Introduction

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s products or services. When someone makes a purchase through your unique affiliate link, you get a commission.

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to have your own products or worry about after-sales service. As an affiliate marketer, you can also promote different products and earn money from all of them.

How does affiliate marketing work?

Step one: As an affiliate, you get a unique link so purchases made through your link can be tracked and attributed to you.

Step Two: When someone clicks on your affiliate link, a small file called a cookie is stored on his/her browser

Step Three: This cookie has two uses:

It helps the merchant attribute the sale to the right affiliate
It usually has an expiry date, so you get paid as long as the purchases is made before the cookie expires.

How much money can I make as an affiliate marketing?

The simple answer is that there is no limit. It depends on your niche and the amount of work you put in.

The most successful affiliate marketers make six or seven figures a month. Keep in mind through that it took these people years of hard work to reach this level.

With hard work, the right knowledge, and time, you too can make lots of money in affiliate marketing.

What are some successful affiliate marketing examples?

1. Pat Flynn from Smart Passive income makes over $100,000 in monthly affiliate commissions.

2. Michelle from making Sense of Cents makes over $50,000 in monthly affiliate commissions.

Facts about affiliate marketing

1. Statistics reveal more than 80% of brands have affiliate programs.

2. Nearly 25 percent of all affiliate programs are in the fashion industry.

3. Almost 65% of affiliate marketers generate traffic by blogging.

4. Over 50% of affiliate marketers connect with their customers on social media.

5. The majority of affiliate marketers (48.32%) make less than $20,000 a year.(Job2Joy; 99firms Content, 2021)

6. 12% of affiliate marketers generate $75,000 in affiliate income alone. (Mediakix, 2020)

How to start making money in affiliate marketing?

1. Choose a Platform

First, you need an online platform. This allows you to build an audience, so you can sell your affiliate products to them.

Blog

YouTube

Facebook

Instagram

TikTok

Etc.

Which platform you choose depends on where your target audience hangs out, how good you are in building an audience on the platform, and how easy it is to drive affiliate sales through the platform.

Personally, I prefer to write so blog suits me. I can also build an audience from search traffic. I.e. people who are searching for specific terms. Running my blog also means I am in control of my own platform.

2. Decide On Your Niche

If you’re starting a blog today, you have a lot of competition. According to Growth Badger, there are more than 600 million blogs in the world today, out of over 1.7 billion websites.

To stand the best chance of success, niche down. Keeping your topics tight can help you build a more focused audience and potentially help you rank higher in search engines. After that, you can always expand into other sub-niches. Also, choose a topic that you’re passionate about. This will make your affiliate marketing business succeed in the long run, as you are more likely to enjoy what you’re doing and less likely to give up halfway.

3. Join affiliate programs

There are two different ways to go about joining an affiliate program:

Affiliate networks.

Standalone affiliate programs

An affiliate marketing is a platform that allows merchants to establish their affiliate programs. Marketers like ourselves can then search the network to find products to promote. Amazon Associates.

CJ Affiliate.

Click Bank

JV Zoo

Share A sale

A Standalone Affiliate program, on the other hand, is offered by the merchant itself. Hence, you are only able to promote items sold by the merchant. To promote items offered by different standalone affiliate programs, you will need to sign up separately for each affiliate program.

4. Create great content

To succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to create high-quality content that people will read. Your affiliate links should also fit naturally within your content, so it doesn’t seem like a hard sell or spam website.

Don’t just blindly promote products from Amazon. Go the extra mile to ensure your content solves your reader’s problem.

How? If you’re doing reviews, it helps that you are already using the product. If not, actually purchase the product and test it.

Promoting products that you don’t really believe in or that you haven’t used yourself will only hurt your blogs credibility in the long run.

5. Drive traffic to your affiliate platform

The next step is to get more eyeballs on your content, so people will click on your affiliate links (and hopefully make a purchase).

Paid traffic

This is where you pay to drive traffic to your blog. You can do this using either PPC ads or Facebook ads. The advantage of paid traffic is that it is immediate. Ads are great traffic source if your affiliate program is high paying (at least hundreds in commission per sale) and you can make the numbers work.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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

Build an email list

Having an email list of subscribers means you can reach out to your readers anytime you want.

6. Get clicks on your affiliate links

Just because you have awesome, content doesn’t mean people will click on your affiliate links.

Link placement

If your affiliate links are at the bottom of the page where most readers will not scroll to, you’ll get far fewer clicks.

Also if you make every other word in the introduction an affiliate link, your content will appear spammy.

In short, spread out your affiliate links, but you’ll do well to put the most important ones on top.