Affiliate Marketing For Beginners: What It Is + How to Succeed

According to Statista, business spending on affiliate marketing hit $8.2 billion in the U.S in 2022 and Influencer Marketing Hub estimates that the industry will continue to grow to $15.7 billion by 2024.

Start today, and you’ll be in a prime position to take advantage of that.

Affiliate marketing is where you promote another company’s product or service. When someone purchases through your affiliate link, you earn a commission. These commissions are usually a percentage of the sale price or a fixed amount.

For example, here's a link to a book on Amazon:

If you clicked and bought this product ($33.25 for the hardcover version), I'd earn $1.50 if I was the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is not a scam. It is absolutely legit.

Learn more: Yes. Affiliate Marketing Is Legit. But Is It Worth Your Time?

Here are four reasons why you should consider affiliate marketing:

Starting a business can be risky and expensive because there are upfront investments for products, employees, equipment, rent, and so on. With affiliate marketing, all you need is a website. If it doesn't work out, you've only spent time and a little bit of money.

If you have a job, you need to work hours in return for income. If you're doing affiliate marketing, you can earn an income as long as there's traffic to your website and they're buying via your affiliate links. This can happen at any time of the day, even when you're sleeping.

Earning passive income means you can work anytime and anywhere, as long as you have Internet and can access your affiliate website.

A typical salesperson only sells products from one company. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote products from many different companies and earn commissions from all of them.

Learn more:How to Start Affiliate Marketing With No Money (5 Steps)

Upon joining an affiliate program, you receive a unique link containing a tracking ID. This allows the merchant to track whether you've referred customers to them.

People who click on your link get a tiny file called a cookie stored on their device. This usually holds an expiry date, so you get paid even if they delay buying for a while. For example, here's how it works if you're an Amazon affiliate:

Thanks to the affiliate cookie stored on this person's device, you earn a commission on the recommended product and the ski gear.

According to Authority Hacker's affiliate marketing survey, the average affiliate marketer earns $8,038 per month.

However, the average monthly income for an affiliate marketer with less than one year of experience is only $636.

So, don't expect to be successful right away. Affiliate marketing takes time. If you’re just starting out, your checks might look more like this for a while:

You need to manage your expectations. You won’t earn the big bucks right off the bat, but don’t let this discourage you.

The success of others tells you that with hard work, time, and the right knowledge, you too can potentially reach those levels.

Learn more:Here's How Much You Can Really Make From Affiliate Marketing

An affiliate marketer is simply a person who does affiliate marketing.

So, if you follow the section below on how to get started with affiliate marketing and actually put in the work to make an affiliate website, drive traffic, and convert visitors, you will become an affiliate marketer.

Learn more: How to Become an Affiliate Marketer (5 Steps)

Follow these seven simple steps:

Learn more:Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners

Your niche is the category you want to talk about and promote.

To stand out amongst the countless other websites today, my advice is to be specific. Instead of tackling a broad niche like food, go for something a bit narrower, like grilling. This helps you build a more focused audience and may also help with SEO.

Here are four questions to ask yourself to find a good niche:

It's hard to overstate the importance of choosing something you're passionate about. You'll need to create a lot of content to succeed with affiliate marketing. If you choose something you hate, you'll find it hard to press on when the going gets tough.

That's why, when I built my first site, I chose to talk about one of my hobbies—breakdancing. And despite knowing nothing about marketing, I grew it to an estimated 2K monthly visits.

Learn more:3 Ways to Find a Great Affiliate Niche (With Examples)

You can do affiliate marketing on any platform. This includes:

The method you choose will depend on your preference and occasionally, your niche’s preference. For example, people who are learning breakdance will prefer videos. So, even if you prefer writing, running a YouTube channel may be a better option.

That being said, we recommend building a website and using search engine optimization (SEO) to rank your content high on Google. This allows us to generate passive search traffic consistently, which means consistent clicks on affiliate links too.

There are three main types of affiliate programs to choose from:

Which affiliate program should you join? This depends on your niche and level of expertise.

If you’re targeting consumers, go with the second model: low-paying, high-volume. If you’re targeting businesses, go for the first one: high-paying, low-volume. Popular programs include software and web hosting-related products.

The best way to find these affiliate programs is with a Google search. Alternatively, enter a competing affiliate site into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Linked domains report.

For example, I know that Pat Flynn promotes a number of software products on his website, Smart Passive Income. Eyeballing the report shows that Pat links to Aweber pretty often. And if we expand the caret, we’ll see that Pat is an affiliate.

It only takes a quick Google search to find an application form for this program.

If there is a product you’d like to promote but they don’t have a public affiliate program, reach out to the company and ask if they would be willing to build an affiliate relationship with you.

Learn more:9 Best Affiliate Programs for Beginners (Any Niche)

If you want your affiliate site to succeed, you need to create high-quality content where your affiliate links fit naturally. Don’t just blindly curate products from Amazon’s best sellers. Go the extra mile and make sure your content solves your readers’ problems.

For example, if you’re doing reviews, you should actually purchase the product and test it. Use it over a period of time and report your findings.

That’s what Wirecutter did for all their articles, which explains their success. For example, in order to find the best air purifiers, they tested more than 50 of them:

If you can collaborate with experts to review your findings, that’s even better. Again, Wirecutter goes above and beyond in this aspect, solidifying their status as the gold standard of affiliate websites:

You’ve created great content. The next step is to get more people to read it, so they will click on your affiliate links.

Here are three traffic strategies to consider:

This is where you pay for traffic to your site. You can do this using pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

The advantage of paid traffic is that the moment you start paying, you get traffic.

However, there are some downsides.

First, running ads will dig into your profits. It’s quite normal for advertisers to lose money before they make it… if they ever do.

You need to be realistic about how long it takes to optimize a paid traffic campaign.

Secondly, once you stop paying for ads, your traffic will stop.

Generally speaking, ads are a great traffic strategy if you’re part of a high-paying affiliate program and can make the numbers work.

But if you’re completely new to paid marketing and have no marketing budget (or are working with lower commission programs like Amazon Associates), then it might not be such a great idea.

Learn more:PPC Marketing: Beginner's Guide to Pay-Per-Click Ads

SEO is the practice of optimizing pages to rank high in search engines like Google.

For as long as you can rank high in the search engines for your target keywords, you’ll get consistent and passive traffic.

On the most basic level, SEO is about:

Learn the basics in this video or read our beginner's guide to SEO:

Email lists allow you to communicate with your readers anytime.

Use them to tell fans about new content and keep them coming back to your site for more. This leads to more affiliate clicks and sales.

You can even add affiliate links in the emails to your audience:

To build an email list, you need to persuade the readers on your site to sign up. That means offering something valuable, like a free eBook, an email course, and more.

Just because you have an amazing piece of content doesn’t mean people will click on your affiliate links.

There are a few things you need to consider.

If all your affiliate links are at the bottom of the page where people rarely scroll, clicks will be few and far between.

On the other hand, make every other word a link in your introduction, and your content will look spammy.

You need to balance link placement with the other factors below.

Let’s say you were writing an article on the best kitchen knives for under $50.

Your introduction probably shouldn’t look like this:

The links look out of context and spammy.

This would make more sense:

Using callouts like buttons, tables, and boxes can help attract your readers' attention and make the post more skimmable.

For example, the Wirecutter uses eye-catching boxes with product links anytime they share a top pick.

Good Housekeeping takes a different approach and creates a table with buttons:

In affiliate marketing, two conversions need to take place for you to make money.

The first conversion is the click to the product page.

You’re 100% in control of this action. Use the tactics above to improve your chances of getting that click.

The second conversion is the visitor purchasing the product. In the case of affiliate marketing, the merchant controls the checkout, and their conversion rates are out of your control.

The trick is to play the game to your advantage and look for merchants with programs that convert well.

Here are a few ways to find them:

If people are making decent money from an affiliate program, then it's likely that the product converts well.

How do you know if people are making money?

Look at public income reports where bloggers publicly reveal how much money they're making from their affiliate deals.

You can find these reports on Google.

For example, if you search for “income report amazon affiliate”, you’ll see a few blog posts showing how bloggers have made money from Amazon Affiliates.

Looks like one blogger made over $47,000 from Amazon Associates:

If you’re in the same space, you can also take a look at where her other affiliate income comes from, and potentially promote the same products.

If there isn't much information available about an affiliate program you want to join, sign up and ask questions.

For example, you might want to find out what their average conversion rates are, or a ballpark figure of their top earners’ monthly commissions.

This can help you figure out if the affiliate program is worth promoting.

Sometimes, it’s best to go with your gut feeling.

If the program or product you’re checking out feels “off," or if you would personally never recommend the product to a friend or family member, then don’t promote it.

[post_nav_link link_text="Affiliate marketing examples" section="affiliate-marketing-examples]

Here are examples of websites that monetize via affiliate marketing:

Learn more: 7 Affiliate Marketing Examples & Why They Work So Well

[post_nav_link link_text="Affiliate marketing tools" section="affiliate-marketing-tools]

Tools are your friends in affiliate marketing. They help you do your job faster and easier.

Here are some of our recommended affiliate marketing tools:

Learn more:15 Best Affiliate Marketing Tools & How to Use Them

Frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing.

EPC stands for earnings per click. It refers to the average amount of money you earn each time someone clicks your affiliate links. Here's how to calculate EPC:

EPC = total amount of commissions you earn / number of clicks on your affiliate links

The cookie duration is how long the affiliate program will attribute the purchases to your cookie. The cookie duration is usually set to 30 days. So, that means that if someone clicks on your affiliate link and buys within the 30 days window, you'll be attributed the sale and therefore get the affiliate commission. If that person clicks on your affiliate link but buys after 30 days, you will not be attributed the sale.

All the principles above apply to Amazon affiliate marketing. For a in-depth guide on how to build an Amazon affiliate site, I recommend reading this guide.

Recommended reading:How to Build a Successful Amazon Affiliate Site (Step by Step)

As long as you have a way to drive people to your affiliate links, you can do affiliate marketing without a website. For example, there are many people who drive clicks on their affiliate links via their Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and more.

High-ticket affiliate marketing is the promotion of products or services with large payouts. A payout becomes “high ticket” once you get above $100 but can go as high as five figures.

Read the guide below to learn how to do high-ticket affiliate marketing.

Recommended reading: High-Ticket Affiliate Marketing: How to Make Big Commissions

No affiliate marketing wheels were reinvented here. These are the fundamentals, and applying them will get you off on the right foot.

Just don't expect life-changing income or the freedom to quit your 9-5 overnight. Affiliate marketing takes time.

Focus first on making your first affiliate sale. As your site grows, set new goals, and continue experimenting.

This is how to build up a site that eventually generates a decent income.

Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.