Affiliate marketing

What is affiliate marketing?

Being an affiliate means recommending products and services from company's your partnering with.

Every time someone buys something through your links, you get a commission.

Actually, one of the oldest professions.

Affiliate marketing in a nutshell

Earn commission by selling another brand's products or services.

Based on a revenue-sharing concept.

Well-tested monetization model that offers profitability for all parties.

How do you get paid?

You get paid when people take action on the advertiser's website. There are three pays to earn money as an affiliate marketer.

All three ways can generate a decent income and serves their purpose. Which one you should focus on depends on your industry and visitor behaviour.

Commission models

Pay per Sale (PPS): Earn a percentage of the sale.

Pay per Click (PPC): Get paid for the number of visitors you send to the merchants website (regardless if a sale is made or not).

Pay per Lead (PPL): Get the customer to visit the merchant’s website and complete the desired action. For example, subscribing to a newsletter.

The affiliate marketing model

You can actually generate passive income. However, it does it time.

No limits or restrictions. No income roof. No scalability dilemmas.

Location independence. You choose from where you want to work.

Flexibility. You choose with what niche and market you want to work.

Limited start up costs. You actually don't need more than €30 to get started.

How to get started with affiliate marketing in 4 steps

Now that we have covered the affiliate marketing for dummies part, it's time to concentrate on the main topic: how to start affiliate marketing.

Let's get into it.

Here are 4 steps on how to start affiliate marketing for beginners:

1. Join an affiliate network

Technically, all you need to do to become an affiliate marketer is signing up to an affiliate network.

Finding a decent affiliate network is important when starting out as an affiliate marketer.

Some affiliate networks are better than others, especially if you're just starting out and don't have too much traffic.

2. Find a brand, product or service that you want to promote

There's hundreds of thousands of products and services, so today, you can literally find affiliate programs for anything.

Now, all you have to do is figure out what products you want to promote.

So, how do you know what products you should promote?

Well, there's no easy way to tell, and many factors are involved.

Choosing your niche is indeed one of the steps where people get stuck and never get started with affiliate marketing. Unfortunately, I can't tell you what to do.

Things to keep in mind when finding a niche Something you have passion for.

When starting out as an affiliate marketer, I would recommend becoming an affiliate for a product or service that you resonate with and have some level of passion for. If you have an interest in the thing you're trying to sell, it's more likely to come across in your marketing message, and that might lead to increased conversion.

Expertise is a big plus

It's a big upside if you have experience with the product, or expertise about the topic. Trying the product or service first hand will ensure that you can speak honestly about your own experience, and it will add credibility to what you're saying. It will also build a sense of trust with your audience and potential customers. This is harder to do if you have no prior experience, but of course, still doable. Again, conversion goes up if you can offer an expert opinion.

Niched topic.

The more niched products, the easier to sell them. If you go broad, you'll have a more difficult time to convert your visitors into money. Niched products do have a big advantage.

3. Start promoting your affiliate products

The hard part is figuring out what products and services you wanna promote, so if you did that, congratulations.

Now it's time to start promoting it.

There's different ways to promote affiliate products. You can setup a website, do email marketing or use social media.

Personally, I'm a fan of promoting the products through a website, because it's more automatic, and you have less limits.

4. Generate customers and earn commission

The final step is all about getting customers, making sales and earning that passive income.

It's the most fun part, but also the most difficult.

In simple words, you need to figure out how to get traffic to your website. Of course, all other affiliate marketers out there are competing for the same traffic, so it's not always easy.

But with sustained efforts for a longer time, you'll slowly build up your audience, and start getting sales.