affiliate marketing

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How To Get Started In 2021

 

In this article, I’m going to explain in detail what affiliate marketing is and how to start making money.

Get ready because you are about to discover a whole new world that you have probably never considered before. At the end of this guide, you will find all the information you need to get started.

 

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing basically allows you to earn a commission by promoting products from other companies.

The affiliate is a retailer who earns a commission on every product they can sell, a bit like offline traders i.e. door-to-door traders or those in call centers (I know it doesn’t sound like a good job, but trust me, it’s completely different online).

There are 3 parties involved in this market:

how affiliate marketing works

  • The advertiser or whoever makes the advertisement available.
  • The publisher or whoever is promoting the ad.
  • The consumer or the end-user.

 

The nice thing about affiliate marketing is that in the end, everyone earns it!

  • You are happy because you earned your commission
  • The company is happy because they made a sale or got a new contact
  • The user is happy because thanks to you they found what they were looking for

 

Affiliate marketing is not just about promoting and selling products created by others, but you can also be the one putting your own product in affiliation.

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Would you be interested in joining our community to build multiple income streams for you?

 

Here I explain it:

If you have created an info product, e.g. For example, a video course, you can choose to share it on an affiliate network and allow others to sell it for a commission. This also means doing affiliate marketing.

Don’t worry, you will understand everything by reading on.

This work is essentially divided into 2 parts:

  1. The dealer or the person who creates the product
  2. The affiliate or the person who will be promoting the product

 

The merchant makes a product available to sell through their website or through an affiliate network which creates a link that ends with a reference (ref = “”).

referral link sample

This reference indicates that any user browsing the merchant’s website via this link is doing so on behalf of the affiliate, who will receive a commission on every purchase.

The only thing the publisher has to do is promote the link with all means at its disposal.

It’s all very simple on paper, a little less in practice, as without relevant sources of traffic it will be difficult to bring home considerable commissions over time, but don’t worry, in this guide I’ll show you everything you need.

 

The potential sources of traffic are different and we’ll see them shortly, but first let me tell you why affiliate marketing can be a great idea.

 

4 Reasons for Affiliate Marketing

reasons for affiliate marketing

To better understand what affiliate marketing is and how it works, let’s try to examine all of the advantages of this fantastic world.

Affiliations are a great way to make money online, both for those who are among the beginners and those who are already experienced in the field.

Here is a shortlist of the main reasons:

1. Getting started is easy

As an affiliate, you don’t have to create anything, you just have to sell an existing product, this will save you a ton of time and money.

Starting to work as an affiliate is extremely easy, just sign up for the affiliate program of the product you want to promote and get the link to identify your account which will track all the user’s movements through cookies.

Basically:

  • You don’t have to spend time or money creating a product
  • You don’t need to buy any physical products, let alone have a warehouse to store them
  • No need to manage e-commerce or payments
  • You don’t have to worry about customer support

Basically, your only job is to be able to bring quality traffic to the product landing page to convert for the user.

Through affiliates you can earn commissions even higher than 70%, it depends a lot on the type of product and the network.

 

2. It’s easy to grow up
Since you don’t have to personally create the product to sell, it’s extremely easy to try different solutions and find the one that suits you best.

In addition, you can also start several campaigns at the same time and devote all your energy to promotion.

 

3. There are no access limits
No prior knowledge or skills are required to work in this field.

Of course, an expert web designer or web marketer will certainly not benefit you a little over the competition, but I can guarantee you that many successful affiliate marketers have started from scratch, with just a lot of effort and perseverance.

You will learn how to best optimize your campaigns on site. You will certainly not get the results you want in the beginning, but with each mistake, you will become more aware of the right path.

 

The only skills required to get started are:

  • Basic use of computers and the Internet
  • Determination and perseverance
  • Learning ability
  • Patience, a lot of patience

 

4. Minimum initial cost
One of the greatest advantages of affiliate marketing is the startup cost. You don’t need large sums of money to get started.

Basically, you need around $100 for both domain and hosting for the first year.

Paradoxically, you could do affiliate marketing without a website/blog simply by using social networking or email marketing, but these days it is not that easy to make relevant long-term amounts of money with just these tools.

 

How to Be Successful in Affiliate Marketing

How to be successful in affiliate marketing

To better understand how to get started in affiliate marketing, we need to clarify a few points.

There are many small, more or less important phases during the sales process that we can include in 4 basic steps.

 

1. Choose a niche
The very first thing to do is choose your niche. A niche is a small part of a larger market that you can specialize in.

Don’t choose too big or varied topics, it will drastically decrease your chances of success. Try to be as specific as possible, people like specialized websites, find them more reliable, and deserve attention.

The more specific the niche the better, always keep that in mind.

Final advice: look for an evergreen niche, that is, one that will last over time, avoid temporary or limited effect fashions.

 

2. Market analysis
Once you have chosen the niche, the second thing to do is find the product to promote through thorough market analysis and evaluate if the product you have chosen is actually sought by the people and if consequently, it will generate profits.

You can do this by searching on Google and evaluating the competition. Also, check for ads in the search results. When people invest in this sector, it means there is a market.

 

3. Building a website
Once you have chosen the product, you need to create an entire specialized website around it, or a landing page, or a sales page.

Usually, WordPress CMS is better for this purpose for having lots of tweaks and features and easy to handle even for non-techies.

Unfortunately, a simple website is not enough to guarantee you a sale, everything needs to be tweaked for the best in order to convince the user to make a purchase.

There are several techniques to increase your website’s chances of success.

 

4. Attract visitors to your website
No visitors = no sales.

Of course, you need to generate constant traffic to your website. There are many possible sources of traffic and we will see them below.

 

Traffic sources

Obviously, once you have everything in place, you need to generate as much traffic as possible to your website and therefore your affiliate links.

Well, here are the top traffic sources that you can fall back on:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
The best technique for attracting organic traffic, or the natural and freeway, is SEO.

With advanced SEO techniques, you will be able to optimize your website so that search engines notice you and show your website on the first few pages looking for specific keywords.

PROS: It’s free and can attract a lot of high profile visitors over time

CONS: It’s not easy, especially for some niches and it’s basically a slow method, you won’t see results right away.

 

2. Social network
Social networks like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter have become a constant in each of us. The ability to build a solid presence on social networks can bring many benefits.

PROS: Great potential and free traffic especially if you can create viral content.

CONS: The hardest part is precisely creating a solid and authoritative presence on social networks and thus viral content.

 

3. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most functional strategies of all time, if you can generate a relevant and high-quality contact list you will get great results.

PROS: A large list of contacts relevant to your niche will convert far more than thousands of visits to your web.

CONS: It is not easy to make an extensive list of quality contacts and it still takes a lot of time and patience

 

4. Paid traffic
This is definitely the preferred source of traffic for the vast majority of marketers.

It’s a quick and effective method.

It basically consists in creating paid ads through social media, search engines or banners that entice the user to click on and access your offer. Typically, you will be billed every time a user clicks your link.

The tools to generate paid traffic are numerous, the best known are certainly Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

 

Almost all tools around the web allow you to target users, i.e. to filter only those who are potentially interested in your product.

PROS: You can get quality traffic right away, and once you’ve verified an ad’s potential, you can scale the campaign and earn more by paying more.

CONS: Of course you need money!

 

Affiliate network

An affiliate network is a tool that acts as an intermediary between the merchant and the publisher.

If you intend to put your product in affiliate, let the network take care of managing payments and generating links for the affiliate, you will save time and money, the network will also give you a lot more visibility.

The affiliates often go to these networks instead, for convenience as they can have the most offers to choose from, and because some companies give exclusivity to a particular network for selling their product.

Here are some examples of famous networks:

Amazon, Rakuten, ClickBank, MaxBounty

 

Affiliate Marketing Course

If you intend to get serious in this field then I recommend registering on our website to get the latest information and guides on Affiliate marketing and other marketing techniques. I also recommend you to check out the great platform YouTube to learn the Affiliate Marketing in the freeway and later you can choose to go for paid one as soon as you obtain the basic knowledge.

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