Affiliate Marketing For Beginners: Step-by-Step Guide

This step-by-step guide about affiliate marketing for beginners has been written to give you a clear picture of what affiliate marketing is. Get ready to learn all you need to succeed online. 

Have you ever dreamed to start making money online but without any idea how to do it?  Keep reading and you will discover it.

You are probably wondering if there is a way to start making money online that actually works! Fortunately we are living in the digital era and there are hundreds of ways to get started online.

In this blog post I will show you what affiliate marketing is and how you can make money thanks to it.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Probably you didn’t realize it but you are already doing affiliate marketing.

I’m pretty sure you’ve recommended to your friends the last restaurant you’ve been or maybe shared your Airbnb or Booking invite link on Facebook.

These are 2 examples of how affiliate marketing works.

That’s why is really amazing because you can actually start from everything. 

Let’s give it a more professional definition:  

“Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make”.

Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income

In other words, it doesn’t matter if you like cameras and drones or you are passionate about shoes and clothes.

In every case you can start promoting those products and earning some money every time you make a sale.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

To avoid confusion, I go straight to the point.

As I said, affiliate marketing is the process of promoting other people’s products, in order to earn a commission every time someone buys those products.

Therefore, let’s see how the process looks like and who is involved:

Affiliate marketing for beginners: how does it work?

You sign up for an affiliate program on a specific website (e.g. Amazon).

In some cases we have websites that are called affiliate networks.

After you sign up, inside these platforms you can find a lot of different products to promote.

These products are offered by the merchants, who actually give the possibility to affiliate marketers to promote their products.

Therefore, as an affiliate marketer, you can publish content on your website to promote those products.

Once you start getting traffic to your website, some visitors will click on your affiliate links.

When a customer buys a product after clicking the link on your website, you’ll get paid by the affiliate network or the merchant.

To recap we have 4 different key-players: 

• affiliate network
• merchant
• affiliate marketer (or publisher)
• customer

How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

In this step-by-step guide I want to really make your life easier and show you the whole process to start getting your first commissions.

Affiliate marketing for beginners is not always so simple as it seems.

After you’ll finish this post, you will have a clear idea of what affiliate marketing is.

The process: step by step

1.Choose A Niche

A niche is simply a segment of a bigger market. The first thing to do in order to be successful is to do a lot of research online, prior to start any affiliate marketing campaign.

You can start by looking to niches in which you are interested or passionate and then consider your potential audience and how many products are associated with that niche.

Check out how to find a profitable niche in 4 simple steps. 

2. Find Products To Promote

This is a crucial part of your journey as choosing the right products could change your life. 

Usually it’s not difficult to find websites where there are products to promote, even if you are a total beginner in affiliate marketing. These kinds of websites are called affiliate networks.

One of the biggest websites where you can apply for the affiliate program is Amazon. As you may know on Amazon you have a huge selection of products to promote for each category. It’s just up to you.

Instead, if you are interested in digital products, one of the biggest platforms online where to find good products to promote is ClickBank.

3. Build A Website

This is the foundation of every business online. Don’t worry it isn’t difficult as you may think. 

Open a WordPress blog like this one is just a matter of minutes. What you need to do is just to buy a domain name and a hosting service to host your blog.

My first recommendation as hosting service is SiteGround, that I personally use to host this blog. The performances of this hosting are really outstanding and the good thing is that for the same price you have included as well the domain name.

Instead, if you want to build your free website at the beginning and you don’t want to spend any money I recommend you to use a tool like SiteRubix.

If you are lazy (come on, all of us are lazy) and you don’t want to build an entire website, it’s possible to start doing affiliate marketing just having a landing page to where you will send your visitors. What you need to do is just to choose the best landing page builder that fits your need.

4. Post Content

Of course a website itself is nothing if it doesn’t have any content on it. You need to fill your website with relevant content that will be useful for the people in your niche.

Then you will place affiliate links in strategic parts of your content in order that someone will be attracted to click on it. If they buy through your links, you’ll get a commission.

5. Drive Traffic

Once you have published content on your website or landing page, you need to attract visitors in target with your potential audience.

There are a lot of different ways to drive traffic that we can divide in Free Traffic and Paid Traffic.

The first free traffic source where a visitor can find your blog is through Google search, meanwhile you can promote your website for free just posting your blog posts on social media.

If you have some money to spend you can think about using paid advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads to send targeted traffic to some blog posts or landing pages.

6. Make Sales

Finally you are ready to make money!

If you have a good offer and highly targeted traffic it’s just a matter of time and you’ll get your first commissions.

Join our community for free and learn the best way to make money online.

Who Is Affiliate Marketing For?

I’m really serious if I say that affiliate marketing is not for everyone but if you are reading this article is because you want to know how to make a passive income online.

It’s not something that will happen overnight, that’s why you need to think for the long term if you want to build a profitable business.

If you are willing to put into some efforts and you want to change your life, that’s enough to start changing your current situation.

You don’t need any prior experience to get started in affiliate marketing, but what you need is the help of the best community of affiliate marketers, where you can get a free course of affiliate marketing for beginners.

Wealthy Affiliate has helped thousands of people, including me, to start their own online business from home.

How Much Money Can You Make With Affiliate Marketing?

The sky is the limit…It’s not a joke! It depends on your hard work and your skills.

It’s obvious that at the beginning the things are always harder but with constancy and dedication the results will come.

Although it’s possible to earn a full-time income when you become an expert affiliate marketer, it’s not realistic to expect a full-time income when you are a beginner.

You can earn $10 a day as much as $100 a day or more but if you don’t work properly you may end up with $0 per month.

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

There are plenty of ways to make money with affiliate marketing, as I said before the sky is the limit.

Nowadays the real problem is not to find the right platform but to find the right audience.

You can make money sharing your links on social media, sending emails, buying solo ads, doing pay per click advertising, building a sales funnel and many more.

I would like to focus on the 4 easy steps to become a successful affiliate marketer.

4 easy steps to become a successful affiliate marketer

Here I describe you the 4 best ways to start your own affiliate marketing business.

1. Review products

The easiest way is to create content around products in your niche that you like or that you already use, so in fact you don’t need to invent nothing so special than just to talk about these products.

For instance, you could open a blog where you review books related to business and marketing.

Really any product works.

If you don’t like to write you can make a video review and post it on YouTube, putting your affiliate links in the description.

Look at this YouTube Channel, reviewing “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, the  #1 bestseller in personal finance by Robert Kiyosaki. It has more than 800k views.

You can check an example of my review here.

The easiest way to start is to find a category on Amazon that you’re interested in and open a blog around a particular topic, related to the niche you’ve chosen.

Simply sign up to Amazon Associates and you can then proceed to get your own affiliate link to any product on Amazon.

Otherwise from the main page of Amazon you just scroll to the bottom and click on “become an affiliate”.

Related: Amazon Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

2. Collect Emails

“The money is in the list”. 

Email marketing is still considered one of the top marketing strategy to use online.

Therefore, you need to build an email list if you want to boost your results, doing affiliate marketing.

Even if you collect just few hundreds email addresses you can already improve your results and therefore your commissions just sending few emails to your list where you promote other offers.

To do this you can simply use an email autoresponder to create simple automation and send emails in autopilot (e.g. once a week).

If someone leaves you an email address is because is interested in what you have to propose.

Here you have 3 ways to collect emails:

• A landing page where the visitor leaves you the email in exchange for something else, such as a report or a free ebook (lead magnet).
• Hello Bar at the top of your page with a specific call to action (e.g. download your free report).
• Sidebar widget, it’s a box appearing on the side of your blog when the visitor is scrolling your posts.

3. Live Webinars

Maybe this is already more advanced but in fact it’s a really effective way to engage with your audience.

It depends on the product you want to promote. In general a webinar is effective for high-ticket products (such as a $997 course).

Even if you are not so experienced and you are shy to go live, you could eventually just talk and present your slides instead of showing your face.

Once you’ve recorded it you can then use it all over again as many times as you want. This is an example of recorded webinar:

To create your webinar you can simply use a landing page builder, such as ClickFunnels, or in some cases use the tool included in some email autoresponder services such as GetResponse.

Then, you can promote your webinar on social media for a week in advance and get people to sign up.

4. Paid Advertising

As this guide is about affiliate marketing for beginners I left this option as the last one.

In fact paid advertising is maybe the most effective way to have faster return on your investment (ROI) but at the same time it requires bigger investment from your side.

Spending some money in order to promote your offers or website can cause you some issues if you don’t have enough money left for your business.

As you are not sure whether a campaign will have a high ROI or not, it’s better to wait when you are a bit more experienced and you are already making  some money constantly with affiliate marketing.

The most important platforms to do paid advertising (pay-per-click campaigns) are Facebook ads and Google ads.

In order to master paid advertising for affiliate marketing, check out Super Affiliate System.

FB has an excellent targeting tool in order to show your ads to the right people. You can really be super detailed and be sure to attract the right visitors to your offer.

You can run PPC campaigns to :

• promote your offers/products
• get people to sign up for your webinar
• grow your email list, offering a lead magnet

In Google you can run PCC advertising, targeting specific keywords related to your niche.

If you write a review about ClickFunnels for example (landing page builder), you may see your ad at the top of the google search maybe under the real website (ClickFunnels is promoting itself).

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Everyone has his own needs and interests in starting an online business.

Here I want to show you why to invest your time in affiliate marketing.

1. Full-Time Passive Income

Potentially you can build a business that will pay you over and over again even when you are sleeping (24/7). Once your content is online you can get paid for that even after years you posted it.

That’s why the more effort you punt into the better. Passive income is a dream for everyone and affiliate marketing is one of the best way to achieve it.

2. Flexible Working Schedule

You can decide on your own when to work and most important from where to work.

For me has always been a priority the concept of be the owner of my time. Wouldn’t it be great to quit the 9-5 lifestyle and work at your own pace?

This is what I call the “real freedom”. Many of you might be inspired by the laptop lifestyle but you have to know that this is only possible through hard work and dedication.

When  I need concentration I prefer to work from home. Anyway, very often, I decide to go for a coffee in any Starbucks in my city. I feel free working from there (free Wi-Fi will be your best friend).

3. No prior experience needed

Last but not least, really everyone can build a profitable affiliate marketing business starting from scratch. You don’t need to be a web master, digital marketer or online guru to build your own blog and start to make sales.

Thanks to a lot of digital tools available (free or paid) you can start in minutes. NO coding skills, NO sales skills, just HARD WORK!

You can start NOW and for FREE joining me in the biggest community for affiliate marketers.

How Can I learn Affiliate Marketing?

It’s one thing to learn affiliate marketing for beginners and it’s another for who already has some experience.

At the beginning you need someone who will show you how to set up a website or blog optimized for making money from your affiliate programs.

I’m pretty sure you have now a better idea about affiliate marketing and you understand the basic concept behind it.

This is not enough if you want to have a website up and running and be ready to make money.

There are a lot of skills to master in order to become successful in affiliate marketing. Such as website creation, SEO, content marketing, social media, user experience, funnel marketing, etc.

Therefore, below you have my first recommendation in order to learn affiliate marketing.

Wealthy Affiliate is the biggest online community and the best program for affiliate marketers.

Do you want to…

• work anytime and anywhere
• make money while you sleep
• be free to travel and stay with your family

Wealthy Affiliate has allowed me and thousands of other marketers around the world to build an online business.

With your free account you get access to:

• 10 lessons covering basic topics (choose a niche, build a website, SEO, content creation)
• Free keyword tool: Jaaxy (up to 30 searches)
• 2 free websites with SiteRubix
• Live chat for a week

And if needed you will have my support inside the community to ask me any question.

Conclusion: Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

I hope this step-by-step guide helped you to understand the basics of affiliate marketing.

Nowadays affiliate marketing allowed a lot of people to have a full-time passive income.

I’m on my way to become a successful digital entrepreneur. I hope you will get the success you deserve too.

All of this thanks to affiliate marketing!

I want to give you a realistic expectation. You can start making your first commissions within 3 to 4 months if you take it seriously.

To start earning a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars you’ll need from 1 to 2 years time. ALL DEPENDS ON YOU!

The best choice you can do today is to join Wealthy Affiliate, create your free account and start building your own online business.

If you have any question, please leave a comment below.

See you inside!