In this article, I am going to cover everything you need to know about affiliate marketing, from how the process works all the way to making your first ever sale and commission.

As well as things to watch out for, methods that work incredibly well in 2022, and ways to supplement your income by being an affiliate for multiple companies.

So let’s dive into the basics first…

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting someone else’s product or service and in return for finding them a new customer, they will pay you (the affiliate marketer) a commission for the sale generated.

Which can range massively depending on the types of products/price points etc. I’ll be talking more about commissions later on.

Essentially affiliate marketing is a win/win/win business model.

It’s a great way for businesses to acquire new customers, it’s a great way for the affiliate to earn money without having their own product, and customers may never have found/heard of the product or business without the affiliate introducing them.

So in even more simple terms, the affiliate marketer is the middle man/bridge between a product and a customer.

It can also be the most passive form of income out there because it’s not the responsibility of the affiliate marketer to deal with payments, refunds, support, shipping, logistics or anything a business needs to worry about!

You simply just need to promote the company’s products and the more customers you bridge to the product/business, the more money and affiliate income you can make.

Affiliate Marketing Income

Ok, let’s dive into the fun part first and talk about the amount of money that can be made because let’s face it, that’s why you’re here…

I’m going to start off by saying that there is a ton of money to be made as an affiliate, but it’s going to take time, effort and determination on your behalf.

Like anything worthwhile!

I actually started my online affiliate marketing journey back in 2018 and one of the first things I googled at the time was ‘Is affiliate marketing saturated?’

And tons of blog posts came up saying yes, it’s extremely saturated and there’s very little money to be made.

Sure some niches are incredibly popular such as finance, fitness and business.

But there are always new businesses and products coming to the market, so the key is to hop onto a trend before the rest of the crowd does.

Since I read the articles talking about how little money can be made with affiliate marketing, I’ve made over $400,000 in affiliate sales and now work full-time as an affiliate marketer.

Here are my sales with just 1 affiliate program.

Now, I’m not saying this to brag or show off at all!

There are affiliate marketers out there who make way more money than me.

I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, passively…

But I just want to make sure you’re aware of the vast amounts of opportunities that are out there in the affiliate marketing world and not to let negativity from others put you off.

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Finding customers as an affiliate marketer is your one and only job, so building up an audience of people who like, listen and trust you is going to make you wildly successful and should be your top priority.

So if you already have an audience or tons of followers on social media, it’s going to be much quicker for you to start getting results.

But don’t worry if you’re starting from scratch, this was how I started out back in 2018.

There are so many different marketing strategies that are suited to everyone, from people who like to write, people who like to create videos and be on camera, people who love to use social media, and so on.

It’s not one shoe fits all, so let’s dive in.

Affiliate Website

One of the best and most passive ways of generating affiliate income is through having a website that educates and reviews products, which can help your target audience make a buying decision.

First, you’ll need to choose a niche in which you have an interest and knowledge.

You don’t need to be an expert, but at the same time, you’ve got to be able to educate and help people at ‘entry-level’ in the niche you choose.

Then create content that can do 2 things:

• Build up trust with your audience so they will be more inclined to buy through you.
• Review products that you believe will be a good fit for your audience and niche by creating a blog post.

It’s important to have a vague understanding of SEO (search engine optimization) so you can rank your articles on Google, but don’t stress as this is something you can learn as you go.

The reason ‘Review’ blog posts are so powerful is that it’s exactly what potential customers will look for before making a purchase, they’ll check google, make sure the product is worthwhile and then make a purchase.

Meaning if you can get your review to page one on google for a certain product, offer a high-quality insight into the product or service and then include your affiliate link, it’s highly likely that customers will buy through you.

And remember, once you’ve created the article and its ranking on Google, it’ll be there 24/7 running on automation, earning you passive income.

Sure, you’ll spend a bit of time updating it and making sure it’s current, but that’s it!

Youtube Channel

Youtube being the second largest search engine in the world is another great place to start affiliate marketing.

It works in a very similar way to an affiliate site, the difference is you’ll be creating videos to interact, educate and build up your audience rather than writing blog posts.

Creating product review videos as an affiliate is extremely powerful on youtube, as it’s where potential customers will go to review a product before making a purchase.

Especially if it’s a service or something a bit more pricey.

Most of the time the affiliate marketer in the video will do a full review on a product, maybe even an ‘unboxing’ video to show they have purchased it, used it and found it to be valuable, they will then leave a link below the video to make it easier for the customer to make a purchase.

Similar to creating an affiliate website, you’ll need to understand basic SEO to rank the videos on youtube, and then it works on automation.

Social Media

Over the last 10 years, social media and ‘influencing’ has become absolutely massive.

Now as much as affiliate marketing is different than influencing, there are a lot of similarities at the same time, as the purpose of affiliate marketing is to essentially influence a buying decision of a product.

Most ‘Influencers’ on social media who are building up large followings are looking for brand deals or to sell their own products, however, it can be a fantastic platform to utilize for affiliate marketing.

Take Instagram for example, once you reach over 10,000 followers you have the ability to add ‘Swipe Up’ links on your stories, meaning you can create a video or a story about a product, tell your audience to swipe up, and it’ll take them to the website to purchase the product.

A drawback to social media, however, is that the platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, etc focus on new content, whereas google focuses on high-quality content.

Meaning that your post on social media will go to the bottom of the list a few days later, and years down the line no one will find it.

Search Engines however can keep high-quality content available on page one for years.

Paid Advertising

So far most of the marketing strategies we have spoken about such as building an affiliate site, youtube channel, and social media are free (very cheap) options to get started as an affiliate marketer.

Also known as Organic Marketing.

Just take into consideration that this takes time to build your audience before making sales, in fact, most of the time it requires weeks/months of hard work before seeing any sort of financial return.

Paid marketing however is a great way to start if you have a budget. It’s also how I personally started as an affiliate because I didn’t have much time (working a full-time job), I had no social media following and I wanted to get results as soon as possible.

This is the process of creating adverts that direct people straight to the product or service that you are promoting as an affiliate.

I started out by promoting a website and marketing course as an affiliate, which I personally went through and thought was awesome. So I created some video adverts and published them on Google ads and started generating sales within a matter of days.

A few things to keep in mind:

• It obviously costs money to do paid marketing campaigns, so whichever product you promote you need to keep track of your profit and loss. Spending $100 in marketing to make $80 in affiliate commissions is the quickest way to go broke!
• Paid marketing works best with high ticket affiliate marketing or recurring affiliate marketing programs.
• You’ll need to create landing pages and sales pages to send the traffic to, as you can’t send traffic from a paid marketing campaign directly to another business that isn’t yours.
• Testing, testing and more testing is required to succeed with paid advertising, I’ve seen so many people chuck a few hundred dollars into it, but quit as soon as they don’t get a result.

Personally, I love paid marketing, but if you want to create a successful business as an affiliate it’s always important to diversify, paid marketing and organic marketing at the same time.

What are the Pros of Affiliate Marketing?

It’s time to talk about some of the benefits of creating an affiliate marketing business and the reason I stepped into this space.

Firstly, you don’t need much money to get started. Take this website here for example, it cost me $3 a month to build on Bluehost (web hosting platform), it’s then it’s up to me to put time into writing articles and ranking them on google to start producing affiliate income.

Due to the fact you don’t need to create your own product, deal with refunds, customer service, logistics and everything a business needs to deal with. The business model can be extremely passive.

For me, this was one of the biggest pros of stepping into the world of affiliate marketing, as I wanted to be able to work and travel at the same time.

I lived in the UK, it rains 11 months of the year….you can’t blame me for wanting to leave!

Another huge benefit is you don’t need to promote just one affiliate program, you can massively diversify your income by promoting as many products as you like. The sky is literally the limit here, it’s all up to your marketing efforts.

The more products you promote and get success with, the more money you’ll earn. Which is the reason there are successful affiliate marketers earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, as there is no cap whatsoever to your earnings.

But it also allows you to pivot as well. Take the travel niche for example, with everything that’s been going on over the last few years, this industry has taken a massive hit.

As an affiliate, you can pivot into other areas of travel, for example, motor homes, camping, hiking, etc. Which is something that’s just not possible working in a job!

How do I find affiliate programs?

Before starting your journey as an affiliate it’s important to do some research into your niche to make sure there are plenty of affiliate programs and products that you can promote.

This is super easy, go to google and type in whatever product or business you want to look for, followed by ‘Affiliate Program’.

Example: Dji Drones Affiliate Program

Click through onto the website and it’ll then give you plenty of information about what they pay, how to sign up, the do’s and don’ts, how often they pay their affiliates etc.

Another way of searching to see if a business offers an affiliate program is to scroll to the bottom of their website, it may say something like ‘Partner Program’, ‘Ambassador Program’ or just ‘Affiliate Program’.

Once you sign up for the affiliate marketing program you’ll then be given your own unique affiliate link, which is what you’ll be sharing with your audience.

Once someone clicks that link and makes a purchase the sale will then be tracked back to you, which is how you’ll be awarded your commission.

Please note: Some companies may have requirements that you’ll have to adhere to before signing up, such as proving you have a website or an audience with traffic.

What are affiliate networks?

An affiliate network is a marketplace that allows brands to connect with affiliate marketers. Instead of having to search for individual programs, you can access a whole bunch of them in one place.

For example, if you want to start an affiliate website in the health and fitness industry there’s a good chance you’ll need to sign up for multiple affiliate programs as most companies will only offer a small percentage commission.

By signing up to an affiliate network, they have pre-screened all of the companies and will only allow ones on to their site that they deem as trustworthy.

ShareASale is one of the most popular affiliate networks and has been running since 2000, working with over 3500 different merchants.

Another great perk about using an affiliate network is they will often have exclusive deals with merchants that you can take advantage of, which you wouldn’t be able to get if you just went direct.

On top of this, once you start to get success on the platform (making affiliate sales) you’ll normally be given access to a dedicated account manager who will be able to help you negotiate your commission higher.

Joining an affiliate network is completely free and easy to do, all you need to do is sign up and check out all of the companies and products that they offer, which are usually categorized into niches.

Here’s a list of a few different affiliate networks that you can join:

• ShareASale
• CJ Affiliate
• Awin
• FlexOffers
• ClickBank

How Do I Earn Affiliate Commissions?

There are a few different ways that you can earn affiliate commissions. The most common way is through a pay-per-sale method.

This means that every time someone buys a product using your unique affiliate link, you’ll receive a commission.

The amount of commission will differ from company to company and also the product that’s being sold.

For example, some companies will offer a percentage of the sale price, whereas others will offer a fixed amount per sale.

Here’s an example of an email marketing affiliate program by Getresponse

Another way that you can earn money is through pay-per-lead. With this method, you’ll be paid every time someone signs up for an email list or newsletter using your affiliate link.

This is often used by companies in ‘Business opportunity’ or ‘make money online niches’.

The last method is pay-per-click, which as the name suggests, you’ll be paid every time someone clicks on your affiliate link, regardless of whether they make a purchase or not.

This method is often used by companies to drive traffic to their website or landing page.

How Do I Get Paid?

Each company will have there own requirements when it comes to paying affiliates, most will pay monthly into a PayPal account, but some may pay directly into your bank account.

A couple of things to note on this:

• Most companies offer refunds policies with their products, which means that you’ll most likely not be paid your affiliate commissions until the refund policy is over, in case the customer requests their money back
• There may also be a minimum earnings requirement before you will get paid, simply because companies don’t want to waste time paying out $12 in commission, they would rather wait till $100/$200.

Affiliate Marketing Tips For Beginners

Now you know the basics of affiliate marketing, I wanted to give you a few tips that will help you get started.

Here are my top tips:

Focus on adding value to your audience more than making money.

I seriously can’t stress this enough, if you focus all of your time and effort on money, then it won’t come to you, if you focus on helping others and really trying to serve your audience then you’ll see the money flowing in.

Once I made the shift to serve and add value my business skyrocketed.

Do your research: This is so important, especially if you’re just starting out. You need to make sure there’s a demand for what you want to promote.

It can be as simple as searching on Google what affiliate programs are in that particular niche.

Be truthful and promote products that you actually believe in: There are so many people out there who are simply promoting products just for the money, rather than focusing on offering good quality products that can help people.

Join an affiliate network: These are great as they offer exclusive deals and a wide range of products/companies to choose from.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help: If you’re struggling or need some advice, reach out to someone who’s been in the industry for a while. We’re all happy to help!

Keep learning: The world of digital marketing is always changing, so make sure you’re always learning and keeping up to date with the latest trends.

Find digital products to promote: This is actually super important if you’re looking to replace your income quickly, digital products often pay much higher commissions than physical products because the margins are a lot higher due to not having manufacturing and shipping costs.

Avoid These Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

Now it’s time to start your affiliate marketing journey but before you do, I want to quickly go over some mistakes that you’ll want to avoid making.

Not having a niche or target audience: This is probably the number one mistake people make when starting out as an affiliate. It’s important to have a focus on what you’re promoting and who you’re promoting it to. Trying to be everything to everyone is just not going to work.

Not doing any keyword research: What are people searching for online? What terms are they using? What questions are they asking? You need to know this stuff before even thinking about creating content or launching ads.

Not building an email list: This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Email marketing is still one of the most powerful ways to reach your audience and promote products/services.

Not being active on social media: Social media should be a key part of your affiliate marketing strategy to generate traffic for free but so many people are not using it effectively, if at all.

Not tracking your results: What’s working? What’s not working? You need to know this stuff in order to improve your campaigns and make more money.

On top of this…Don’t share affiliate links randomly all over your social media or your Facebook page without any real context, all this will do is annoy your friends and family members.

Remember, affiliate marketing is about introducing a customer to a business or product that they wouldn’t have found or brought without your help.

Affiliate Marketing Can Set You Free Financially

The truth is, affiliate marketing is one of the best online business models out there by a country mile, especially high-ticket affiliate marketing (You can read more on that here)

With very little barrier to entry in terms of start-up costs, millions of products to promote from any niche you could imagine, unlimited earning potential and the fact you can set your business up to run virtually on automation.

What beats it?

I mean when you put it like that, it almost sounds too good to be true, which was exactly what I thought about affiliate marketing when I first came across it.

However, your affiliate marketing success ultimately comes down to you and your marketing efforts.

Keeping a positive mindset is everything!

If you look at the success rate of affiliates it’s low, probably in the region of 5-10%, because people don’t take the long approach.

I can’t stress this enough, it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme at all.

It personally took me 2 months to learn the basic skills of setting up my website, creating landing pages, choosing my niche, learning digital marketing skills, creating my first few paid advertising campaigns and making my first ever sale online.

From that point it took another 7 months to replace my salary, so we are talking 9 months to ‘make it’.

But roughly 12 months for me to feel comfortable relying 100% on my affiliate business.

However, I’ve never had to go back to work a job since, and have the skills to continue building and growing my businesses without having to worry financially.

Again, I’m not saying any of this to show off, I’m actually just hoping it will inspire you to realize it’s possible for anyone to succeed as an affiliate marketer, even if you have little to no experience.

If you put in the work, you’ll no doubt get the success you deserve.