If you’ve heard the term “Affiliate Marketing” before but have no clue what it’s all about then read on.
In this post I’m going to give you a no-nonsense guide to affiliate marketing – what it is and how you can get started. Lets dive in!
What is affiliate marketing?
Put simply, affiliate marketing is where you promote other people’s products or services and get paid a commission if your marketing efforts lead to a sale. That’s it in a nutshell. You find a product or service you’d like to promote, and you get paid a commission every time you generate a sale. The commission is normally a percentage of the sale value.
When you sign up to become a marketer of someone else’s products or services you are known as an “affiliate”. You can join hundreds of affiliate programs for every sort of product and niche you can think of. Most major retailers and brands have some sort of affiliate program. Amazon, Walmart, Target, and most major high-street retailers and online brands have some sort of affiliate program you can join which will allow you to start promoting their products and earn commissions.
You can think of affiliate marketing as commission sales – you don’t get paid a wage, you are paid solely on the sales you generate.
How does affiliate marketing work?
This diagram gives a great overview of how affiliate marketing works:
Lets say you want to be an affiliate for Amazon so you can start promoting their books and earn commissions from your efforts. You would join the Amazon affiliate program, which like most affiliate programs is 100% free to join. Once accepted you are able to start promoting any of the products that Amazon sells.
The first step is to find products you are interested in promoting. You are then given a unique link, known as your affiliate link. This is link is unique to you. Its normally a number or code of some sort, like in this example below:
Lets say you are reviewing a book on your blog – you can include a link to the book on Amazon for your audience to buy it. That link will contain your unique affiliate link or code, which means Amazon will be able to know that that visitor has been sent to their website via your affiliate link.
Because that person has been referred to the website via your unique affiliate link, any products that person purchases will be attributed to you and Amazon will give you a commission for your effort in generating that sale. The great thing is that once someone has clicked your affiliate link and ended up on the destination website, a cookie will be placed on their browser for a certain period of time.
This tracking cookie could be active for 14 days, a month, a year, or even for life!
This means if the person you sent to the merchant’s website or product page doesn’t buy right away, but buys a week or a month after that initial click – you still get credit for driving that sale and you earn a commission!
The cookie duration will differ depending on what affiliate program you join and the product you are promoting.
Amazon gives you credit for any sale generated within 24 hours, whilst more niche affiliate products or programs have longer cookie durations such as 30 – 90 days, or longer.
Not everyone you send to an offer or product page will be ready or willing to buy straight away, but as long as they do buy within the cookie tracking period you will still get the commission paid out to you.
Affiliate marketing definitions
Affiliates: The individual who is promoting the product or service in order to gain commissions from their effort.
Merchants: The individual or company who’s products or services you are promoting e.g. Amazon, Walmart etc.
Affiliate Network: Act as intermediaries between affiliates and merchants – find out more about affiliate networks below.
Consumer: The customer who buys the product or service you are promoting via your affiliate link.
What are affiliate networks?
Affiliate networks are organisations that act as intermediaries between merchants and affiliates. They handle all the sales, payments, reporting, and refunds.
Some merchants (product creators, companies etc.) don’t want the hassle, or don’t have the expertise of managing their own affiliate programs, so they use a network instead. Amazon manages their own affiliate program called Amazon Associates, but there are many well-known companies and brands that trust affiliate networks such as Clickbank , Share-a-Sale, or CJ Affiliate to manage their affiliate programs for them.
These networks also act as databases for affiliate offers. This means you can join an affiliate network like Share-a-Sale, Clickbank, or CJ Affiliate and get access to a number of different programs and products that you can promote.
Joining an affiliate network is a great place to start if you are unsure about what products or services to start promoting. These networks are free to join (there are some exceptions) and give you access to a wide variety of different products and services you can start to market. Major companies like MLB use Share-a-Sale to manage their affiliate program.
Some merchants work exclusively with certain networks, which means if you want to promote that merchant’s products or services you have to join that specific affiliate network.
Most of the major affiliate networks are completely free and easy to join, and they have staff members called affiliate managers who are on hand to offer as much help to affiliates as possible. This is great, especially if you are just getting started with affiliate marketing and need a bit of support, know-how, and guidance.
Affiliate managers want to help affiliates to make as much money as possible – because when affiliates win, the merchants win, and the networks also win. Affiliate marketing really is a win-win situation for all parties involved.
How and when do I get paid?
How or when you get paid depends on the merchant or affiliate network you are promoting for. Most affiliate networks or merchants pay out commission every 2 weeks. Some pay out every month. Each network and merchant will have different payment schedules.
How you get paid will depend on your preference – most merchants and networks allow you to choose between being paid by check or by bank transfer.
How NOT to do affiliate marketing!
There’s no one way to do affiliate marketing. There are a number of ways in which you can promote your affiliate links and drive sales. But there are some ways that are better and more efficient than others, and there are some ways that you should definitely avoid!
Too many beginners that start affiliate marketing get their affiliate links and start plastering them all over the internet, anywhere and everywhere they can find.
I’m sure you’ve seen that sort of thing….
If you scroll down and read the comments on YouTube videos you’ll see people have posted links to certain products or pages – these are normally affiliate links. This is not a good way to do affiliate marketing. This is spammy and doesn’t create any lasting results. You can’t just post your affiliate link everywhere and anywhere and expect to make any sales!
This is what I call the “spray and pray” method of affiliate marketing: you “spray” your link all over the internet and pray that someone clicks and buys…..it simple doesn’t work.
An easy (and free) way to start affiliate marketing in 3 steps
One of the best ways to become successful as an affiliate is to create reviews around products or services in your chosen niche or market.
These are the basic steps you need to follow:
a. Pick a niche
This could be anything such as dating, health, tech products, etc.
The more specific your chosen niche the better. It’s even better if you pick a niche that you are genuinely passionate about and interested in. Try and go for a very specific niche and then dive deeper in to that niche.
For example: If you are interested in promoting camping gear, instead of focusing on everything perhaps you could specialise in sleeping bags, or tents, or torches.
The more specific and granular you can get within your niche the better results you will see.
b. Create valuable content about that niche or products within that niche
The main thing here is to add value to your audience. You are providing them with valuable information about products or services they are interested in and considering buying.
You can create YouTube videos or blog posts reviewing products or services that people in your niche will be interested in. For example: You could create a YouTube channel or blog dedicated to reviewing the best camping gear on the market.
Of course, you can review all the products in your niche such as all the different types of camping gear from tents, to lamps etc. but from my experience the more specialised you are the faster you will see results and the better your results will be.
Start by focusing on one core product within your niche e.g. sleeping bags and create content around that first, before branching out to wider areas and other products of your niche. The more specialised you are in one area or on one product category, the faster and easier it is to standout from the crowd. Once you have gained an audience you can start to expand out and cast a wider net by reviewing other products in your niche.
c. Add your affiliate link to that piece of content
If you have written a review about a certain sleeping bag for example, you can add your affiliate link for that sleeping bag which directs your reader to the merchants website where they can buy that product.
If you create YouTube videos you can add your affiliate link in the video or in the description. Anyone purchasing through your link will lead to you earning a commission. This is a very basic outline of an easy to implement affiliate marketing strategy. The best thing about this strategy is that it is evergreen, and you don’t need to spend any money to get started. You can create a YouTube channel for free, and you can use sites like WordPress.com or Wix to set up free websites.
As long as you are creating valuable and useful content, your videos and blog posts will start to get ranked by Google and you will attract visitors to you blog posts and videos for free.
Affiliate marketing using paid ads
There are other affiliate marketing strategies that involve using paid ads to drive visitors to your offers. The advantage of using paid traffic sources to promote your affiliate offers is that you will start to generate instant traffic to your offers, whereas free traffic takes a bit more time and effort to generate.
You can use paid traffic sources like Google search ads, Microsoft ads, YouTube ads, or Facebook ads to drive highly targeted traffic to relevant affiliate offers. In fact, using Facebook ads to promote affiliate offers can be one of the most lucrative and best ways to start making major commissions with affiliate marketing. This is because the targeting on Facebook is super powerful and effective at getting the right offer in front of the right people at the right time.
How to get started in affiliate marketing
I want to encourage you to start your affiliate marketing journey and learn how to start making passive income by promoting other people’s products and services.
You can promote products that you use yourself, or products and services that you are interested in. Do you have any hobbies? If so you can start reviewing products in the area of your hobbies and interests. There are a ton of great resources out there, but I understand that it can be very overwhelming when you are starting out.
My best advice is to find someone who has achieved success as an affiliate and do what they do. You may tweak the strategy as you gain more experience and you can start to try out new strategies and tactics, but at first try and follow a proven blueprint, that is the shortest way to success.
I will be creating more post on affiliate marketing which will go into more detail on various strategies. These will include strategies that use free traffic sources, and those that use paid traffic sources.
