How To Start Affiliate Marketing – Beginners Guide

This post is a beginners guide on how to start affiliate marketing. I’ll be going over a step-by-step way for you to go from zero to profit in affiliate marketing.

I recommend you go through all the steps in this post and actually you can start earning your first commissions right now if you just take these steps. So, let’s get started…

What is affiliate marketing is all about

Affiliate marketing is the act of selling other merchants products for an agreed percentage. Let’s say I create a book and I want you to help me sell the book to your customers or clients.

We would agree on a percentage of 10% for each book that you sell for me. So, lets say the book is sold for $10 each, this means you will make a profit of $1 for every of these book you sell. Now the big question is how to find merchant products to sell and make profits.

There are many affiliate marketing platform that you can use to start your affiliate marketing business. However, it may be quite confusing to know which affiliate platform to start with.

How do you decide what affiliate network to join?

The two great affiliate networks to join are amazon and Clickbank. These platforms are very easy to join and I will me show you how to join them.

How to start affiliate marketing amazon network

It’s very easy to join and start selling on amazon. All you have to do is sign up, advertise and earn. One of the things they will ask you for is your website. So, you need to have a website to promote products on amazon.

If you don’t have a website you can create a Facebook profile or YouTube channel for free and use it as your website.

Amazon affiliate network pay very little commissions when compared to other affiliate network.

So, let’s say you are selling books on amazon for $20, if you sell 10 of those books you will only earn $20. This kind of sales will not make you six figures

How to get started with amazon

• Go to amazon.com and sign-up
• Search for products you want to promote
• Click on the product
• Get your affiliate link

After creating your text link, you will use it to sell your affiliate products. This is the link people need to click on to buy the products you are promoting. They click on the link, buy the products and you make money, it’s as simple as that.

Your affiliate links carries information that tells amazon the people that actually clicked on your link to buy the product.

Clickbank affiliate network

This is the affiliate network that most marketers use. It is the most trustworthy and the oldest affiliate network around for 21 years. This is the network that many people have made their first commissions.

If you go to Clickbank affiliate marketplace, you will see all of the products that you can sell on a commission only basis. They tell you how much money you’ll make if somebody buys what you’re selling as an affiliate.  

Let’s get started with amazon…

• Go to clickbank.com and sign up by entering your basic information
• Read the terms and conditions and click the “join clickbank!” button
• Find a product to market as an affiliate
• From the homepage, click on the marketplace tab
• Get your affiliate hoplink
• Get paid for any affiliate sales

How to get people to click on your affiliate links

We’re going to move on to posting about how we can actually get some people to come to click on your affiliate links. There are a few ways to get people to come to your link. You may already have access to them if you communicate with people digitally.

• Mobile text messages is one of the ways you can get your link out to people
• Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to send your affiliate link out to people
• You can use social media to get your link out to customers
• YouTube is a good place that you can get your link out to people

So, all of these methods are ways you can get your link out to people now most of the time. We’re talking about making money, that’s what we’ll need to be talking to people about in our emails.

Email marketing

Now, let’s say I’m promoting an eBook, so the first place I could start is through email messages for people to click on my link.

I could send an email to a couple of my close friends, type in my friends emails and write something like book recommendation. I would say, I’m reading a really good cooking book right now. It absolutely lovely! So check it out and I will put my link on the content.

I wrote a little short personal email in the way I normally communicate with my friends and I added my initials. This is a way to get my affiliate link out to people, especially people who are interested in what I am promoting. So, this would be a good way to start affiliate marketing.

Social media

A good strategy to get my affiliate link out to people is by using Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and so on.

I am sure you will have many friends on Facebook that you can  recommendation your affiliate products to. If we want people to click on your affiliate link, it needs to be somewhat of a personal recommendation.

Let’s say you are promoting a skin care product, you can create a post on your Facebook profile recommending your affiliate products to your friends. So, if they click the link and go ahead to buy the product, you will get paid.

Video marketing

You can use video marketing platforms like YouTube to create content for your audience and promote your affiliate links to them. YouTube is a very effective way to start affiliate marketing and it is free and very easy to set up.

Let’s say you have experience in weight loss. You can create videos about weight loss and use these videos to sell weight loss products to your audience. So, this is most people started affiliate marketing. If you go to YouTube, you will find a lot of videos that affiliate marketers use to promote their products. So, video is a good way to promote you affiliate links.

Conclusion

There are other methods of getting your link out there but these method are very expensive. I will advice that you use the free methods. So if you are interested in going deeper into affiliate marketing, you can use paid advertising. However, this will cost you more and as a biginner you may not know how to make use of ads campaign

So, in a nutshell, this is how to start affiliate marketing. If this post was helpful to you make sure you like and comment about what you’d like to see next on this blog.