.com.
This affiliate network also is very similar to impact radius. They have a number of reputable brands that you probably already recognize who basically run their affiliate program through this network so they have thousands of different companies in there. So let’s look at some of the different things on their website.
On www.cj.com, we can go through different advertisers and perhaps find one that we think could be a great fit for our brand. You’re probably going to recognize 23andme and it’s that DNA test to see sort of where your ancestors are from or what heritage you might have. We can then apply to the program right here and will get a link for it pretty easily and quickly.
I can almost guarantee that you’re going to find some companies on cj.com or on impact.com or even on amazon associates that you can decide to start promoting.
Now let’s say that you’ve found a product(s) that lines up perfectly, for example you found and would like to promote adidas or nord vpn.
The next step is to think about how you actually want to get people to click on your special link or your affiliate link right?.
So how do you achieve this? This leads us to how to get traffic and how to get link clicks which is the next section of this article.
When thinking about how to get people to click on your link there are two primary strategies involved: there’s free traffic and there’s paid traffic which I mentioned earlier in this article. . Sometimes people also refer to free traffic as organic traffic . Now what is the best way to do this?
Please note that if you decide to create a blog or a youtube channel, it can be done without breaking the bank. As a matter of fact, while creating a you tube channel is free, building a blog may incur a little cost. It is basically up to you.
On the other hand, paid traffic is the running ads which directs traffic to your affiliate link , so you can actually run ads with your affiliate link and make money. For example, if you google “best bank accounts”, you’ll probably notice a bunch of different ads that will come first before you actually get to what you search for right? Some of those ads can be affiliate links, or even affiliate websites.
But overall we like to use free traffic. If however you want to run paid ads with your affiliate links, then you can make sure you read the terms of service for those different affiliate programs. This is because a lot of companies may not want you running ads with your affiliate link on that company’s name which is based on their company policy.
The problem with running ads as a newbie is that it costs money and you’re gonna do a lot of split testing and a lot of A and B testing to figure out the best types of ads.
So overall I wouldn’t recommend starting with it. Although we run some paid ads, it’s only because we’re profitable due to our free traffic and now we can afford to run some paid ads for some of our different affiliate products that we promote.
Let us now focus on free traffic and how to get free traffic to your links. You might have people tell you that the best way to do this is to post your affiliate links on forums like Quora or go to other facebook groups and just paste your link everywhere. Well you can get people to click on your link but I wouldn’t recommend doing this.
You don’t need to spam people with your affiliate link. Don’t be that person because nobody really likes that. So you want to do this selectively and get people to click on your link without doing it in a deceptive manner, you want it to be as natural as possible and to be organic as well.
Now, a great way to do that for example is to get some type of organic traffic or free traffic from building on different types of social media platforms or ranking on search engines(through a blog).
I have written an article on how to create a blog somewhere in this blog so check it out for the step by step process if you are interested. The importance of a website or blog is to funnel people back to where you have pasted your affiliate links on that website/blog, or on that landing page right?
You can start a blog now and you can still make a lot of money with it. You can also decide to start a youtube channel to get traffic.
Starting a youtube channel and having a blog are great ways to get traffic but there are other things you can do as well, one of them is having an instagram page. I have friends who’ve built instagram pages specifically for getting tons of affiliate commissions from their swipe up features on their stories on instagram.
The problem here is that you need to have at least 10,000 followers to be able to get those swipe up features on instagram so if you don’t have that or if you think it’s going to take you a really long time to achieve that then you might consider other options while still gradually growing your instagram page. You could also put a link in your bio as an affiliate link for instagram pages if you want to. .
Besides instagram, another one that I really like and would recommend for getting free traffic as well is Facebook groups .Facebook groups can help you get free traffic but to succeed, you have to own the facebook group.
The key here is that you really want to be the owner of the Facebook group that you’re in, so that you can regulate and make sure that your affiliate links don’t get deleted or flagged by other people, especially in a group you didn’t create. If you go into some random Facebook group and start just posting your affiliate links to everybody you’re gonna get banned and nobody likes that.
I have a friend who owns a facebook group about credit cards and it has tens of thousands of people in that group and every now and then he will go into that facebook group maybe once a week or every couple of weeks, and he will say “hey how’s everybody doing just found this new credit card” they just have this new offer and then he will leave a link to it which is his affiliate link and then he pins that at the top of the facebook group.
So because it’s his group, and his followers like him, know him and trust him, they might go and click on that link and then sign up for that credit card because of that. So if you do decide to go that group route, just make sure that you own those groups.
And also once again going back to the basics of what we talked about, keeping a high level of integrity is also very important for something like that. Besides that, try to find out where else you can get media or so you can get followers or have eyes on you or on your product or even on your business which you think is going to be helpful as well.
Another source of traffic is email marketing which allows you to simply collect email accounts from any of your followers, whether this is on your blog or on your youtube channel or anywhere else where you’re getting traffic from. You collect their emails and you can own this email list which you can send these emails out whenever you want with your affiliate links in those emails that you send out.
A certain company called Morning brew was valued at 30 million dollars a few years ago and what they do is affiliate marketing. They basically just write emails and they have an email newsletter that comes out Monday through saturday. They embed this email newsletter which is packed with value with different types of affiliate links for different products.
So basically they make millions of dollars with affiliate marketing from an email newsletter that is now worth over 30 million dollars because of affiliate marketing. So consider making an email newsletter and just getting people to sign up for that newsletter through different types of platforms through which you can hit them with different types of affiliate links. So you can see that with affiliate marketing, the opportunities are endless.
That’s all for this article, and we hope you found some value in this article. If you want to learn more on how to make money online with other areas apart from this affiliate marketing, then you can check out our other blog posts.
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Insightful piece