In this article, we will be talking 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 can 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 tick tock or whatever it might be.
You can market products for other businesses by getting special links or custom links from those businesses that are specific to you 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 you don’t have to use a you tube 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 the 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 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.
It probably already exists and 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 ‘nikes affiliate program’ or ‘adidas affiliate program’ 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 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.
1. Amazon Associates:
Let’s start with amazon associates. I really think this is sort of like a rite of passage for any affiliate marketer. This is the first affiliate program that I joined and has a lot of products you can choose to promote and earn a commission.
To get started, you can sign up for 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 end up making 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 and it does vary 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 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 get started, you can just google amazon associates and sign up to kickstart your affiliate marketing business.
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 sign up on. So once again you know you don’t have to worry about spending money on anything especially as a beginner .
Besides amazon associates, two other affiliate networks I will recommend and which have which have thousands of different products and also pay a lot more money are Impact Radius and Commission Junction(CJ).
2. Impact Radius
Let’s take a look at Impact radius. This is just another affiliate platform where you can find different Companies’ products.
So you can quickly head over to www.impact.com and take a look at that now. You can even create a free account if you don’t have one already.
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 organic traffic or maybe paid ads if you have extra funds.
But what I would suggest is going through and finding a couple of different products or brands in different categories.
One of my favorites actually is education. I think education is a great one. However, if you have some type of publication or you have a website where ( for example) 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 are on your website niche so that you can promote them.
You also need to understand and look at cookies of a product while finding a product to promote, 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 a few days to 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 something 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 this is 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 .
So the cookie length depends on the company. Sometimes the cookie length for some companies is only 24 hours. An example is your amazon affiliate links which 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 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 that 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 just lines up for your industry or niche.
There’s one product that 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 for people who are in the fitness industry.
If we look at the different rates of products on Impact Radius, 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.
There is an important part here, though that determines whether you actually get accepted into these affiliate programs and what determines that is they look at your website or they look at your youtube channel to see the type of traffic that you are bringing. So this is why I think it’s really important to build a website.
3. Commission junction(CJ)
Third affiliate network or website that I want to talk about 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, 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.
So you can still scroll through the CJ website and see how many companies are there.
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.
But let’s say that you’ve found these or maybe you found a product that lines up perfectly, for example you found and gonna promote adidas or nord vpn.
So once you find the things that you want to promote you need to think about how you actually wants to get people to click on your special link or your affiliate link right?.
So how will 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.
So when thinking about how to get people to click on your link there are two primary strategies here, there’s free traffic and there’s paid traffic. Sometimes people also refer to free traffic as organic traffic versus paid traffic. Now what is the best way to do this?
Well we’ve done both, we have created blogs, we have created youtube channels and different media out there, which are totally free. We didn’t pay any money for that, we just got them totally free.
And then the paid traffic is just the running ads, so you can actually run ads with your affiliate link and make money. basically sort of kind of this comes with certain profit margins that are not as Great, but still it’s possible.
let’s use an example, if you google “best bank accounts”,
You’ll probably notice a bunch of different ads that’ll comes first before you actually get to the actual things that you search for right? some of those ads can be affiliate links, they can be affiliate websites.
But overall we like to use free traffic. Also if you want to run paid ads with your affiliate links, then you can do it and sometimes you just have to make sure you read the terms of service for those different affiliate programs. because a lot of Companies don’t want you running ads with your affiliate link on that company’s name it gets kind of complicated, but it is still something that sometimes people do decide to run ads for their affiliate links and just kind of force traffic there.
The problem here is that it costs you money and especially in the beginning if you are running ads to your website or You’re running ads to something that maybe contains affiliate links, this costs you 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 would not recommend starting with it. Although we run some paid ads but it’s only because we’re profitable because of our free traffic and now we can afford to run some paid ads For some of our different affiliate products that we promote.
So in this article, we’re really going to focus on free traffic, how to get free traffic to your links.
But sometimes you might see people say that the best way to do this is to put Your links on forums like go on to quora or like go on to other facebook groups and just paste your link everywhere, Well you can get people to click on it but i would not recommend doing this.
You don’t need to spam people with your affiliate link, don’t be that person nobody likes that. So you want to do this selectively And you know sort of going in and getting people to click on your link without be doing it in a deceptive manner. you want this to be very natural and to be organic as well.
So 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 or ranking on search engines . so the easiest way to do this is with a Blog.
I’m actually going to show you how to build a website and how to set up a blog because i think regardless of where you’re getting your traffic from, you need a website to funnel people back to where you can then paste your affiliate links on that website, 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.
So starting a youtube channel and having a blog those are great ways to get traffic but there’s other things you can do as well, one of them is an instagram page i have friends who’ve built instagram meme pages specifically that they get tons of affiliate commissions from their swipe up features on their stories on instagram.
The problem here is that you need to have 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 for that then that might be somewhat problematic. you could also put a link in your bio as an affiliate link for instagram pages if you want to do that.
Besides those another one that i really like and that i think is great for getting free traffic as well . Also facebook Groups can help you to get free traffics but the key here is that you have to own 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 links you pasted doesn’t get deleted or flagged by other people. Because you know like if you go into some random Facebook group and you start just blasting your affiliate links to everybody you’re gonna get banned nobody likes that.
But if you own the facebook group will be better. I have a friend who has a facebook group about credit cards and it has tens of thousands of people in that facebook group and every now and again 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 he will leave a link to it and he places his link and then he pins that at the top of the facebook group.
So because it’s his group, his followers like him they know him, they trust him and so they honestly 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 know anywhere else that you can get media or Anywhere else that you can get followers or eyes on you or on your product or even on your business which you think is going to be helpful as well.
Another sources 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.
There is one company i know which is morningbrew, This company that i believe was valued at 30 million dollars last year and all 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 they embed it with different types of affiliate links for different products.
So they make money with affiliate marketing, they make millions of dollars with affiliate marketing from an email newsletter That’s 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 which then you can hit them with different types of affiliate links. So you can see how this is endless Opportunities.
So as i was mentioning earlier that it’s really crucial to have a blog or to have a website that you can Get people to come back to your website or to your blog which might also rank for google search and also you can use to write articles and to have resource pages. And this is a great way to embed affiliate links and make nice buttons that people think can then click on.
If you want to learn how to create a website or Blog in just few minutes, you can read this article, in this article you will learn on how to set up your blog in just some minutes. So try to read it out.
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 makes money online with other areas apart from this affiliate marketing, then you can check out our other blog posts.
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