Affiliate marketing for beginners is a foundational aspect that needs to be understood clearly before further steps are taken. So, if you have ever wanted to try out affiliate marketing but don’t know-how, this article is for you.
Have you ever wondered how to successfully make money in affiliate marketing as a beginner? Or perhaps you are not even aware of the affiliate marketing hacks that exist, talk more of utilizing them to grow your business as a beginner.
A couple of things could be involved and that is what this article will be addressing. We will be talking about the hacks you can use to get amazing results either as an affiliate marketing beginner or an established affiliate marketer.
We want you to know that as much as affiliate marketing can be done from the comfort of your home without a need to own a product or develop one, if you don’t pay attention to the right thing, you may never get your desired result.
Affiliate marketing for beginners is a part of affiliate marketing that determines the future and growth of the business.
Do you know that 81% of brands and 84% of publishers leverage the power of affiliate marketing, a statistic that will continue to increase as affiliate marketing spending increases every year?
You don’t want to be caught off guard, do you?
Moving on, you would agree with us that good things deserve the best practices, and for affiliate marketing, you deserve to know the right thing and how to achieve them.
This is why in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we do not only teach our students how to start and grow as an affiliate marketer, but we also teach them every other aspect in digital marketing as well so they are not stranded in knowledge and experience.
Keep reading as we explore those together!
How Does affiliate marketing work
Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing marketing method in which a third-party affiliate promotes a product or service made by another company and earns a commission for each sale or action made through their unique referral link. The process involves three parties: the seller or product creator, the affiliate or advertiser, and the consumer.
Affiliate marketing works by spreading the responsibilities of product marketing and creation across parties, leveraging the abilities of a variety of individuals for a more effective marketing strategy while providing contributors with a share of the profits. The affiliate promotes the product or service to their audience through various channels, such as social media, blogs, or email marketing. If a consumer clicks on the affiliate’s unique referral link and makes a purchase or completes a desired action, the affiliate earns a commission.
What are the Benefits of Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing offers numerous advantages for both businesses and content creators. Here are some key benefits highlighted in the search results:
- Extended Reach: By partnering with affiliates who already have a dedicated audience matching your target market, you can leverage their reach to promote your products or services to a broader audience.
- Increased Traffic and Leads: Affiliates can generate traffic and leads for your business, helping to boost sales and conversions.
- Cost-Effective Promotion: Affiliate marketing is a low-cost way to promote your products or services to a wider audience, ensuring consistency with other marketing efforts while achieving maximum results.
- Revenue Sharing Model: The revenue-sharing model in affiliate marketing motivates affiliates to continue promoting your brand, leading to sustained marketing efforts and increased sales.
- Flexible Working Arrangements: Affiliate marketing offers flexibility for content creators, allowing them to work full-time, part-time, or as freelancers based on their preferences.
- Passive Income Generation: Affiliate marketing allows content creators to develop passive income streams by monetizing their content effectively.
Affiliate marketing serves as a mutually beneficial arrangement where businesses can reach new audiences cost-effectively while providing content creators with opportunities to monetize their platforms and engage with brands they believe in.
Great Hacks in Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
1. Know what you are starting out
Just as we stated at the beginning of this article, you should know what you are stepping into, and a good place to start is to get familiar with the terms in affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a means for you to earn commission from promoting/marketing a company’s or someone’s product/service.
It involves having your own website or blog and sending the traffic you generate to another person’s website to buy their products or services. For every sale initiated by a link from your site, you earn a percentage called affiliate sales commission.
Affiliate Marketer
An affiliate marketer is someone who does affiliate marketing as a career and a business as well. An affiliate Marketer can also be said to be an individual who is responsible for creating an involvement chain between the parties involved in affiliate marketing.
Their duty is to maintain and properly advertise the products to get sales that would in turn convert to commissions for them.
Affiliate Sales Commission
Affiliate sales commission is the reward an affiliate marketer gets for his/her affiliate marketing skill. It ranges between 5 – 30% though not limited to this.
So, basically, this works by you getting rewarded for helping a business promote and sell its product. Surprisingly, affiliate marketing is not restricted to digital marketing, it also exists in traditional marketing as well, depending on the product and services you want to promote.
Some products have an online audience. While some have an offline audience, whichever one, you just have to go for what works for you.
And it’s not compulsory for you to sell all the time before you get an affiliate sales commission. Yes, because there are different affiliate programs and they use different payment terms such as:
- Pay per sale: This kind of payment allows a product owner to pay you a percentage of the sale price when the purchase is completed. So, the leads you generate must be converted to a customers before you can get paid by the product owner.
- Pay per click: You get paid here based on the number of visitors that click the link that would direct them to the product owner’s website from your own website or blog. It doesn’t matter if a sale is made, you will still get paid.
- Pay per lead: You receive payment the moment a referred visitor provides their contact information on the product’s website by using the contact form on the website.
2. Know the advantages and disadvantages
Advantages
1. Low cost to start up
Like I said earlier in this article, this type of marketing requires little capital. You don’t have to spend all your savings or you might not even get to spend any of it.
This doesn’t mean that you won’t have to spend anything, of course, you would. Example is having to spend $3 and above to host your website, and also buy a domain. We will be sharing more about this in the other part of the article.
The low cost in affiliate marketing also means that no matter how large it grows to become, you won’t be needing a physical office or even have to hire professionals like customer support.
Yours is just to include the link in your blog or website, create content, drive traffic, and you are good to go.
2. You get to make profits immediately
If you pick a fast-selling/growing niche, you have a higher chance of earning an income immediately you start.
All you need to do is to refer quality people and your payment is ready. You just have to stand in as a middle-man and get paid.
3. Scalable business
Affiliate marketing is one business that can easily be scaled into the white label drop shipping without difficulty.
You would ask, what is white-label, right? Well, white label is a concept that allows a company to produce goods or services that people can sell on their behalf.
Basically, white label is doing affiliate marketing on a large scale and it is this large scale that would require customer support as you have a lot of businesses advertising their products on your website.
Imagine you own a large content website or blog that has a thousand or more persons as visitors every day. And these visitors come to look for engaging and interesting articles about health, sport, fashion, traveling, business, and other topics. on your website. Then, a good way to monetize your site would be to sell banner spaces, placements of ad creatives (announcements, interviews, etc), and native ads, such as product reviews or quizzes and games.
Disadvantages
This is why in this article we would also be considering the disadvantages and the risk that comes along with the advantages.
1. Takes time to establish
Like every other business out there, it takes time to arrive at success. On an average, it will take you between 18 to 36 months before you can start earning an income and that is if you are consistent.
From having to build an audience to getting your website and blog ranked by search engines and securing lucrative affiliate partnerships, the process is long but definitely worth it. The moment you can scale through the hurdles, you can sit back to eat the fruit of your labor.
2. Bad affiliate partnership
There is a possibility of you running into a bad partnership that may be caused by some factors either from your end or from your partners.
As much as there are many affiliate marketing programs, there is a possibility that not everyone will pay high commissions.
Sometimes, your partner may decide not to pay you for the work you’ve done probably due to change leadership, and of course, the new leadership may either not know you exist or decide to review the percentage for commission payments.
This and many other factors here are the disadvantages of affiliate marketing.
Meanwhile, in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach our students how to scale through the hurdles of affiliate marketing alongside the other aspects of digital marketing. You should register!
3. Know the channels of affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing for beginners is the foundational knowledge of this business and this is why you need to know the channels that exist. When you do, it becomes easier to navigate through and get your desired result.
A channel is a means used to convey information from one or more senders to one or more receivers, and in affiliate marketing, it can be said to be a pathway through which the marketers convey information to their prospective buyers.
These channels are:
- Influencers
- Bloggers
- Email list
- Large media websites
1. Influencers
An influencer is someone who has the power to influence the purchasing decisions of a specific segment of a population.
This person, in particular, has a great advantage in affiliate marketing, as he/she already has an impressive following and it makes it very easy for them to direct consumers to a seller’s products through their social media posts, blogs, and other means of interactions with their followers. And of course, they get a share of the profits that comes from the sales they made.
We can also call this form of marketing, influencer marketing. Campaigns done by these set of people are pretty much popular on Instagram where brands can easily partner with them especially the ones who are seen as experts and authorities in their chosen niche.
A brief example of how influencer marketing works in affiliate marketing is the registration process for a product especially the ones that require you to download the mobile applications on your smartphones.
After registering, there is a navigation button where you are asked to refer a friend or friends and get a specific percentage of money after your referred client successfully registers (Pay per lead). Or it could be when your referred friend eventually makes use of the product either to make a purchase or to make a transaction (Pay per sale).
As you must have noticed, a couple of us have been involved as unknown influencers in affiliate marketing. Sometimes it could even be a “tell XYZ, that you are coming from me”, and you get a share for influencing that person’s purchasing decision either with your reviews or recommendations.
An example of small-scale influencer marketing in affiliate marketing for beginners. Source: Piggyvest
2. Bloggers
Having a blog that has the ability to rank organically in search engines is another perfect channel for affiliate marketing for beginners. This is a chance for bloggers to excel at increasing sellers’ conversions.
All the blogger has to do is simply sample products or services, write a comprehensive review that promotes the brand and its visibility as well, driving traffic from their blogs to the seller’s website, and of course, they don’t do it for free.
The blogger gets paid for his or her influence on a consumer’s purchasing decisions, this is similar to influencers except that this one is done through blogs. The word that the blogger spreads is what is being paid for, as it spreads the value of the product or services thereby helping to improve the seller’s sales.
3. Email List
An email list is another channel for affiliate marketing beginners to consider. We call it email marketing, and it is the use of emails to market and promote a business.
This is a viable source of income in affiliate marketing for beginners. You can leverage an email list to promote a seller’s product by including hyperlinks to products and get a commission once the purchase is done.
Employ various campaigns for the collection of emails and then send out emails regarding the products that are being promoted.
Meanwhile, in our 90% practical digital marketing course, email marketing is one of the modules we have for our students. We teach them how to start and grow a mailing list alongside other features of digital marketing that would make you a world-class digital marketer.
An example of using email marketing for affiliate marketing.
4. Identify your target audience
This is number one on the list of affiliate marketing hacks. It is one thing you should focus on either as an affiliate marketer starter or an established affiliate marketer. If you want to get the best out of your affiliate marketing, you need to research and identify your target audience.
Just so you know, you don’t necessarily have to target the general audience as this would mean taking up every niche which might not work well for you.
It would also affect your focus as you might end up being a jack of all and a master of none. A target audience helps you to know the kind of content to create that would attract and be engaging.
Your target audience could be couples. But with your niche being anything that has to do with marriage and undefined, the desired results will be far fetched.
You can do this by doing research, taking polls, and asking friends and people around you. With this, you can get the kind of audience you want and the kind of content that would attract them.
If you can get a strong grasp on this particular affiliate marketing hack, then, you are positioned for growth.
4. Pick a niche
After identifying your audience, the next thing is for you to pick a niche.
This is one of the affiliate marketing hacks that is as important as every other one as they all work hand-in-hand to get results.
And you don’t have to register for every niche that exists.
As an affiliate marketer, your duties require that you have in-depth knowledge and skill about a niche. Now, imagine taking on every niche that exists.
For example, one of our employees currently has a blog where she shares tips about faith and lifestyle. You see, that is her area of specialty and she chose to concentrate on that alone. Definitely, all the contents she shares or will be sharing will relate to that.
There are several affiliate marketing niches you can choose from, fashion, education, digital marketing, health, tech, and many more. Pick the one that suits you well and that you also know you will always have content to share on.
To pick a niche in affiliate marketing, you should consider the following factors.
- Easy promotion. Will it be easy for you to promote this product? Does it represent the content you share?
- Rate of monetization. Is there an existing market for it already? Will you get paid for promoting products under that niche?
5. Create contents
The moment your website is ready, the next and right thing for you to do is to start curating content. Your content can revolve around product reviews, tutorials on how to use a product, or do-it-yourself (DIY).
Creating content is an affiliate marketing hack that drives engagement and builds credibility.
Your content should be genuine and engaging. Remember you already know your target audience so create contents that will speak the language your audience understands. Contents that they will easily connect with and also push them to buy from you.
For a blog, your content can come in the form of articles or videos sometimes, depending on your audience.
Product reviews are a powerful way to share your experience about a product with your audience. This at all times have been proven to have a huge influence on purchasing decisions.
Basically, 89 percent of consumers/customers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations.
Ensure that your product reviews persuade your followers/audience to try the product you’re recommending. There are a number of tips you should keep in mind including giving honest product reviews and publishing seasonal content.
6. SEO
This is one of the most important affiliate marketing hacks for beginners that should never be ignored. It is like the oil that powers up your affiliate marketing.
Invest in SEO, SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of ensuring your website is on top of the search engines result page list.
The key to getting more traffic lies in integrating content with search engine optimization techniques. You can never go wrong with this. As it will not only increase traffic to your blog or website but also establish you as an authority
Search engines do the work when it comes to search engine optimization.
FAQs
How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing with No Experience
To begin affiliate marketing without prior experience, follow these steps:
- Study Free Resources on Affiliate Marketing available online to learn about affiliate marketing principles, niche selection, and content creation.
- Pick a Niche: Choose a niche that aligns with your interests, profit potential, and competition level. Selecting the right niche is crucial for the success of your affiliate website.
- Launch Your Website: Create a website using a reliable hosting service and a suitable WordPress theme. A well-designed website is essential for showcasing your affiliate content.
- Start Writing: Produce high-quality content related to your niche to attract and engage your audience. Consistent content creation is key to building a successful affiliate marketing venture.
How Much Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing?
The earnings from affiliate marketing vary widely based on factors like product type, content quality, and audience size. While some affiliates make less than $10,000 annually, top earners can reach six- to seven-figure incomes. Success in affiliate marketing requires dedication, patience, and continuous effort to build a sustainable income stream over time.
Do You Need a Website to Do Affiliate Marketing?
While having a website can be beneficial for affiliate marketing, it is not mandatory to start. You can leverage free platforms like social media, blogs, YouTube, or forums to promote affiliate products. Also, engage with your audience effectively. Building a website may come later as you scale your affiliate marketing efforts or diversify your online presence.
Conclusion
From all said, affiliate marketing is one viable aspect of digital marketing. And it is not restricted to expert because experts are also known to have started from being beginners.
To get the best out of affiliate marketing as a beginner, you should register for our 90% practical digital marketing course. Where you get tot learn everything you need to know about how to be an affiliate marketer!
More relevant articles on affiliate marketing
Video Marketing for Beginners: Using Video Marketing for Business Success
How to build a WordPress website or blog in Nigeria
Top Affiliate Marketing Programs in Nigeria With High Commission
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) – Guide, Importance, And Best Tips