Affiliate Marketing For Beginners – Step By Step Easy To Follow Guide

This blog article discusses affiliate marketing for beginners.  It is a step-by-step guide to get you started in the right way.  Are you are an affiliate marketing beginner and have decided to start your home business in order to either supplement your current income or replace your current income?

Making money with affiliate marketing can be a great way to develop that side income, supplement your current income or even replace your current income.  There are three main profit activators that I cover in this article.

If you are a blogger one of the easiest ways to create an additional source of income is through affiliate marketing. The way this works is that you may want to write a review article on a product or software and then at the end of the article include your affiliate link.

Or you can do what I am doing and link to different products in your article itself.  It just needs to be made clear to your readers that you are an affiliate.  You will need to have a disclaimer on your blog stating that any links that are clicked in the article may be affiliate links etc…

You may have not ever done this before and you may not be sure where to start or what tools to use.  This article will take you thru step by step and show you how to do this the easy way.

What Beginners Need To Know About Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is where you promote someone else’s product/software and you are paid whenever a sale is made. This does not increase the price to the customer. The product creator usually has excellent copy and sales material for you to use.

The more sales you make the more money they make. It is in their best interest to help you be successful. In a nutshell, you are connecting the product owner with your network of customers.

There are many big-name companies that use affiliates.  As we go through this article I will be showing you where you can find offers to promote and how to get set up for success.  I will also break down the steps needed.  If you want more information I wrote a blog article about affiliate marketing.  You can read that here.

Keep in mind that there are many different ways to promote products.  Many people choose to use blogging as their method of promotion.   As a blogger, you may be familiar with using WordPress.  Maybe you have been using the free version and are considering getting into affiliate marketing.  At the end of this article, I have some specific tools that I recommend.

STEP ONE: What Is Your Niche?

In order to figure out your niche the first step is actually to figure out the market.  There are three main markets that you will need to choose from Health, Wealth and Relationships.  Within those three markets, you will then narrow it down to the niche.  Start with something that you are passionate about?  What do you want to spend time researching?

One of the most common mistakes that beginners make at this point is to try and relate to everyone.  It is easy to fall into the trap of feeling like the more people you market to the better.  People think that they will end out making more sales when in truth you will be more successful if you narrow down the market.  “the riches are in the niches”.

The truth is that the more targeted you are the greater the success you will have in relating to your audience.  So for example in the Health market, you may want to promote dieting or promote a diet program.  Within diet, you could narrow it down even further by going after a Keto diet or diet for diabetics.

Another example in Wealth would be affiliate marketing as the broad niche and within that, there is affiliate marketing for beginners or affiliate marketing for women.  So from these examples, you can see how to narrow your niche down.

STEP TWO: Get A Domain Name.

When I first started I wondered why I would need a domain name.  In fact, I delayed quite a while before purchasing one.  I think this really slowed down my success.  Having a professional domain name will really help you in the later steps.  If you want to read through this whole article and think about what you want your domain name to be…come back to this section and follow the directions.

If you don’t already have a domain name then that is would be the next step.  How do you want to brand yourself?  A lot of people decide to brand themselves so that if they change the products they are promoting they do not have to start over with branding.

If you choose to incorporate the brand that you are promoting then if for any reason the company goes away or you decide to not be associated you would almost need to start over with a new domain name.

My recommendation is to brand yourself so that people get to know like and trust YOU and then you are free to promote the products that you use and recommend.

To purchase your domain name there are two main companies that I use.  NameCheap and GoDaddy.  They are both very good.  If you are a blogger and want to make affiliate commissions via your blog then there are a couple of other tools that you will need.  I will cover affiliate marketing for bloggers later in the post.

FOR BLOGGERS

If you are using the free WordPress site you will not be able to use it for affiliate marketing so you will want to follow the steps listed above for domain name.  In order to be an affiliate and use blogging as your method of promotion, you will need to have a hosted website.

You can follow the steps above for getting your domain name but you will also need hosting.  Many people choose to get their domain and hosting from the same provider in order to make it easy and less confusing.  The tool that I recommend for this is BlueHost.

STEP THREE:  Find A Product To Promote-Become An Affiliate

You have chosen your niche and now you need to find products to promote.  There are a couple of ways to go about this.

Join an affiliate platform – Below I have listed two platforms that you can join.  They are both easy and FREE to join.  Both of these affiliate networks have hundreds of affiliate offers to choose from.

Between the two I think that Clickbank is the easiest for affiliate marketing beginners.  On JVZoo there are a lot of offers that require approval from the product vendor.  If you are an affiliate marketing beginner sometimes it can be difficult to get approved to promote the offers.

a:  Clickbank – https://www.clickbank.com/ – For Clickbank go to the main website and create your account.

b: Warriorplus – https://warriorplus.com – create your Free Account

c: JVZoo – https://www.jvzoo.com/ – Again go the website and create your free account.

You will see once you log into Clickbank or JVZoo the wide variety of products available to promote.  There are a few things that are important to keep in mind.  To make this easy I will focus on Clickbank.

At the top, once you log in you will need to click on the marketplace. 

Then on the left-hand side, you will need to go to your niche and find a couple of offers.

Within your niche, you will then decide on what offer you want to promote.

1:  Look at the offer and make sure that it is a good match for your niche.

I also recommend doing some research on google or youtube to find reviews of the offer to make sure that it is something that you want to promote.

2:  Look at the average sale.

It is just as easy to promote a higher-priced product as it is an inexpensive product.  You want to make sure that when a sale is made that you can at least break even.

A common mistake that affiliate marketing beginners make is that they are uncomfortable with sales that they gravitate to the lower-priced products.  This, in turn, will lead to losing money and a lack of success.  Get comfortable with making sales and selling higher-priced products!

3:  Look at the Grav (gravity score).

This score represents how many people have made money promoting this offer.  “Gravity is a measure of how many affiliates earned a commission by promoting a particular product over the past 12 weeks.”  The higher the number the more people that have been successfully promoting the offer.

4:  Check out the affiliate resource page.

Make sure you read the terms and make sure that your promotion method will not get you banned.  Check out the quality of the promotional materials offered.

Many offers will have things like email swipe files, banners, and other resources.  The product owner wants to make sales and they have already done the research as to what works.  If you are using the emails provided just make sure that you are changing them up so that they are unique to you.

5:  Is this offer is a good match for you and your audience.

Click on the “promote” button and get your unique link.  You may need to apply for some offers to get authorization (whitelisted) to promote.  Make sure you are good to go before you spend your time and money promoting the offer.

FOR BEGINNER AFFILIATE MARKETERS

If you are a beginner affiliate marketer and are interested in promoting Clickbank offers watch the video below that reviews the process needed to be successful.:

I  am an affiliate marketer and I promote different affiliate programs, tools, and software that I use.

Ethically it’s best to promote the offers and products that you are using or have reviewed extensively.  If you are not familiar with the product and how it works it will be more difficult to be successful.

If you do not think the product or service is worth your money how will you convince your customers that it is a good investment for them?  That being said the affiliate marketing world is filled with opportunity.  Just about every product or service or software has an affiliate opportunity.

Once you figure out what you want to promote then you will need to sign up to be an affiliate for the program.  Some programs have a very stringent application policy and you may need to prove that you have been doing this for a while before you will be accepted.  Other programs are more open.

Be honest in your application and make sure you tell them your experience level.  Many products and services pay a different percentage to affiliates. Other programs have a recurring monthly income.  These are ideal because they give you some stability in your income.

Another option to consider is private affiliate offers.  There are many private offers that have higher-priced products on the “backend”  the affiliate offers are ideal because they give you the opportunity to make a profit.  Many of them will do the selling and telling for you so your only job is to bring people into that ecosystem.

STEP FOUR:  Improve Your Results

In order to really increase the amount that you make from your promotions, it is best practice to collect the email address of the people who were interested in your offer.  In order to do this, you will need to either have a freebie or low-cost item to ethically bribe your prospects for their email address and an autoresponder.

This is the point at which you will need to create a squeeze page, capture page or opt-in page.  They are all different names for the same thing.  I am sure that most people are familiar with the opt-in page where you are interested in something and you are willing to enter your email address to get it.

There are a couple of different software that are easy to use to create these pages.  If you want to create capture pages and do not want to mess around blogging then I use a tool called Clickfunnels.

Clickfunnels has a 14-day free trial and you can get your site up and running right away.  This software syncs with your autoresponder, (which I discuss in the next step). It is very easy to use drag and drop software.  Here is a review of Clickfunnels: https://salesfunneltemplate.net/clickfunnels-review/

If you are a blogger you are most likely familiar with WordPress.  On this WordPress site, I use a plugin called Thrive Themes.  With Thrive you are able to create awesome opt-in capture pages and host it all on your own website.  Thrive is another easy to uses drag and drop page builder.

Not only does it have awesome themes for your blog but there are many other tools included.  You can create membership sites and quizzes as well as beautiful opt-in or capture pages.  It integrates very easily with your autoresponder as well.

STEP FIVE:  Autoresponders

You have the email addresses…now the next question is how are you going to follow up with the people that were interested but did not buy right away?  An autoresponder basically automates your email communication with your customers.

Most people do not purchase right away, they don’t want to be sold.  Sometimes the timing is not right when they are looking at your offer and other times they may just be more hesitant because they don’t know you.

Regardless of the reason why they didn’t buy right off, you need to have the ability to follow up with people and provide value and education.  Allow your customers to get to know you.  Ideally, it is best if you can email your clients every day.  You might be wondering…how do you follow up with people and not spend all day in front of the computer writing and sending emails.

If you want to follow up with your customers then you need an autoresponder. There are many different autoresponder companies out there and they each have their pros and cons.

Most of them do not like affiliate marketers because we have gotten a bad name in the community from the bad apples that have been spamming.  Whichever company you decide to use just make sure that you are putting out high-quality emails with value.

Each of the three companies that I am recommending all have affiliate programs.  Make sure that you sign up for the affiliate program once you decide which company you want to use.

One of the big benefits of using autoresponders is that you are able to follow up with everyone by scheduling your emails.  You can determine who gets the emails and how often emails are sent.   You are able to set up emails or lists relating to a specific product.  It is also recommended that you email your list every day.

The three Autoresponder companies that I recommend for affiliate marketing beginners are Aweber, Getresponse, and Convertkit.

1:  Aweber – 30-day free trial

Try AWeber free for 30 days! – AWeber Communications

2:  Getresponse – 30-day free trial

If you would like to read a review of GetResponse I wrote a review of the autoresponder.  You can read that here.

3:  Convertkit – 30-day free trial

STEP SIX:  How Do You Get People To Your Offers As An Affiliate Marketing Beginner?

The last two steps to this process are how to get people to your offers and tracking.  The common concern with marketers is how to get people/customers to the offers in order to make sales.  It does not do any good to spend the time and money creating something and not have anyone see it.

If you don’t have customers you don’t have any sales.  There are 2 methods of getting leads/customers to your offers:

1: Paid Advertising

This includes Google/Bing Ads, paid social media ads, and any other paid method.  A lot of new/beginner affiliate marketers do not have the cash to do the paid methods.  There is a very steep learning curve and sometimes it is very easy to burn through a lot of money testing and learning on these platforms.

If you are able to be consistent with paid marketing and know how to do it successfully your business will grow much faster using paid methods.

2:  Free Methods

These methods work but instead of paying with money, you pay with your time.  Growing your company is slower when you use free methods but they are still effective.  Some of the free methods are posting in forums and social media groups, creating and posting videos on your youtube channel and using your affiliate link in the description.

Blogging and posting in ezines is also an option.  With these methods, you will need to come up with content and do the work of creating your material.  If you are going to be posting online the main thing to keep in mind is that you do not want to be spammy.

Make sure that you are creating relationships with people and not just sending your affiliate link out there.

STEP SEVEN:  The Final Piece – Tracking And Scaling Your Offers

Tracking is especially important especially as you try different marketing methods.  You will need to know where your sales come from and what method was most effective.  You do not want to waste your money on a method that is not working.

Tracking software makes it easy to know where your sales and “clicks” are coming from so that you can scale the offers and methods that are working.

When I first started with my business I did not follow the advice of my mentors regarding tracking and I ended out spending quite a bit of money on a couple of methods that were not working.  I made some sales and so I tried to scale but I choose the wrong method because I did not know where my sales came from.

If you would like more information on this I wrote another blog post about the importance of link tracking:  https://dldonaldson.com/the-importance-of-link-tracking-in-your-online-business/

The link tracking software that I use is called Clickmagick and they have a 14-day free trial.  Here is the link for the 14-day free trial.

The Last Piece To The Affiliate Marketing Puzzle

Just know that as a beginner in affiliate marketing you will make mistakes.  I know that I have made plenty of them.  In fact, I wrote an article about the 3 mistakes that I made with my online business.  Keep in mind that action and mistakes are better than no action at all.  Even though the affiliate marketing business model is simple it still takes works and there is definitely a learning curve.  If you have done marketing before things will come much easier for you.  Or, if you are tech-savvy then the whole process is easier.  For myself, the tech area was a challenge so I know that if I can make it work, so can you.

RESOURCES LIST

Domain names:  NameCheap and GoDaddy

Hosting:  BlueHost

Autoresponders:  Aweber, Getresponse, and Convertkit

WordPress Theme:  Thrive Themes

Capture Page Builder:  Clickfunnels

Link Tracking Software:  Clickmagick