Do you want to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing, but you’re not sure where to get started?
Affiliate marketing is all about generating tons of profits without any effort, right? At least that’s what a quick Google search would have you believe, but as usual, the truth is a little more complex than that.
Yes, you can make money through affiliate marketing. Good money. And, yes, you can even make money while you sleep.
In this post, we’re going to teach you how to generate passive income with successful affiliate marketing.
But before we get into all the details on how you can do this successfully by yourself, I want to point out that there is also a done-for-you method that I always recommend for beginners or people who just don’t have much time to deal with the learning curve. It’s called Big Ticket Commissions.
Big Ticket Commissions is a revolutionary web-based app that creates high-ticket pages and drives 100% free traffic automatically. After purchasing the product, you will be generating your first $1000 sale with this never-seen-before system.
Everything is 100% done for you. I mean no blogging, no content creation, no video creation, no list building, no creating products, no prior experience, and absolutely no paid traffic.
You just need to click on a single button that spits out big-ticket commissions, upwards of $1000 every single time. Well, that is exactly what you can get from Big Ticket Commissions. Here’s their site for more details. Check it out, we have tried it ourselves and it works very well for what it is. Of course if you have the
time to invest then you can really excel with affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is when an online retailer pays you a commission for traffic or sales generated from your referrals.
It’s essentially classic advertising in a less intrusive way. Rather than promoting a product on your website with visual advertisements, like this:
You simply embed the product link in your content, like this:
In the image above, the affiliate partner is Bluehost, a company that offers self-hosting services for websites.
So does that mean you can create a website, toss in a bunch of affiliate links, and watch the affiliate commissions roll in? Not quite, but we’ll get to that.
For now, you simply need to know the basics with how affiliate marketing works:
- You recommend a product or service to your followers through your website, blog, or email list.
- Your followers purchase the product or service using your affiliate link.
- You get paid a commission for the sales made using your affiliate link.
Let’s break down this process into more detail to make sure you know exactly how to make a successful affiliate marketing strategy.
But first, let’s quickly look at 2 things you need before starting out with affiliate marketing.
What You Need to Start Affiliate Marketing
There are 2 things you need to get started with affiliate marketing:
- Create a website or blog in your niche
- Choose affiliate products to promote
Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail:
1. Create a Website or Blog for Your Niche
To make money with affiliate marketing, the first thing you need is a website.
When it comes to building your website, you have tons of options. But we highly recommend using WordPress.
With WordPress, anyone can quickly build a professional-looking website in minutes.
Plus, WordPress has more tools to help their sites perform at a higher level than other website builders. That means more functionality across your site and a better user experience (UX) for your visitors.
If you’re interested in making money with affiliate marketing, WordPress is definitely your way to go. You can check out these tutorials if you need help building your site:
- How to start a WordPress blog
- How to make a website with WordPress (step-by-step-guide)
Now that your website is built, you’ll need to determine which products you want to promote. That takes us to the second prerequisite for starting out with affiliate marketing.
2. Choose Affiliate Products to Promote
If you’ve done the work to choose a niche, choosing affiliate products to promote should be easy. Choose products that fit your niche and relate to your content.
One of the best ways to select your affiliate products is by joining an affiliate network.
Affiliate networks are businesses that connect merchants and affiliate marketers so both can earn more money. Affiliate marketers use affiliate networks to make better product selections to promote on their site.
There are many affiliate networks out there, but here are a few of the most popular:
Ok, now that you have your website built and you know which products you want to promote, it’s time to dive into our exact process for making money with affiliate marketing.
How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
Now that you have a website and joined an affiliate network, it’s the right time to start monetizing your site with affiliate marketing.
Let’s get started!
Step 1) Create Content That Generates Affiliate Revenue
In an effort to make money with affiliate marketing, most beginners simply publish some random content and insert affiliate links within the article.
That strategy may or may not work, but if you truly want to boost your affiliate revenue, you’ll need to make sure the content you publish reaches your target audience.
Your target audience is someone who wants to buy a product but not sure whether or not the product is worth it. Sometimes, the user may not even know which product to buy for fulfilling their needs.
As an affiliate marketer, it’s your job to help users discover the right product for their needs with high-quality content, help them make a purchasing decision, and then navigate them to the product website for completing the purchase.
That means your article should be targeting investigational intent keywords — the type of keywords your target audience uses on Google to research about the product they want, right before making the purchase.
Step 2) Promote Your Affiliate Products in the Content
Now you know what kind of content you’re going to produce: investigational. You’re looking for topics that revolve around your target audience searching for an answer to the problem they’re facing.
Once you’ve done your keyword research and have your content ideas, it’s time to start inserting affiliate links in your content.
The way that you insert your affiliate links will depend on the specific article you’re writing. It wouldn’t make sense to add affiliate links to 5 different products if you’re doing a product review.
On the other hand, if you’re showcasing the “Top 10 Tools for Solving X,” you would want to put in multiple affiliate links to increase your chances of making more sales.
The goal is to insert your links as strategically as possible.
Here are a few tips you can use to get the most out of your affiliate links’ placement:
- Only link where appropriate: Don’t add an affiliate link if it doesn’t fit in your content. This will negatively impact the user experience (UX) and cost you more lost sales in the long run.
- Add links as early as possible: If you’re showcasing many products in one article, make sure you add your affiliate products at the top of the list. Most people won’t take the time to read an entire article. You want to make sure they see your affiliate links early on.
- Get more out of your site’s space: You can use floating bars, inline banners, and sidebar widgets to promote your affiliate products. These enhance the impact of your content and lead to more sales over time.
Here’s an example of affiliate links from a post by IsItWP on the best recipe plugins for WordPress:
You’ll notice the list has many options, but the first few are affiliate links. This gives the user a chance to research all the options while increasing the odds that IsItWP’s affiliate links will be seen.
Again, you want to appropriately promote your links as often–and as powerfully–as you can.
Now that you’ve created the right kind of content and have strategically placed your links (while using an affiliate management plugin), it’s time to kick things up a notch with targeted conversion campaigns.
Step 3) Turn Your Visitors Into Affiliate Customers
One of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is assuming they need to 10x their traffic if they want to 10x their profit.
It actually doesn’t work that way, which is great news for you.
For example, let’s say that you’re promoting a product on your site that pays $50 as affiliate commission for every sale you make. And imagine that your affiliate conversion rate is 2%, meaning for every 100 visitors you send to that website, 2 of them are buying the product.
That means the CPC (cost per click) you earn is $1 per click.
(CPC = Total affiliate revenue / total traffic you sent)
But what if you could send 2X more visitors to the affiliate product site? Based on the CPC value, you could double the affiliate revenue as well. And the best part… you don’t have to increase traffic to your site. Instead, you could simply set up a conversion optimization campaign that boosts your revenue.
Step 4) Optimize Your Existing Traffic for More Revenue
This next step comes from a strategy that’s driven by something called “the 80/20 rule.”
The 80/20 rule, in this case, suggests that 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your content. It’s obviously not an exact metric, but the basic principle stands firm:
Identify your highest converting content and make it a priority for affiliate campaigns.
Once you know that a particular post or video is resonating with your audience, you can create a targeted campaign with OptinMonster to increase affiliate sales.
This is a much better plan of action than blindly making campaigns for every page on your site. How do you get started?
Jump into your Google Analytics dashboard, identify the articles that bring in the most content, and then create targeted campaigns for those URLs.
Step 5) Grow Affiliate Revenue from Your Email List
No matter how you look at it, email marketing is still the best way to earn passive income. All of the other methods fall short in some way.
SEO is great until Google changes its algorithm and your rankings tank. Paid ads can bring quick results if you have the budget to fail your way upwards. And even then, paid ads require constant care and attention to keep conversion rates high.
But your email list is traffic that’s always yours.
Plus, it’s full of people who have an interest in your niche and have already engaged with your content. That means you know they’re interested in your niche, and they’ll make for an excellent audience for your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Also, another product I like to recommend for anyone doing email marketing is 5,001 Profit-Producing Emails. It’s a massive collection of 5,001 profit-producing and click getting email sales pitches that can really help save you time and optimize ROI for your email campaigns.
Good luck with your new affiliate marketing business.