This How to Start Affiliate Marketing in 2024 guide is your way to an online monetisation strategy which online marketers use to promote the products and make money online without much investment or paying anything in most cases with Affiliate Marketing.
Start Affiliate Marketing
The process of affiliate marketing is not hard to understand, in fact, the more you understand, the easier it becomes to apply. Most of the bloggers and video marketers struggle with their affiliate marketing and that’s why I thought to cover this up on my blog.
Why Affiliate Marketing?
Do you promote any product on your blog?
Have you ever thought about making your conversion rate better?
Do you want to know the secrets of affiliate marketing success?
Well, we all want to know this stuff.
The reason I’m covering this topic is that once newbie bloggers or video marketer get their hands on something useful and a certain part of their blogging strategy gets better and they start making some money from their blogs, it becomes easier for them to focus on rest of the game.
The psychological impact of a few sales give them a big boost to change the destiny of their blog or video channel and that’s the time when they learn, evolve, and get better at this.
So, there will be a lot of connected things with affiliate marketing and once I’ll start this up, you’ll see everything (that I’ll discuss) would have a link to the affiliate marketing.
Without any further delay, let’s begin the process.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing in 2024
The best part is that you’ll find out something interesting in this article. This article is a guide for affiliate marketing beginners who are either going to start blogging or struggling with the affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing is a process that is based on trust, loyalty, and honesty. You can’t win in this with your SEO techniques and advertising budget. Gone are the days when a $300 Facebook Ads campaign used to give a 10x ROI because everything was new to the people and people were ready to try things up.
Now things are completely different, in fact, the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) game has totally changed in last 5 year because people are become more sensible, choosy, brand oriented and the competition has gone way up then before, so you need to come up with a proper plan and strategy.
Imagine you wake up in the morning, open your laptop, and look at such great numbers with Affiliate?
(Image source: Top 5 SEO)
Exciting isn’t it? Now Coming back to the topic, In order to start affiliate marketing, you’d need to follow these steps to make money like above:
The fundamental concept of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a money-making system which enables content creators to make money online by referring the audience to the certain products. You can’t make money by just directing the readers or viewers to the products and expect to make a commission on those referrals. It must happen through the funnel.
What I mean by the funnel is that you always have a referral link of a product or website to send the traffic to in order to make sales. If your audience goes through the link and purchases the product, then you’ll earn commission; otherwise, you won’t be able to earn it. So it’s also necessary to understand the basics of affiliate marketing.
When we join an affiliate program, they provide us with necessary links and tools to generate referral links to the products they sell. Most of the times, everything is already created in the affiliate marketer’s account.
In case, you don’t have a clear picture of an affiliate marketing, then let me tell you what it is:
Affiliate marketing is an online monetization strategy in which the affiliate marketer promotes products and earns commission on the successful sales.
Affiliate program refers to the affiliate marketing system that allows an affiliate marketer to join the program as an affiliate and starts promoting the product.
What are some of the most popular affiliate networks?
- ShareASale.
- ClickBank. [My personal recommendation]
- CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction)
- Amazon Associates.
- FlexOffers.
- Pepperjam.
- Rakuten Marketing
Building a Platform
Consider this as a base to get started. How would you refer any product to someone online when you would not have any existence on the internet? This is why building a platform is necessary. A platform refers to any website or blog that is well-managed and updated. A blog could possibly the right platform in order to keep the new content coming and fulfilling other requirements.
Most of the affiliate marketers try to build a blog that does have a niche and the content marketing plan to entertain the audience and get affiliate sales. A blog or platform is not about just having an online existence, in fact, the purpose of having the platform is far bigger than the platform itself; for instance, when a blog is established to make money from affiliate marketing. It is established as a business.
The content is published on the regular basis, readers are taken care of, the blogger tries to engage the readers in the comments; and the sole purpose of the content publishing is to help resolve the readers’ problems.
There are two type of websites I recommend to start with.
Recommended : Learn How to Make Money Online
Website Designed Completely Just for Affiliate Marketing :
Let’s have a look on Securityguardtraininghq.com which is just designed for affiliate marketing and Adsense Income.
A blog in any particular niche which regularly recommends multiple products time by time.
For Instance, Michelle earned more then $100,000 income last month alone via his blog Makingsenseofcents.com
Or You can also see the blog of Pat, who earned more then $167,000 last month alone and that too in Affiliate income from his SmartPassiveIncome blog and other properties.
This website launching guide or how to create your own blog in just 15 minutes? will help you launch your site in minutes in order to build a platform online to get started. Once there is a blog up and running; you’ll be able to move forward to the next step. All this doesn’t mean that you should launch your blog first and then think about the other steps. The blog should be launched after the complete understanding of all the steps involved.
You can also consider running a Youtube Channel and promote your affiliate programs through giving reviews or just mentioning the products or videos frequently in your videos.
Video’s are also being used alone as a platform or combined with website to earn Affiliate Income. There are many people who do this. Have a look on Matthew Wood Youtube Channel.
He has more then 12,500 subscribers with videos having thousand of views which is earning him money round the clock via affiliate marketing.
If you are starting out with Video Marketing, Do checkout my complete guide on Video Marketing and if you are considering Youtube for starting with, my 10 youtube video tips are going to help you a lot and if you finally planned to buy one, make sure to read out all the good vlogging camera reviews i have posted on my website.
The last option or another opinion, could be to start doing amazon product reviews and earn money through it. For instance, I have been using Amazon on some of my articles to redirect traffic whenever they plan to buy the product.
I have used Amazon last time on my article on Best 4K Curved Monitor Reviews, where i discussed the benefits of 4k monitor, why do you need to buy a 4k monitor and some famous 4k tv monitors, reviewed. You can click above for reference.
Catering the Prospective Audience
Have you ever heard of niche selection? This is exactly what you’ve heard there. When you talk about niche selection, what you’re supposed to mean is that you’re talking about targeting the certain kind of audience.
This is exactly the same thing. Catering the prospective audience means, you should cut down the unnecessary section of the audience by honing your content strategy; so that you don’t waste your resources on the visitors that aren’t supposed to come to your website because they don’t need your content and they will never be your customer (affiliate prospect).
When you cater the prospective audience, it means you’re very clear with your target audience and you’re serving the right kind of people through your blog. This will eventually impact positively on your blog’s conversion rate.
The affiliate marketing without analysing and fixing up the conversion rate is incomplete. After setting up your blog for affiliate marketing, be very clear with your audience selection. Find out who should be your possible audience that will need the content you’re good at creating, while the products you have in hands to promote are the ones that audience would be interested in buying.
Start Solving the Problems
Don’t keep dreaming about getting affiliate sales. The affiliate sales will ultimately start coming once you’ve found the right path to keep moving. When you publish content to solve readers’ problems and people can’t wait to check out your articles; that could be a time when you’d start thinking about affiliate sales, in fact, you won’t even care about affiliate sales because they would ultimately come without any hassle.
When bloggers spend years in building their blog’s audience and worth, after a certain time period, they just reap the benefit. The key to reaching to that level the SOLVING THE PROBLEMS.
If you don’t solve the problems through your content, you won’t be able to make a difference. The affiliate marketing isn’t just about getting referrals and getting paid out of the promotion. In fact, it’s about giving away the valuable knowledge with full of solutions. And the interesting thing is that the perk of being a problem solver is that sometimes you manage to grab some affiliate sales as well.
For Instance, there are thousand’s of people who don’t know how to create an online wordpress blog?.
Now this a Blog and Michelle know’s it very well so what she did was she created a detailed post on his blog about it back in 2014 and till date, that post alone is helping her to earn more then $30,000 a month just by solving a little problem of How to create your own WordPress Blog?
You can check the post by clicking here.
Even I did the same thing on my blog as well. I searched around over the internet and saw, many people were looking for a detailed tutorial on SEMRush, a digital marketing tool which is primarily being used by Internet Marketers, so what i did is, solved there problem by writing a detailed guide on SEMRush Review.
How To Place Affiliate Ads and Offers on the website/video for promotion?
If you are promoting affiliate programs via Video Marketing, then you can recommend the links in your videos along with writing them in your description.
If you are promoting it via your website, there are different ways on how you can promote them, for instance you can promote it via
Banners on different area’s of website
Having an Affiliate Link in middle of your article.
Develop a Community – [Very Important in Long Term Success for Affiliate Marketing]
Developing a community is an essential part of growing as an affiliate marketer. The affiliate marketing success doesn’t revolve around just affiliate promotion and sales. Don’t forget that the readers are real human beings who have feelings, mind, and observation.
The reason I’m focusing on developing a community for your affiliate marketing success is that if you try to be focusing on sales and profits, you would start to appear salesy which is clearly not a good option to go with.
There could be only two possibilities, either you focus on building a good relation with the audience by helping them out; solving their problems, and developing healthy relations with them or by trying to sell everything you got without any concern of your readers’ feelings and problems. I’m sure you’ll clearly see that being social and problem solver for others would be the ideal way to moving forward.
I added up this point of ‘developing a community’ because at the end of the day, everyone realizes this and it’s better to get started as soon as possible than after a few years from now.
You can establish a Facebook group and get connected with it via Facebook Groups app. In fact, there might be a lot of options to get started with. Use Triberr to build a tribe. You can also start using Disqus commenting system to establish a Disqus community of your own.
Promote based on Personal Experience
The most important step of starting an affiliate marketing program to make money from your blog is this one. You can’t sell something that you don’t personally use. People won’t trust the offer that you haven’t taken for yourself. In fact, it goes the other way around as well, once you buy it for yourself and like it, then you come up with a review, it really works. You’ll always see bloggers and online marketers are doing this for a long time and this is legit.
The personal experience means you have the proof of the product that you’re promoting, in fact, it builds trust of your audience because you never went for promotion straight away, you’ve rather chosen to step up and spend money before recommending it to everyone; if everything goes the right way, you can certainly come up and give a heads-up to the audience that this product works. The best way to do is writing a full-fledged review of the product that you’re using and wanting to promote to the audience.
For Instance, Iftikhar Ahmed of Iftiseo.com knows this technique very well. His review of Revenuehits went viral very soon and even Revenuehits started promoting it itself making the situation win-win with free traffic and referral earnings.
Iftikar Ahmed Review of Revenuehits
and then Revenue Hits started promoting his review! (That happens when you spend time in writing an awesome review)
Build Your List
Now if you are planning to achieve something big or planning to build multiple streams of income by selling multiple products to the same user and branding yourself, it’s time for you to build your email list to make your audience even bigger. This strategy also helps in branding yourself as i mentioned above.
While a go, I have written a guide on How to Start Email List Building To Grow Your Business? Spend some time reading it as it will definitely help you!
Use SEO/Paid Advertising For more Traffic :
As with anything online, you can use SEO (Search engine optimization) or Paid Advertising such as advertising over Adwords, Facebook or Social Media; can bring you ample of traffic of your website to convert very well and that too in a very short time frame.
For SEO, I recommend you to read 8 Ways to Establish Your Website Authority in Search Engines which will educate you in knowing the key factors in establishing your website trust/authority in the eye’s of search engines.
For PPC, I recommend you to read How To Make a Successful PPC Campaign? article which outlines basic fundamentals you need to know about starting your own first online PPC Campaign.
Don’t Over do in Affiliate marketing :
Remember, excess of anything is bad. Same is the case with affiliate marketing, when you over do something or promote a product excessively, the consumer starts losing the interest in the offered product or service. They start considering that they are trying to be fooled by you, which makes it even harder for you to generate sales. So you need to remember that overdoing not only will reduce sales but it will also lose your visitor’s trust.
How to Choose the Best Affiliate Marketing Program
Are you wondering how to choose the best affiliate program for your blog?
You are not alone in this situation, a lot of bloggers get into affiliate marketing every day, choose different products to promote, and join different affiliate platforms to make money off blogging.
What I’m excited about is that you’re about to learn some useful things namely:
- The definition of affiliate marketing [Mentioned Above]
- The basic idea of an affiliate program [Discussed already]
- Choosing the right affiliate program
Choosing the Best Affiliate Marketing Program
So now comes the question that how to choose the best affiliate marketing program?
There is no rocket science in choosing the best affiliate marketing program. The reason I call it the best affiliate marketing program is because it must be bringing in the results for you. The point is that every affiliate marketing program is free to join and you can join as many as you want. The core idea is that how to choose the one that works for you.
Here are some tips for choosing the best affiliate marketing program:
Niche Relevancy
The fundamental thing you should consider in choosing your affiliate marketing program is the niche relevancy, which means that it must be relevant to your niche. For instance, if you write a blog about blogging tips, but you joined an affiliate marketing program of a motorbikes spare parts e-store because you’re passionate about motorbikes.
It will be of no use to your blogging tips blog. The reason is that there is no relevancy between the motorbike spare parts and blogging tips. The audience that would be landing on your blog would be expecting the blogging-related content, and they could be interested in the products that are related to the blogging.
So be very careful with the niche relevancy when it comes to choosing the affiliate program.
Personal Experience
There is no alternative to the personal experience. The readers always love to see if you share your experience of using a certain product or service.
When they know that you have been using it for a while, and you liked it, then it becomes easier for them to decide about purchasing the same product. If they’re loyal to your blog, they’d prefer to buy through your links.
In some cases, an affiliate marketer has promo discount codes from the brands to give out to the audience, or you can set up a discount through your referral link by asking the brand to make that happen for you.
The core point is that personal experience does help in conversion. If you have used the product and you’re happy with it, you must know how to communicate it with the audience to let them know about it.
Payment Methods
Once everything seems fine with your affiliate program, make sure to check out the payment methods of the affiliate programs. Sometimes, the affiliate programs only have a single payout method. It’s necessary to know before choosing the affiliate program that how it would pay us out.
A lot of blogging beginners make this mistake; they hurry to join the affiliate program when they figure out the affiliate marketing without realizing that it could be difficult to receive the payments even when you start earning it.
For example, let’s assume the affiliate program only sends out checks to the affiliates, it means that you must have a bank account to cash in your checks.
Sometimes, companies only payout through PayPal. So it’s understandable to check out the payment methods before making a selection.
Multiple Programs
It would be a huge mistake if you join various affiliate marketing programs at once and start promoting a wide range of products on the same blog or website. This is also one of the mistakes that beginners do when they start off affiliate marketing; they don’t focus on one product and start to join a different affiliate program, which results in the disturbance in the content strategy. When the content strategy falls off, the chances of converting the readers into referrals decrease.
What most of the successful bloggers do is that they emphasize on a certain affiliate program or product to promote and try to focus on that for a specific time. Not only they use the products and share their experience with the readers, but they also promote it along the way.
You might see bloggers who are promoting various products that belong to different companies; it always difficult to earn and cash out the earned money when you have money scattered on various affiliate platforms.
So joining multiple affiliate programs is a mistake, at least, when you’re new and you have not done affiliate marketing much.
Recommended Affiliate Programs :
There are hundreds of Affiliate Companies and programs out in market, however if you are starting out, I recommend you to initially work with these companies and expand over time.
Recommended Readings For Guide to Affiliate marketing:
While i tried to deliver most of the things to you; but if you are newbie; i feel before you step in, you need to learn a lot about it; so i suggest everyone to checkout the recommended articles for further command over Affiliate Marketing.
- 7 Amazing Tips For Every Affiliate Marketing
- 6 Ways To Make More Money and Sales with Affiliate marketing
- How To Make Money with Clickbank?
Misconception on Affiliate Marketing :
Now since you have came here for searching for a guide on affiliate marketing, let me assure you that I will try to answer majority of your questions, but still if i miss with something, please do comment and I will make sure to update it as well.
Affiliate Marketing is Easy :
No it’s not at all easy, you will have to spend time, money and resources to make the game win win.
Affiliate Marketing is Saturated
The same time, I also say that it’s not saturated at well, it’s just people who are earning well though it, don’t want you to enter the game.
Need huge money and resources
You need huge money to make money : While it’s true that you may need money in case if you are a totally newbie, but if you know things well, you may don’t need to invest much to start seeing results, all it requires is some sort of dedication and hard working from you.
Frequently asked questions regarding How to Start Affiliate Marketing
Is affiliate marketing for me?
That’s a question you need to answer yourself, for some it’s a matter of choice, for some it’s a passion, Some like it due to being ease while some people find it very difficult to do.
I want to start my Affiliate marketing career. How much can i earn?
There is no limit. You can make as much money as much you want doing Affiliate marketing. Earning thousands of dollars a month shouldn’t be a problem. I have personally seen people who earn thousands of dollars every month through affiliate marketing alone.
How can I start affiliate marketing with no money?
Few good ideas can be; Write a blog about different product reviews or start your own Youtube channel and start doing product reviews through videos. These method requires little to no investment.
How much do affiliate marketers make?
A survey from Viglink which discussed on how much affiliate marketers earn online. 9% of the participants said they earn more than $50,000 a month.
Is affiliate marketing easy?
Depends. Everyone have different results however unlike freelancing. Affiliate marketing requires budget, consistency and practise to achieve results and earnings.
Is affiliate marketing a pyramid scheme?
There is no pyramid scheme like thing in Affiliate marketing.
How do affiliates get paid?
Every affiliate marketing company has their own set of rules. However majority of the companies pay you via : Paypal, Payoneer or Wire Transfer.
Conclusion on How to Start Affiliate Marketing Guide 2024 :
The affiliate marketing game isn’t the world’s toughest thing to do, of course.
All you need is to understand what works in this. Remember like with everything, you need to be consistent with anything you do; nothing in the world is called as overnight success because behind every overnight success there is years of hard work involved; so keep on testing and eventually you will start seeing results.
Once you come up with the strategy that helps others around you, you’ll start figuring it out that solving the problem and helping others are the best ways to get into the affiliate marketing.
Focus on your audience :
Because you’re connected with humans, not robots who don’t have feelings and motives.
Be human.
Once you start being human, you’ll care for others and definitely choose the path that does good to others.
The basic idea of this article was that the affiliate marketing success isn’t just surrounded by the sales. You have to earn respect and trust, once you get that, you’ll continue to get sales in the future.
The community building and harbouring the audience are few of the strategies you should be understanding if you really want affiliate marketing to work for you.
I also tried to share some affiliate marketing essentials that will help you choose the best affiliate program for your blog or website monetization.
Is there anything else you would like to add to this blog post?
What else would you do to get success in how to start affiliate marketing?
Please do share your views in the comments section.
