How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners (Step By Step Free Guide)

Hey there, it’s Horlax and welcome you to our affiliate marketing course for beginners.

This course will walk you through the process, tactics, and strategies to create your own revenue-generating affiliate site.

There’s no fluff, no bs, and no sales pitches for a premium course.

This Particular course is created for those who wish to start their affiliate marketing using a blog, and I will be focusing more on blog post content creation for affiliate making.

so if you don’t have a blog yet, you can just go and read my post on how to start affiliate marketing without a blog. 

So let’s get started with the first Outline, where we’ll talk about what affiliate marketing is and how it works.

What Is Affiliate Marketing

So affiliate marketing is when you promote another company’s or person’s products. And when someone makes a purchase because of your referral, you’re compensated with a commission. 

Now, in order for the affiliate company to attribute sales to the right person, the merchant usually uses a unique link that looks something like this (https://thedomainname.com/?ref=YourReferralCode), which is called an affiliate link.

When a visitor clicks that link from your blog, website, or wherever,  a cookie is stored on their device. And an affiliate cookie does two main things.

First, it helps the merchant attribute the sale back to the right person.And second, cookies usually hold an expiration date, meaning people don’t need to immediately purchase the product after clicking your link.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Let’s run through an example, so everything is crystal-clear.

Let’s say a visitor comes to your post about gardening hoses and clicks on some of your affiliate links.

This leads them to a product on Amazon. But wait… they have to go and pick up their kids from soccer practice.

So they do that, also have dinner, and then go back to Amazon.com in their web browser.

They find the product again and then purchase it along with a game console controller. Because they clicked on your affiliate link, a cookie was stored on their device.

And because Amazon has a 24-hour cookie duration, you would still get compensated, a percentage for both the garden hose and the console controller, even though you weren’t promoting it. 

Now that we’ve covered the basics of what affiliate marketing is and how it works, let’s talk about what you’ll need to get started with affiliate marketing.

Things You Need To Get Started

In this lesson, I’m going to talk about the two things you need to get started with affiliate marketing.

1. Property or Platform

The first is a property or platform. A platform is simply a place where you can recommend your links.

So that might be your own website, YouTube channel, Social Media (Like your WhatsApp, Facebook, IG and So on..)

Now, creating a website is straightforward, so we won’t go into things like how to make an affiliate website because this course is about the actual marketing of an affiliate site.

You can learn how to create a wordpress Blog that you can use for you affiliate marketing Journey with that link

2. Relevant Traffic 

The second thing you’ll need is relevant and consistent traffic.

Relevant traffic means that you’re attracting visitors to your Platform (Any of those ones that I mentioned above) that are interested in a topic and ideally want to make a purchase soon.

And one of the most important parts to getting relevant traffic is by creating content, which will house information as well as your affiliate links.

So that might be Reviews of Products, Best of Comparison Lists, and How-To Articles or Videos. I will talk about how you can come up with these topics in a later Outline.

As for getting consistent traffic, much of that will come down to where you get your traffic from. Three of the most popular channels are social media, ads, and search engines (For Blogs).

• Social Media: Now, social traffic is typically inconsistent because social media networks are designed to surface new content. But many affiliate pages can actually be somewhat evergreen.
  
  So if you don’t have a significant following and brand, I wouldn’t count on social media as a reliable primary source for traffic to an affiliate site.
  
• Ads: Now, ads can be great because you can get highly relevant traffic fast but you have to pay for every single person who clicks on your ad.
  
  So unless you’re a part of a very high-paying affiliate program and you have the expertise with ads and conversion rate optimization, I’d say stay away from ads because you’ll find yourself underwater fast.
  
• Search Traffic: Now, search traffic is free, consistent and passive. And the way you get search traffic is through a marketing method called search engine optimization, or SEO.
  
  It’s the primary traffic source I recommend and it’s what many multi-million dollar affiliate websites rely on.
  
  We’ll go much deeper into the tactical and strategic elements of creating content and getting relevant and consistent traffic later but first, you need to know whether the reward will be worth the effort.
  
  So next, i’m going to talk about how to make money with affiliate marketing and how much you can actually make.

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

In this section, I’ll give you a high-level overview of how to make money with affiliate marketing. 

As we discussed above, when you join an affiliate program, you’re able to generate unique affiliate links.

When someone clicks on one of your links and makes a purchase within a set period of time, you’re paid a commission.

So very generally speaking, the more relevant traffic you get, the more clicks you’ll get on your affiliate links.

And the more clicks you get, the more conversions, which equals more money in your pocket. And as long as your revenue exceeds your costs, you’ll be profitable.

Now, you might be wondering how much money you can make as an affiliate marketer? 

The simple answer to that is that there is no limit.

For example, Pat Flynn used to share his income reports and reported over $100,000 in affiliate commissions in December 2017.

Ryan Robinson also shares his income reports. And in October, 2019, he reported over $19,000 in affiliate revenue.

Both of these gentlemen have done an excellent job building their brand and I’m sure it’s taken a lot of hard work and time to get to where they are. 

But the reality is that your checks might look more like ($5.32) at least when you’re first starting out.

If you want to make a sustainable income with affiliate marketing, you need to think of your affiliate site as a business.

It will be a grind and there will be some disappointing times.

But that’s totally fine because when you adopt this business mindset instead of seeing it as a way to “hopefully” make a few bucks here and there, you’ll be setting yourself up for success.

Let’s move on to the next part where I’ll give you a high level overview of what it looks like to start and grow your first affiliate site.

High-Level Overview Blueprint 

To start your first affiliate website I will give you a good idea of the skills, techniques and strategies with key Principles you’ll learn throughout this course.

But first, let’s recap some key principles we’ve covered above which are going to play into your strategy.

So, at a high level, your affiliate site is going to be made up of primarily blog posts and the types of content you’ll create will mostly be informational pieces.

For example, How-To Articles and Comparisons of Different Products.

So it is within the content, you’ll add your affiliate links to products you recommend.

Now, when someone clicks on one of these links and makes a purchase you’re going to be compensated by the affiliate merchant or partner.

Now, not only will your content convert visitors into revenue, but it’s going to attract visitors to your website, too.

And the marketing method we’ll use to get traffic to your affiliate site is search engine optimization because the traffic is free, consistent and passive.

Best of all, SEO traffic will help you generate consistent revenue that compounds over time. 

Now, there are actually quite a few steps to get to the point of generating consistent traffic and revenue.

But to give you a high-level overview, we can break down the process into four macro steps. Which are”

• Finding a Niche;
• Find Products To Promote In Your Niche;
• Building your website;
• and Getting Traffic to it.

So let’s go through these phases at a high level, starting with finding a niche.

1. Choosing a Niche

When you’re starting affiliate marketing or any type of blog/website choosing a Niche is a very important aspect because you can just start writing anything or everything you feel like talking about.

Take for example, Worth Explorer is a finance blog meaning it under the finance Niche and all we talk about here is how to make money, and this post is about Affiliate Marketing while Affiliate marketing is one if the various ways to make money.

You can see that we didn’t get out of our Niche, and we will never wake up one day and start talking about Dog, or kitchen equipment. You should see my free Guide on how to choose a profitable Niche.

If you’re relatively inexperienced, it’s beneficial to start with a heavy focus on a sub niche.

For example, it would probably be better to start a barbeque recipes site rather than a generic one on all types of recipes.

If you like animals, you should rather focus on Dog or Cat or Bird rather than talking about animals in general.

This is because broader topics tend to have more competition and as a result, it’ll be tough for you to get traffic to your site. And without traffic, there is no revenue.

Although you can always expand in your niche later in the future after gaining good authority and trust, being specific at the beginning is a very good practice.

Now, this is just one small example of the things you’ll need to consider when choosing a niche. There are other things to evaluate like

•  SEO competition: The level of SEO competition, which will tell us who we’ll be up against or even if we can compete.
• Commerciality: Commerciality, which will give us hints into how much money we can make. Because if the niche is not making money all effort could come to waste.
• Personal interest: which is important to most people because you want to actually enjoy what you’re doing.
  And this aspect is very crucial because if you don’t have interest in the niche, you might easily get tire and give up if you don’t see result on time, more of the reason you need to check out my guide on how to choose a niche
• The Breadth: which gives us an idea of the size of our addressable market – at least for the type of traffic we’ll be going for.
  These will help us qualify a niche so we can make an informed decision when it comes to time to choose one.

2. Find Products To Promote In Your Niche

Now if you have finalized your blog niche or topic then you have to find out relevant products to promote.

This step is crucial because if you start promoting the wrong product you will lose your audience trust and your affiliate marketing business is not going to survive for a long time.

Just think about it, if you are running a blog based on musical instruments and you start promoting some weight loss products over there, does this make any sense? NO!!.

Another thing i would like to talk about is: You should not focus on the commission percentage of a product, but you should focus on the quality of the product.

The product you are promoting should add some value to your audience, it should solve their problem.

Before selecting a product, you have to analyze your audience. Who are your readers? What are their interests? How can you solve their problems?

Once you have analyzed your audience needs then you can choose the products based on the analysis.

An Affiliate Product can be anything like a physical product, online courses, online tools, services, etc.

Just keep in mind that the product you are promoting should be relevant to your audience.

Where To Find Affiliate Products To Promote?

Once you have decided on your products then the next step is to find their affiliate programs and join them.

The easiest way to find a product affiliate program is to type in Google the company’s name followed by the term “affiliate network”.

If the company has an affiliate program then their page will pop up and you can easily sign up for their affiliate program.

Some companies do have their own affiliate programs while others are a part of an affiliate networks.

I know the next question that will cross your mind is What Is An Affiliate Network? Let rush and take a few sec to treat that.

What Is An Affiliate Network?

An Affiliate network is a company that provides you a collection of Affiliate Programs from different companies.

It acts as a middleman between you and the brand. The good thing about an affiliate network is that you will find most of the affiliate programs in one place, you don’t have to sign up for them again and again.

Affiliate networks work with lots of brands whose affiliate programs you can join and start promoting.

Some Affiliate Networks like ClickBank allow you to promote all the products just after signing up but few other affiliate networks require approval from every brand that you want to promote.

Read more about the Best Affiliate Marketing Networks To Join

3. Building your website

This includes making a website and setting up tools for things like tracking.

Now, the most time-consuming and important part of this stage is creating content, because content is what will help you to rank in search engines and it’s what your visitors will use to make buying decisions.

We have an entire section dedicated to content creation where we’ll talk about the content creation process, the types of content you should create, and I’ll also give you templates you can follow for various affiliate type content. 

4. Getting Traffic To Your Website

Now, getting traffic through SEO is much more challenging than just writing good stuff.

A key ingredient to rank high in Google and attract a ton of visitors to your site will be backlinks.

We’ll talk about some basic strategies that any beginner can implement which should help power your pages to rank for their target queries and hopefully put some money in your pocket.

So now that you have a high-level overview of what building your affiliate site will look like, let’s get our hands dirty and move on to the next keyword research for your affiliate marketing site.

How to do keyword research for your affiliate marketing site

Keyword research is the first step in our flowchart in our journey to a consistent income through an affiliate site. And it’s basically going to set the foundation for the topics you’ll create content on. 

So simply put, keyword research is the process of finding search queries people use when looking for products, services, or general information.

Now, because we won’t be selling products or services directly to consumers with an affiliate site, we ideally want to find topics where it’s easy to organically recommend products.

But before we get into the techniques to find topics, it’s important we talk about one foundational thing that’s massively important in SEO. And that’s Search Intent.

Know About Search Intent

Search intent tells us about the purpose of a searcher’s query. And by understanding the intent of a query, you’ll be able to determine whether you can easily recommend products or not.

For example if someone searches for “Best Protein Powder,”

chances are, they’re in the market to purchase a product but they want to weigh out the pros and cons, look at different brands, and assess variables like price, quality, and so on.

As a result, you actually need to recommend products. And the people who read this article may very well click affiliate links to the products and make a purchase.

Whereas a topic like, “What is Protein Powder,” is more informational in nature.

Based on the keyword alone, we don’t know whether the searcher is writing a research paper, exploring the world of supplements, or wants to know which type of protein powder to buy.

Simply put, this topic probably wouldn’t generate many clicks to protein powders because the majority of people aren’t in the market to buy any.

So adding product recommendations would probably be unnatural.

Now, in general, there are four types of so-called affiliate keywords we’ll want to go after. And these are: General Comparisons; Branded Comparisons; Product Reviews; and T&A keywords.

Now, before we get into how you can find these types of keywords, I’m going to choose a niche and do keyword research with you.

So to set some context, I’m choosing baby products as my main niche. And as I have explained above, I’m going to choose a sub-niche to start. Let’s go with car seats.

keep that in mind, we are moving on to the next…

Different Types of Affiliate Keywords

So let’s talk about the four different types of affiliate keywords, how they fit into an affiliate marketing site, and how you can find them for your site. The first type of keywords are general comparisons.

• General Comparisons: These are your typical “best [product name]” keywords. For example, “best car seats,” “best booster seats,” “best strollers,” etc. It’s super easy to recommend products in posts targeting these keywords because searchers are looking for product comparisons. After all, the keyword, “best” implies that a comparison needs to be made. On top of that, people searching for these “best product name” keywords are likely in the market to purchase something in the near future.

They just don’t know which product. So to find these keywords, you’ll need a keyword research tool. Ahref, Semrush, and so on. Alright, the next type of keywords are branded comparisons.

• Branded Comparisons: These are keywords where a searcher wants to compare the differences between two branded products. For example, that might be “Chicco Car Seat vs Graco. These types of keywords usually have lower search demand, but they typically convert better than general comparison keywords because the searcher has likely narrowed down their purchasing decision to a few key products.

The easiest way to find these keywords is to create a list of brands or products in the same category. The next type of keywords are detailed product reviews.

• Product Reviews: These queries will typically follow the format “product name” review And people who search for queries like this are likely very close to making a purchase. They’ve researched multiple products, something caught their attention about a specific model, and now they want a more in-depth review on it.

Now, just like the branded comparison keywords, search volumes will be lacklustre to say the least. So if you’re going to buy these products and actually review them, choosing products that people are actually searching for may be a smart way to do it.

A simple way to find brands and models worth reviewing is to go to a popular ecommerce site and look through the different categories and brand names in their navigation.

• T&A keywords: which stands for “Trust and Authority.” Now, in order to rank your pages, you need to have some kind of page-level and website authority. Meaning, you need backlinks. But since all of the keyword types we’ve discussed so far are commercial in nature it’ll be tougher to get links to these pages. I mean, would you rather link to a post about 10 random car seats, or one about car seat safety?

Probably the latter, right, seeing as it’s non-commercial and provides more objective value for your audience.

Now, while these keywords may not directly contribute to your revenue, it’ll still serve two important purposes.

• #1. You’ll build trust with your audience since you’re creating helpful content.
• #2. You’ll build authority through links – hence, “trust and authority.”

Final Words

Here comes to the end of this Affiliate Marketing Free Course For Beginners.

I know i didn’t talk or elaborate more on the SEO aspect, like i said earlier, this is a finance blog, so if you want to learn about SEO in full details, you can just check out on some other SEO blog like;

1. Rock Content
2. Banklinko (Their Blog)
3. Semrush (Their Blog) and So on…

Or just search google for “how to rank on google” you will find different useful content on that.

I hope you found this useful, and I pray for your success as you are about to begin your affiliate marketing join.