By recommending genuine products and services that can truly benefit your audience, affiliate marketing enables you to generate thousands of dollars per month.
The power of affiliate marketing combined with excellent content and a reliable brand is indeed remarkable.
By taking a step-by-step approach, you can generate a significant amount of passive income with minimal effort initially, allowing you to earn money even when you are not actively working. Essentially, you have the opportunity to earn by promoting another individual’s product or service rather than being involved in the complications of creating it yourself.
Affiliate marketing is gaining popularity due to the flexibility and convenience it provides for working from home and earning good money.
Per Statista, the expenditure on affiliate marketing in the United States is projected to increase from US$ 5.4 billion in 2017 to potentially US$ 8.2 billion by 2022.
If your goal is to earn money online with minimal investment, affiliate marketing can be a suitable choice for you.
Let’s gain a comprehension of what affiliate marketing entails and the methods of earning money through it.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
As an affiliate, you have the opportunity to earn a commission by marketing or endorsing products or services of a company or individual through affiliate marketing.
You can participate in a referral program by recommending and endorsing products and services that you appreciate to your audience on various platforms such as your blog, website, social media channels, or YouTube channel. If your audience makes a purchase through your recommendation, you receive a small commission from that sale.
There are two options for commissions: they can either be based on a percentage of each sale or a fixed amount. The sales are determined by using the affiliate links given by the product/service owner.
To simplify, let me break down how affiliate marketing works and its main components.
How Affiliate Marketing Works
To put it briefly, you have the option to participate in affiliate programs that align with your niche and target audience. You can choose to engage in these programs by directly partnering with brands or becoming a member of affiliate networks. Once you become part of an affiliate program, the brand or affiliate network will furnish you with a distinctive link that you can incorporate into your promotional materials, such as blog posts or YouTube videos.
When you create content focused on a product, you can include links within the content that allow your audience to click and make a purchase. If a sale is made through your specific link, you will receive a small commission from that sale.
Affiliate marketing comprises individuals who participate in the creation and promotion of a product or service. The key elements of affiliate marketing include a product owner, an affiliate, a consumer, and optionally, an affiliate network.
Let’s investigate the relationships and roles they play in affiliate marketing.
Product Owner
The product owner, as the name implies, is the individual or entity that possesses the product or service that requires marketing. This encompasses a wide range, including large corporations, small and medium-sized businesses, or even independent entrepreneurs responsible for bringing the product to life.
The product may encompass various items, such as tangible objects including refrigerators and cosmetics, or intangible things like online courses. Similarly, the service provided could range from web hosting services to car rentals, and so forth.
In step-by-step thinking, the product owner has the potential to become a web host desiring to broaden their audience by partnering with a blogger whose readers could potentially be the web host’s customers.
Affiliate Marketer
An affiliate marketer, whether a company or an individual like a blogger or YouTuber, acts as a publisher. Their role is to promote the seller’s products or services on their platform or site by convincing their audience. This persuasion is achieved through the creation of engaging content that highlights the product or service’s advantages.
If the audience approves of the product or service, they have the option to visit the provided product links and make a purchase. Upon a successful sale, the affiliate marketer receives a cut of the profits. To thrive as an affiliate marketer, it is crucial to establish a reliable brand that garners enough trust from the audience for them to consider the marketer’s recommendations.
The Consumer
The primary focus of affiliate marketing is on reaching out to consumers. These consumers can be the dedicated followers of a blog or a YouTube channel, who consistently engage with the creator’s content in search of information. If they deem the content valuable and come across a recommended product or service that aligns with their interests, they may make a purchase.
The Affiliate Network
By associating directly with a brand, you can become their affiliate. However, to simplify the process, you can utilize an affiliate network such as Amazon Associates, which acts as a middleman between the merchant and the affiliate. They assist with tasks like product delivery and payments.
In some instances, only through an affiliate network can merchants operate their affiliate programs. If this is the case, you will need to utilize the network to advertise the service or product. Additionally, it provides a range of choices for selecting products and services.
Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?
At times, marketers may question the rationale behind becoming an affiliate marketer when they only receive a minimal portion of the sale they generate.
Is it genuinely worthwhile?
What is the reason for choosing affiliate marketing when there are numerous options available for earning money online?
Affiliate marketing is a cost-effective method to earn a significant income without the complexities of product creation and independent sales. Simply recommend the product to your audience and generate income.
By examining the advantages of affiliate marketing, we can understand why you might want to consider it.
Passive Income Source
With affiliate marketing, you have the opportunity to generate income even while you sleep, as opposed to a regular job that necessitates ongoing work to continue earning. By dedicating time and effort initially, you can consistently earn substantial profits whenever someone makes a purchase through your link.
Low Investment
To begin a business, it is typically necessary to invest some money. Should one desire to develop a product, various elements are required, including an idea, funds for manufacturing, a team for marketing and selling the product, as well as other investments.
Starting affiliate marketing doesn’t require any financial investment. All it takes is your dedication and commitment to produce content about the product and convince your audience to support it.
Work from Anywhere
Affiliate marketing operates online, allowing you the flexibility to generate content and insert links from any location you prefer. As long as the affiliate links remain functional, your content will continuously generate income. This is particularly suitable if you dislike office settings and thrive while working remotely.
How to Make Your First $200/Month with Affiliate Marketing
1. In Articles
To begin incorporating affiliate links, the first location you should focus on is within your posts.
Review articles are perhaps the most effective way to generate affiliate sales and clicks, so incorporate affiliate links into such articles.
Our preferred review pages consist of two types that we particularly enjoy.
- Product comparisons
- Reviews of a specific product or service
Product Comparisons
I primarily utilize these kinds of review articles for Amazon products as they are more affordable and generally have a higher chance of being purchased. Even if a reader doesn’t end up buying the product mentioned in your article, these articles are still effective in generating clicks and potentially leading to future sales on Amazon.
Review of a Specific Product or Service
When conducting a review of a particular product or service, it is typically recommended to encompass the following aspects:
- What the product or service is
- Why it’s useful
- Advantages and disadvantages
- Possible comparisons to other products
- How to get started using the product (with affiliate links)
2. In Social Media Posts
Before adding affiliate links, ensure that you thoroughly go through the guidelines and disclosures of each platform such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. Generally, you are allowed to incorporate affiliate links in your posts, videos, and pins on these platforms.
3. In Emails
Linking affiliate products in your articles is something you can do continuously, but enhancing your efforts lies in selling affiliate products through emails.
By sending emails to your audience, you are provided with an opportunity to enhance your connection with the reader by
- telling them more about yourself,
- explaining why you do what you do,
- and providing them with valuable and useful content.
The individuals included in your email list are those who are most familiar with you and have a higher level of trust in you, thus increasing the likelihood of them making a purchase from you.
There are two different ways in which you can use affiliate links in your emails.
- One-Time Broadcasts
- Email Sequences (Sales Funnels)
Advanced Affiliate Marketing: 4 Tips for Making Six Figures
1. Pay Attention to Your Competitors
There are many successful blogs that solely earn six figures from affiliate marketing, but it is interesting to note that few of them disclose specific details about their affiliate earnings.
Affiliate marketing for bloggers is both highly competitive and relatively easy to imitate, primarily due to the wide availability of products for marketing purposes.
When it’s your own product, promoting it becomes a unique experience as you solely possess the capability to do so.
Due to this reason, individuals typically keep quiet about their particular approaches to affiliate marketing for blogging. However, even if you are unaware of their earnings, observe the products and methods your competitors are using to promote them.
2. Disguise Your Affiliate Links
At the beginning, bloggers often overlook this crucial aspect of affiliate marketing, which is extremely important.
The majority of your affiliate links will appear unattractive, as the URL itself will be a messy collection of random characters.
If a person clicks on your link and is directed to a page that has a unattractive URL, they might be slightly discouraged. Similarly, when you share a visible link like that on a platform such as Facebook, it lacks a professional appearance.
PrettyLinks is a plugin that is available for free and permits the modification of links to make them appear more visually appealing.
By following a step-by-step approach, one can transform a visually unappealing hyperlink into a more straightforward version.
Your affiliate links not only appear more professional, but they are also more convenient to remember. You can effortlessly incorporate your links on your website or social media platforms without the need to search for them.
By thinking step by step, if your affiliate link changes, you only need to update it once in this plugin instead of having to update it in every instance throughout your entire website, courses, emails, and so on, thus maintaining the same meaning.
Prior to using this plugin, I would store all my affiliate links in a spreadsheet and had to search for them whenever I mentioned them in an article or my Facebook groups.
Using PrettyLinks is a free and effective solution to avoid wasting time before adding random links to your website.
3. Your Blog Niche Matters
In every blog niche, there exists an average market price for products. A prime instance of this is seen in comparing the average cost of a weight loss course to that of a finance or investing course; the former is generally priced significantly lower than the latter.
Based on my experience, I have observed that sales in the health and wellness sector primarily prioritize quantity over other factors. Weight loss, being a highly sought-after subject globally, generates substantial online activity. However, the typical prices of products related to this category tend to be relatively inexpensive.
Because people are accustomed to paying low prices, it is challenging to convince them to pay $500 for a weight loss course. That is why we decided to set our weight loss program price at $47 and concentrate on generating more traffic instead of aiming for higher sales prices.
As a result of this, we encountered difficulties in increasing our affiliate marketing income with lower-priced products. Our attention shifted towards developing our own products, which allowed us to obtain a greater profit margin.
4. Affiliate Marketing Will Teach You How to Sell
One of the most significant takeaways in affiliate marketing for bloggers is that it enhances your selling abilities.
Our initial earnings came from the health blog, where we sold a yoga product through affiliate marketing. The sales of those early products marked the beginning of our online income. Remarkably, our first $20, $50, and $100 days were all achieved by promoting that initial product.
More importantly than the initial income, it provided us with the knowledge of how to sell. This knowledge was so effective that upon creating our own product, we immediately began making sales from the first day of launching it.
