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Affiliate marketing is so common these days. You can find it all around yourself. Probably you have been involved in this marketing process without even knowing it!
In this blog, you will get to know how to start affiliate marketing for beginners.
Table of Contents
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the way of earning by promoting another organisation’s products or services. In other words, you find a product online, promote it to others through your blog or website, and earn a portion of the profit for each sale you make.
It’s like earning a reward for sending new customers to the company. However, the company offering an affiliate marketing program may call it referral programs or partner programs.
You may ask, “how does affiliate marketing work?” If you were going through some blog posts and clicked on a link to that page that was offering a product of another website, there’s a chance that the website owner from which you originally clicked the link received a commission from your purchase.
Factors of Affiliate Marketing
Now you will see the details of how affiliate marketing works. There are three main factors in affiliate marketing. They are:
- You and your blog or website-the affiliate.
- An affiliate company. You will work directly with a company to promote one or more of its products or services.
- Customers. The audiences who use your affiliate link to buy products from the affiliate company are customers.
How these three parties benefit from affiliate marketing
All the parties related to affiliate marketing enjoy the benefits by following ways:
Affiliate marketing can certainly be a win-win! All the parties become fruitful when it is done the right way. But, at the centre of everything is your audience’s trust in you. In other words, when the audience believes you have their best interests at heart, they trust your recommendations. Subsequently, all the parties in the marketing relationship benefit from it.
Why Should You Start Affiliate Marketing in Post-COVID Era?
There are no boundaries, markers or virtual walls to keep it out of unwanted areas. The benefits of affiliate marketing in post COVID-19 era are given below:
Great income potential
Firstly, affiliate marketing provides you with a potential source of income. Unemployment is increasing due to the COVID-19 breakout. Affiliate marketing can make you self-reliant. You can work and earn sitting on your favourite couch at home. Your earning will depend on your expertise.
Work from home
Secondly, in the post COVID-19 era working from home is an asset. You can work from home or somewhere else. It is up to you.
Low barrier to entry
Thirdly, affiliate marketing is easy to start, and it does not cost much. Most affiliate programs are free to join. You don’t have to make, stock, or ship products from somewhere. That also means less burden.
Ease of activity
Moreover, affiliate marketing offers several benefits to marketers; one of them is its ease of operating. Your side of the equation simply revolves around handling the “marketing” side. Your task is to educate customers and promote selling a product. You don’t have to worry about the hectic tasks, like creating, supporting, or fulfilling the offer.
Low risk
Furthermore, you save your time and money to create your own products as someone else has already done the task. You can start making money only by recommending products. Additionally, as you are not the product maker, you don’t lose anything if a customer doesn’t buy those offers.
More freedom
Finally, you are the boss here! You can work anytime, from anywhere and receive rewards for your hard work as long as you have internet access.
Before starting this work, you should learn that great affiliate marketing is built on customer’s trust. If you work hard in this field, you’ll be a gainer. And which else work can give you so much revenue sitting at your home in the post COVID-19 era?
How to Start Affiliate Marketing? (Step-By-Step Instructions)
You can join affiliate marketing—either as a product owner or an affiliate marketer. To participate in an affiliate marketing program as an affiliate marketer, you’ll need to follow these simple steps:
Step-by-step instruction to start affiliate marketing for beginners are described below:
1. Join an Affiliate Program You Like
Indeed, the main criteria for successful affiliate marketing are to keep in mind that both the product and platform should align with your audience. Ask yourself if the target audience would find your product valuable. Or, does it go well with your expertise?
Please make sure the offer you’re promoting suits the platform you’re promoting it on. For example, clothing, home decor, etc., suit well to image-friendly platforms like Instagram. Meanwhile, if you’re promoting something that requires more in-depth descriptions (e.g. software), your review may convert better on platforms like YouTube or a blog.
Where can you promote your affiliate products?
Try various tactics to find the best places that suit you. Some ideas following:
Build your website
There are many ways to build audiences on social media. For example- Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or make your website.
But when you are talking, especially about affiliate marketing, you should have a website. However, you might know many people earning through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn, without even having any website. Regardless of this, they are lucky ones indeed. If you aspire for the most success in affiliate marketing, you obviously need to run a website.
Meanwhile, you probably know that social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube can make changes in their setting, affecting your business. You can see this if you observe their operational change, especially with Facebook. Facebook changes a lot, especially since they are trying to make money for their investors.
As an affiliate marketer, you need to avoid all sorts of risk and take full control of them.
Therefore, create your website where you have full control over your audiences and business. The website is where you can:
Also, remember that, beyond just blog posts, there are lots of ways and places to share your affiliate links, including:
Create YouTube videos about the product
You should post unique content on YouTube to grab the attention of your viewers. YouTube is the ranked as #2 search engines in the world, following Google.
You can achieve a lot of traffic coming in through your affiliate link on YouTube. Also, the videos themselves can rank on Google. You can also shoot multiple videos about a particular product. Thus, you create even more SEO opportunities.
Make sure to attach your affiliate link in the video description. Surely, it is great to put it in the first part of the description. Otherwise, people have to click on “show more” or “read more” to see it.
However, the question is, what should you cover in these videos?
Try recording short videos with all the important product features and benefits. Let people know how you benefited from it. Also, educate them on how to use the product. People like to watch shorter videos. So, it is favourable to create multiple videos. After that, this will increase opportunities to rank for various keywords related to that product.
If your product is digital, start at the moment of purchase and show viewers through the entire process. However, if you’re doing a physical product, consider an unboxing video. Audiences will love them, surely.
2. Choose Which Products and Services to Offer
After you start building your audience day by day, you will learn about their needs and wants. Thus, you are likely to create a beautiful bond with these people.
Subsequently, you know what they are looking for or what kind of offer can catch their attention. After that, the very next step is to identify the products and services you can suggest. Your recommendation will meet your audience’s needs and help them in their purchasing journey. Firstly, note that sometimes the products will be those which allow you to generate affiliate money. Sometimes they won’t be profitable for you at all.
Secondly, the nicer approach for a great start is problem finding. You will search for your audiences’ problems and solve those with your offer. However, if the product is not the best solution to their problem, disclose it to them. Be honest! Trust and relationships come first! Finally, don’t start with a product or commission in mind. Enjoy your work!
Select particular products
Meanwhile, know your audiences and their desires. How do you select a particular product? You need to be precise and think of your target audience. As a result, your audience can easily trace what they need from you.
Firstly, you should identify what you want to help your new visitor to get, think about how they’re going to get to the destination. Secondly, think about the roadmap. Defining the steps in this way will help you determine what types of offers will benefit your audience at different points along their road.
Therefore, you need to think about the products that will help your audience. Choose ones you have used for yourself at least once. Following your niche area, spend some time making a list of the services and tools you use.
Things that have already helped you achieve your goals can also help your audience achieve their goals. However, offers can be anything from tangible goods like books or clothes to intangible software or coaching services.
Online research
You can also do research online to get affiliate product recommendations about various products and services, along with brainstorming.
There are plenty of places and resources to find new affiliate products, including:
The preferable product for affiliate marketing changes with market trends. When signing up, look at purchase trends of that moment. Target products that people are actively looking for some of the most popular products right now include the following:
To sum up, if an offer doesn’t make any sense to promote and is not a part of the audience’s rewarding path, don’t promote it, no matter how big the affiliate commissions you gain. Certainly, trust comes first!
3. Get a Distinctive Affiliate Link for Each Offer
An affiliate link is a unique URL. It bears the affiliate’s ID or username. The affiliate marketers use links to record the traffic sent to the product owner’s website. This is a vital act of an affiliate program. There is an affiliate agreement that states that the affiliate marketer is responsible for arranging the affiliate link and confirm that it connects to the company’s website.
After you choose which product to offer, obtain a unique affiliate link for every product or services. Communicate well and build a relationship with the owner of the product. You will get to know more about the product, and your audience will have more trust in you.
4. Create Great Content
The success of your affiliate marketing largely depends on the quality of the review. To create a good review, begin with thinking about your audiences and what they want to purchase; what type of information they may have in their mind about the product. Present your offer to them precisely. Tell them a good story.
You can share your personal experiences in your blog, social media video or post. If you are writing a personal review, give a candid opinion based on your knowledge and experience with the product. The more honest you are to your audience, the more reliable you seem to them. People will accept your advice if they feel they can trust you:
Value Trust
Trust is the biggest fact in your affiliate marketing. If people do not trust you enough, they won’t act on your recommendations naturally. The level of trust you’ll need from your customers depends on your industry and the products you’re offering. For instance, it takes more trust to be an effective affiliate for a £2,000 camera than it does for a £30 pair of trouser.
Let your voice be heard
However, when you sign up as a marketer with any company, they may regularly send you marketing language. They will ask you to use those in your emails, blog posts, and social media messages to help to sell the product.
While this language can be handy, try not to use it word by word. Instead, use it as raw materials to craft your personalised language. The reason is your audience wants to hear from your voice. Don’t disappoint them by just copying and pasting from somewhere else.
Beyond just sharing your experiences, you can grow trust by limiting the number of affiliates you promote. Go for the affiliate for products you personally use and stick to your area of expertise.
5. Share Various Affiliate Links on Your Website, Social Media Platforms, or Blog
Now, it is time to share the links on your website or social media. Many people fail to implement this simple job tactfully. As a result, they are missing out on potential income. When you give your audience only one chance to click on your affiliate link by adding a single link near the top or bottom of a blog post, you’re doing nothing but losing out on your potential income.
Give your viewers more than one opportunity to click through your affiliate link. Subsequently, in a blog post, a lot of business owners will just link the first mention of an affiliate product in a post. However, if their viewers miss it or keep scrolling to return later, then they may forget to scroll back up. Thus, you’ve lost your potential commission.
Therefore, keep it as easy as possible for all of your visitors to use your affiliate links without overdoing it.
The best thing is you can just naturally place affiliate links where they will be more visible. Take a blog post as an example; you could mention the product first time on top, then somewhere in the middle of the post, and then again at the end.
But don’t overdo this. You will disgust people by stuffing affiliate links into your posts.
Another good approach is to link product images with your affiliate link. Also, you can consider adding affiliate links to other content. You can try this in YouTube videos, podcast show notes, and your resources page.
6. Get clicks on your affiliate links
There is no difference between normal links and affiliate links. But always reveal when links are affiliate links. That’s all about transparency and authenticity.
Moreover, people will appreciate your honesty. Along with that, give them enough information and really help them out. Many of those audiences will likely want to pay you back for your reliability. If you disclose that you are attaching affiliate links, they are clicking on, and people will appreciate your work more.
Mention in the post that you’re using affiliate links; you may also say you’re getting a commission. As this doesn’t cost them extra, they are going to buy the product anyway, and they might as well buy it from you to help you make some money.
A great thing you can do is just be honest and upfront with your links.
Using callouts like buttons, tables, and boxes can help attract your readers’ attention and make the post more skimmable.
Moreover, you can thank people on your website for going through links. Is this a tiny thing that probably doesn’t make a big difference? Yes, it may certainly increase sales.
If the company you’re an affiliate with allows you with the name and email of audiences who are purchasing through your link, you can definitely follow up and thank them.
Furthermore, give them a bonus as a surprise if you want to. This will make them want to buy through one of your affiliate links again in the future.
7. Receive a Commission whenever Someone Uses Your Links to Purchase Anything
Now all set. Whenever someone purchases stuff following your affiliate links, you will get a cut from the revenue. The more clicks from your site, the more money you may earn.
Who is Good for Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a great option for you if you’re not ready to create your product or service. Also, you want to work by assisting people by offering them stuff that may solve their problems.
Affiliate marketing can be an excellent choice for website owners, virtual entrepreneurs, bloggers, and anyone who can build an audience base and serves authentically.
Few Affiliate Niches
Here are a few affiliate niches to consider:
How to Find Affiliate Marketing Programs?
You can visit the affiliate marketplace or platform to find affiliate programs. Browse your niche to find top-performing affiliate platforms. Most popular platforms following:
You can visit company websites of the products and services you use and like. Check if they have an affiliate program. Large companies often have such arrangements to promote on their site, such as Amazon Associates.
However, you can take a more direct option. Find the owner of a good product you like to promote. Afterwards, see if he is offering an affiliate marketing program. If he doesn’t, he might be happy to set up a contract with you. He may offer you a special coupon code to share with your audiences.
Meanwhile, the best deals often are found when you’re the first to ask and have a relevant distribution channel. For instance, approach the seller of a new wellness product if you’re a health and fitness blogger.
Related: 15 Highest Paying Affiliate Programs to Avoid 9 to 5 Job
How Much You Can Earn through Affiliate Marketing
The average salary for an affiliate marketing manager is £39,094 per year in the United Kingdom.
Success in affiliate marketing is all about patience and persistence. You have to be tenacious. Choose the right niche and the right strategy. You shouldn’t expect that your profit will always be the same. In Affiliate marketing, there are many cases when, after earning a good income for a long time, the revenue fell suddenly.
A good affiliate website can help to make you £100 to £40000. However, The math is not very simple. There are several variables into accounts. Like:
Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
As a beginner, you don’t need any money to start affiliate marketing. Find and go for an affiliate program that’s a good fit for you. After that, get the links, and start promoting the products to your audience. Most importantly, the most successful affiliate marketers spend time nurturing their communities.
Ready to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing?
In this blog, you get to know why you should start affiliate marketing in post COVID-19 era. Also, you have learnt how to start affiliate marketing with easy steps.
Just don’t forget that affiliate marketing works best when you’re confident and honest about the offer you’re promoting. Only advertise a product if you know it could help your viewers.
You can generate your income in the post COVID-19 era through affiliate marketing. Don’t miss your chance. Click Here to Learn and Earn with Affiliate Marketin
Affiliate Marketing
Our Affiliate Marketing course is the best way for you to gain professional insights into the world of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing
Our Affiliate Marketing course is the best way for you to gain professional insights into the world of affiliate marketing.
Further resources
- Digital Skills: The Ultimate Guide to Grow Your Career
- 22 Practical Skills that Everyone Should Learn in 2023
- 20 Tips to Teach Online and Earn Money by Sharing Skills
- Employability Skills: A Guide to Skills Employers Look For
- 21 Basic Computer Skills You Must Have in 2023
- Essential IT Skills that will Get You Hired as an IT Professional
