Affiliate Marketing for beginners – A simple guide to kick start earnings

Are you starting your online life for affiliate marketing earnings?

Affiliate marketing, what does it mean? How it helps you to earn money online.

Whether it is a marketing platform or marketing strategy, what else is this? 

You all have this lot of confusion in your mind, we’ll make your mind clear, from this guide you will get the simple answer to your queries.

You are here to know about Beginners Guide To Affiliate Marketing, but what’s your purpose whether you are searching for a marketing or just to know a piece of knowledge about it.

Why we are giving more importance to affiliate marketing?

It’s because many people do affiliate marketing to earn money and a lot of money than you expect. There are thousands of affiliate programs available around us.

Affiliate marketing is a powerful way to make money. It is done by promoting your unique affiliate link and get product sales through it.

Affiliate marketing is one of the main sources of income for bloggers. The major advantage of this affiliate marketing is you can earn a passive income.

Let’s start this learning session to get more ideas and knowledge about affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is selling or promoting someone’s brand products. Once you joined an affiliate program, you will get a unique URL from the brand.

You should need to promote the product with your unique affiliate link. If anyone clicks your link and buys it, then you will get an affiliate commission.

Every sale made through your referral link will bring you profit at some rate of commission. Affiliate products will have a standard commission rate or sale percentage for their affiliate marketers. The way of promoting other’s products and getting commissions is called affiliate marketing.

What does an affiliate marketer do?

Affiliate marketing is just a simple thing to understand, that affiliate marketers will promote their product links. Once the sale made via your affiliate link, then you will end up getting the affiliate commissions.

You need to approach many big affiliate merchants for selling their brand products via blogging sites. You will promote their brands to your customers and allow them to make use of it.

In contrast, you will get a certain rate of commission. The commission depends on the clicks and the product purchased through your referred link.

You can’t just go and promote every affiliate program. Most of the famous products and services will have their affiliate programs. You can easily join any affiliate programs you are interested in, but choosing the best affiliate product for promoting is Important.

You can use affiliate link management plugins like Pretty links to efficiently manage all your affiliate links under a single dashboard. These WordPress affiliate plugins help you to boost up your affiliate revenue.

Consider these things before joining or promoting a product to the audience. Use free chrome extensions like affilitizer to find new affiliate products.

Quality values more

The brands you promote to your audience need to be in a good quality product because the quality speaks about your loyalty.

If you promote low-quality products, it will affect your reputation among the audience. Web Hosting affiliate programs are one of the high paying in the industry.

Focus on the audience’s choice than your profit

Affiliate marketing is really a profit fuel source for you to earn money with blogging platforms or other marketing sources.

With less than $100 you can create a Perfect professional blog. Cost of creating a WordPress blog.

Affiliate marketing doesn’t give you instant success, but if you learn it properly, it gives you success until you neglect it. 

Before getting into the affiliate marketing field learn about it, so you can easily promote your best products on your website.

Whenever there is money, then you have to follow a few guidelines and procedures to run it successfully and earn money from affiliate marketing.

There are many ways to promote your affiliate links, but blogging is the best and trusted way of earning constant passive income for long period.

If you are a beginner and you want to earn money as an affiliate, then you must follow these few tips to start a profitable blog from the right stage.

Definitely, you want to have a niche and a fruitful domain to explore your marketing on your website.

Make your blog a brand. As an affiliate marketer, you always need a loyal audience who trust your brand. Affiliate marketing is not about placing your blog full of affiliate links. 

Start writing a blog about what you are passionate about and advertise the products in your domain.

Earning money from affiliate marketing will work only when your readers have an intention to buy your products.

You can also promote the brand in your YouTube channels and make people visit your videos, likewise motivate them to buy products from your link.

The people should trust you so they consider your service as a loyal one and they would purchase via your link.

How to start affiliate marketing as a beginner?

As a beginner, you need to know about the concept of affiliate marketing and then you can easily work with these links and you can easily make your site a profitable money-making machine.

Here are the perfect tips on how to start an affiliate blog and how to set up the domain, hosting, and all features to build a successful website.

Pick the profitable niche

The niche you choose is the most and significant part of passing your site to the next stage because the power of the niche has a chief value.

If you are passionate about something and simultaneously you are well knowledgeable about that topic then you can start writing about that without any doubts.

Therefore, it will help you earn money from your passionate topic and if it really a wealth hidden niche, then you could have deep researched to know more about it.

There are still some niches available, where you can’t easily monetize with affiliate marketing. So mixing up your interest and profitable niche is more important to choose the perfect niche.

You want to create more content on a particular topic is very much important to develop the niche, you should have the interest to explore more about the content at the same time it needs to be useful for your audiences.

How to choose a niche?

The well-known name always has a faster growth always among the audience. 

For instance, famous people always have a higher response among the audience. So, your choosing niche wants to make interest in the people, likewise, it needs to be beneficial for them.

There are some popular niches, which is always considered evergreen niches. So choosing these types of contents will bring more attraction at the same time it will create intention among the readers.

Some famous niches are about health & fitness, cooking, food, music, beauty tips & products and so on…

You can also choose any of these topics and can create a blog or any YouTube channel for promoting the affiliate products.

But your content needs to be in a unique manner for the above topics, because these topics have so many contents which already exist in the higher ranks.

If your content is similar to their content, then it does not fit well in the unique content and doesn’t get more trust from the audience. So make your content ideal from others.

Before buying a domain, choose what is your niche and list some of the affiliate products in that niche you are going to promote. So it can help you to choose the domain name based on that.

If you are a travel blogger, then look at the best travel affiliate programs for better earnings.

Choose the best hosting for the website

You need to consider many things before choosing the hosting.

WordPress offers various features in both the paid and free domains for creating a site on WordPress. With just a few dollars you can easily create a professional wordpress website.

Get your site hosted on the best WordPress hosting providers, which also comes with auto-installed WordPress.

WordPress has many benefits for the users, so make use of it for your sites. If you are a beginner and don’t want to invest money in buying hosting, then you can also go for free web hosting providers.

But free hosting has many drawbacks, if these drawbacks don’t affect you then you can go with it.

Choosing the perfect themes

There are many themes in the industry, optimized for affiliate marketing websites. But when it comes to professional, Astra and GeneratePress is the best.

Astra is the top theme in WordPress that comes with over 1 million active downloads. GeneratePress also packed with some high-performance features, that highly optimized for affiliate marketers.

Best Tools for affiliate marketers

Pretty links – It is the perfect affiliate links management plugin for WordPress. It makes your ugly affiliate links into branded links and improves your conversions. Pretty links also help you to cloak your links to make your earnings safe.

Amalinks Pro – This is a powerful link management tool for Amazon affiliates. This simple tool allows you to get all your Amazon affiliate links WordPress dashboard. You can also easily create show boxes.

Hello Bar – A Free notification bar plugin to pop-up your affiliate links and redirect the audience to a specific URL. Complete Hello Bar review.

• Check out the best WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers

How does affiliate marketing work?

In affiliate marketing, the major role played by the three-players

• Product makers or merchants
• Influencers or affiliates
• Consumer or buyer

Product Makers or merchants

The product makers are the people who make the product and they prompted the product to reach more audiences or fresh people through affiliate marketing.

The product creators approach influencers or affiliates to promote their products on their website.

Influencers or affiliate marketers

The influencers are the people who sell the product of sellers and then promote the product to their audience. 

The bloggers and marketers will make their audiences buy the product. Once the purchase made on the merchant’s website, through their referral link, a specific amount of commission will be given to the affiliates or influencers.

If you are promoting an affiliate product link, then you are the affiliate marketer.

Consumers or buyers

The customers are the consumers who buy the product through the affiliate link, which referred by the influencers in the social media or in webinars or through their website blogs.

When the sale made through the referred link, then the merchants & influencers get benefits, both get profit from it.

What are Cookies in affiliate marketing?

The cookies in affiliate play a specific role in affiliate marketing. We usually see the cookies on all websites when you enter the page. 

A cookie is a small piece of data stored on the user’s web browser. It is used to remember the user and computer. If you are visiting a site again, then the cookies can easily remember you. It is the basic function of the cookie.

Likewise, when the people made a click on an affiliate link and entered into the website where the cookies exist already on the page, with a specific set of life periods.

Do the cookies have a specific life period?

The life period of the cookie varies, one may have a 10 days lifetime or some may have 30 days or 90 or120 days. Every affiliate product will have its own cookie lifetime. The longer the cookie life, the much better for affiliate marketers.

For instance, we can consider the cookie lifetime for a product is 30 days.

If a sale made within 30 days, after the referral link clicked, then the affiliate commission given to the referred affiliate. The sale made after the cookie life period, will not be considered as your affiliate sale.

This affiliate cookie is introduced because most times people don’t buy a product instantly seeing it. So they will take some time to analyze and get more information about the product before buying.

Here the page shows the cookie duration of some best affiliate marketing programs.

Different types of Affiliate Programs

Most of the affiliates usually pay with pay per sale, in the B2B market, it said as a win-win situation. Through this, both of them (merchant and publisher) will have a profit.

Here is a list of some different types of Affiliate programs offered by different companies.

Pay per sale or Cost Per Action (CPA)

In this model, you will earn a commission when the sale is made through your affiliate link.

Whenever your referral takes an action on the merchant’s website, you will get paid the commissions.

Mostly, the pay per sale is the most used, and highly profitable type of affiliate model.

Cost per Click (CPC)

It is one of the very easy types of an affiliate method. You will get paid for every click made by your audiences. Here visitors don’t need to take any action. They just want to click and visit the website. You are just referring to them and getting paid.

Pay per Lead (PPL)

In this type of Pay Per Lead, you will get a commission when your referral converted into leads. The leads are just like signing up for a form or joining a free course. Once your referral converted to lead, you will get paid.

Recurring affiliate programs

In these types of affiliate programs, you will get a commission when every time a user renews the subscription. If a user buys a product for one month, then you will get a commission, then every month he renews you will get a commission.

So it will give you sustainable income for a long time.

The best affiliate products marketplace for Bloggers

The affiliate marketplace is the place where you can signup for many affiliate programs under one dashboard. You can join in both direct affiliate programs and the marketplace.

Many products have their own affiliate programs on their website and some other products will host their affiliate under this famous marketplace.

From the marketPlace, you will get multiple varieties of products to promote. Every affiliate programs are free to join, so you don’t need to pay anything for joining.

List of some famous Affiliate platforms

• Amazon associates
• ShareAsale
• Click Bank
• Impact
• cj.com (Commission Junction)
• vCommission
• eBay Affiliates
• Rakuten marketing

Amazon Associates (Affiliate Program)

Amazon is a well known and top e-commerce store in the world. You can easily join as their affiliate and promote millions of products from their store.

Amazon is the best and free for the people who have a blogging site. You can easily sign up and become an affiliate and you can start using the affiliate links of the product on your website.

Read – Best WordPress affiliate programs for maximum profit.

ShareAsale

The ShareASale is also a beginner-friendly platform, where there are over 3000+ merchants are available, so you can choose any products from them.

when you sign up for the ShareASale website and when you finish submitting the application. It will take a few days to get your application approved. Once you get approved, you can signup for the individual product on their marketplace and start promoting it.

Every affiliate platforms provide your proper dashboard to properly track the sales and your commissions. So you will get detailed analytics of your commissions and referrals.

Click Bank

The ClickBank is also an easily accessible one, anybody can use its service, the affiliate can make use of their affiliate links and direct the audience to the product page.

Sign up for the account in the click Bank and then fill in all your personal details and payment information.

eBay Affiliates

Joining in the eBay partner network is simple, you need to create an eBay account and after choosing the affiliate, before clicking the sign-up option fill your information. 

Now you accepted the agreement of the eBay affiliates, so start using its service.

Rakuten marketing

The joining in Rakuten marketing is easy to process, it is also a free one so that it will be helpful for the users.

Start signing up the form on the website, fill up the business details as a publisher, once the application is signed up, wait for the approval from them via email (about 5-10min).

The takeaway from Joining affiliate Programs and marketplace

There are various affiliate programs are available but choosing the best will offer you what you need. Earning money from affiliates is not as tough as you think, it all depends on hard work and smart work.

So start using the best programs and start earning money and make a profit, but you need a trusted audience. Use different techniques to promote your blog posts to reach more audiences.

Affiliate marketing is one of the good offers for people willing to blog. If you are more passionate about blog writing. You can also efficiently repurpose your older blogs to drive traffic to the important pages.

You can explore some famous high paying affiliate programs in the market. Make all your affiliate links as No-Follow links on your website.

Important terms used in Affiliate marketing

Like other fields, affiliate marketing also has some technical terms used. Let’s look it down.

Affiliate Program – It is a system where the affiliate method is running. Every product has their own affiliate programs with its own commission structure.

Affiliate Commission – It is the amount of money given to you, every time when an action is taken by the audiences.

Conversion – It is the converted user. When the audience takes an action on a merchant’s site, then it is a conversion.

Affiliate Link – It is the unique link of the product given to you. This link embedded with the unique tracking ID, in which merchants can easily identify that’s you.

Cookie – It is a small file automatically stored on the user’s browser, to identify them. Every cookie has an expiration date.

First click Model – Some affiliate programs follow the first click model. If the user clicks 2 same product affiliate links of different users and takes action, but the commission is given to the first clicked affiliate link.

Lask Click model – It is opposite to the first click. The last clicked affiliate link will be awarded the comission.

Benefits of affiliate marketing

Make a passive income

As an affiliate, you can earn money more easily than the people who work for the entire day. The passive income is directed to you as a commission rate.

You need not spend the entire time in front of your desktop and then your income will gradually increase every day.

Do your work from home

This affiliate marketing offers you the best option that you can work from the home, if you like doing work from home, this is like an offer for you.

No need for investment

Joining most of the best affiliate program doesn’t need any money to invest. If any affiliate program is asking you for the money to join, then please confirm whether it is trusted or not before joining.

Work as you wish

This allows you to work as you wish, while other jobs need people to spend the 5 days in a week of about 40-hour/week.

Here you can spend the time doing what you like to do and you can follow your passion. The money you earn depends on the performance of the work.

Finally, affiliate marketing is also one of the important sources of income for bloggers.

FAQ on Affiliate Marketing

conclusion

Concluding this topic, I hope this article will be useful for you, and you are benefited too because this article explains how a beginner starts with affiliate marketing, how to work with affiliate marketing, and all your questions. 

• Read – Best Plugins for affiliate marketers to boost sales
• Read – 20+ best WordPress affiliate programs to promote

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If you find any topic missed in the beginner’s affiliate marketing guide, kindly intimate me in the comment box.