Affiliate Marketing: How to – Passive Income Guide

Learn how to create a passive income stream without starting a new business from scratch. The key to popularity of affiliate marketing lies in the fact that you can easily find affiliate programs that correspond with your current business and use what you are doing as a base for affiliate collaboration with brands. If you are willing to find out how to make money with affiliate marketing, continue reading this article. We are going to explain everything you need to know about affiliate marketing for beginners.

Affiliate Marketing Explained

Online entrepreneurs who participate in affiliate programs are called affiliates. Affiliates promote or recommend products in their niche on the platform they are using, whether it`s a website, a blog or a social media. They post a trackable link to the product sales page, and if someone follows it and buys the product, the affiliate receives a commission. Affiliate marketing has proven to be one of the most effective ways to enlarge the brand`s target audience, finding the way to the heart of potential clients and multiply sales.

Affiliate Marketing Step-by-Step Guide

Here are a few steps that you need to complete if you want to make money with affiliate marketing.

Step 1. Find the best affiliate programs in your niche, by ‘best’ I mean the most profitable. There are two types of programs: commission-based and rate-based.

Commission-based may offer you anywhere from 5 to 50% from each sale; rate-based is a pre-determined rate.

Sometimes it may be more profitable to work for a commission, and other times for a certain amount of money. It all depends on the affiliate program and the type of products you are going to promote. Therefore, at this stage you need to do a thorough research.

Step 2. Apply for the program, and as soon as you get accepted, choose the product you want to promote.

Step 3. Get the trackable link for each product and add it to your website or sales page.

Step 4. Promote the products. It is recommended to share your personal experience of using this product.

Step 5. Receive your first commission.

Pros

Starting an affiliate marketing business doesn`t require any initial investment. You don`t need to buy products to resell them, you don`t need to pay for participating in affiliate programs – normally they are free to sign up.

Therefore, there is zero risks. If it doesn’t work with the brand or product you have chosen, you can easily switch to another affiliate program without losing anything at all.

However, it’s important to know that you need to invest some of your time and effort into including product recommendation into your content and creating an effective marketing strategy to make more sales and make more money in commission.

Affiliate marketing is easier than any other product-based business. It doesn`t require you to create and produce your own product, you don’t need to worry about financial matters like finalizing the sale or shipping.
The only part of the job that is required from you is marketing the products and increasing product awareness among your audience. Most affiliates use their own experience with the company to recommend the products.
Affiliate marketing allows you to multiply your income easily, without the need of hiring other people. You can grow your affiliate marketing business by recommending new products to your audience, collaborating with new brands and companies, applying for new affiliate programs.
Actually, there is literally no limit to growing an affiliate marketing business.
You don’t have to handle or stock pile products, everything is done online.

Cons

Although including product recommendations into your content may sound easy, you still need certain marketing skills to become persuasive and find out what your audience will respond better to. You will probably need some time to improve your marketing skills and make better sales.

Learn Affiliate Marketing

There are a few online programs and courses that can train you how to start an affiliate marketing business. Although, based on my personal experience, I would say that Wealthy Affiliate gives the best affiliate training I`ve seen so far. Not only do they offer a thorough course that will teach you everything you need to start your own affiliate marketing business, but also it gives you access to a huge community of affiliate marketers – both newbies and pros – with whom you can share whatever difficulties you are experiencing and ask for advice.

Affiliate Programs Guide

The first step you need to take to start making money with affiliate marketing is to find a suitable program.

There are a few ways to do that.

Check the websites of the brands you are already using and are satisfied with their quality. If they don`t have any information on their website, don`t give up and contact them directly. The chances are, if you offer a collaboration, they will be happy to consider it and would probably agree. Some companies that don`t have an official affiliate program, offer their affiliates a coupon code that will allow their audience to purchase the product with an exclusive discount.
Another way to find an affiliate program is to search for products and brands that look attractive to you and your audience.
Also take a look at the websites that offer all kinds of products, such as Amazon, and other affiliate platforms that share all types of affiliate programs from various brands.
AffiliateNetwork; ClickBank; ShareASale are among the most popular affiliate marketplaces. Keep in mind – each program has its own terms, in order to receive a commission, you need to strictly follow them.
Pay extra attention to the technical issues and the link you`ll be sharing with your audience.

What to Look for in Affiliate Products

While choosing your first affiliate program, you might find helpful to keep in mind these two things you need to look for in an affiliate program.

Choose products from your niche. In order to succeed in making sales, you need to offer your audience something that corresponds with the theme of your blog. Let`s say, you have a food blog, then you need to choose products that can be used in cooking, for example kitchenware or kitchen décor.
There are two reasons for that.
First, your followers are interested in cooking, so they are more likely to buy kitchenware than let`s say, novels or beauty products.
Secondly, you have proved yourself as an expert in cooking, so your followers will trust your recommendations in this niche.
Choose products that fit into the form of your blog. The variety of media for blogs is impressive right now, you can choose whatever form that looks more fun to you – from long-reads to photos and videos.

Search for the Best Keywords

Even if you already have stable traffic on your website and a permanent audience, you should also aim to expand it. There surely are more people whose problem or dilemma you could solve by sharing your content with them. That`s why you need to do research to find the best ranking keywords. There are many free and paid keyword tools online that will help you with that.

Read Reviews

If you have chosen a product or brand you are not very familiar with, search the Internet for customers` feedback, see what other people say about the product. That will help you know the product and all its features better as well as recognize all possible pitfalls.

Create a Tutorial for the Product

If a person sees your ad but doesn’t know how to use this product or how they can benefit from it, then they simply won`t buy it. The best technique to increase sales is to create a tutorial for the product you are promoting and point out what advantages it has and in what ways this product will make your readers` lives better.

Moreover, keywords starting with ‘how to’ rank much higher than any other keywords, and creating a tutorial will help you to draw new readers to your content.

Use Your Personal Approach

These days, what really helps to stand out and to build an efficient marketing campaign is to be unique and add your personal touch to your promotional content. The most popular ideas for a promotional video are unboxing and using the product on camera.

However, be one step ahead of others and add a personal touch that you use in your other videos or content. It will make your content more authentic and successful.

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Share Your Content

As soon as your content is ready, make sure that as many people as possible will read it. Publishing it on your website and sharing it on your social media accounts is not enough. If you have an email list of your subscribers, send out personal emails to ask them to take a look at your new post.

Add a Disclaimer to Your Website

It’s highly important to add a disclosure or a disclaimer to your website. Not only is it a legal requirement from the Federal Trade Commission, it’s also an act of respect to your followers.

They have the right to know that you are going to receive a commission for each sale of the product you are promoting. What’s more, it would improve the impression on your followers if in the disclaimer, you will assure them that if they purchase the product using your link, there won’t be any additional cost for them, and also that you promote only those products that you use or trust yourself.

To prepare your own disclaimer, you can take a look at what other blogger have published on their websites or ask for a lawyer`s advice.

Add a Bonus to Your Deal

A pleasant bonus can also be a free guide, a free consulting session, an access to a private chat or group or simply a free download of some useful materials, presets, tutorials and so on. It depends on your niche and your imagination!

Again, a program such as Wealthy Affiliate offers everything you need in this market it’s like an all-in-one package or a one-stop affiliate program.