Welcome to Learn Affiliate Marketing for Beginners step-by-step guide.
Quick Links:
- What is Affiliate Marketing?
- How Affiliate Marketing works
- Why Affiliate Marketing?
- Who is Affiliate Marketing for?
- Making money from Affiliate Marketing
- A 4-step Guide in Affiliate Marketing
- What’s the income potential?
- Tips to improve your success rate
- Are you ready to get started?
- What do you need to get started?
Does the idea of having your own successful online business appeal to you?
How about if your business allows you to engage your audiences from all over the world with your ideas?
Furthermore, this business allows you to pursue your passions, develop your expertise and gain satisfaction in your work. The monetary rewards that come in the form of sustainable, long-term passive income can pave your way to financial freedom.
You may ask: Is there a way to achieve the above?
The answer is yes. You can achieve it through affiliate marketing.
The good news is: many have achieved online success with affiliate marketing. There is no need to ‘re-invent the wheels’. You only have to follow in the footsteps of those who have succeeded before us.
Affiliate Marketing is an established and viable business model.
With the growing number of people with access to the internet, affiliate marketing has almost unlimited potential.
What you need is the right skills set, a supportive platform, commitment of time, hard work and perseverance.
In this article, I will go through the few steps to set up your affiliate marketing business.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Recommend a product or services to other people and get paid is what affiliate marketing all about.
You may have participated in Affiliate Marketing without knowing it.
For example, if you rent a warehouse storage space. You then recommend it to a friend who needs similar storage space, and the company rewards you with rental rebates. This is a form of Affiliate Marketing taking place!
Another example is when you need to purchase an air purifier but cannot decide on the type or brand.
You start with a search on Google using keywords such as ‘’air purifier for home review’’.
Information from the product reviews helps to decide on the most suitable type of air purifier that meets your requirements.
You finally decided to purchase it online.
Some affiliate marketers will earn the affiliate commission from your purchase from the company that sells the product.
How Affiliate Marketing works
In the simplest term: Affiliate Marketing is the promotion of other’s product or services to earn commissions.
I will illustrate in more details how you earn commissions with Affiliate Marketing using the example of air purifier.
I will illustrate below how you earn commissions with Affiliate Marketing using the example of an air purifier.
You found a product review from your online research of ‘air purifier for home review’ of your choice.
This product review was written by an affiliate marketer who has an affiliate link to the product. You click on the link when you decide to purchase the item online.
The affiliate link is provided by the seller of the product. He will credit the affiliate marketer a commission every time for every successful transaction that goes through the affiliate link.
This product review post helps the affiliate marketer to earn commissions 24/7.
The affiliate marketer earns a commission every time when someone makes the online purchase through the affiliate link. That’s the power of using Affiliate Marketing in earning money!
Why Affiliate Marketing?
No prior experience
Affiliate Marketing is one of the simplest models to build a profitable online business without the need for experience, programming skills, sales techniques or logistics in product delivery.
No face-to-face selling
As we all know, face-to-face selling is not for everyone.
Unlike other business models such as Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) or Network Marketing, where you have to sell the products and promote the membership. It’s not an easy task for an introverted person.
With Affiliate Marketing, there is no face-to-face selling. All you need is for you to manage your website. You can ‘sell’ your product or services online 24/7 without meeting anyone in person.
The seller of the product takes care of the logistic to deliver the products to your buyers.
Flexible working schedule
You can start ‘working’ on building your online business on your own schedule. There is no one to report to and you have the complete freedom to decide on the number of hours you want to work.
So, you have the time and location freedom – you can work anywhere as long as you have your laptop and internet connection.
Potential full-time passive income
You have the potential to earn a full-time and recurring income with affiliate marketing. Your website is ‘working’ for you 24/7 while you are asleep so you do the work once but get paid again and again.
This is what we call passive income which is much better than the traditional working system.
Traditional working system is where you ‘trade’ your time (paid by the number of working hours) and therefore it’s very difficult for most of us to reach financial freedom in this system because our time is limited.
Do you want to learn how to generate passive income and create more free time for yourself?
Great potential for growth
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we traditionally work but also forced most people to spend more time and conduct their business and other daily activities online.
This created a golden opportunity for those who are aspiring to set up their online business where the potential for future growth is even greater than before.
Who is Affiliate Marketing for?
Affiliate marketing can benefit anyone, but you must be prepared to put in a lot of effort to build your passive income system.
As described in the previous section, the main difference between the passive income and the traditional working system is that once you have successfully set up and build your passive income system and received a steady income stream, you only work if you choose to do so, not because you have to in order to sustain your current lifestyle.
You don’t need any prior experience to get started with affiliate marketing. What is important is you are willing to learn and the determination to succeed.
This Awesome Community, with all the necessary education, tools, technical support and a supportive community of more than 1.5 million members, is ready to help you to succeed and thrive, as long as you are willing to take your first step.
Making money from Affiliate Marketing
There are many ways of making money online with Affiliate Marketing, such as selling your products using solo ads, Pay Per Click (PPC), via sales funnels, social media.,
The focus of this article here is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
The first step is to sign up with an affiliate program. The commonly affiliate programs available in the marketplace currently are:
- Amazon
- ClickBank
- Commission Junction
- Link Share
- Digital River
These are known as affiliate networks where they provide you with millions of products for promotion as an affiliate to their program.
You can sign up for free as an affiliate for free to most of the affiliate programs. Do stay away from those programs that require a fee.
Upon signing up as an affiliate, you will be give a unique link known as affiliate link. You can then use this link to track the sales that successfully made through this link for your affiliate commissions.
The process of promoting affiliate products and getting sales through the affiliate link seems straight-forward but in reality is not so simple.
I will explain this process in greater detail in the next section.
A 4-step Guide to Affiliate Marketing
1. Decide on your niche
A niche is a specific segment of the market which you want to target at or a group of people who are interested in the items you are promoting.
Your niche will determine the topic of your website and the products that you are promoting.
A very commonly asked question is: How can I choose my niche?
The starting point in choosing your niche is to consider the area of your expertise or your passion/ interests where you already have a certain level of knowledge and areas where you have strong interests to continue to work on or to explore further.
For beginners, not to worry that you are not yet an ‘’expert’’ in your niche. As long as your niche is one where you have the passions and interests, you will develop your expertise in this area as you work on your business. You will eventually become an expert if you continue to learn and improve.
Your passions and interests in your niche will also ensure you can ride through the difficulties and challenges which you will eventually come across in your online business and succeed in the end.
To succeed in Affiliate Marketing business, you should concentrate your effort to market (promote) your products effectively to your target audience, which are at a lower level of expertise than yourself.
2. Build your website
The next important step is to build your niche website.
With the current technology, anyone can build a website within minutes. Using tools such as the SiteRubix, you can build your website with no knowledge of programming and coding within a very short time.
However, to maintain and ‘tailored’ your website to cater to your target audience will take up much time and effort, and lots of learning and fine-tuning in between.
Usability is an important aspect we need to consider for website design.
Website usability is the design and layout of a website, which is meant to make it easy for a customer to use. The goal of usability is to create an experience that makes it easier for customers to find what they are looking for and complete their desired action.
One of the most critical factors in customer retention is website usability. It can also help you improve your conversion rate optimisation efforts.
3. Create content & attract visitors
A website’s content helps to draw in potential customers and convert them into loyal customers. You can have the best-looking website in the world, but if it has no content, it won’t do you any good.
A website needs well-written content to get visitors to stay on the site for extended periods, increase traffic and conversion rates, and ultimately drive revenue.
There are many factors to consider when creating high-quality content for your website. It is important first to understand the target audience and what type of content they are interested in. Next, create a topic that is interesting and timely for your audience. Finally, use SEO best practices to make your website rank higher on search engines such as Google and Bing.
You need a strategy to create effective web content that appeals to your audience and attract them to your website.
Finally, conversion is the completion of a website goals.
The goal is to make your website more inviting, increase your brand awareness, and ultimately increase your sales or leads by making it easier for visitors to take desired actions on your website.
To understand the conversion rates of a website, it is important to understand the customer’s experience and how they interact with your website.
You can use tools such as Google Analytics to obtain a wealth of information to help improve your website.
4. Making sales and earn affiliate commissions
The last step in this process is to make money from the affiliate commissions.
If you have an incredible offer and a high traffic volume from your targeted audience, the traffic will convert to sales easily and your commissions will build up within a short period.
In summary, these are the 4 main stages in Affiliate Marketing process:
1.Customers search for products information
2. Your niche website with products review & information
3. Customers buy products through your affiliate links
4. Your earn commissions
What’s the income potential?
You may ask: ‘how much can I make from my online business?’
The short answer is: ‘as much as you can imagine.’
In theory, there is no limit to how much you can earn, but in reality, it depends on the amount of effort you put in and your commitment to the business.
The income from some top affiliate marketers, such as Pat Flynn, John Chow, Jeremy Schoemaker, Neil Patel, ranges from $10,000 to $50,000 per month.
You may ask: How realistic are the figures for me, especially when I’m just starting my online business?
I have gathered some income data from one of the training programs ‘affiliate Bootcamp’ from the Awesome Community.
The time into the business and the potential earnings (as a general guide) are as follows.
- 3 Months: 0 to $500 per month
- 6 Months: $500 to $3,000 per month
- 1 Year: $3,000 to $10,000 per month
- 2 Years: $10,000 to $20,000 per month
- 5 Years and beyond: $10,000 to $50,000 per month
Realistically, you will start making a few sales after 3 to 4 months and can expect to earn a few hundreds dollars in your first year, and it’s possible to reach thousands of dollars after about two years.
The earnings are achievable provided you are willing to commit your time and effort to learn, practice and improve using the right business platform.
Always remember: What you get OUT of your business is what you put INTO it. You ‘pay forward’ before you receive your rewards.
The next section provides you some proven tips to improve your chances of success in Affiliate Marketing.
Tips to improve your success rate
Dedicate your time and effort in building your online business
Whether you are starting your online business as part or full-time, always treat your online business as your real business by dedicating your time and effort to focus on learning, improving and getting better every single day.
Those who set realistic goals and invest a fixed amount of time working on their business for an extended period of time will eventually see the results.
Focus on serving your target audience
Focus all your attention and effort to serve your target audience better than your competitors.
Develop your website contents with your target audience in mind and always think how you can cater to their needs and serve them well. Communicate regularly with them to understand their concern and needs and promote products and services that will improve their lives and solve their problems.
Follow your passions
Follow your passions and share your expertise with your target audience through the contents of your niche website.
Never mind if you are not yet an ‘expert’ in this area, you will eventually become one as you learn and work on your online business. Your passions and interests will serve you well and motivate you to ride through the rough patches and on your online business journey. Your passions will greatly improve your chances of success.
Consistency in education and practice
For Affiliate Marketing business, consistency is your key to success.
Consistency means set goals, develop a plan and work on your plan daily to achieve your goals. For beginners, you need to commit a fix amount of time to learn and apply the new skills/ knowledge gained from training and put them in practice. You should fix your goals but take a flexible route to achieve them.
Consistency and continuous application of skills and knowledge in practice to running of your business is essential for success in affiliate marketing.
Perseverance
As with any other business venture, the road to success will not be smooth sailing, but one fills with bumps along the way.
Having a growth mindset prepares you to face the challenges and problems that arise along the way, and to find solutions to overcome them. Take this as a learning opportunity and develop the courage and skills to overcome the problems. This will bring you one step closer to your goals.
If you persevere in finding solutions and overcome your problems, you will emerge stronger and more capable, which paves the way to your future success.
Find a mentor
A mentor is someone that you can model after and to learn from. Having a right mentor dramatically improves your chances of success.
In your online business, your mentor is a successful and established affiliate marketer in different areas of affiliate marketing where he or she is ready and willing to help you.
Where to find my mentor?
I strongly recommend you to find one in this Awesome Community where I hang out. You can find many like-minded people in this community are people who are kind in sharing with you their experience and success as long as you are willing to reach out to them and ask.
You can meet these people right after you sign up as a Starter Member for free to join this community today.
Are you ready to get started?
- Start your own online business without prior experience..
- Make sales without face-to-face meeting and promotion…
- Decide on your own work schedule with no one to report to…
- Earn passive income 24/7 even while you are asleep or away…
- Tap into the great potential of online affiliate marketing for future income growth starting from today…
What do you need to get stated?
Before you get started it’s good to take a longer term view with the objective of building a sustainable online business.
You need a platform that can support your business and these are some main considerations:
Education – Especially for beginners, you need practical, step-by-step training programs to guide you all the way from niche selection, set up your website, products research, driving traffic until making sales, and to bring your business to the next higher level.
Website and web hosting – You need a fully customisable website with different themes to choose from according to your requirements, and with a web host that will ensure your business is running on a fast, secure and reliable web hosting platform.
Keyword research tool – You need a keyword research tool that is reliable, easy-to-use yet able to provide you with the necessary data for your product research and contents writing.
Support & Networking – A supportive and caring community of like-minded people and experts in affiliate marketing who care and are ready to help you when you need will be very helpful, especially when you are just getting started.
The opportunity to network with and learn from the expert affiliate marketers is invaluable.
You may also find a mentor who can help to accelerate your learning and shorten your path to success.
This Awesome Community where I’m in provided you with all the above to get started from day one of your online business. You can get started today by taking the risk-free approach by joining as a Starter Member.
JOIN AS A STARTER MEMBER
I sincerely look forward to seeing you in the Awesome Community soon!