So you’ve heard about affiliate marketing, but you’re a bit of a noob with no idea where to start?
No problem! In this comprehensive starter guide, we’ll go over all the things I wish someone told me before I started my affiliate marketing journey. We’ll cover the basics, but we’ll also talk about pitfalls, and common mistakes beginners make. Are you ready to take the plunge and join us on a thrilling venture of affiliate marketing?
Before you can decide how to make affiliate marketing work for you, let’s go over the basics of how it works, starting with what affiliate marketing is and how it works.
To start, affiliate marketing is a way for a person or company to earn money by promoting products or services offered by other businesses. It’s a bit like being a salesperson for these products, but it happens online.
Here’s a simple way to understand the process:
Successful affiliate marketing is like recommending a product to a friend and then getting a reward from the store when your friend buys it, except it all happens online, is scalable, and requires minimal maintenance if done correctly. This is a popular way for websites and bloggers to make money, as they can promote products that are relevant to their content and audience.
Contrary to popular belief, successful affiliate marketing strategies do not require having a massive following, any individual with their own blog or active presence on social networks may have some success within this area too!
However, it is essential to understand what is required to become good at affiliate marketing before starting, so you don’t have expectations of immediate success overnight. It just doesn’t happen that way.
So what do you need to do to become a successful affiliate marketer?
Chances are, if you’ve done any research on YouTube about affiliate marketing for beginners, you’ve come across thumbnails with outrageous sales figures and success claims in record times.
The truth is affiliate marketing campaigns require dedication, effort, and most importantly patience. You simply cannot expect overnight success and last in this industry, as there are multiple factors that drive success.
Most affiliates go through the process of setting up a brand new website on a fresh domain that they’ve spent a lot of time pondering over. It’s so easy to overthink this, but it’s your brand baby after all. You want to represent this website and make a successful online business out of it, right?
When you set up a new website on a fresh domain, it will need time for Google and other search engines to crawl and index it. What’s more, as these search engines index your site, it’s crucial that the pages they crawl have helpful content and are geared toward helping readers achieve their goal of learning about the topic you are passionate about. This takes time!
In my experience, it can take a few weeks to several months for Google to display results from your affiliate website, and you’ll need to have a basic understanding of search engine optimization to compete in the more lucrative niches.
While there are certainly tactics to reduce the time it takes to get started, if your approach is a free or low-cost one, it’s essential to narrow your focus and set the expectation that this is a long-term project, often entailing lifestyle changes and sacrifices to do well.
So you’re ready to begin your affiliate marketing journey, but aren’t sure what to focus on? No problem! Let’s go into some tips to finding a topic that you’ll enjoy working on, but more importantly, will pay you for focusing on it.
Gone are the days where affiliate marketers could throw any old website together and cover anything and everything they wanted while expecting to rank on search engines and generate sustainable revenue. Nowadays, Google rewards sites that focus on a particular subtopic within a niche, and deliver the best content to satisfy its users.
So before setting off on your affiliate marketing journey, the most crucial thing you must do is specify a topic within a niche you understand pretty well. that you are willing to become an expert in, or at the very least, associate with.
How do you choose one?
Remember when you were a kid and there were just some topics that you could talk hours and hours about, that seemed to have a never-ending supply of wonder for you? Whether it was computers, or make-up, skateboarding, or dirt bikes, there were things in your youth that captured your attention more than others.
Remember how you actively sought out others with similar interests? Did you join any communities or clubs centered around this topic?
I ask you these questions to spur an idea in your mind for how this works, and more importantly, how it can work for you.
Choosing a topic that interests you first makes doing all the minutiae of everything else seem worth it. Since this can take upwards of a year for most newbies, you’ll spend most of the beginning talking to an empty room. This gauntlet is best trialed supported by something that will continuously interest you, that you’ll be willing to talk about regardless of whether or not someone reads or views it.
Sites like The Wirecutter and The Points Guy began as reflections of personal interest before turning into triumphant business success stories – all thanks to having passion behind their niche choice.
To share an example from my own experience: I started with home brew beer as it was something I truly cared about and invested in, resulting in a site which gathered over 200 thousand visits per month!
Still, there were many months of writing (thankfully not drinking) alone before anything took off.
For some, figuring out what to create content about is easy. These people have a ton of interests, but for others, this can be challenging. I am not sure which applies to you, but in either case, coming up with 10 solid niches with topics of interest to you can significantly increase the likelihood that you’ll be successful with your first site.
Open up a Google doc or click this link to create a new doc and jot down as many things that interest you. Feel free to browse our website for affiliate program categories to help you. Don’t limit yourself to topics that you think make the most money.
We will get to that as we narrow them down. For now, use this exercise in introspection to learn more about yourself and what you like. When was the last time you asked yourself truly, “What do I enjoy?”
Aim to be an involved affiliate by choosing a niche that has affiliate products and services you care about. An affiliate site where the reviewer has actually tried the product they are reviewing is considered “involved.” Involved affiliate marketing is the best way to refer and recommend products because you can provide your firsthand experience.
You’ve got a huge list, hopefully. And hopefully, a few really stand out to you, giving you the urge to move forward. If you still haven’t felt that urge, I urge you to look at your YouTube watch history and see where you spend the most of your view time.
That’s it. Find 10 Topics that you would be willing to test right away.
Now, go to flippa.com (no affiliation) and create a free account. Once you’ve verified your email, use the search tool to locate content websites and blogs for sale within those niches (we won’t be buying anything).
A quick tip here is to find the websites selling for the most and use those as a benchmark, versus looking at the lowest cost starter websites which flood this marketplace.
Do some due diligence as if money is no object and you are going to purchase a site. What are some ways you can emulate this website’s success? Is it successful at all? Is the niche on a downtrend?
The great thing about narrowing your list of potential niches, is that there may be more than one with potential, but let’s start with one that has the highest chance of success. Your due diligence is key for making the final decision here, but once you have it, now it’s time to decide where you want to create content and build an audience.
There are tons of affiliate success stories from normal people just like you who decided to throw caution to the wind and just go for it. Still, these success stories happen because there are individuals dialed in behind the scenes planning, creating, editing, and optimizing.
And there are plenty of mediums to choose from, though the most common way affiliates make content is via a WordPress blog.
The affiliates I’ve met with the most success do a little of everything, but have a main medium they use for discovering and cultivating their audience. It is up to you and the skills you have or want to learn that will drive you toward focusing more on social posting, video content, or written posts.
Whatever you choose, I implore you to go ALL IN on one method and stick with it until you see results. Don’t waffle or dilly dally like most new affiliate marketers tend to do.
Let’s face it, most people have extremely short attention spans. We can thank TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Stories, and YouTube Shorts for this phenomenon. This is true beyond video content.
To get visitors to engage with you successfully, over the long-term, it is essential to create trustworthy and easy-to-digest content for your growing audience.
Being able to produce actionable, insightful and relevant material that provides value helps build trust with them in the age of information overload where readers have short attention spans. Getting this step wrong can wreak havoc on all your efforts, so put some effort into getting it right.
Optimizing your content using SEO techniques will make them more discoverable on web searches as well as draw more traffic towards your site, like targeting specific longtail keywords or taking advantage of keyword research tools such as SurferSEO, SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner.
My word of caution to you is to not put too much focus on the SEO bit until you’ve created the bulk of your content, covering topics you want to cover regardless of ranking factors. We must always remember that becoming successful as an affiliate marketer in this day-in-age involves setting trends, not just copying what others have done. To be a leader, one must be willing to venture into the unknown versus following the easy path.
I’ll do my best to keep this section short so you get the key points right away.
Filling your content with these elements will ensure it isn’t boring, and that users won’t instantly bounce away.
For video content, try the following:
Use watch time and engagement metrics on the chosen platform to help you understand where you can improve, but focus on creating first and optimizing second. Everyone is terrible at writing blogs when they first start out and everyone is the worst YouTuber for their first video. Don’t let either stop you from creating.
As we’ve covered up to now, focusing on a particular niche is essential, but it’s just as crucial to address all the subtopics within your chosen niche, even the bits that don’t interest you as much.
You don’t have to go all out for every piece of content you create, but you should aim to cover every bit of content you can about a particular niche. Doing so shows that you are knowledgeable, on the ball, and offers search engines as many opportunities to choose your content over others.
Just be careful in the methods you use to generate your content as the game has changed recently.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital component of affiliate marketing. Recently, the introduction of AI has completely revolutionized SEO strategies where now the focus of many internet marketers is creating bulk content quickly. This has forced Google to rework its algorithms to weed out regurgitated artificial content from helpful content.
Still, utilizing AI to help you create is not a bad thing as long as you use it as a tool and not as a crutch. The chances of you making a significant dent in your niche as an expert is at stake. I prefer to use AI to build outlines or cover content pieces that are staples, without much need for much editorialization.
Some internet marketers swear by the “create quantity” approach and then go for quality while optimizing later on. I can see benefits to this approach too as covering a topic in totality is a requirement that would take ages otherwise to complete.
It is up to you to weigh the benefits and drawbacks on these strategies and choose one that resonates most with you and your goals.
Remember one thing, however, before you jump on the AI bandwagon: It is only a matter of time before search engines punish sites relying solely on AI content.
At least, don’t be surprised if your once successful site completely falls to zero thanks to an algorithm change focused on the tactics you employed. Stick with the fundamentals of creating helpful content no matter how you create it, and make it the best that exists on the internet. This involves human intervention every time.
So you’ve chosen your niche, set up your site or channel, created a bunch of content, and now it’s time to talk about signing up for your first affiliate programs. I know, you probably wanted to do this right away, but as you can see, there are many things to consider and do before you even think about applying. Why?
As an affiliate manager for over 6 years, one of the biggest red flags for me is coming across websites and channels that have no engagement and no audience. I know that working with these applicants will rarely result in a positive return on my time.
Good affiliate managers are willing to work with new affiliates, but you’ve got to show that you’ve got some skin in the game and that there is potential to earn through an affiliate partnership.
Fortunately, once you are ready for this step, you are in the right place. Boosted Affiliate has a curated list of some of the best affiliate programs to choose from in all niches. We aim to provide you with as much information about a specific program before you apply, so you have an idea of what to expect going into the relationship.
Before joining an affiliate program, it is crucial to thoroughly investigate and review the company behind it, their offers, how they are perceived by their own customer base, and their trustworthiness based on your due diligence.
Boosted Affiliate aims to take some of the guesswork out of this process for you by providing these details and by encouraging the community to review each program. When conducting your own research consider the following questions:
Once your affiliate website is established and you have joined relevant programs, it’s time to begin driving traffic to your affiliate content. You can do this with various tactics like SEO, email campaigns, PPC, and social media marketing.
In my experience the two most effective strategies involve interlinking your existing blog content to your affiliate content and to leverage an email list to drive traffic to your affiliate content. PPC is also valuable when done within the terms of service of the programs you work with, but are far riskier.
If you’ve done everything we’ve covered up to this point, you should already see traffic going to your content before applying to affiliate programs. Maintaining a good ratio of 60-70% informative helpful content to 40-30% commercial content should provide a good enough balance for most competitive niches, but it’s best to analyze what your competitors are doing and follow suit.
It is important to track your affiliate performance as your site grows in popularity. Doing so helps you discover the strategies that are most successful and spot top-performing affiliate content, allowing you to make adjustments and allocate resources where you get the most return on investment.
To make monitoring simpler, use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, RankMath, AccuRanker, and AHrefs. Each tool has it’s own benefits, and while no paid tool is required for success, they certainly help disseminate data quickly for faster decision-making.
Affiliate marketing is an online promotional activity that allows you to make a profit from sharing products or services with your own unique link through websites and social media. It’s like being a salesman, but online, and in your PJs.
Getting started in affiliate marketing with no prior experience is the same as any endeavor. It can be done by researching free online resources, learning as much as possible, but taking action as soon as possible. Although challenges might arise along the way, determination and consistent effort is key to success!
Affiliate marketing does work for those new to it, but it takes effort and a willingness to lay a strong foundation beforehand. The more you understand how the industry works, the better you’ll perform.
The right time to monetize your content is different for everyone, but for me and those I work with, I recommend waiting to monetize your content until after you have content driving at least 1000 pageviews per month. Significant earnings can occur before this, but monetizing too soon may send bad signals to search engines and readers, making them think you are only in it for the money and not to provide your unique insights.
Achieving a daily income of $100 through an affiliate marketing business is possible with dedication and targeting the right audiences. It is not common for affiliates to earn $100 per day with a single program, and definitely won’t happen overnight, but it is certainly feasible with the right strategy and niche to earn $100 or more per day.
Creating affiliate marketing success involves investing in yourself, choosing the right niche, laying the foundation, selecting properly vetted programs to partner with, and effort to optimize and grow all without traffic in the beginning.
When you create content that resonates with an ideal audience looking to buy, the possibilities are endless, but don’t forget – patience is key when it comes to establishing an effective affiliate marketing endeavor – so remain committed, keep pushing forward and remember: believe in yourself, and that affiliate marketing works, as long as you are willing to work on it.
