How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners | Step by Step Guide

How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners in Step by Step Guide
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Are you looking for how to start affiliate marketing from scratch?

Do you want to be a top affiliate marketer?

I believe you’ve landed in this article because you are looking for a comprehensive write-up on getting started with affiliate marketing today.

Many can’t see that times have changed!

The Industrial Age

You set your alarm for 4.00am, sign in at the office at 7.00am or 8.00am. Close for the day at 4 pm or 5 pm. Get home at 8 pm or 10 pm.

You dread Mondays. Always looking forward to the weekend.

You work 22 days in a month and get paid only once.

They decide your worth and pay you just enough to keep you from quitting.

You are further humiliated by the Pension Scheme!

They decide how much you are Worth, even after retirement!

Digital Age, (The 21st century)

No Alarm! You wake Up when You finish sleeping!

You work from your Home. Your bedroom, sitting room or the garden beside your house.

If you have any need to go out of your house, you take your office with you. It’s called Smart Office.

Every day is a weekend for you. You look forward to Mondays because it’s part of your Weekend and Green Days.

You decide how much you’re worth and when to get Paid!

You are Your Own BOSS!

Unfortunately, most people aren’t aware that times have changed!

Questions regarding affiliate marketing have been sent to my email and that’s why I’ve written this post for those who are looking to make money online or those looking to start an online business.

The truth is affiliate marketing was thoroughly covered in our digital marketing training course.

So, if you’re searching for an affiliate marketing course, you should just look into our course details.

This is because you won’t only learn affiliate marketing, you will also understand everything there is to promoting and expanding your affiliate marketing business.

This post is just your starting point to learning affiliate marketing for free.

Perhaps,

9 Tested and Proven Ways to Make $500/Day with Digital Marketing Skills working from home or anywhere.

*By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service.

If you want to expand and know more, don’t hesitate to click here to see what we offer.

Making money with affiliate marketing is not so difficult though.

There are certain affiliate marketing strategies affiliate marketers have failed to do. And that’s why most of them failed!

You can create passive income with affiliate marketing.

In fact, some have popped the question:

Can affiliate marketing be a career?

Absolutely… You can make money with different referral programs.

In truth, one of our students has and is still making money through our course referral program. So why can’t it be a career?

If you are looking to be your own boss, or want to make money passively… then here is the article you have been looking for.

Before you read to the end of this article, you will agree that affiliate marketing can be an exciting career.

In this article, I’ll break down Affiliate Marketing in bits.

You will be able to start a successful affiliate marketing business from anywhere in the world.

Let’s get things underway.

First,

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing involves having your own site and sending your traffic to someone else’s site to buy their products or services. For every sale initiated by a link from your site, you earn a percentage–an affiliate sales commission.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketing is basically when you are rewarded for helping a business promote and sell its product.

For example;

If you sign up for Konga affiliate program and promote its product, then you will get a commission when the visitor you send from your site, blog or Facebook page makes a purchase.

When you join Konga Affiliate program and choose the products that you want to sell, Konga will provide you with a unique affiliate code that you can use to refer traffic to their website.

When interested customers click on these links from your site, blog or Facebook page, they get redirected to Konga and if they purchase a product or subscribe to a service you as the referrers make a commission.

Do you want to know the exciting part of affiliate marketing?

You don’t need to sell products all the time to make a commission.

Yes… you really do not have to sell all the time to make a commission.

This is basically because different affiliate programs can use different payment terms such as:

  • Pay per Sale: In this program, a product owner pays you a percentage of the sale price when the purchase is completed.
  • Pay per Click: In this program, you get paid based on the number of visitors you redirect to the products owner website from your affiliate site, whether or not a sale is made.
  • Pay per Lead: You get paid once the referred visitors provide their contact information on the target site by filling out a simple contact form.

With that said,

Let’s look at the benefits of affiliate marketing in more closely.

What are the benefits or advantages of affiliate marketing?

Here are some of the importance of affiliate marketing and why you should invest in it.

1. Low Startup Cost

low-startup-cost

Other startups require huge startup cost, you don’t need to spend 1 year raising a large capital investment from investors before your business can function.

In affiliate marketing;

You only need to spend $3/month on hosting plus $7 for a domain in order to launch a website.

Sometimes you don’t even need a website!

You can start affiliate marketing without a website, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Youtube and so on.

Perhaps, to make the most out of affiliate marketing, it’s recommended that you have a website where you promote and review affiliate products.

We offer cheap hosting services for your website or blog if you intend to create a blog from scratch (click here to see our hosting and domain packages).

From then on,

Your only true costs are content (which you should be able to write yourself), choosing a nice CMS and website design (you can use WordPress, which is free) and then writing a blog post to help generate traffic and sales to your site.

Even once you start earning an income with your site, your overheads will still remain low. You don’t need to hire an expensive office to meet clients in, you don’t need to hire anyone to deal with customer support (like you would in an e-commerce venture).

You don’t need to hire an expensive office to meet clients in, you don’t need to hire anyone to deal with customer support (like you would in an e-commerce venture).

2. Earn An Income Quickly

Earn An Income Quickly

With affiliate marketing, you can literally start making money almost straight away.

If you work in popular niches such as technology and fashion for instance, then you can earn lots of money for every customer you refer to buy.

You only need to refer a few customers every month to make huge money.

This strategy is how I started my own affiliate marketing business around studying at college. I then kept re-investing and doubling my income to the point where I was making enough money to pursue it full time as a career. It really can scale quickly once you start to see your first sales.

Remember, you don’t need to provide any ongoing support or services to your referred customers.

Once you’ve referred them, the operator/merchant will take care of the customer loyalty and upsell marketing campaigns.

3. You Can Make Millions From Affiliate Marketing

One of the misconceptions of affiliate marketing is that it’s only for small businesses.

However, there are plenty of cases where affiliates have gone on to build multi-million-pound brands and ventures.

Some Nigeria blogger like Mr Pascal Okafor, the owner of www.naijatechguide.com has hit a jackpot with Konga.com affiliate program. He won N1,000,000 as the best affiliate marketer of konga.com.

The truth is,

Affiliate marketing has no limits, the more traffic you garnered, the more money you make. It’s your affiliate marketing strategy that matters most.

One of the lessons to be learned here is to launch an affiliate marketing business in a high-growth industry in Nigeria or one where you can add your own unique value to your Nigerian visitors. This is what will help you scale your site quicker and reach that dream of retiring at 21…hehe.

This is what will help you scale your site quicker and reach that dream of retiring at 21…hehe.

4. It’s Easy To Scale An Affiliate Marketing Business

It’s Easy To Scale An Affiliate Marketing Business

Many successful affiliate marketers have discovered that scaling their businesses into the white label, dropshipping or wholesale operations was not a terribly difficult task.

An increasingly common thing I’m seeing successful affiliates do nowadays to scale their operations is to launch their own white-label operation or skin

The advantages of starting your own white label are that you can increase your conversions by reducing traffic leakage as well as recruiting other affiliates to promote your brand on your behalf.

It also is very easy to scale an affiliate marketing site in eCommerce by venturing into dropshipping or wholesale.

5. Many Monetization Sources

Many Monetization Sources

One of the reasons one should focus on affiliate marketing is:

Affiliate marketing lends itself really well to different marketing channels and sources of customer acquisition.

For example,

RightCasino managed to monetize traffic through industry and entertainment news, Twitter, PPC (we’ve just translated our site into foreign languages to take advantage of cheaper sources of traffic in other countries), email marketing and others. (We will show you how you ways to promote your affiliate products faster if you click here to join our digital marketing training)

Some brands even let you advertise your affiliate links directly on media and PPC networks such as Facebook. This means you don’t even need your own website to start affiliate marketing.

These  5 reasons are the most important factors why you should start affiliate marketing today.

But, are there cons of affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing can be a great and successful venture that one undertakes. It clearly has its disadvantages too.

Disadvantages of affiliate marketing

1. Take time to establish

In spite of all the goodies attached with starting an affiliate business. Bear in mind that, it is not a get rich quick scheme.

Just like every other business, affiliate marketing takes time to establish.

On average, it takes between 18 to 36 months to start earning a real income from affiliate marketing sites, and that is if you work on the site just about every day.

Building an audience, getting ranked in search engines, gaining the trust of readers, and finding lucrative affiliate partnerships takes a while.

2. Requires self-discipline

It is not like other traditional jobs that require you to follow a set routine tasks and agenda.

Affiliate marketing can be carried out at your own time when convenient.

And for this to be achieved, it requires a lot of self-discipline to get to the top.

3. You may run into bad affiliate partnership

When you search on google for top affiliate marketing programs, you will find so many.

But the truth is;

Not all of them are paying with high commission.

Sometimes:

Your affiliate partner will decide not to pay you for your work or may even change leadership or go out of business.

4. No control over pricing and commission

Another one of the big industry disadvantages of affiliate marketing is that you usually can’t negotiate product pricing.

This also ties into having very little control over commission rates, which are often set by the company.

These two factors are controlled by the affiliate company you’re in partnership with.

5. Huge Competition

This is one of the biggest industry advantages but also fit into disadvantages of affiliate marketing list.

What makes affiliate marketing so attractive is it has a low barrier of entry. Unlike other entrepreneurial activities, you don’t have to have a lot of startup capital or skills or training to become an affiliate marketer.

That’s why people are signing up for different affiliate programs to sell one thing or the other.

Affiliate marketing has big competition and you should always have that at the back of your head.

You just have to take advantage of this competition and to do that, when first starting out, finding the right niche for your affiliate business is so crucial and it all starts by choosing the right domain name.

Now that you have seen the meaning, advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing,

I’m sure you want me to tackle questions such as:

  • How do I start?
  • What level of literacy/skills do you need?
  • Which are best-paying ones?
  • What is the commission model like?
  • How can you promote your affiliate link?
  • How do you get an affiliate link?
  • How do you monitor the clicks on the link?

Calm, take a chilled Fanta as I’m about to take you for a ride.

So, let’s get down to business real quick!

How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners | Step by Step Guide (2018)

Step 1: Pick An Affiliate Niche

Easiest way of making money in Nigeria

Set your mind back then in school?

Are you best at all subjects?

No, right?

Okay, so here is what I’m trying to say.

Before you get started with affiliate marketing, you need to first pick a niche that interest you.

Choosing the best niche requires your expertise in that field and sometimes requires in-depth knowledge and skill.

For instance, one of my employees started a technology blog to market strictly tech product on his website and social media pages.

He opened this blog due to his interest in helping people with simple tech problems.

So, I believe you understand what I’m saying now.

There are different affiliate marketing niche you can venture in — Fashion, Education, Health, Digital products and more. Carefully look for the area you fit and find a product you would promote in that market.

Carefully look for the area you fit and find a product you would promote in that market.

Step 2. Build A Blog or Social Media Community

There’s no doubt that effective affiliate business requires a blog or affiliate website, the importance of a website for any digital business can’t be argued .

You’ll need a blog.

I think most of you already have it.

But if you don’t have a blog, do not worry we can help you…

Here are things to consider before choosing or picking a domain name for your blog or affiliate website. After, you can click here to learn more about building your own affiliate marketing blog or website.

Or you can register for our digital marketing certification training and we will help you in building your own WordPress website or blog because we have included it in our course module.

Like I said, a blog is important but not having one shouldn’t kill your dream of becoming an affiliate marketer.

I will tell you how you can achieve your dream of starting an affiliate business even if you can’t afford to create a blog.

The answer is quite simple.

You can start marketing your affiliate product directly on your social media accounts!

It’s that simple!

All you need to do is, create a social media account with a reasonable number of followers.

For instance, you can set up a Facebook group or Page, then grow your page likes slowly. But make sure you’re getting targeted followers who are interested in your affiliate niche market.

Am I making any sense at all?

Okay, let’s move on to the next step…

Step 3: Build Traffic

If you have a platform where you market your product — social media pages or a blog…

You must understand that your customers or follower are never enough!

The more website visitors on website or followers on your social media page, the better chances of getting increased affiliate sales.

Building traffic for Social media pages

Here are some affiliate marketing strategy resources that will help you grow a healthy social media community;

There is a lot more resource on the internet that will help you get more customers or followers where you can start marketing your affiliate products.

Building traffic for blog

Once you have built your own blog, all you need is a little over 100 to 1000 daily visitors to your blog.

This number can be improved on if you want to make more money.

Here are some affiliate marketing strategies to grow your website traffic:

Getting 100 to 1000 visitors for free on daily basis to your blog won’t be that difficult as long as you follow the step by step guide we give you to getting your blog post seen on Google’s first page in our digital marketing certification training.

Want to learn more about getting free visitors to your website?

Click here to learn more about search engine optimisation or click here to register for our digital marketing certification training and learn firsthand practical training on how to move your website or blog to Google’s coveted front page.

Trust me you can’t imagine the amount of revenue your online business can generate if your business is on Ggoogle’s front row seat.

Let me dish out one quick fast secrets to grow your list If you decide to go with the blog instead of Social Media page.

Create an eBook for your blog.

This is the most important factor in this process. You have to create an eBook which is really totally unique. It must attract your readers.

It’s what we call a lead magnet. Click here to learn more about lead generation.

Write an eBook with great information about your niche, which audience all over the world wants for FREE.

For doing this, create a very catchy cover and make the title of eBook a bit spicy.

If you can’t write an eBook then you can outsource it from others too. They are many writers available there. It may be a bit expensive.

So better you write by your own. After creating eBook, it’s time to create a landing page for your blog.

A landing page is where your visitors’ lands and that page attracts the visitor and makes him give his email/buy the eBook/subscribe to your blog etc.

Different landing pages have different purposes to convert.

For this process, you need that visitor to provide you with his genuine email address. In return, you’ll give the report/eBook to him for free. You create a landing page on your blog’s homepage because of most of the visitors arrive at your homepage.

If you don’t know to design landing pages, then do not worry.

At our digital marketing certification training, building a custom landing page for your business is one of the core practical aspects of our training program. Click here to register for our training let’s do the teaching.

We believe this is one of the most effective ways of generating quality leads or buyers with an interest in your affiliate product and service. Click here to learn more about building landing pages

So let’s move on.

latest online money making opportunities in nigeria

After that, you’ve to set up an email auto-responder.

When someone gives his/her email address, the auto-responder will send him a notification to confirm it and the eBook (for what he subscribed).

Now, this is where your knowledge of email marketing comes into play.

Email marketing is an important part of your affiliate marketing strategy. This is because most times 90% of your first-time blog visitors won’t buy from you immediately.

You will need an email marketing system to nurture them over time. Click here to learn more about email marketing

Once you have built this all things, you’ll need traffic to your landing page. Remember even if you are getting 1,000,000 daily traffic to your blog if they are not interested in what you are offering it will all be a waste of time and effort.

The key is getting quality traffic of people with an interest in the affiliate product or service you are offering.

Which is what we show you how to do at our digital marketing trainingClick here to learn more about generating traffic from google or social media.

For example, you want to sell slimming tea as an affiliate product and the kind of people you get to your blog are people who are already slim… what’s the likelihood of them buying the slim tea?

Almost close to none… even though you may get models who still want to slim down, the idea is to get as much quality leads as possible.

Once you got the email address, now you need to convert it to a buyer. Send them a 7-day course which will teach them something unique in your niche.

For example, if you are blogging about weight loss, send a 7-day course named “The 7-day Plan to lose weight guaranteed”

If your blog is about blogging tips, then send them “How to Make Your Blog More Profitable in 7-days”. The more attractive your headline is, the more attention you will get. (Click here to see how to generate headlines)

In this 7-day course, you need to win the heart of him/her. You need to build a relationship of trust with them.

So be careful while writing it, it is very very important. Once you are done writing it, now it’s time to earn some money. You have given them lots of information for free, now you need to earn money from them.

You will help them make the process fast, and help them, and earn money. Like when you sent a course titled “The 7-day Plan to lose weight guaranteed” promote some products related to losing weight and earn money.

When they trust you, they’ll surely buy it.

Step 4: Find An Affiliate Product

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To start affiliate marketing, you need an affiliate product to promote.

For finding products related to your niche, you need to sign up at Clickbank or Amazon Associates.

These two are best affiliate networks. I use Clickbank most. Amazon Associates is also good.

If you are looking for Nigerian affiliate programs that will pay in naira, you can read my article on top affiliate programs in Nigeria with high commission.

Where to get affiliate links or banner?

Once you are registered for the affiliate program, you will get a unique link named affiliate for the product from the affiliate networks. Include it in the email, when the person will buy it via that link, you’ll earn commission for it.

Let me show you how to get links with Jumia affiliate:

Here is a step to get affiliate links or banner links with Jumia.

  1. Login to your Jumia affiliate dashboard
  2. Locate Tools, then select if you want banner or links.
    where to get affiliate links or banner for Jumia

For generating banner links: 

  • Select your target country from the advertising offer drop-down menu.
  • Select banner folder and preferred banner size.

See picture below:

All you need is the banner code to get this banner to display on your website.

However, if you’re going with marketing your links on social media pages such as Facebook and Twitter, then you only need to copy the Ad URL.

For building affiliate links:

If you intend to promote a specific product, then this one is just what you need.

  • Select Build links.
  • Go to Jumia.com as if you’re a visitor then copy the URL of the product you want to promote on your website.
    how to build links on jumia affiliate
  • Head back to your affiliate dashboard. Select your target country from the advertising offer drop down menu and paste product URL in the PAGE URL section.

See picture below:

how to build links on jumia affiliate

So that’s pretty much how to generate product and banner links for your website.

This step does not look the same on other affiliate partners.

If you’re using Konga affiliate, AliExpress affiliate, Clickbank affiliate, Amazon affiliate etc, then you might as well look for how to do this on their different platforms. The concept is the same.

Let’s move on to the next step.

Step 5: Promote Affiliate Products

PROMOTE

Ok, now the most important part.

I believe by now you should have a perfect idea of what affiliate marketing is, have an idea of what products you want to promote, and know how to get your affiliate links for them.

Nevertheless,

If you don’t know how to properly promote them, everything you’ve learnt won’t make sense.

In this step,

We’re going to look at some of the easiest and most successful ways to promote an affiliate product.

a. Product Reviews

If you’ve built up a lot of trust with your audience, product reviews are a fantastic way to generate some sales.

This works for all three types of products you can promote, and I’ve personally seen success with each.

The key to a successful product review is honesty.

I’d generally only review things you like, but if there are drawbacks or little things that bother you – be upfront about them.

Most people know that no product is perfect.

So:

If you set expectations and are open with them, there’s a good chance they’ll buy it anyway.

Make sure you include the following items in any product review:

  • Clear headline featuring your desired keyword (“product name review” for instance)
  • Clear links for where to buy at both the top and bottom of the page
  • A clear recommendation
  • A personal story about how you use the product or why you recommend it

b. Tutorials

Tutorials are easily one of the most effective strategies for driving affiliate sales.

They can take a long time to put together, but it’s also totally worth it.

So what is a tutorial exactly?

Simple,

You create a post that shows people how to accomplish something step by step – you then make a product or service one of the key components to success.

For example,

Awhile back I created a post that was all about how to start email marketing in Nigeria. I talked about it in step by step guide. I make a few hundred dollars a month just from that one tutorial.

c. Comparison Posts

These can be another really effective strategy for making affiliate sales.

It works well when there are either two products that are very similar and people are thinking about one or the other.

A great example would be comparing the iPhone X vs the Samsung Galaxy S8.

If people are looking for a new smartphone, it’s probably going to be one of the two. You can create a definitive post and make sure you put your SEO skill into practice.

d. The Resource Page

This is probably the easiest thing you can do right now to bring in a few sales over the coming weeks: create a resource page.

Regardless of what your business is, there are tools, products, and services that you use to run your blog or business.

By putting together a page of all of your tools and resources, you’re creating something that’s shareable, as well as useful.

e. Email Series

This is probably the most effective (and most advanced) method we’ll talk about for making affiliate sales: your email list.

If you’re getting to the point where you have a sizable list, you could create a series of emails to promote a product.

This works best if it’s an information product with relatively high commissions.

For this to work well you should have the following:

  • A list of at least 1,000 people
  • A product you’ve either used and had success with, or have a very good story/reason for promoting
  • A product that converts well (talk to the creator about this)

If you have no idea about writing an email series that will sell your affiliate product, I recommend that you join our digital marketing training to learn more about this. We take our email marketing module seriously!

To sum it all up:

The secret success of affiliate marketing is not just consistency, hard work but using the right affiliate marketing strategies.

Also, understanding the various traffic generation tips.

That’s why we’ve don’t only teach you how to start affiliate marketing in our digital marketing course.

We also drive our focus on ensuring you learn how to build a customer base, target commercial value keywords and more importantly you will learn how to drive quality organic traffic for free.

Click here to join our complete digital marketing course.

Additional Resources:

9 Tested and Proven Ways to Make $500/Day with Digital Marketing Skills working from home or anywhere.

*By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service.

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