Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: How to Get Started

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: How to Get Started

Affiliate marketing, sometimes called referral marketing, has exploded in popularity over the past decade or so as more and more sites add affiliate links to their content and thousands of online marketers make a full-time living with affiliate programs. It involves promoting another company’s product or service, and earning money when that product or service is sold as a result of your recommendation. But what does it mean exactly? How do you get started? What are the best affiliate programs to join?

The Basics

If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, it’s basically a way of making money off advertising other people’s products. Instead of advertising your own product or service, you sign up with an affiliate network—or even create your own—and then refer people to other businesses (their products or services) and get paid if they make a purchase.

The Right Niche

Before you get started, it’s important to think about your niche. If you’re like most people—especially those who are new to affiliate marketing—you might have an idea of a particular product or service that interests you. It’s often best to choose a niche that appeals directly to your passions, since these things will be more interesting and relevant to readers in your audience. You should also consider any possible partnership opportunities with brands in your niche.

The Right Offer in Affiliate Marketing

If you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing, it can be a little overwhelming. You need to know what products and offers are going to convert best, and how much of an affiliate cut you should get paid on each sale. Luckily, there are tools available that take care of these problems—tools like Profit Well, OfferVault, and Kajabi offer up free product images (including e-books!), banners and sales pages, ready for you to customize for your audience.

Optimizing For Conversion

One key to successful affiliate marketing is knowing how much to bid on each keyword. The sweet spot is in finding keywords with a high number of searches, but that are not so competitive that you’ll be outbid by someone willing to pay more per click. Because if you find a keyword that has both high search volume and low competition, then you’re onto something!

Trust and Transparency in Affiliate Marketing

In order to be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to build trust and transparency with your audience. It’s easy enough once you’ve actually started doing business—all you have to do is be transparent about how well your services/products are performing. However, before that point, it’s a good idea to build trust by providing content that both informs and excites.

It involves promoting someone else’s products in exchange for an advertising fee or commission on sales. If you have the skills and know-how to make an audience of potential customers hungry to buy, then affiliate marketing can be very rewarding — with commissions ranging from 20% up to 75%, depending on the product and industry, it’s easy to see why affiliate marketing has been so popular in recent years. So how do you get started as an affiliate marketer? Here are some helpful tips!