Have you heard people talking about making money as they sleep through affiliate marketing? This statement isn’t entirely true, but you can make an excellent passive income from affiliate marketing when you do it right.
So, what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is when someone markets other people’s products and gets paid commissions on each sale. The company you’re marketing goods for gives the affiliate a unique code they embed in their content.
An affiliate identifies a product they love or enjoy, promotes it, and earns a commission on its sale. Potential customers click on the link, and if they buy the product, the affiliate gets a part of the sale as a commission.
Affiliate marketing is a versatile stream of revenue that anyone can leverage, regardless of their industry or niche. Since it’s one of the best ways to make money online, with or without a website, you must be proactive. No money will pile in your bank account without the correct input to generate income.
Fortunately, our affiliate marketing guide will inform you how affiliate marketing works, where to find affiliate programs, and how to leverage affiliate marketing to earn revenue. We’ll show you how to start affiliate marketing in 2024 and grow your affiliate business to the next level.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Companies use Affiliate marketing strategy to drive sales of their product or service through a third party. In this digital era, you may have seen a social media influencer promoting a product during a podcast, making them affiliate marketers.
When recommending a product or service to an audience, the influencer is an affiliate who is part of an affiliate program. In return, when the product or service sells, the influencer gets a commission off each sale.
An affiliate begins by joining an affiliate marketing program and getting a unique link or code to promote the product. Companies use the same unique code to track all customers who visit their website and make purchases. Once a customer purchases from this link, the affiliate earns a commission.
Affiliate marketing spreads the sales responsibilities across parties, leveraging the abilities of different individuals for a more effective marketing strategy. All contributors get a share of the company’s profit in the process. For affiliate marketing to work, these different parties must be part of the process:
- Manufacturers (product creators) and the seller
- The affiliate party or advertiser
- The consumer
Now, let’s look at the relationship between these three parties and how working together ensures success in affiliate marketing. But first, here’s how a standard affiliate program functions:
- An affiliate promotes a product from store A on their social network, website, or blog
- A potential customer clicks on the unique link or code
- The customer purchases Store A
- The company or affiliate network records the purchase and transaction
- The affiliate receives a commission
How to Join Affiliate Marketing
The internet provides many resources to wade through when looking for information on affiliate marketing. Our guide will give an in-depth look at the affiliate marketing process and the best practices to get you up and running. Let’s get it done:
1. Choose a Niche
A niche is a unique section of a larger market. The niche you choose becomes your speciality, and the field people will know you for will be like a travel blog, pet care, or home improvement tips. Some of the top affiliate marketing niches, as per data analytics, include:
- Technology
- Finance – Wealth building
- Fashion and beauty
- Health and Fitness
- Lifestyle
The list above isn’t exhaustive, as hundreds of other niches are available. But how do you know if the niche you choose is profitable? Here are some factors to consider:
- Does the niche interest you, and do you want to learn more? Once you create content in this niche, you become an expert in the topic. Hence, you must cover the topic like an expert and provide valuable content every other time. Your audience will learn from you, meaning you must stay afloat of all trends. Therefore, you should continue learning about this topic to help people fix problems.
- Is the niche profitable? Run a search on search engines like Google to determine if the niche is marketable. Search the competition and see how they’re doing in the market reports. Also, find out how popular your niche is. A busy niche means many people are looking for it, and there’s a ready market.
The primary goal is to choose a niche that you enjoy, is marketable, and profitable, and you’ll hit the ground running. Even with a marketable niche, you’ll not make six figures overnight, but with commitment and time investment, your affiliate business will be successful. Working in a niche you enjoy and love will fuel your engine and keep you going even when the sales aren’t great.
2. Choose Your Channel
Once you have a niche to work with, you need a platform or channel for affiliate marketing. Blogging is the most popular way to start affiliate marketing, as it is affordable and easy. Affiliates who love to write product reviews and comparisons of different products can promote chosen affiliate products within their content.
Social media platforms, like Instagram (IG), are great places for affiliate marketing moves. The platform is highly active, and if you have a decent following, affiliate marketing will work well for you. You can promote your affiliate products to your audience by creating visually appealing videos.
YouTube is also a prime channel for affiliate marketing. The platform is famous worldwide, and starting a YouTube channel is free. All you have to do is create and upload videos focused on your affiliate marketing goals.
However, there’s a significant downside: Thousands of other video creators on YouTube make quality videos, which can hinder your visibility. Creating quality videos takes more creativity and time than writing a blog post. However, if making videos excites you, learn how to make them, and if you love the camera, talk to people. Once you amass a decent following, you can leverage it for affiliate marketing.
Whatever platform you choose to run your affiliate business, make it clear to your audience that you’re promoting a particular product. For instance, you can add an affiliate link disclaimer with all your links to inform potential buyers of the promotion. On YouTube, you can put the disclaimer link in the description of your video. On IG, you can use #ad or #sponsored.
3. Decide the Product to Promote
After choosing your niche and channel for your affiliate business, it’s time to find the product you’ll be promoting. When choosing products to promote, ensure you consider your Target Audience (TA).
Choosing a product that resonates with your TA is a way to provide high-quality products they can benefit from using. How do you know you’re on the right track? Ask yourself if the product you want to promote will improve your TA life. If you had the same problem, would you buy the product? Assuming the answer to both questions is a YES, you can make money by promoting it.
Another area of concern is the product’s conversions and payouts. However, if you can’t find any relevant information, open your browser, type “your niche affiliate,” and judge from there.
4. Join an Affiliate Program
It’s crucial to find the right affiliate program for you. Don’t let money drive you to focus only on high-paying affiliate programs; find affiliate offers and products that resonate with your audience. Here are a few things to consider when choosing an affiliate program:
- Market reputation of the affiliate program—Reputation will tell you if the partners you choose are trustworthy. Luckily, affiliate networks vet programs first to ensure you work with reliable, profitable merchants.
- Good commission rate—The main goal here is to earn money for your time and efforts. Most programs offer a 10%—20% commission per sale. Go with what works for you.
- High Earnings Per Click (EPC) rate – EPC is a metric used in all industries to display the average affiliate earnings in every 100 clicks across the affiliate program.
To ensure you find good affiliate opportunities, go for products you’ll appreciate working with. Here are some affiliate marketplaces where you can find ideal products to promote:
- Etsy
- ShareASale
- Awin
- Skimlinks
- CJ Affiliate
- Impact
- Rakuten Advertising
- FlexOffers
5. Create Content
After you identify the products to promote and the platform to run your affiliate business, it’s time to create high-quality content. How you deliver content to your TA will depend on the platform you’re working with. However, we have a list to guide you in creating different types of content:
- Product Reviews – These are affiliate marketing staples because they can quickly get any affiliate started. The review can be presented as an article or video, depending on the channel you’re partnering with. Share the positives and what’s not so good in the product review. Share negative information? YES, you read it right. Transparency is critical to making your audience trust you.
- Case Studies—Here, you share a success story related to the product. Case studies take product reviews a step further by showing results from someone who has used the product you’re promoting.
- Tutorials—You can create a video or other content to tell your audience how to use the affiliate product you’re promoting. Tutorials are actionable content, meaning your audience should have the same experience after using the product.
- Product Comparisons – Here, you create content comparing two products with the same level and purpose. In the product comparison, you choose a product designed to work the same way and give your honest opinion. Even if the product you’re promoting isn’t the best overall, tell your audience the truth so that they know you’re trustworthy.
- Create a Resource Page – Although they don’t drive big sales, a resource page will earn you additional revenue from affiliate marketing. Creating a resource page is easy, and the products you recommend and their affiliate links are in one place.
6. Build an Audience and Generate Traffic
After creating content, you drive traffic and build an audience to click your affiliate links. The main types of affiliate marketing strategies include:
- Building an email list—An email list will help you promote your products to your audience 101. When writing emails to your contacts, offer a lead magnet like a free course or anything your audience will find valuable. Once your audience leaves their contact info, send valuable content alongside promotional emails.
- Optimising content – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will make your content findable by search engines like Google or Microsoft Edge. Content optimisation is crucial for driving organic traffic to your site. How do you optimise content? When creating content, use specific target keywords your TA is interested in and create content focused on them.
- Paid traffic – Once money flows, you can reinvest part of it in paid traffic. You create an ad that drives people to your site on any search engine or social media platform. While the method doesn’t guarantee affiliate sales, generating traffic to your site and ranking higher is still great. With a good ranking on search engines, people will find you quickly and want to know what you’re offering.
You can follow and tag other social media influencers interested in your niche. The game’s name is to do whatever it takes to generate traffic to your website or social media page.
Reeling in traffic is the initial step. Then, build trust to keep your audience coming back for more. Don’t rush to sell anything to your audience just to make money; ensure whatever you offer is useful to them, and they’ll trust you.
Unfortunately, some influencers are deceptive and willing to promote scams to earn a quick buck. Avoid this by telling your audience about the affiliate product you’re promoting. You’ll get a commission if they use your link to make a purchase.
Common Affiliate Marketing Channels
Most affiliates’ primary focus should be their target audience. They put their best foot forward to ensure the TA is engaged and receptive to buying the products or services they promote. However, different affiliates employ varying strategies to advertise their products. Here’s a list of the various marketing channels affiliates can leverage.
- Influencers are content creators with a massive following on different social media platforms. They create content to influence the buying decisions of their audience. Thanks to the large following, influencers can easily direct consumers to buy certain products through blog posts and social media posts. After a sale, influencers receive a share of the profits.
- Bloggers use content marketing to increase seller conversions by ranking on SERPs. They sample a product, then write about it and publish it on their blog.
- Paid search microsites are advertised on sponsored listings and differ from the organisation’s primary site. They offer relevant content to a specific audience, which leads to higher conversion rates.
- Affiliates use email lists to promote a seller’s products. Email newsletters also contain hyperlinks that lead buyers to the product page.
- Large media websites create significant traffic and then promote products to them using banners and contextual affiliate links. As a result, products are exposed to a massive audience, which generates high-income streams for the seller and affiliate.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
Now that you understand what affiliate marketing is about and how it works, it’s also good to know how the low-risk venture will benefit you:
- Affiliate marketing is a low-risk venture that requires little or no money to start and maintain. Content management Software (CMS) on WordPress is a tool bloggers can use to create content; it’s affordable and easy to navigate.
- Affiliates don’t need to purchase or store stock. Instead, merchants carry out all inventory tasks, such as processing orders, packaging, shipping, and customer service.
- Affiliate marketing is easy to start and manage since the affiliate only adds links to their content.
- There is a wide selection of merchants and niches, meaning there’s something for everyone.
- High recurring earnings and one-time payouts. New customers will always visit your site, meaning there are more chances to earn from a single link.
- Earn passive income. You only embed a link in your content once and market it everywhere you can. Affiliate marketing is an online marketing strategy that functions 24/7, and you’ll make money even when you sleep. However, earning cash around the clock will only happen if you market your site correctly.
- Your content and recommendations on a product are helpful to people. Affiliate marketers have an opportunity to guide customers into making the right purchase decisions through content.
- Develop different in-demand skills. Most affiliates use several marketing strategies to generate commissions. These marketing strategies include social media, content, video, email, SEO, and paid marketing. The list isn’t exhaustive, but if you encounter a skill you don’t know, learn it to remain relevant in affiliate marketing.
- No sales calls are needed. Selling products physically can be daunting, especially if you have to approach everyone and anyone on the street. Conversely, affiliate marketing focuses on a specific audience, and traffic converts to sales in the process. Therefore, you don’t have to bother people with endless calls to convince them to purchase your products.
- A choice to work part- or full-time. Affiliate marketing allows affiliates to work partially or full-time. Some affiliates make it a side hustle, while others choose to work full-time to earn more revenue.
- A choice to work alone or with a team. Most affiliates work solo, but as the business grows, they can expand to make room for more members. For instance, if you’re producing videos, you can hire people with different skills to help you create high-quality videos.
- The terms and conditions of affiliate programs are straightforward. In affiliate marketing, what you see is what you get. When signing the contract to join an affiliate program, the terms of work the program offers remain the same.
The Downside of Affiliate Marketing
While affiliate marketing has many benefits, please don’t overlook the disadvantages since they exist.
- Affiliate marketing is a low-risk/low-reward venture. Any business endeavour with a lower risk also has lower revenue potential. Compared to merchants, affiliates take no risks. Hence, they earn small commissions on every sale.
- Affiliates are at the top of the value chain but are the last to benefit. They promote products to a potential audience but only get a commission after a sale, which can be after a month or so.
- High commission thresholds for payment. Some merchants only offer payouts above $100, meaning you will have a long wait for your payday if you gather less in commissions. As a result, affiliates may need help to reach these thresholds, discouraging the program’s termination.
- Short cookie durations—Some affiliate marketing apps limit cookies to 30 days, which can lead to win-lose outcomes. Short-lived cookies produce unfavourable results for affiliates.
- Late or failed payments to affiliates. Most merchants have an almost perfect payment process. However, the remaining small percentage can make commission payment a hassle for affiliates.
- Unfavourable Program terms and policies. Occasionally, advertisers can update their terms to unfavourable by reducing commission rates or cookie duration. Therefore, you must know that your reasonable rates can turn sour fast. Additionally, programs can end abruptly, leaving you stranded and with no choice but to start afresh.
- Affiliate marketing software can fail you. As long as you’re relying on the internet, it’s not uncommon to face downtime and bugs. Apps can fail you, and it’s naive to think affiliate marketing is failproof. Another problem is that some apps cannot produce the expected results for merchants and affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing Strategies
Affiliate marketers use different strategies to persuade buyers to visit a merchant’s website. Here are some of the methods to help you succeed in your affiliate marketing business:
- Know your audience to ensure you promote valuable products or services to them.
- Set goals you want to accomplish daily, weekly, and monthly. The Specific Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely (SMART) principle will help you influence your annual results.
- Create a content plan to generate traffic, clicks, and sales.
- Diversify by creating different content covering various topics to include more people to consume your content.
- Create original content to impress your audience. Publish something others have yet to notice.
- Be objective to ensure you cover the good, the bad, and the ugly to build trust and increase sales.
- Focus on delivering quality over quantity. Publishing uninspired content will not cut it in affiliate marketing. However, focusing on delivering regulated content to reach the right audience with helpful information will increase your conversions.
- Major on news and trends as they permeate every industry, and your business will remain relevant to your audience.
- Experiment frequently by researching and trying new things to determine what works better for your affiliate business.
- Follow the rules of every affiliate program you sign up to work with to ensure they keep you around long enough to earn good revenue.
- Monitor the performance of your affiliate business and make improvements where necessary, as well as what works more.
Tips to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer
If affiliate marketing sounds like your kind of hustle, here are some tips that can aid your success:
- Develop a strong relationship with your audience
- Treat your affiliate business like a personal affair that’s close to your heart
- Start your affiliate journey by reviewing services and products
- Leverage multiple sources to reach a wider audience
- Choose campaigns meticulously by studying them before promoting them
- Stay afloat with trends since competition is stiff in the affiliate marketing sphere
How Affiliate Marketers Get Paid
Anyone looking to earn revenue online should consider affiliate marketing as it is quick and inexpensive. As an affiliate, you make money without selling an actual product but by drawing buyers towards it.
So, how do affiliates get paid after leading the consumer to purchase a product? Depending on the affiliate program, a seller’s contribution towards sales is measured differently. Some programs don’t require an affiliate to acquire a product to get a kickback.
Here are the different ways affiliates get paid:
- Pay per sale is the standard structure for paying affiliates. An affiliate must get consumers to buy a product for a cut from the sale.
- Pay-per-click (PPC) motivates the affiliate to redirect buyers from the marketing stage to the merchant’s website. The affiliate must convince the consumer to move past their site to the merchant’s. An affiliate is compensated to generate traffic to the merchant’s website and is paid in two ways:
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – The affiliate is paid each time the seller acquires a lead to the merchant’s online store.
- Earnings Per Click (EPC) – The affiliate program pays an affiliate average earnings for every 100 clicks
- Pay per lead compensates affiliates depending on conversion leads. The affiliate must persuade the buyer to complete a desired action, like filling out a contact form, subscribing to an email list, or signing up for a tutorial.
- Pay per install – The affiliate is compensated every time a consumer goes to the merchant’s website to install a product, like an app or software.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I self-learn affiliate marketing?
If you cannot pay to learn affiliate marketing, some sites offer sufficient information online. You can search online or watch videos on YouTube to ensure you grasp all affiliate marketing aspects.
Which affiliate marketing programs are suitable for a beginner without a website?
As a beginner without a website, you can leverage sites like Amazon Associates, ShareASale, ClickBank, Impact, Rakuten, or CJ Affiliate to start an affiliate marketing business. You can also use social media platforms, YouTube, and email marketing to launch your affiliate marketing journey.
How do I introduce myself as a new affiliate?
As a new affiliate, you introduce yourself by name and mention that you’re an affiliate of a specific program. From the onset, be transparent and honest about your role to build trust with your audience.
In Summary
Affiliate marketing is an exciting online venture that can earn you revenue for a long time.
From the details we shared on how to start affiliate marketing in 2024, you can launch your affiliate business now to get kickbacks. There are many avenues that affiliates can explore, with most choosing blogging and vlogging on YouTube to reach the right audience.
Affiliate marketing is versatile enough to accommodate online entrepreneurs even without a website. Other avenues an affiliate can leverage without a website include social media platforms or email marketing. However, to collect email addresses, you need a landing page or a single-page website with an opt-in form for people to sign.
Affiliate marketing will make your dream of earning online a reality. However, you must put in serious work to build a trusting audience and ensure you close a sale.
With unlimited opportunities for affiliates to earn revenue through affiliate marketing, you need the proper knowledge and persistence until the business succeeds. Kindly contact one of our kncmap.com experts here if you have any questions.
