[b[center]]HOW TO START AFFILIATE MARKETING
AS A PRO[/b][/center]

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners:
Imagine all you needed to make money online was a website. You don’t have to create your own products or offer a service. Sounds good? Welcome to affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is where you promote another company’s product or service. When someone purchases through your affiliate link, you earn a commission. These commissions are usually a percentage of the sale price or a fixed amount.

Why should you do affiliate marketing?
Here are two reasons why you should consider doing affiliate marketing:

Low-cost and low-risk
Starting a business can be risky and expensive because there are upfront costs for products, employees, equipment, rent, etc. With affiliate marketing, all you need is a website. If it doesn’t work out, you’ve only wasted time and a little bit of money.

How to get started with affiliate marketing
Follow these seven simple steps:

Step 1: Choose your niche
Your niche is the category you want to talk about and promote.
To stand out amongst the countless other websites today, my advice is to be specific. Instead of tackling a broad niche like food, go for something a bit narrower, like grilling. This helps you build a more focused audience and may also help with SEO.

Here are four questions to ask yourself to find a good niche:

What am I good at?
What do I like doing?
What am I curious about?
What do other people tell me I’m good at?
It’s hard to overstate the importance of choosing something you’re passionate about. You’ll need to create a lot of content to succeed with affiliate marketing. If you choose something you hate, you’ll find it hard to press on when the going gets tough.

That’s why, when I built my first site, I chose to talk about one of my hobbies—breakdancing. And despite knowing nothing about marketing, I grew it to an estimated 2K monthly visits.

Organic traffic going to a niche site

Learn more: How to Easily Find a Niche for Affiliate Marketing

Step 2: Decide on a content platform
You can do affiliate marketing on any platform. This includes:

Website
YouTube
Social media (e.g., Instagram, TikTok)
Newsletter
Podcast
The method you choose will depend on your preference and occasionally, your niche’s preference. For example, people who are learning breakdance will prefer videos. So, even if you prefer writing, running a YouTube channel may be a better option.

That being said, we recommend building a website and using search engine optimization (SEO) to rank your content high on Google. This allows us to generate passive search traffic consistently, which means consistent clicks on affiliate links too.

TIP
Whether you’re creating a website, YouTube, or something else, note that you’ll need to disclose the fact that you’re including affiliate links. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires you to be transparent when receiving income from an endorsement.

If you’re building a website, create a standalone page or include it in the footer of your website:

Affiliate link disclosure on blog

If you’re doing it on YouTube, include it in your description:

Affiliate link declaration on YouTube

Step 3: Find affiliate programs to join
There are three main types of affiliate programs to choose from:

High-paying, low-volume — Niche products with fewer buyers. For example, HubSpot sells only to businesses but their affiliate program pays well (100% of first month and 15% monthly recurring commission.)
Low-paying, high-volume — Products with mass appeal, e.g. PS5 games. For example, Amazon only pays up to 10% commission. But the good thing is they offer commissions off the entire value of the purchase (and not just the product you recommended.)
High-paying, high-volume — Expensive products with mass appeal, e.g. credit cards. An issue is that these programs tend to attract affiliate marketers with deep expertise and pockets and willingness to black-hat tactics.
Types of affiliate programs

Which affiliate program should you join? This depends on your niche and level of expertise.

If you’re targeting consumers, go with the second model: low-paying, high-volume. If you’re targeting businesses, go for the first one: high-paying, low-volume. Popular programs include software and web hosting-related products.

If there is a product you’d like to promote but they don’t have a public affiliate program, reach out to the company and ask if they would be willing to build an affiliate relationship with you.

Learn more: 9 Best Affiliate Programs for Beginners (Any Niche)

Step 4: Create great content
If you want your affiliate site to succeed, you need to create high-quality content where your affiliate links fit naturally.Don’t just blindly curate products from Amazon’s best sellers. Go the extra mile and make sure your content solves your readers’ problems.

For example, if you’re doing reviews, you should actually purchase the product and test it. Use it over a period of time and report your findings.

That’s what Wirecutter did for all their articles, which explains their success. For example, in order to find the best air purifiers, they tested more than 50 of them:

Wirecutter's content

If you can collaborate with experts to review your findings, that’s even better. Again, Wirecutter goes above and beyond in this aspect, solidifying their status as the gold standard of affiliate websites:

Wirecutter working with experts for their affiliate content

Step 5: 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 pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

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

However, there are some downsides.

First, running ads will dig into your profits. It’s quite normal for advertisers to lose money before they make it… if they ever do.

People tend to lose money before making it in PPC

You need to be realistic about how long it takes to optimize a paid traffic campaign.

Secondly, once you stop paying for ads, your traffic will stop.

Generally speaking, ads are a great traffic strategy if you’re part of a high-paying affiliate program and can make the numbers work.

But if you’re completely new to paid marketing and have no marketing budget (or are working with lower commission programs like Amazon Associates), then it might not be such a great idea.

Learn more: PPC Marketing: Beginner’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Ads

B. 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.

On the most basic level, SEO is about:

Understanding what your target customers are searching for
Creating content around those topics
Making sure Google understands clearly what your page is about
Acquiring or earning links to push your pages higher in the search engines
Ensuring Google can find, crawl, and index your content
Learn the basics in this video or read our beginner’s guide to SEO:


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.

You can even add affiliate links in the emails to your audience:

Affiliate links in email newsletter

To build an email list, you need to persuade the readers on your site to sign up. That means offering something valuable, like a free eBook, an email course, and more.

Step 6: Get clicks on your affiliate links
Just because you have an amazing piece of content doesn’t mean people will click on your affiliate links.

There are a few things you need to consider.

A. 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.

You need to balance link placement with the other factors below.

B. Context
Let’s say you were writing an article on the best kitchen knives for under $50.

Your introduction probably shouldn’t look like this:

Today, I’m reviewing the best chef knives.

The links look out of context and spammy.

This would make more sense:

Today, I’m reviewing three different chef knives you can buy on Amazon for under $50. These are, product name 1, product name 2, and product name 3

C. Callouts
Using callouts like buttons, tables, and boxes can help attract your readers’ attention and make the post more skimmable.

For example, the Wirecutter uses eye-catching boxes with product links anytime they share a top pick.

Wirecutter product call-out

Good Housekeeping takes a different approach and creates a table with buttons:

Good Housekeeping product table

Step 7: Convert clicks to sales
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.

Learning new things and practicing them is the path way to success.