Affiliate Marketing: What it is and How to Get Started

Imagine making money while you sleep that’s the power of affiliate marketing! It’s the most passive form of passive income.

The affiliate marketing industry is expected to reach over $15 billion by 2024. That’s why the sooner you start the more time you have to take advantage of this industry.

In this guide, we’ll walk about what affiliate marketing is and how you can start your affiliate marketing journey. Let’s dive in.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of online marketing where you promote products and services of other companies and when you generate a sale for them, they will pay you a commission in return.

How does Affilaite Markeitng Work?

Here’s how it works:

• First, a company creates an affiliate program for its products because it’s a cost-effective way to promote its products.
• An affiliate joins the affiliate program and get’s a unique tracking called an affiliate link.
• The affiliate creates content about the product for his audience and includes the affiliate link in the range.
• Someone from the audience clicks the affiliate link and purchases the product.
• The company pays a commission to the affiliate product.

Now, let’s talk about how to get started with affiliate marketing.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing?

Here are the steps to get started with affiliate marketing.

Choose a Niche

A niche is a topic on which you will create content about.

Now, it’s totally up to you which niche you choose. But, here are some questions you can ask yourself to narrow down your options.

• What am I interested in and passionate about?
• What am I experienced and knowledgeable in?
• What topics are people searching for that aren’t too competitive?

Also, you can use Google Trends to do research for finding a niche.

When you have got your answers, combine these and you will find your niche.

After choosing your niche it’s important to give it some time like a few months to see if it works. Even, if it doesn’t work very well, you can always pivot to a new one. Don’t be afraid to try out new niches, it may take some time but in the end, it will be worth it.

After choosing your niche, it’s time to think about where you are going to promote your affiliate products.

Choose a Content Platform

These are some of the most popular content platforms affiliate marketers use to promote products:

• Blogging
• YouTube Channel
• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• PPC Ads

Blogging and YouTube channel are the two most common ways for affiliates to promote products.

But, the way I recommend is building a website or blog rather than creating a YouTube channel, and here are some reasons for that:

• Blogging brings passive income: If you ranked your blog post on Google, you will get traffic and sales every month, but you still have to update that content to maintain
• Blogs bring more revenue: The affiliate links present in the blog post tend to get more clicks than the affiliate links present in the description of a youtube video.
• Creating videos is harder: Creating videos is harder due to the types of equipment required, scriptwriting, and video editing.

Still, the platform you choose depends upon these two factors:

• What you prefer: Choosing a preferred method will help you create valuable content. If you enjoy writing you can go with blogging, if you are not camera-shy like me and prefer making videos you can go with a YouTube channel.
• Your niche: Sometimes it depends on your niche. For example, If your niche is dance, people who want to learn dance will prefer videos. So, YouTube videos will be a better choice than writing on a blog.

Choose the Right Products

There are 2 things to keep in mind while choosing the right affiliate product for you.

Commission Rate

Commission rate is the most attractive factor that affiliate marketers look at while choosing affiliate products.

But, it shouldn’t be your only focus, you should maintain a balance between commission rates and other factors to avoid earning peanuts or making tons of money while promoting anything shady.

Also, some products offer one-time commissions and others offer recurring commissions, you can choose whatever aligns with your goals and needs.

Brand Reputation

Product quality is also important because your audience doesn’t trust you to promote low-quality products. If you are promoting anything shady and your audience bought it, it will damage your reputation and their trust in you.

Make sure to do a bit of research on every product that you promote. You can check out reviews from other people that have used the product.

Create Great Content

Creating content about the affiliate products is the hardest step in affiliate marketing, it’s not just about putting affiliate links in any type of content.

You have to influence your audience to purchase through your content.

Here are some examples of content that has a high conversion rate:

• Product Reviews: More than 90% of people online read online reviews before making a purchase. Creating detailed and honest product reviews can be valuable to your audience and help build trust. You can highlight the features, pros, and cons of the products.
• Product Roundups: Product roundup post is a list of products in the same category. It’s useful for introducing a collection of products to your audience.
• Comparison Posts: Comparison posts are similar to reviews, but it’s a side-by-side comparison of two products, you highlight the difference, pros, and cons of both products.

Wrap Up

Affiliate marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme but If you can create valuable content and are ready to put in time and effort, affiliate marketing can bring passive income for you.

Lastly, it’s helpful to focus on achieving small milestones like getting your first sale, rather than solely aiming for life-changing amounts of money.