Affiliate marketing- the complete guide. How to start affiliate marketing.

 Hey guys and in this post, I am going to cover what is affiliate marketing, how does it work, is it still effective and how do you start with affiliate marketing.

This is going to be a complete guide to affiliate marketing. So let's start.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is basically promoting other people's products, and getting a sale whenever someone buys through your referral link.

How does affiliate marketing work?

For affiliate marketing, you need to find a good affiliate network or program.

Apply to get your affiliate link. Whenever the product owner accepts your request, you will get an affiliate link. This link is unique and has cookies so the program will know whenever someone purchases through your link.

If someone purchases from your links, you will get a commission. This commission can be upto 50 percent. To make sales you will need to get traffic or visitors to your affiliate link. We will discuss methods to get traffic to your links in after seeing some other things.

Is affiliate marketing profitable?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable online businesses, as the only thing you need to pay for is getting traffic, which is also not necessary as you can also get organic and free traffic. 

Whereas in other businesses such as dropshipping, you will have to pay for the product cost, website builder(like shopify) cost, paid ads cost(there are not really many ways to do dropshipping with free traffic, fees and other things. Your margins will not be really high.

High profit margins are a great thing about affiliate marketing.

Is affiliate marketing dead?

These days a lot of people are saying affiliate marketing is dead. However, this is not the truth. The real truth is just that affiliate marketing is now very saturated, even more than dropshipping, and has a lot of competition.

This is because affiliate marketing is basically free to start and there is no barrier to entry.

Anybody can basically get started with affiliate marketing.

This is a great thing, but also a bad thing. The great thing is that it allows beginners to start their online journey.The bad thing is that just makes affiliate marketing very saturated. 

Why most affiliate marketers fail?

Maybe you are also an affiliate marketer, and you have probably not made any sales yet. See, most affiliate marketers fail. And there are a few reasons for that.

The first thing is that there are many youtubers, who teach scammy methods to do affiliate marketing. They show that these methods do not require any work.

However these methods do not work.

You need to be willing to put in the work.

These videos that you see, just make you happy. You only make them money and don't make money yourself.

If you will not work, you will not earn.

If it was a one day process to make hundreds of dollars, then no one would try to become a doctor or engineer. Affiliate marketing too takes a lot of time and effort.

Steps to start affiliate marketing:

1. Choose a niche

A niche is basically a topic. It is important to choose a niche as you don't won't to be everywhere. So choose the topic of the affiliate products that you are going to be promoting.

It can be anything, health, wealth, relationships or anything else.

Also some recommendations to choose a niche:

Have an interest in that niche.

This is important because you are going to be out there posting content of your niche consistently and for a long time. If you are not interested in that niche, then it will be very bring for you to produce content and you will also not be knowledgeable about the niche you are talking about.

For example, I started a health blog sometime back and as I was not knowledgeable about that topic, it was very hard for me to write long and valuable content and I also had to read a lot of blogs about a topic to write.

So I had to close it and it basically just wasted my time as it got nowhere.

This blog however, I am passionate about it and I also have some success in the things I have discussed and therefore I have some knowledge about what I write.

It should have a big enough audience

The niche that you should have some audience in it. Try to find a niche that has a lot of audience but it is not saturated. If you don't have any audience who would like to see your content then nobody is going to view it and then you would not make any sales.

For example, the topic of my blog is make money online, business, side hustles, etc. This niche has a big audience.

It should have money making potential.

See, the kid songs on youtube get millions and sometimes even billions of views. But they don't make nearly as much money as a make money online channel if they also got the same number of views.

The reason for this is simple. Advertisers would not make any money or sales afer showing their ads to 4 or 5 year old kids.

Therefore the amount people are willing to pay to put their ads on these videos is very less.

This is not related to affiliate marketing, but you can also make money through other things like ads through your following so this was worth sharing.

2. Choose your platform and get traffic.

Here you just choose a platform to do affiliate marketing in and start to get traffic to your affiliate links. So let's discuss the different traffic methods below.

Traffic methods for affiliate marketing

You can choose any of these traffic methods to get traffic to your affiliate links and you can also do more than one of them but I recommend that when you start out just focus on one method and put all your time and effort into it to build it first.

Then once that traffic method id all set up and established, you can try to scale it even more or also try to start and set up another traffic source or platform.

1. Blogging

Blogging is the best way to get started with affiliate marketing. This one however requires a lot of effort but can also be extremely lucrative.

To start a blog go to website hosting service like bluehost and by the web host.

You need to buy a domain. You can do it with a service like namecheap or godaddy.

You also need a blogging service like wordpress or wix. My favorite is wordpress.

Once all that is setup you can start to write your blogs.

You need to be consistent with it. You need to write long and valuable content.

You will need to do SEO(Search Engine Optimization) , you will also need to bring backlinks for your website, you will also need to promote your website.

So as you can see, this requires a lot of work especially at the first few months of a blog, but this will pay off.

2. Youtube

Youtube is the most popular video sharing site. It is also a search engine based on videos.

Youtube is one of the more passive ways to do affiliate marketing.

However, you need to take the camera and record yourself. I personally do not feel comfortable showing my face on camera so I am going to start a youtube channel where I just do a voice over and maybe consider filming with my face in the future.

However, if you are comfortable filming your face, then I highly recommend you do that, because it helps build trust a lot and also helps you to build a connection with viewers.

Whenever someone has a query or they want to learn about something, they head over to google or youtube most of the times.

So, if you want to do affiliate marketing or make money online, you should be making content in youtube or blogs or even both of them if possible.

3. social media marketing

You may have also heard about this method several times.

This is actually a lot easier than blogging or making videos. The content also does not have to be necessarily yours as you can also give people credits for their work.

However, as it is easier it does not have as much potential as blogging or youtube, it is also less lucrative. But it is still worth it.

Why?

Running a social page to do affiliate marketing takes very less time. or example, I have an instagram dog page. I have spent about 10 minutes a day on average on that page and it has only been about 2 months and I am already at a 1000 followers.

Here are some of the social medias you can start with:

a) Instagram.

This is the one I also do affiliate marketing in as you saw above. In instagram you can either create your own content, or repost other people's content and give them credits in your post captions like this:

Credits: @username.

I am not going to get into all the tips to grow your page write now as the post will get too long, so I will just give a few tips and I will also link to one of my blog posts I wrote on this topic.

Tip number 1: Use hashtags. Hashtags help your post to get a lot more reach. After posting for some time on instagram, you will notice that your most popular posts are the ones which have gotten more recognition on hashtags.

Tip number 2: Post consistently. This gives you more chances to go viral.

Tip number 3: Tell your audience to follow you in your captions. This helps to improve the percantage of people who follow you after seeing one of your posts.

You can read my article here for more information.

I also wrote an article about how you can monetize instagram. You can check it out here.

Instagram is best when you are targeting the younger audiences.

b) Facebook

Facebook has the most registered users in any social media platform. Facebook has middle aged and old audience in majority.

However, I don't like facebook much, but it can help you get some traffic.

You can get a lot more traffic with facebook groups. I will leave a link to a tutorial here.

I also wrote an article about how you can promote in facebook without groups. You can check it out here.

c) Pinterest

In my opinion, pinterest is the best among all other social platforms to get traffic to your blogs especially if your target audience are women. This is because 90 pecent of the people who use pinterest are females.

Even if your content is not targeted for women, I still recommend you post a pin on pinterest every time you write a new post. Pinterest will give you a boost in traffic in the first couple months itself.

I have seen people getting hundreds of thousands of blog visitors on pinterest. If you use pintersest, you must have seen blog profile getting 10 million + views.

Not all of these views click but they still end up getting several hundred thousand clicks. I will have a blog about pinterest coming out soon so stay tuned.

d) linkedin

I must say, linkedin is very underrated. It gets millions and millions of visits a month. Linkedin however, works well only in the business niche and is more of a professional social media platform.

So those were a few platforms you could use to get traffic to your blogs.

4. QnA sites.

These are like guaranteed visitors to your blog if you use the right method and don't get blocked. Here are a few QnA sites.

1. Quora

2. Answers.com

I only focus on quora as it get's the most traffic out of all these websites.

Never spam on quora and don't include your links more than 1 or 2 times in answers. Also include links only 1 time out of 3 0r 4 times you write an article.

Quora is really a great traffic source for your blog.

I also wrote an article about quora marketing and how not to get banned, best practices and all that. You can check it out here.

5. Forums.

Forums don't have millions and millions of people who visit them. However the people who do join the forum are very highly targeted people in your niche. They are obviously very interested in that particular niche.

You can get traffic to your blog from forums in many ways.

Give links to your blog in your signature.

Give a link to your blog in your profile.

Give a link to your blog while answering questions and engaging in the forum when it can actually help and provide value to them.

The best and most popular forum in the business and digital marketing niche is warrior forum.

However, you should not spam in forums as it will first of all, get you blocked by the forum and also people won't click on your links as you basically are spamming.

You can find forums in your niche by doing a simple google search and you can also find forums in findaforum.net with a simple search.

I also wrote an article about how you can promote links in forums. You can check it out here.

So guys that was it for how you can get traffic to your affiliate links.

And with that, this guide to starting with affiliate marketing is over.

Thanks for reading.