How To Start Affiliate Marketing (The Complete Beginners Guide)

William L. Davis
6 min readFeb 18, 2022

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How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

If you are a beginner and don’t know where to start, this article is for you. Affiliate marketing is a superb way of earning money online; it’s one of the most popular methods out there. In addition, many people earn passive income through affiliate marketing because they love their work and do it full-time.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions, and the answer is straightforward:

Affiliate marketing means you (the affiliate) earn money by referring friends or readers to products or services.

To make things easier, here’s a five-step approach for getting started with affiliate marketing:

1- You locate a product you want to promote

2- You look for an affiliate program for “product name.” If it’s available on Amazon, you can also market it there.

3- Join their affiliate program.
4- You are given a unique link that enables the retailer to track the number of people who have clicked on your link.
5- You will be paid a commission if they purchase the product.
Isn’t it straightforward?

It can get a lot more complicated, but in this post, we’ll only cover the basics and bring you to the point where you can make your first commission.

Check out our more detailed post for a bit more about the specifics of what affiliate marketing is by clicking here

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

There are various methods for tracking affiliates these days, but they all rely on someone visiting your unique tracking link.

A cookie is the most frequent and basic sort of tracking.

When a person clicks on an affiliate link, a little file called a cookie is saved on their computer. Then they buy something, and the merchant sees that you suggested them.

Here’s How to Start Affiliate Marketing on Your Blog in 8 Steps:

Step 1: Make a website or a blog.

Step 2: Pick an industry, then narrow it down.

Step 3: Find products in your niche to review.

Step 4: Join the Amazon Associates Program.

Step 5: Look for affiliate programs for the things you’d want to review.

Step 6: Use your affiliate link to create content in the form of tutorials, review pieces, resource pages, or newsletters.

Step 7: Optimize the page and keep an eye on your Google rankings.

Step 8: Rinse and repeat!
In this piece, we’ll go over all of these processes (and more) in detail, but it’s crucial to understand the overall process from the start.

How to Make Your First Dollar Through Affiliate Marketing?

Making money with affiliate links can be done in a variety of ways. But what if I was starting as an affiliate marketer and wanted to make a hundred dollars this week? This video will show you how I would accomplish it step by step. One of the things I like about this sort of monetization is how simple it is to get started with affiliate marketing (even without a bunch of technical knowledge).

Then, as your site and marketing skills progress, you can study more complex ideas and tactics.

How Much Money Can You Make With Affiliate Marketing?

The amount you can earn will vary greatly — it will most likely be between zero and millions of dollars.

The types of deals you advertise, the number of visitors you bring to the site, and your understanding of other online marketing skills like email marketing and SEO will all affect your earnings.

However, you’ll get a decent idea of the earning possibilities of various types of promotions in this post.

How Do You Become an Affiliate Marketer?

Here’s the thing: you can buy almost anything online, and there will be an affiliate network that will pay you a finders fee if you refer a sale.

But just because you have the ability to promote anything doesn’t mean you should.

When choosing a product to advertise, the most critical factor to consider is “is it relevant to your audience?”

For example, selling dumbbells on Location Rebel is probably not the best idea, given that 99 percent of my readership has no interest in dumbbells.

Start Affiliate Marketing: Physical Products vs. Information Products vs. Services

Now that you’ve figured out which items you’d want to promote, it’s time to figure out which ones are the best fit for you and your target market.

You can promote three main sorts of affiliate products:

  • Physical Items
  • Informational Items
  • Services
    Each of these has advantages and disadvantages, which we’ll discuss today.

Amazon Affiliate Marketing: How to Market Physical Products

Physical products are probably the easiest thing to promote for one reason, and one reason only: Amazon.

Amazon has the world’s largest affiliate program, and once you sign up, you can get a link for any product on the site earn a (small) commission on it!

Using this example from my site Breaking Eighty, a golf bag, check it out.

So you see, at the very top, I have my Amazon Associates links. I type the item into the search box and then click on the type of link I want (usually text).

Here it is in action.

I type ‘golf bag’ into the search box.

And then, once I’m on the bag's page I want to highlight in my review, I click ‘text’ from the Get Link bar at the top.

You’ll see that there will be a store and tracking ID (I’ve blocked these), and then in the text box, a shortened link will go right to this golf bag.

Whenever someone clicks that link, their cookie is recorded in Amazon as coming from me to get a small % of the commission.

Pretty cool, right?

Well, yes and no.

Commission rates on physical products are notoriously low due to all of the factors that go into selling them (manufacturing, wholesaling, shipping, etc.). And in 2017, they made a few changes to the rate structure.

How to Select What Information Products to Promote?

I’m very picky about the items I advertise, but I make tens of thousands of dollars each year selling information products.

I enjoy marketing them because the commissions are considerably higher than real things.

Because the production expenses are so much lower, information product commissions often vary from 30 to 50 percent.

When I advertise information products, I typically opt for high-priced items made by marketing experts. Why?

MY ART IS SIMPLE because I send traffic to their funnel, which results in a sale.

To give you an idea of the breadth and what’s feasible, I’ve made over $20k in affiliate commissions from just one product over the previous two years.

I’ve witnessed the incredible outcomes that folks have gotten from the program to make things even better.

So, if you have a course or product that you’ve personally used and had a lot of success with, see if there’s an affiliate program — you might as well get paid for it if you’re going to recommend it anyway!

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Conclusion: Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money while doing something you love. For example, if you enjoy writing, you can create an affiliate blog and promote products related to your niche. The best part of affiliate marketing is that you don’t need much experience or special skills to get started. Instead, you need a computer, the Internet, and creative ideas!

Important Note: I appreciate your time reading this article, and helping me by clicking and buying or sharing the article on one of the links above will provide the best in the future. I am an affiliate marketer, and I would like to inform you that this post contains affiliate links. Therefore, if you intend to click these links to buy something, we may earn a small commission. Thanks.!

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William L. Davis
William L. Davis

Written by William L. Davis

William L. Davis is the Travel adviser at Reliable Investments and loves helping people in affiliate marketing, content marketing, and how to make money online.

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