Are you looking for a way to make money online? Learn how to start affiliate marketing and start earning in 2023.
Affiliate marketing is an excellent option that can provide a steady passive income with minimal effort. With affiliate marketing, you simply promote the products and services of other companies and earn a commission on every sale generated through your referrals.
Learn How to Start Affiliate Marketing in 2023 in 6 Easy Steps Click To TweetIt’s one of the easiest ways to start making money online from home without needing any special skills or experience.
Let me help you by covering the basic steps required to get started with affiliate marketing: choosing a niche, selecting a publishing platform (i.e. blog), picking affiliate programs, creating optimized content, driving traffic to your links, and tracking and optimizing conversions.
Plus I will throw in some great tips on how to start affiliate marketing effectively so you can maximize your earnings!
But let’s start with how affiliate marketing works, how you make money with affiliate marketing, and why you need to start an affiliate marketing business!
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate Marketing is a business model that involves linking to a companies products or services on websites, blog posts or videos. Affiliates then earn commissions based on a transaction made using their unique affiliate link.
The commission rate varies depending on a company’s product and service offered. You can earn anywhere from 5% of sale (typical for products) to 50% of the sale (services). Other Affiliate programs offer flat rates on every sale rather than percentages like $50 per sale, and some offer recurring payments for subscription based services – these are my favorite kinds of programs.
Affiliate marketers are responsible for direct marketing of the affiliate program to customers. For this purpose, the marketers use an affiliate link to affiliate program’s website.
Tracking cookies on these links helps affiliate networks identify what affiliate website is generating the revenue. When customers buy, their purchases (affiliate sales) will be linked to that affiliate marketer. The affiliate marketer can view there sales and conversions within the companies affiliate dashboard.
Just how big is affiliate marketing? Take a look at these statistics from DemandSage:
16% of online orders in the United States come through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is used by 83% of marketers to raise brand recognition. Some of the top businesses in the world get 5% to 30% of their internet revenue via affiliate marketing.
Source: DemandSage
How do affiliate marketers make money?
Affiliate marketers make money when they refer people through their affiliate link and those people purchase the affiliate products or services.
The affiliate marketing company then pays a share of the sales value or flat rate to the successful affiliate marketer. It really is just as simple as that – you as an affiliate marketer refer traffic to an affiliate marketing program and get paid commission for every sale.
You just have to build up a steady stream of targeted traffic with a call to action to your affiliate link for successful affiliate marketing!
Why You Should Start an Affiliate Marketing Business
Ok, so now you know how affiliate marketing works, but let me show you why you should start an affiliate marketing business this year. The following are the main benefits that set affiliate marketing apart from most other side hustles are businesses.
You Can Earn From Day 1 With Affiliate Marketing
This right here is the best benefit of starting an affiliate marketing business – you can actually start earning money on your first day!
Most other businesses can take months or even years to break-event much less become profitable. But with affiliate marketing, as soon as you sign up, you can begin earning commissions on every sale that you send to your affiliate link.
This means you can start earning money immediately, without waiting for months to see a return on your investment. As you continue to promote more products and build your audience, your earnings can grow exponentially.
Affiliate Marketing is Low-Risk and Low-Cost
Another great benefit of an affiliate market business is that it is very low-cost to start and low-risk to operated.
You don’t need to invest a lot of money upfront to get started with affiliate marketing, in fact there are many ways to do affiliate marketing without any upfront cost.
You also don’t have to worry about creating or producing a product, maintaining inventory, or renting office or warehouse space. All you need is a website or social media presence, some basic marketing skills, and a willingness to put in the time and effort to make it work.
You take on none of the financial risks, as an affiliate marketer, you earn a commission for promoting someone else’s product. They are the ones covering all the risks and costs, if the product doesn’t sell, you don’t lose anything.
Affiliate Marketing is Easy to Scale
Once you develop a traffic stream and start earning money from affiliate sales, it is easy to scale your affiliate income.
You can expand by joining more affiliate programs related to your niche, finding products that meet the needs of your current audience.
Or you can begin developing other channels and marketing campaigns to increase your audience and traffic to convert into more sales with your affiliate partners.
This scaling is the affiliate marketing strategy that can provide you with a significant and stable passive income business.
6 Steps to Become an Online Affiliate Marketer
Choose a Profitable Niche
Select a Publishing Platform (blog, YouTube, etc…)
Best Publishing Platforms for Beginners
Start a Blog for Affiliate Marketing
Start a YouTube Channel for Affiliate Marketing
Pick the Best Affiliate Marketing Program for Your Niche
Types of Affiliate Marketing Programs: Affiliate Network vs. Affiliate Program
Types of Affiliate Products: Physical vs. Information vs. Services
Research Affiliate Programs
The affiliate marketing industry is full of different affiliate programs that have widely different commission schedules, payment terms, conversion rates, and promotion policies.
As a beginner, you need to first look at the payments terms and conversion rates. You want payouts paid quickly, so look for payment terms of net-30 or less – meaning you get paid no later than 30 days after a sale.
You want to also look at the conversion rates and compare like products – higher value products typically have lower conversions rates, but they may make more due to the higher commissions earned. You want to compare like products or services.
Also read reviews of the affiliate program and see what other’s that have used it are saying – you want to make sure you are signing up with a reputable affiliate network.
Create Optimized Affiliate Content
Optimize Titles and Descriptions
Create Engaging Content
Use Simple Calls to Actions
Cloaking Affiliate Links
Drive Traffic to Your Links
Optimize for Organic Search Traffic (Best Free Source of Traffic)
Cross Promote on Multiple Channels
Use Social Media Platforms
Use Paid Advertising and Sales Funnels
Track and Optimize Conversions
Additional Tips and Affiliate Marketing Strategy
Affiliate Marketing FAQ
Is affiliate marketing good for beginners?
Definitely! Affiliate marketing is one of the most beginner-friendly online businesses out there. There are so many ways to promote affiliate marketing products and services, you can easily find a way to begin earning affiliate income as an affiliate marketer.
How to start affiliate marketing as a beginner?
Start by picking a niche, find some affiliate programs related to it, and promote those affiliate products or services. To promote you chosen affiliate programs, you can start a affiliate website, start a youtube channel or use your social media accounts to get started.
What are the best affiliate programs for beginners?
The Amazon affiliate program is a great product based affiliate program for beginners. Amazon sells every product you can imagine, so they will have products in whatever niche you chose to promote.
Fiverr is another great affiliate program for beginning affiliate marketers to promote services. Their marketplace contains services in a wide range of niches.
Clickbank and ShareASale are good affiliate networks for the beginning affiliate marketer because they have lots of products and services to choose from in their affiliate network.
How to start affiliate marketing with no money?
You can start affiliate marketing with no money by utilizing social media platforms, free blogging platforms, article sites like medium, question and answer sites like Quora, or start a YouTube channel.
All are great free ways you can earn money by creating affiliate marketing content with your unique affiliate link.
How to start affiliate marketing if I have no websites?
There are many platforms like social media and YouTube that you can include your affiliate link to drive traffic to affiliate networks and start generating affiliate sales without a website.
What platform should I use for affiliate marketing?
The best platform depends on what you want to accomplish as an affiliate marketer – if you want to generate earnings quickly from your affiliate network, then use a platform like YouTube or Social Media for your marketing efforts.
You can also use paid advertising on Google platform or the social media platforms to generate traffic. For paid traffic, you will want to use a sales funnel with affiliate landing pages that lead to the affiliate site. That way you can collect emails as potential customers go through your paid links – you can then promote related affiliate sites to your list.
For long term income from your affiliate marketing efforts, the best platform is starting your own blog to promote affiliate marketing programs. Generating valuable content either on your site including a few affiliate links is how many affiliate marketers generate affiliate revenue of five to six figures a month from their affiliate campaigns.
You can generate the content for your blog yourself, outsource to writers, or utilizing AI writing tools to reduce the time needed to create high-quality blog content.
How much does it cost to start an affiliate marketing business?
There are affiliate marketing strategies that require no upfront costs like posting affiliate links in social media messages or profiles. These will give you quick wins, but will not be consitent of time.
The average affiliate marketer wants long term income and that does require some minor startup costs. This could be the hosting costs and domain name to start a blog to promote your affiliate program – but these are still under $100 for the starter plans.
You can create high quality content overtime as part of your content marketing strategies to target your affiliate niche and gain tons of organic search traffic.
What is the hardest part of affiliate marketing where to start?
For many people, the hardest part is choosing a niche and finding the right affiliate product to promote. But with some research and experimentation, you’ll find your first affiliate product to promote and start generate affiliate revenue.
What are the biggest affiliate marketing mistakes beginners make?
The biggest mistakes that most affiliate marketers make in the beginning start with the niche they choose to promote.
Some chose a niche that has too small of a target audience to attract enough traffic to be lucrative. While others jump into a highly competitive niche too soon and then get discouraged because they cannot compete.
The can’t generate enough traffic from their target audience and many end up quitting too soon because they cannot get enough sales to their affiliate program.
Other mistakes are not creating the right content. Affiliate marketing requires learning online marketing skills like copywriting, SEO, and content marketing channels.
There are many resources and blogs covering the affiliate marketing industry that you should read when starting affiliate marketing.
You can find great information including online marketing tips, and affiliate strategies to help you avoid making affiliate marketing mistakes as you start your affiliate marketing career.
Wrapping Up – Reap The Rewards from Affiliate Marketing Success!
You have just learned how to start affiliate marketing and the reasons why you need to join other successful affiliate marketers and start promoting your first affiliate program now.
Use the affiliate marketing tips you just learned to pick a niche and select your first affiliate program to promote. And if you put in the time and start creating high quality content, you can start earning affiliate marketing income this month.
Affiliate marketing is just one strategy to start earning passive income – check out our other great ideas for earning passive income including how to start a blog and make money.