How to Start Affiliate Marketing from Scratch?

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic that lets a product owner increase sales by allowing others targeting the same audience—“affiliates”—to earn a commission by recommending the product to others. At the same time, it makes it possible for affiliates to earn money on product sales without creating products of their own.

Simply put, affiliate marketing involves referring to a product or service by sharing it on a blog, social media platforms, or website. The affiliate earns a commission each time someone makes a purchase through the unique link associated with their recommendation. Done well, this performance-based opportunity can become an important part of your business by netting you a healthy income.

How does affiliate marketing work?

To participate in an affiliate marketing program, you’ll need to take these five simple steps:

1. Find and join an affiliate program.
2. Choose which offers to promote.
3. Obtain a unique affiliate link for each offer
4. Share those links on your blog, social media platforms, or website.
5. Collect a commission anytime someone uses your links to make a purchase

Commission rates vary dramatically, depending on the company and the offer. On the low end, you’ll earn about 5% of the sale but, with some arrangements, you can earn as much as 50%, usually when promoting a class or event. There are also affiliate marketing programs that provide a flat rate per sale instead of a percentage.

Start today, and you’ll be in a prime position to take advantage of that.

You’ll learn how to get started with affiliate marketing in seven steps:

1. Decide on a platform
2. Choose your niche
3. Find affiliate programs to join
4. Create great content
5. Drive traffic to your affiliate site
6. Get clicks on your affiliate links
7. Convert clicks to sales.

Briefing on Important Points

However, it’s much easier to build an audience and increase your affiliate sales via one of two channels: a blog or YouTube channel.

Starting a blog today is relatively easy and cheap. There are plenty of tutorials online that teach you how to get started. The best part? It’ll likely only cost you a few dollars per month.

Choose a topic that focuses on a specific category. For example, the topic of “food” is an enormous category. Rather than tackling that, try something more specific, like grilling food.

How to decide which affiliate programs to join?

This depends on your niche and level of expertise.

If you’re targeting consumers, you’ll likely go with the second model of low commissions and higher sales volume.

If you’re going after a business audience, you’ll likely go for the first model: high-paying and low volume. The most popular programs here are for software and web hosting-related products.

Drive traffic to your affiliate site

You’ve created great content. The next step is to get more people to read it, so they will click on your affiliate links.

Here are three traffic strategies to consider:

A. Paid traffic

This is where you pay for traffic to your site. You can do this using PPC ads.

The advantage of paid traffic is that the moment you start paying, you get traffic.

However, there are some downsides.

B. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the practice of optimizing pages to rank high in search engines like Google.

For as long as you can rank high in the search engines for your target keywords, you’ll get consistent and passive traffic.

C. Build an email list

Email lists allow you to communicate with your readers anytime.

Use them to tell fans about new content and keep them coming back to your site for more. This leads to more affiliate clicks and sales.

D. Link placement

If all your affiliate links are at the bottom of the page where people rarely scroll, clicks will be few and far between.

On the other hand, make every other word a link in your introduction, and your content will look spammy.

In affiliate marketing, two conversions need to take place for you to make money.

The first conversion is the click to the product page.

You’re 100% in control of this action. Use the tactics above to improve your chances of getting that click.

The second conversion is the visitor purchasing the product. In the case of affiliate marketing, the merchant controls the checkout, and their conversion rates are out of your control.

The trick is to play the game to your advantage and look for merchants with programs that convert well.

Public income reports

If people are making decent money from an affiliate program, then it’s likely that the product converts well.

How do you know if people are making money?

Look at public income reports where bloggers publicly reveal how much money they’re making from their affiliate deals.

Final thoughts

No affiliate marketing wheels were reinvented here. These are the fundamentals, and applying them will get you off on the right foot.

Just don’t expect life-changing income or the freedom to quit your 9–5 overnight. Affiliate marketing takes time.

Focus first on making your first affiliate sale. As your site grows, set new goals, and continue experimenting.