Affiliate Marketing is one of the common monetization methods where publishers (like you) earn a commission by promoting a product or service made by others using an affiliate link on your website or social media accounts. You can check our earlier post Website Monetization Review for all common monetization methods.
In this post, I will explain how to start with an affiliate marketing business and show the common affiliate marketing programs.
There are Four Steps To Start With Affiliate Marketing Business:
Step One – Find a niche:
You need to find a niche which means you need to find a specific group of audience in the market and offer them interesting information like a solution for a problem, a review of a product, or a piece of interesting information.
It is always recommended to keep the topics on a specific subject in order to compete with other websites and to get traffic to your website or social media accounts.
How to find your specific niche?
The best way to is to check search engines like Google. When you start typing in the search field, check the auto search suggestions. Each one of the results might be the targeted niche. For example, if I want to write about “affiliate programs”, this niche is very broad and the competition from other websites will be big. But if I select a specific part like “affiliate programs for beginners” I will have better chances to compete.
Step Two – Build up your website:
After finding the topic of your interest, you need to build up your website. DO NOT get distracted with finding the best domain providers, themes, and plug-ins. The most important part is to START and that can be done for FREE!!
There are many websites that offer FREE plans to start like Weebly or Wealthy Affiliate and I will explain in detail later-on.
At this stage keep it simple and focus on the content.
Step Three – Create content:
Your website is up and running, so it is time now to create useful and interesting content to attract an audience that will lead traffic to your website. The trick here is to use low competitive keywords while writing the posts.
Keyword tools can assist you in getting information on how many times people search for the phrases and the difficulty of competing with other websites using these phrases. It is recommended to use phrases with a difficulty rate of less than 50 which means in total there are less than 50 websites using these phrases.
(This screenshot is from using Jaaxy keyword tools)
Keep your content related to your niche so search engines like Google can rank it faster to bring more organic traffic to your website.
Step Four – Join Affiliate programs:
The more people visit your website means the more possibilities for them to click on the affiliate links which will make you earn money. There are many affiliate programs you can join and each one of them has its own agreement on commissions and payment methods. It is important to read the terms of use and policies while joining these programs to not provoke any term which will lead to canceling the subscription.
Common affiliate marketing programs:
I started with Wealthy Affiliate because it has a FREE starter membership that provides all the required training and tools to start your affiliate marketing journey. You can watch free training, create a free website, use free keyword tools, and more.
There are also two other paid membership types: Pro and Enterprise if you want to advance in this career and get access to more tools for better competition.
Wealthy Affiliate program offers affiliate links and different size banners to match your needs.
You can read this dedicated article on Wealthy Affiliate.
Amazon is the biggest online store and has one of the most famous affiliate programs. It is easy and FREE to join, you just need to provide some basic information about you and your website.
You can choose any single product or a category to generate your affiliate links or banners. If a customer clicks on one of these links it means you get a commission on any purchase they make not only the product you advertise.
If you have traffic from different countries, make sure to subscribe to each country in the Amazon website in order to get the commissions
It is one of the most common affiliate programs with more than 21000 merchants with a big variety of digital and physical products. You can find here products for almost every niche from big variety of merchants whereas Amazon Associates focuses only on Amazon products.
It is FREE to join the ShareASale affiliate program then you can choose to join any merchant separately, and then you have to wait for their approval to be able to get the affiliate links, banners and videos.
There is a dashboard showing your revenue, joined programs and many other options.
It is also one of the most common affiliate programs with more than 3000 merchants with big variety of digital and physical products. It is very similar to ShareASale affiliate program where you can join the program for FREE then you can choose to join any merchant separately and wait for their approval in order to get access to the affiliate links and banners.
There is also a dashboard showing all the approved merchants, revenue and many other options.
Conclusion:
Affiliate Marketing is one of the common monetization methods. You can start it for FREE following the four steps which I mentioned earlier starting from selecting your niche, building your website, creating content, to joining affiliate marketing programs and including affiliate links in your website.
Make sure to read the policies and terms of use while joining any affiliate program and enter your correct information related to taxes and payments to avoid any delays in payments.
It takes time to generate traffic to your website so do not lose hope if you did not get any commission in the first months and good luck with your affiliate marketing journey.
To leverage the AI power, you can read this post on the best AI tools for affiliate marketing and this article on How To Learn Affiliate Marketing For Beginners.
You explain all the right steps. But in all my years in the affiliate marketing business I can say for sure that the single most important aspect is to choose a niche that you are so passionate about that you will never get tired of. Because after years of work on the same thing there will be times that it will be more difficult to work on it so you really need to love it to continue. Otherwise after some time you will abandon it.
Hi Stratos, i totally agree with you that choosing a niche of your interest is the key for continuity and success.
Wael
Affiliate marketing is a great way of earning an online income. The potential of earning a lot of money is high, if you put in the required amount of time and effort. It is not a get rich quick scheme. But if you spend time selecting your niche and setting up your website, and then create content, you can make a success of an affiliate marketing business.
Affiliate marketing is a realistic and legitimate business model.
Hi LineCowley, i totally agree with you that taking time to select the niche is very important. Also, affiliate marketing requires lot of patience and hard work to succeed.
Wael
Great post; thank you for sharing a guide on how to start with affiliate marketing. There are many ways to make money online now, and many of them will not make you wealthy; with affiliate marketing, the opportunities are endless. Once you start, you keep adding more and naturally produce more. Excellent post. Have a great day. Regards. Vlad
Hi Vlad, I really appreciate your comment. Patience is the secret to succeed in affiliate marketing.
Wael
I appreciate you sharing this useful and in-depth article about affiliate marketing. I believe the simplest way to make money online is through affiliate marketing. because starting it doesn’t cost any money. And you can begin right now. Through wealthy affiliate, I gained more knowledge about affiliate marketing. Today, affiliate marketing is how I make money. The best place to start is wealthy affiliate if you want to make quick money with affiliate marketing.
Hi Pasindu, I really appreciate your comment. I totally agree with you that anyone can start affiliate marketing now for free but it needs lot of hard work, dedication and patience to succeed.
Wael
Affiliate marketing can bring a lot of satisfaction, but it is also a great challenge and requires a lot of work. From year to year, the competition becomes greater, and the quality requirements increase.
You have described well the stages of starting such an affiliate activity. A niche can be chosen from any field, there is room for all tastes. Creating great content is the key to getting ahead. You must inform yourself, document yourself well, and gather information about the chosen topic. You have to be better than the competition!
Amazon, CJ si ShareASale are the most common and targeted affiliate platforms, but there are many programs that offer commissions for selling their products. They must be searched according to the niche.
As you specified in the conclusion, good results are seen after a certain period, money does not appear overnight.
Be focused on your work and gain experience.
All the best,
Daniel
Hi Daniel, I really appreciate your comment and totally agree with you.
Wael