Let’s learn how to make money with affiliate marketing step by step!
So you are interested in becoming an affiliate, where you recommend to other people someone else’s products and earn money from the sales you make.
But maybe you don’t know where to start or perhaps you would like some guidance as you start on your affiliate marketing journey. Whatever the case, in this article, I will walk you step by step on how to start earning money with affiliate marketing.
Before I begin, though, I recommend that you read my beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing so you have a better idea of what affiliate marketing is, how it works, and what to expect as we go through the steps.
And, at the end of this article, I’ll show you an awesome free tool that can give you everything you need to win with affiliate marketing!
So, now, let’s go through the steps that we’re going to take to make money with affiliate marketing. Here are all the steps in a nutshell:
- Pick a niche you’re interested in.
- Find good products to promote.
- Sign up and get your affiliate link.
- Choose a platform to create content in.
- Create content and promote your link.
- Drive traffic and start making money.
Step 1: Pick a niche you’re interested in.
First things first, you need to figure out what your area of interest is. That area is going to be your niche. I recommend going for a niche inside one of the three evergreen niches: health, wealth, or relationships.
You should go for an evergreen niche because it’s a niche that’s always in demand and people are always going to spend money on.
Under the health niche, your niche could be weight loss, or inside the relationships niche, you could give mating advice for men or women (depending on your gender). Remember that, whatever you choose, any niche works as long as you are able to make good money from it, but expect the majority of the money to be made in an evergreen niche.
Once you pick your niche, you’re going to be helping people with problems inside that niche and getting people to buy products that can help address the problems these specific people are going to have.
After you pick a niche, it’s time to move on to the next step.
Step 2: Find good products to promote.
Now it’s time to go search for products you can promote. Remember they have to be inside your niche. There are two ways you can find products in your niche:
- Research for products and sign up for their affiliate programs.
- Go to an affiliate network and search products there.
If you’re not sure of which way to try first, I would recommend the second option of going to an affiliate network because it is an easier way to find affiliate products to promote.
Research Products
The first way is through product research. If you can think of brand-name products off the top of your head that relate to your niche, that’s great. But if not, don’t worry! That’s what Google’s for.
You can google the best products related to your niche using a keyword like “best weight loss programs” and “best self-help courses” to give you product ideas.
Here are some examples for you. If your niche is personal finance, you can promote budgeting software like Quicken. Or if you’re into dieting, you can promote a diet plan like Nutrisystem.
Once you know these products, go to their websites and see if they have affiliate programs available. To see if a product has an affiliate program, go to their website, scroll down to the footer (bottom of the website) and see if there’s a link for “Affiliates”, “Partners”, “Referrals”, or the like. Click the link.
If there’s a place to join their affiliate program, you’re in luck because you could promote that product to make money as an affiliate.
Use Affiliate Networks
The other way you can find products to promote is simply through affiliate networks. You can browse the marketplace inside the affiliate network and find products that you can promote all in one place.
There are several affiliate networks available on the Internet. I have a list of the best affiliate networks you should probably check out. Keep in mind that some affiliate networks will require you to sign up to them before you can search their marketplaces for products.
Out of all the affiliate networks, my personal favorite and recommendation would be ClickBank. Just head over to Clickbank.com and click on the Affiliate Marketplace button.
You don’t need an account to see their affiliate marketplace. Then select your niche on the left of your screen and ClickBank will give you great products you can promote inside that niche.
If you’re interested in ClickBank and would like more guidance, you’ll love my ClickBank step-by-step guide for beginners.
How Many Products?
As a beginner, I do recommend you only stick with one affiliate product or two. That way, you won’t be overwhelmed with trying to sell too many products to your audience.
So, in my opinion, I would settle for no more than three affiliate products. Once you find an affiliate product or two that interests you, it’s time to move on to the third step of this process.
Step 3: Sign up and get your affiliate link.
All right, you’re all done with your research. It’s time to take action. You’re now going to sign up as an affiliate and claim the links you’ll use to promote your products.
Sign Up for Their Affiliate Program
If you know the website of the product you want to promote, head over there and go to their Affiliates section. I already showed you how you can do that in step 2. There, you should be able to find your way to sign up to the product’s affiliate program.
Now I need to throw a word of caution here. Some affiliate programs will require you to meet their guidelines, and they usually do this by analyzing the quality of your website. If you don’t have a website or at least a blog yet, I highly recommend you start one before joining an affiliate program. You can read my step-by-step guide on how to start a blog!
Once you’re inside the product’s affiliate program, simply log in to your account there and you should see your affiliate link. For any products you’re promoting, you might want to save your affiliate links to a text file so you have them all in one place.
Sign Up for an Affiliate Network
Chances are, you may have signed up for the affiliate network like I mentioned earlier in order to find the products you wanted to promote. If you haven’t already, though, you’re going to need to sign up for the affiliate network before you can promote any products inside it.
I recommend you have a website available just in case the affiliate network decides to analyze the quality of your site. Here’s my free guide to starting a blog to help you do just that in only six steps.
Once you’re inside the affiliate network, find the button that allows you to promote the products you’re interested in. If necessary, join that product’s affiliate program, so that way, you can obtain the product’s affiliate link. Remember it’s best to save your affiliate links inside a text file so you have easy access to them any time.
Step 4: Choose a platform to create content in.
So now that you have products to promote and you have your affiliate links to them, it’s time to decide where you want to grow an audience that you can recommend the products to. This will be your platform on which you’re going to be creating content and driving traffic.
There are many platforms out there on the Internet that you can choose from. Here are some ideas for you:
- Your own blog, where you can write articles, rank them to target people with problems in your niche, and recommend products that can help solve them. You can start your own blog using my six steps here.
- Your YouTube channel, where you can upload videos, talking to the viewer, giving advice around your niche, and recommending helpful products that can benefit your viewers. All you need is a free Google account to open a YouTube channel.
- Comments on other blogs, where you can compliment others’ blog articles and assist other comment readers by suggesting good products.
- Facebook groups and forums, where you can interact with people that have problems in your niche, give them tips, and supplement those tips with a good product that can really help them out.
- Hubpages.com, where you can write articles for free on your niche, giving helpful information and promoting relevant products there.
Keep in mind that you should choose only one platform to focus on. If you try to be active in too many platforms, you’re never going to get better. It’s really better to get better at only one platform at a time before moving on to another. Just choose the platform that interests you the most.
Once you pick your platform, do whatever you can to get on it, whether it’s investing into that platform or signing up for a free account. After that, you’re ready to create content on it, which is the next step.
Step 5: Create content and promote your link.
It’s time to get down to work and make your presence known! I understand this is going to be time-consuming for you, but don’t you think you’d be willing to spend months of creating content if it was the only way to make a ton of money? I hope you are, because that’s key to being a successful affiliate.
Research for Information
Before you start creating content, I recommend you research about problems that people have in your niche. Start watching YouTube videos and/or reading blog articles to obtain information for the content you’re about to create.
Once you feel like you have enough information to teach everything you learned in your own words, that’s when you start creating your own content. Write articles, explaining solutions to problems in your niche. Publish YouTube videos and pretend you’re a teacher going over a specific topic inside your niche.
Promote Your Link
Of course, don’t forget your affiliate link. Keep in mind that you should only promote the product that is relevant to your content. You don’t want to promote a muscle-building product in an article on weight loss.
Find the right product that matches your content and promote that by copying and pasting your affiliate link. Make sure to test your affiliate link to ensure it works so that you’ll earn the money when someone buys through it.
Keep Creating Content
Now repeat this process over and over again to create more and more regular content. The more content you create, the sooner you should see success. You should be publishing content on a regular basis, but don’t burn yourself out doing it every day. I recommend creating a piece of content at least once a week.
Keep making content until you have a lot for your potential audience to consume. At that point, you can then move on to the final step in this process.
Step 6: Drive traffic and start making money.
Traffic is important in addition to creating content. Now, if you’re creating content on an already established platform like a Facebook group or HubPages, there’s already traffic coming in, so there’s no worries.
But, if you’re creating your own hub, on a blog or on a YouTube channel, no one even knows you’re around. Your content is pointless if there’s no one reading it, so you’re going to have to find a way to make yourself known. That’s why driving traffic to your content is just as important as creating it.
Ways to Drive Traffic
Here are some ways you can drive traffic to your affiliate content:
- Search engine optimization or SEO. You basically optimize your content so that it looks amazing to the search engines and you start ranking for keywords people will be searching in your niche. This is my favorite way to promote content and I do have several SEO resources, like this simple and complete SEO guide for beginners. Keep in mind that SEO does take a lot of time, so if you want to start earning quick, SEO is not for you.
- Paid advertising. You’re going to have to spend some money in order to get traffic. Whenever someone sees your content, you will spend a little bit of money, and if you get a load of visitors from paid ads, you’ll need to make sure you can cover the costs. If you have amazing content, the affiliate earnings make should hopefully become profit.
- Social media. You can join places like Facebook groups, forums, and Q&A sites like Quora, interact with people who have problems in your niche, and encourage them to check out your content for more information.
Once you start seeing traffic coming in, here’s the great news! That means you should be earning money in a matter of days, if not hours, from now!
Check Up on Your Content
The work doesn’t stop here, though. I do recommend that you monitor how your traffic is interacting with your content. Look through your traffic analytics and figure out if your audience is enjoying your content. Make sure your blog’s bounce rate is low or make sure your YouTube fans are giving a lot of likes on your video.
If there’s anything in your content that can be improved, do it! Your audience will thank you and you might just see more people going through your affiliate link and even buying because of that.
Final Words
Well, this is it. These six steps are all you need to do to start making money through affiliate marketing. If you’ve followed all the steps, you should start seeing the money coming in through your affiliate marketing efforts.
Now, even if you did all the steps, I recommend you repeat step 5, because creating content is what allows you to grow and thrive as an affiliate marketer. The more content you create, the happier Google and your audience will be, and the better you’ll get as a content creator.
A Free Resource for You: Affilorama
Now I did promise that I would share a free website that can help you on how to get going with affiliate marketing. Yes, it’s free to sign up to be a member and get access to free lessons as well as a forum where you can post your questions.
And this site is called Affilorama. They offer amazing beginner-friendly content that can help affiliates like you get started in the right direction.
If you’re interested in joining Affilorama, you might want to read my Affilorama review before you get going so you know what to expect inside Affilorama. But I can tell you right now that it’s a great affiliate membership site worth joining. So you might want to check out Affilorama.
Now Take Action
All that’s left for you is to take action. Remember that the money isn’t going to come right away, so put in your hard work now and then, months down the road, you should start seeing some affiliate commissions.
I hope this helped guide you through the process of making money as an affiliate marketer. Making money as an affiliate is truly an amazing feeling, and I hope that this article will keep you from missing out on that feeling!