Affiliate Marketing | Answers For The Beginners

Affiliate Marketing | Answers For The Beginners

Opening Statement

In this article, “Affiliate Marketing Answers For The Beginner”, I will attempt to answer question most frequently asked as well as finding products and how simple affiliate marketing really is.

To begin, affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online from your blog. It allows you to add a steady income stream to your blog’s monetization strategy. In this affiliate marketing guide for beginners, I will explain how affiliate marketing works, and how to get started the right away.

I have answered some of these question in previous articles, but it is important to really know before you start affiliate marketing…so again…What is Affiliate Marketing?

By definition, affiliate marketing is a referral arrangement in which an online retailer (advertiser/company) pays you a commission when (users/buyer) purchase their product from your referral site or link.

The first step is, to find a company or product that you want to promote. You need to select a product or service that you believe will be relevant to your blog’s topic and useful for your audience. The product or company you choose will be called a ‘Merchant’.

As you work on the first step, define your passion or the products you want to promote.  If your interested in health and nutrition, look for products in that niche.  You may be interested in baby clothing, again look for companies you can be and affiliate with and then promote baby clothing.

Again, it is important to well define your niche.  If you try to promote something just to make money and that your not interested in, it will show through to your customers.

Next, you have to partner up with the company by joining their partner affiliate program. This makes you their ‘Affiliate’.  Some companies also use the terms associates, partners, etc.

Once you have joined their partner program (also called Affiliate Program), you will get a unique affiliate ID. You will need to use this affiliate ID in all affiliate links that you add in your website to promote the product.

You can promote the product by adding an in-depth product reviews, recommend it in your articles, display banner ads, sending an email newsletter, and more. All traffic you send to the merchant website with your unique ID will be tracked.

Once a buyer makes a purchase, you will earn a commission. Your payment is issued once your earnings reach a particular threshold typically 45 – 60 days.

Finding Products

There are many ways to find products and companies that you can partner up with as an affiliate. Here are some of the easiest ways to find the products you can promote.

Before I go any further, I need to tell you about finding products.  Finding the right product for your niche will take time.  In fact you may find a boat load of companies with your ideal product.  Of the boat load of companies only a few may offer an affiliate program.  Your job then is to take the time to locate these affiliate companies.

Don’t get discouraged.  As said, this will take time.

To continue with finding products, you need to look at the products and services that you already use and find useful. This makes it easy for you to convince your customers about the product since you already know the pros and cons.

Next, you need to go to the product’s website and search for terms like ‘Affiliate program’, ‘Partners’, or ‘Affiliates’. Many companies are actively looking for affiliate marketers to promote their products that’s why they add a link to their affiliate page in their website’s footer.

Another way to find products is by looking at other blogs similar to yours. You will be able to find many similar blogs that are using affiliate marketing to make money.

The final paragraphs I will share what I believe is the number one program you can do to start earning affiliate income. If you don’t read anything else, at least go to the “Wrapping Up” paragraph..

This post is the introduction to a series on how to start affiliate marketing for beginners.

My goal when I started writing this was to make my article easy to implement affiliate marketing, provide helpful information, and where to get the help necessary to start or expand your business.

Knowing all there is about affiliate marketing can not be done in a single article, so I will be writing several articles in an ongoing review about the incredible idea of affiliate marketing as a business.

Please come back often to see new and exciting articles on the business model.

If you are looking for a step-by-step guide to being successful with affiliate marketing there are many resources.  My attempt here, is to give you, suggestions, ideas, notes,”how to’s” and available resources for the best way to your financial success.

Below I’ll add a BANNER on to where to get the very best program available to affiliate marketing success.

Important note: Affiliate marketing success means something different to each of us.  What success means to me may be different to you.  And what affiliate marketing success means to you could be entirely different to someone else.

Since this is an ongoing project, I highly suggest you “book mark” this site as there will be new and updated articles including strategic plans to implement to guarantee your continue success.

Affiliate marketing is actually a pretty simple concept.

In a basic transaction between a business and a consumer, the business offers a product or service for sale, promotes their product to the consumer, and then the consumer makes a purchase.

Look at a typical Brick and Mortar store…for this example I will use an old west store.  The old west store has products in their store selves available for purchase to their customers.  When a customer purchased a product, the store makes money.  The customer now has a product they wanted or needed for a specific purpose.  Both the store and customer have benefited from the purchase.

Let’s look at how you and I fit into the picture.  The company offers a product or service for sale.   You, the affiliate promotes the product or service on behalf of the company. Your customer makes a purchase, directly through you as the affiliate.  The company supply the product to the customer.  The company makes money and you as the affiliate make a commission.

Very simple concept.  However as simple as it sounds, many beginners make small mistakes.  These small mistakes can make this type of business frustrating.  I’ll address this issue later.

In this example, an affiliate serves a function similar to that of a salesperson.

Unlike a salesman, you are not bound to promoting a single type of product or the products from an individual business. You are also free to share your real experiences with whatever you are sharing, instead of repeating a fact sheet and the marketing claims submitted by the business.

You as an affiliate marketer have the luxury of promoting various products.  Professional marketers will have many companies and many different products to promote.  The reason?  Products gain favor in the market and can quickly loose favor.  The “Pet Rock” is a great example.

The “Pet Rock” jumped into the market and people flocked to buy this product.  However, as quickly as it rose to popularity, it also quickly lost momentum.  Affiliates who promoted the product, make some great money while it lasted.

Professional marketers, knows this so they diversify by having a lot of other companies in their portfolio.

Affiliate ID and Cookies

Each affiliate for a business or product will receive a unique id that gets stored as the cookie. An affiliate cookie is usually inserted using a special link which is given to the affiliate by the business.

Each cookie is only valid for a specific duration which is set by the business. The most common cookie duration is 30-60 days, although they can be significantly longer or shorter. Amazon’s cookie duration on regular affiliate links is only 24 hours.

If a purchase is made by someone who has an active cookie, the affiliate receives a commission.

Once that time period is up though, an affiliate will no longer earn a commission if the referred visitor makes a purchase. Browser cookies can also be cleared by the consumer at any time.

Other ways that affiliate referrals can be tracked is by using special landing pages for each affiliate or by giving affiliates unique coupon codes. In those situations, the affiliate is credited with purchases that come from the landing page or when the coupon code is used.

The explanation above may come across as a bit technical.

I suggest that you don’t worry about the cookie part just yet.  Over time you will become more acquainted with cookies and deal with them with more knowledge.

Amazon Associate Program

The most popular of all affiliate programs is the Amazon Associates program. Even though Amazon has relatively low commissions and a short cookie duration, it’s popular because it gives you access to a massive array of products.

It’s also a website that millions of people trust and use daily, plus you get commissions on any items they purchase after visiting from your link (not just the ones you link to).

You don’t have to actively use every product that you link to, but you should only recommend a product if you have good reason to believe that it would help the people you are sharing it with.  Remember the importance of your NITCH.

Many new affiliates use Amazon as a starting point.  Is it the best…could be.  Is it profitable…could be.  Should you diversify?  Absolutely!

Affiliate Marketing FAQ’s 

• How much money can you make as an affiliate marketer?

This is going to be highly variable and depend on things like your niche, the amount of time you devote, how engaged your audience is, and how much traffic you get.

If you choose a good niche, create great content, and are patient, a few thousand dollars a month is very achievable. Like I said in the introduction to this article, there are many people out there making 5 figures every month.

Set a realistic goal at the beginning.  If your wanting to earn a few dollars, that is easily attainable.  Looking to make a few thousands, yes! But if your new, a few thousand or hundreds of thousands is not that easy.  Remember, it will take time to learn.  Time to establish a customer base.  Confidence to know what you are doing.

• How long will it take me to make money with affiliate marketing?

How quickly you earn affiliate commissions depends on how quickly you can get traffic. For a brand new site, it generally takes at least a few months for Google to start ranking your content, even if you are targeting very long-tail keywords.

Generating traffic before that depends on a good social strategy, but even that is often slow-going in the beginning unless you have a large personal network you are willing to tap into.

• When you do start making money?

The amount of money will be small in the beginning. It’s not uncommon to only make a few dollars in your first 6 months or more. By the end of year two, you should be making at least a couple thousand a month if you have chosen a good niche and created good content along with good traffic.

All of this can be significantly accelerated if you put more work and time to getting you branded or people knowing who you are. A single blog post going viral can also be enough to explode a business thanks to all the shares and backlinks you may pick up.

So I would say a couple months to a couple years before you can potentially be making thousands. Most people will find themselves getting there somewhere in their second year.

This shouldn’t discourage you though. Let everyone else quit or decide not to start. Within the next two years, you could have your own business and quit your job.

• Can I start affiliate marketing without a website?

If you do not want to start a website for some reason, any platform that allows you to publish content and doesn’t restrict affiliate links will work.

The best alternative to a website, in my opinion, is Youtube.

Facebook Pages, Groups, and Communities also work, although not nearly as well as Youtube channels.

However for the best results, a website is your best option.

• Can I start affiliate marketing with no money?

There are no investments required to get started with affiliate marketing. As long as you are able to create useful content and get traffic to that content, you can potentially earn affiliate commissions if you refer people to an affiliate product.

Youtube is one option for doing this. You can start creating Youtube videos with the smartphone you already have, and from there you just need to manually do the work to get people interested in your channel. Not a dime would be required.

Even building a website doesn’t need to cost much.

• Do not focus on earning money??

This is going to sound crazy, but the most important thing you can do to start earning affiliate income is to stop focusing on earning affiliate income.

If you build a website and only care about earning affiliate commissions, I guarantee, you will struggle.

The days of building a website, publishing 20 review posts written by freelancers, and cashing checks for years is over. If that’s your dream, you might as well forget about it.

There may be the occasional niche that this will still work, but this approach is easily dominated by someone who takes more time and puts more thought into their content.

• Picking a niche

You’ve probably heard marketers talk about “picking a niche” hundreds of times by now.

This used to mean doing keyword research and finding high-frequency search terms with purchase intent that didn’t have many – if any – relevant results in Google.

In the beginning days of affiliate marketing, picking a niche was a gold rush that seemed to have an endless supply of opportunity.

You pretty much just had to pick a topic, make sure no one else beat you to it and then build a website dedicated to it.

You can still easily find these websites, even though Google generally doesn’t rank them well anymore.

These low-quality sites are what you end up with if you focus on the money.

Instead of focusing so much on the income, you need to focus on the value that you can provide to people.

The core component of any business is the value that they offer other people. By providing value to others, you open yourself up to receiving value (in this case money) in return.

• Affiliate marketing as a business

Affiliate marketing is a business…treat as a business and the business will take care of you!

What I see so many people do is to treat this business model as a hobby.  And thats okay is you want to make a hobby income.

You are the CEO of a well established business even if you are just starting.  Think as owning a successful business that has gained worldwide presents.  Think as a CEO, act like a CEO.   And if you do, this business model is wide open to a great financial future.

When I first started, I told everyone, friends, family Facebook, Pinterest…that I was the President and CEO of a online business.

If anyone ask, “what is it?” I would tell them that I have an affiliate business and will be working with high powered companies.  I wasn’t as yet, but they didn’t know.  However, in my mind that was all true.  It’s all how you think..

Affiliate marketing is simply one of many ways for you to monetize a business.

From this point forward, I want you to stop thinking in terms of creating ‘affiliate money’.  I want you to think of having a business.  A successful business.

With the help of professionals and myself, I’m going to show you how to build a business that earns the attention and respect of your visitors by providing value and earns affiliate commissions by helping people find solutions to their problems.

We’re obviously going to focus on affiliate income, but the great thing about shifting your perspective and realizing that what you will be doing is building an actual business is that you’ll realize there are many other income streams available as well.

Affiliate marketing just happens to be a very convenient one when you are starting out.

Depending on your niche, you may also be able to offer your own products or services once you build an audience.  But that is a subject way in the future if your just starting.

I believe the number one reason people fail is that they don’t treat the fact that they are building a business seriously enough.

If you view affiliate marketing as a shortcut that allows you to earn income without building a business, you are in the wrong place.

If you like the idea of building a real business centered on adding value to other people’s lives and monetized via affiliate marketing, I firmly believe we have the answers.

Wrapping it up

By now, you should have a pretty good idea of what affiliate marketing success is all about, even if you didn’t know anything about it when you started reading this article.

The number one thing you should take away from this article is that affiliate marketing does not mean starting a business to “make money”.  It means starting a business, helping people, and monetizing that business using affiliate marketing.

This is not a shortcut.

If you decide to continue down this path, you will be building a real business. If you want to be successful, you need to treat it like one also.

The next step is deciding what your business’s niche should be or look like  Deciding if you want the help of professionals.  Determine if you want to shorten the learning curve and avoid costly mistakes.

Finally,

Step 1...Choose a good niche.

Step 2…Setup your website.

Step 3...Examine the marketing strategies successful marketers use.

Step 4…Produce quality blog content.

Step 5… Generate traffic.

Step 6…Find affiliate programs to join.

Repeat Steps 3, 4 & 5.

Conclusion

My Top Advice If You Want To Become An Affiliate Marketing Success Story

Have patience! That is my #1 tip for those that want to become their own affiliate marketing success story. You have to be patient. This is a business just like any other businesses. Most small businesses take, what, a few years to truly start turning a profit? Affiliate marketing absolutely is a legitimate business that can earn you well into the 6 or even 7 figures, but you should not expect that to happen without months, hard work and consistent effort.

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Here’s to your success as an affiliate marketer,