An Overview of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest efficient methods of earning money online. In this Ultimate Guide, I will walk you through each step of starting your online business with affiliate marketing and earning your first online revenue.
To be honest, I don’t make six figures every month with Affiliate, but I do make decent recurring revenue, and what’s more significant, it’s almost entirely passive income!
What is meant by the term “passive income”?
Passive income means that I earn a couple of thousand dollars each month without doing anything. So, even though I take the whole month off, I would receive almost the same amount each month. Haa, that’s cool.
In this post, I’ll explain what I do and give you some pointers on how to get started with affiliate marketing, as well as how to scale and hit 5–6 figures in a year or so.
What exactly is Affiliate-Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the practice of advertising goods and services for the benefit of others in return for a fee on each sale.
So, what’s nice is that you won’t have to worry about creating and purchasing new products; instead, you’ll simply promote an existing one. This is why it is simple, to begin with. As you will later see, you can even begin with a zero-dollar budget.
As a result, affiliate marketing is an excellent choice for anyone looking to start a business online and make money without investing or having a lot of online skills.
Let’s get started!
Simply put, affiliate marketing is built around two concepts:
Choosing the right product to promote.
Product promotion.
It’s as simple as that: choose a product, promote it, and make money!
Let’s begin with the first step, which is to choose the right product.
1. Choose the best product to promote:
Understanding and learning how to choose the best product or service to sell is important because simply put; you will make far more money for the same amount of effort and time if you choose the right product.
Assume you are promoting a service that costs $200, and your commission is 60% on each sale.
You promoted this service and were able to generate approximately 50 sales per month.
Calculations are simple:
$50 dollars x (200 0.6) + $6000 per month. That’s great!
And your promotional expenses are $3000 (if you’re running paid ads). Then you make $3000 per month.
Annually: $3000 x 12 months = $40000 USD
Excellent! BUT, whereas, you will need to promote on a monthly basis, pay for advertising on a monthly basis, and put in effort and time on a monthly basis!! Yes, please!
Let’s change the scenario now!
We chose a product for the same price: $200. Your commission rate is 40%, not 60%.
The difference here is that the product you chose pays recurring commissions, so you will earn 40% every month without having to promote it again and again.
Assume you promoted this service and were able to make 50 sales in a month.
Calculations are simple:
For 50 monthly sales:
$50 x (200 x 0.4) = $4000 for the first month
If your promotional expenses are $3,000, you can only make $1,000 in the first month.
Then, without any ads or effort, $4000 for the next few months (it’s recurring!) Did You Catch It?
So, for the next few months, you will earn $4000 without having to pay anything!
Each year: $1000 + ( $4000 x 11) = $45000 with considerably less effort and time!
Which scenario do you prefer?
Obviously, I believe you will choose the second option (recurring commission), which will become 90% passive with the same or higher revenue!
This is only one example of how choosing the right product (even if it pays less) can be crucial in affiliate marketing.
Of course, this isn’t to suggest that you shouldn’t use one-time commission goods! Definitely not.
I’m just demonstrating the value of choosing the right product and how it can affect your job!
A word of advice: choose at least two items to advertise, one of which is recurring and the other of which is a one-time commission.
Top Affiliate Products and Networks I can recommend.
Okay, now that we know how important it is to choose an affiliate product, the big question is, “Where will I find affiliate products to promote?”
To make it easier for you, I’ll go over more than ten affiliate programs and items that you can join even if you’re a complete novice. I’ll show you goods and services that payout on a recurring basis as well as on a one-time basis.
Affiliate Products for a Single Commission.
I’ll tell you about the top five affiliate networks, in my opinion, where you can start and find different items to promote.
1. ClickBank: As you’ve already learned, ClickBank is an affiliate network where you can find thousands of items to advertise.
There is only one minor disadvantage: it is not accessible nationwide.
2. CJ Affiliate: Commission Junction (CJ) is also one of the top online affiliate networks. I partner with CJ and promote web hosting services such as Contabo and other products.
3. JVZoo: This is a massive and well-known affiliate network with thousands of affiliate services to choose from.
4. Warrior Plus: This network is ideal for beginners since it is easy to enter and accessible from anywhere in the world.
5. Envato Market: This is one of my favorites, and I already use it to make a few hundred dollars per month (100 percent Passive)
This company sells digital assets such as website themes and models, audio and video templates, source codes, and more. You can look it up here and promote whatever product you like.
This, I believe, is sufficient for affiliate networks. Let’s get to my preferred list of affiliate providers and goods with recurring commissions.
Affiliate Products with Recurring Commissions
The best part is that you can work with recurring commission products and earn 10X more money per year with the same effort!
1. ClickFunnels: The Clickfunnels affiliate program offers one of the most generous commissions of any SAAS organization. On all purchases, they pay 40% lifetime affiliate commissions.
They also have what is known as a “sticky cookie.” which is beneficial to affiliates because it follows a customer across all of their devices if you share your link with them. This keeps people you refer linked to your affiliate account regardless of where they are.
Aside from their software, Clickfunnels is constantly developing new products that you can monetize, such as live events and training courses.
2. SEMRUSH: With a 40% commission rate, SEMRUSH is a great service to promote. SEMRUSH is an SEO tools company that lets everyone rank their website to get more free organic traffic.
3. TubeBuddy: When you refer people to TubeBuddy, you will receive up to a 50% recurring fee.
TubeBuddy saves time and helps content producers, brands, and networks expand their channels. As a result, you will market and promote it to content creators in order to assist them in growing their YouTube channels.
4. GetResponse: GetResponse is one of the best email marketing services available, and it also has a fantastic affiliate program.
As you can see, it has many programs to sell, one of which is a single $100 commission per sale. The other is a monthly recurring commission of 33 percent.
What’s good about GetResponse and similar services is that it’s difficult for users to leave them because all of their mailing lists, records, and analytics are saved in the system, making migration difficult.
This is a wonderful thing if you think about ongoing commissions because when you refer someone, you can almost guarantee that he or she will become a long-term client.
Anyway, almost every product and service has an affiliate network, so you can look up any product or service you want, contact them, and inquire about their affiliate program.
5. SendinBlue: one of my favorites because you can receive money per signup! Yes, it costs 5 Euros for each new SendinBlue signup you refer to.
It’s also regarded as one of the best email marketing services available.
Please check this article for a complete list of affiliate programs and services.
Promotion Of The Affiliate Product
After we learned what affiliate marketing is and why it’s important to promote the right products, I showed you some of the best affiliate networks and programs to get started with. Now it’s time to get down to business!
Selecting the best product or service may take as little as 10 minutes or as much as 1-2 days. But now the question is, “How do I promote?” It all comes down to marketing.
We have two options when it comes to marketing:
- Free Promotional ads
- Paid Promotional ads
Free Promotional ads
Let’s begin with free promotion and see how we can use it to promote affiliate products and services.
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a term that refers to the process of optimizing
The easiest way to market affiliate services and products and transform this online company into nearly 100% passive income is to use SEO. What is the reason for this?
Before I clarify the reasons, let me give a quick overview of SEO.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an approach or strategy for ranking websites and posts at the top of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
When people want something on the internet, they use search engines to find it, and they typically just look at the first page of the results.
So your SEO aim is to get your website to the first page of Google for specific search queries. As a result, you’ll be able to get a lot of free organic traffic to your blog.
Consider the following scenario: You published an article on your website about an affiliate product, such as “Top 10 Microphones for YouTubers,” and it was ranked first on Google.
You can imagine how much money you’ll make promoting “Microphones affiliate links” on Amazon and having free traffic from Google; it’ll be money on autopilot!
You may now say, “OK, great!” But how do we assign a ranking to our articles? To put it another way, what the heck is SEO? and how are we going to do it!?
Of course, going into SEO in depth is beyond the reach of this post, but I will do my best to explain how to get started and work with SEO in a few lines. I won’t let you leave unfilled!
The concept is simple; in order to rank your posts, we must go through three steps:
- Understand what people are looking for (Keyword Research)
- Make your article keyword-optimized for these terms (On-Page SEO)
- Off-Page SEO (Trust, Social Signals, and Link Building, to Name a Few)
I hope this has given you a good sense of SEO and how to get started with it. Let’s pass on to the next affiliate link promotion strategy, which is YouTube!
2. Use YouTube to promote Affiliates.
One of the easiest ways to encourage something is to use YouTube! Not only partner services are available. You make videos about your affiliate product and include a link to it in the description.
The Key Question Right Here Is How To Grow Your YouTube Channel And Get More Views.
In general, there are two methods for expanding your YouTube channel.
1. YouTube suggestions: YouTube will begin to recommend your videos over other famous videos.
For example, suppose you choose a popular video or subject and create a similar High-Quality Video while optimizing the metadata (Title, Thumbnail, Description, and Tags)
2. Video SEO: This is the process of optimizing your title and metadata for a particular keyword in order to rate your videos at the top of YouTube search results. Tubebuddy, Vidiq, and other tools will help you expand your channel.
3. Forums and Questions – and – answer sites.
Find relevant forums and assist others by sharing what you know and linking to your article or page where you are advertising the deal (DO NOT SPAM).
Don’t forget about Reddit, which is a fantastic source of free traffic.
Also, one of the quickest ways to get traffic is through Quora Q&A. It’s done by responding to questions and providing a connection back to your website.
5. Use of Social Media
You can automate posting on all channels using a social media management app, such as Content Studio, if you have any Facebook followers, maybe Facebook groups, LinkedIn, or Twitter. With this exclusive offer, you can get Lifetime access).
Of course, when I mention social media, I don’t mean spamming groups and people. Instead, try to build connections, provide value, and build trust before linking back to your pages.
6. Ebooks and Courses for Free
To get traffic, you can also create small free ebooks and publish them on sites like this, or you can create a free course on Udemy, which has millions of students, and connect back to your blog.
7- Email Marketing
By sending updates to your Subscribers, you can still create your email lists, which will be one of the top sources of traffic for your website.
Paid Promotion
When it comes to paid ads, we have a variety of networks and platforms to choose from, including:
- Advertisements on Facebook.
- AdWords by Google
- Native Ads
- Advertisements on Quora
Each of these will take a 300-page book to read! So, in order to point you in the right direction, I’ll go over each one briefly.
Use Facebook and Google Ads to promote affiliate products.
If you’re using Facebook or Google Ads to advertise affiliate goods, keep the following in mind:
First and foremost, do not advertise your affiliate link directly. Affiliate links are usually frowned upon by Facebook and Google, and using them excessively will result in your ad account being suspended.
Instead, send them to your landing page, which is sandwiched between the Ad and the Affiliate product page.
Second, make certain that all of your landing pages adhere to Facebook and Google’s guidelines.
Make a landing page for your website.
What you need to do now is build a landing page. This may be a straightforward page where you pre-sell whatever you’re promoting… It doesn’t matter whether it’s a piece of pre-launch content or a sales page… and invite them to download it by clicking on the link.
Better yet, you can use this as an opportunity to grow your list by converting these people into subscribers to YOUR list and then directing them to the content or offer you’re promoting.
Activate your campaign.
A final point to consider is that whenever you launch a campaign, make sure to select the correct audience and narrow it down as much as possible to target specific audience. You can also try AD retargeting, which is a powerful tool when running paid advertisements.
Also, don’t forget to launch your campaign with low bids and a variety of ad sets to see which works best for scaling.
Advertise Affiliate products with Native Ads.
Native ad networks, such as Outbrain, Taboola, Mgid, and others, are an excellent platform for affiliate marketers with a track record of delivering excellent results.
Advertisements on search results (such as Google) and social media (such as Facebook) are not the same as advertisements on native networks. What is the reason for this?
And there’s a huge difference between scrolling through a Twitter feed, looking for something specific on Google, and reading your favorite news site (where Native ads are shown). Users are in “discovery mode” for the latter.
They are primed to find content that piques their interest.
Quora Ads can be used to promote Affiliate products.
Nonetheless, as I previously stated, I recommend beginning with Quora as a free source of traffic by answering and sharing your knowledge. However, you can still run paid ads on Quora.
I hope that this article has helped you with all of the knowledge you need to get started as an affiliate marketer in the online world.
