What is Affiliate Marketing? A Complete Step-by-Step Guide For (2023)
What is Affiliate Marketing Business?
Affiliate marketing is the concept of earning a commission for selling a product or service of a business by an affiliate. The product belongs to a company and an affiliate is a person who is registered as a seller for the product or service.
Anybody can sell and a percentage of commission is given by the company to the affiliate for every sale made through him/her. The concept of an Affiliate marketing program is very lucrative for people who want to make an extra income.
The majority of the affiliate sales are done online and every transaction and shipping are all handled by the companies. So all you have to do as an affiliate marketer is to promote your affiliate links to your customers.
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Affiliate Marketing might sound like an easy option to make money working from home; however, there are many things we need to know before we proceed. The online world is full of scams and rip-off businesses where people lose their hard-earned money and fortune overnight.
A Step-By-Step Guide on Affiliate Marketing
With all the get-rich-quick schemes and make-money-online scams out there, a beginner may fall victim to all these scam artists very easily.
Many people claim to make a lot of money while they sleep or to earn a residual or passive income for life. All these things need proper knowledge and consistency to succeed.
Becoming rich or successful overnight is just a myth and doesn’t work in the real world. Tapping into the Billion Dollar Affiliate Industry may not be easy. If you really want to make money online with affiliate marketing you need to start from the basic steps.
Once you have the proper knowledge and thorough research go for the bigger goals. There are many things you need to know about affiliate marketing. So let’s start with the basics here.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
The way the affiliate marketing program works is quite simple and easy. This consists of 3 parties:
A company or the Product Creator,
The advertiser or an Affiliate Marketer,
The Customers.
A Company or The Product Creator:
They can be a large organization, a solo vendor, or a retailer with a product or service to be sold in the market. The product can be a physical product or a digital or it may be a service.
One of the biggest online affiliate programs is the Amazon affiliate program where you can find 100,000’s products to sell online.
The Advertiser or an Affiliate Marketer:
They are also known as the publishers, the affiliate can be an individual or an organization that markets the product in an attractive way to potential customers.
When the customers buy the product or services the affiliate gets a portion of the revenue made. Based on the defined niche the affiliates will attract consumers to buy the product or the services.
The Customers:
The affiliate promotes the products through ads, social media, blogs, or a website. The customers make the purchase and the revenue generated is what makes everything go on.
Sometimes due to rules and regulations in the US, the affiliates disclose to the consumers the affiliate activity. And sometimes the consumers are not aware of the whole affiliate sales process.
After the consumers make the purchase most of the processes are handled by the product creator or the company.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing Programs:
There are many benefits of an affiliate marketing program model. We will discuss more on the pros and cons of affiliate marketing later. Affiliate marketing is by far the most convenient and easiest way to make money online without a huge investment.
Most of the time when someone starts a business it involves a lot of hard work and money to market those products. However, through affiliate marketing programs the seller and the affiliate, both have a win/win situation.
The seller also gets an army of marketers to sell their products. You know the cost of advertising a product to many people is huge and this can be eliminated by the concept of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Vs Network Marketing
The product creator gets a lot of people to promote their products and the affiliates get a ready-made product to earn money online. That’s why it’s a win/win situation for both parties.
The affiliates also don’t need to handle all the hard parts of shipping and handling. Check all the Pros and cons of the affiliate marketing program below.
Affiliate Marketing Commissions:
Many companies offer very rewarding affiliate commission models. The rates usually are 5% - 70% of the sales amount in a pay-per-sale model. However, there are also several types of commissions in an affiliate program.
These were popular in old times, but most of the commissions these days are per lead or per sale. In a PPC structure, an affiliate is paid based on how many website visitors they drive to the company websites.
The PPL programs mostly happen in financial products like loans, Insurance, mortgages, etc. The affiliates are paid if they are able to generate a lead, with certain information like name, phone number, address, email, etc. Most of the program pays the affiliate after they verify the lead information as Valid.
This is a standard payout structure for most of the affiliate programs online. The company pays a percentage of the sales amount to the affiliate. For example 10% or maybe 50% of the sales amount. This may be a one-time or a passive commission. These types of commissions again can be separated as one-time Commissions, Passive Income, And High Ticket Commissions
As an affiliate, you get paid just once after you make the sale. That commission can be either a percentage of the sales as mentioned above or a pay-per-lead model.
This is one of the most popular and lucrative commission structures in affiliate marketing. When a consumer buys for the first time there are several programs that enroll them for an active monthly membership fee.
As long as the member remains active in the program the affiliate gets paid each and every month. We will discuss more on, passive income online and how it works, later.
This is one of the wisest affiliate commission models where the companies pitch for many upsells after the initial sales. High ticket commission is really lucrative and most programs offer $500 upwards as a one-time commission just for making one sale.
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Best Affiliate Marketing Programs (Niches) in 2023:
Before you proceed and join the best affiliate marketing program, it’s best to know the niches. There are Niches that are performing very well in the market.
These categories are considered the most profitable niches for affiliate marketing. It’s better if you stick with a niche and do your best to get better by focusing on that particular niche.
So here’s the Top 10 list of the best niches for affiliate marketing
Health and Fitness niches are the most popular affiliate marketing programs in the world. The global fitness industry is valued at $100 Billion or more in 2020-2022.
It has an insane growth rate and this affiliate marketing niche is extremely profitable with huge competition. If you choose the health and fitness niche to start your affiliate marketing make sure to go for less competitive keywords.
Especially after the pandemic, people finally realize the power of the internet to make money online. This concept has become so famous now that everybody started to make video blogs with a few simple types of equipment and started earning with a YouTube Channel.
Blogging and making money online niche is quite popular in English-speaking countries mostly in the US, Canada, UK & Australia. These affiliate marketing programs are also one of the most competitive niches.
Again remember this is a niche where you will find many scams and get-rich-quick schemes. Make sure to promote a make-money-online program that is Legit and gives value to others.
When you go for the dating and relationship niche, this is another highly competitive niche that everyone might be interested to know about. In fact, everybody is struggling with issues with their relationships, money, or health in some way.
So these three niches are the most competitive and the most profitable affiliate marketing niche. If you build a website based on these three niches even the ad sense revenue will be higher for you.
The beauty and fashion niche is highly in demand in the female-only categories of products and services. It can also include personal care programs which are for both males and females.
The beauty industry has a huge sales volume reaching $380 Billion in 2019-2020. It’s expected that the cosmetic industry will reach $500 Billion by 2027.
When we talk about beauty, if you are a female you know how important it is for every woman in the world to get the right beauty products. Make sure you do proper research before you go ahead with beauty affiliate programs.
This is an age of technology and the Global value of the technology industry is approximately $4 Trillion (US Dollars). If you do this in the right ways you can make money online targeting any age group or gender.
If you look at the new technology products that are launched every single day, the sky is the limit for you. But for this, you need a lot of knowledge and experience with the products you will promote.
The tech affiliate programs are very popular, particularly in the iPhones and new product reviews. If you have a successful blog you can gain a huge number of followers in a short period of time using tech affiliate programs.
This is primarily related to getting money and guess what, who doesn’t like to talk about money? The financial-related affiliate programs are one of the highest commission programs in the affiliate marketing world.
Also, the investment niche is extremely profitable as people looking to invest are one of the highest and the most expensive leads that convert to High Ticket Sales. Before an investor decides to make an investment, they will always go for extensive research.
If you can provide high-value information to these clients they will buy anything that you offer. And some of the most popular Personal financial affiliate programs are Loan Affiliate Programs, Mortgage Affiliate Programs, Insurance, etc.
The pet affiliate programs are so amazing and pet lovers around the world are willing to invest any amount of money for their companion animals.
Pet lovers in the United States alone invest approximately $75 Billion dollars for their amazing companion. In pet accessories and pet medicines alone $15 Billion and $30 Billion for pet foods are invested every year.
When you go for Pet affiliate programs you will find programs for Pet Collars, Pet CBD oils, and GPS Tracker as well. One of the most popular pet affiliate programs is the dog training program. This one is huge and you can rack a lot of commissions in this.
The Music industry has the power to move people emotionally and mentally. Music is a strong medium of entertainment and hence the music affiliate programs work like magic.
It is often said that people buy products immediately if they are moved emotionally. Some music affiliate programs like Master class affiliates Guitar learning Affiliate Programs, Piano Affiliates, etc.
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Even the Amazon Music affiliate program is quite famous and you can make money per lead with this.
The Food and cooking affiliate programs are something very famous among people in all categories of life. This is an evergreen niche and can be promoted in any country all over the world.
In order to join the food and cooking niche, you can check Sun Basket Foods, Home Chef, Hello Fresh, California Wine Club Etc.
This is another very entertaining niche and people love traveling, especially vacations and outings. Travel means freedom and the joy of life and everybody loves it. Some of the most popular Travel affiliate Programs are Booking.com, AirB&B, Trip Advisor and Agoda, etc.
Best Affiliate Marketing Websites (Companies) 2023:
If you want to join an affiliate program you have two choices. Either you join a company one by one visiting each and every company site. And the second choice is you can join through a Huge network where all the companies are automatically listed.
When you join these platforms you become eligible for hundreds of products and services. You will get all your relevant affiliate links through these platforms.
So here are the lists of the 10 Best affiliate marketing programs for beginners:
ShareASale is one of the most popular affiliate platforms in the world. It’s been around for nearly 20 years in the market and more than 5000 Merchants from multiple niches are listed on this platform.
So you will find some of the best companies for any product or services that you like to promote. Joining ShareASale is very easy and free. If you have a blog that you update regularly, you will get approved easily for this platform.
Amazon Associates is the world’s largest affiliate marketing program with millions of products that you can sell online. The only disadvantage of joining Amazon Associate is the commission, which is very less compared to other programs.
Approximately up to 10% is offered for making any sales by an affiliate. You can go to Amazon's official site and sign up as an affiliate with Amazon.
OfferVault is another legitimate affiliate marketing platform with 1000s of companies listed. It is a great place for you to start if you don’t have a website or blog. However, there might be certain programs that need a website or a blog.
But most of them approve your application without it. It was founded in 2009 and is one of the biggest affiliate networks ever since.
Commission Junction, CJ affiliate is owned by Publicis Groupe and headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, USA. You will be able to find a lot of passive income opportunities with the CJ affiliate network.
JVJoo was started in 2011 and there are more than 800,000 affiliates who join the JVJoo platform. There are more than 7000 sales per day through the JVJoo marketplace. This is one of the most updated affiliate platforms in the world.
Clickbank is a global leader in affiliate marketing and mainly deals with digital online products. There are no restrictions to the countries where you can promote the affiliate links as the programs are mostly available online.
Clickbank was started in 1998 by Tim and Eileen Barber, with headquarters in Boise Idaho. This platform is so popular that it attracts more than 1.5 Million affiliates since 1998.
MaxBounty is a legitimate CPA (Cost per action) network and was founded in 2004. The company headquarters is in Ottawa, CA. After you join the platform as an affiliate there is a verification call by the support team to the affiliates.
Once the application is verified you can get your links from the MaxBounty dashboard. The disadvantage of the network is most of the best products are country-limited and cannot be promoted globally.
The Rakuten affiliate network formerly known as Rakuten marketing is also one of the biggest affiliate marketing service providers. It was started in 1996 and is headquartered in New York, NY USA. They are highly experienced in the affiliate domain and have a lot of high-quality programs.
As you know eBay is the second largest online selling giant next to Amazon. Just like Amazon.com they too have Millions of products that you can sell online on their platform. Most of these affiliate sales have less percentage of commission just like the Amazon Associate programs. However, you will get products in every domain possible. These products are best to promote on a blogging site if you have good traffic coming to them.
Etsy is a giant marketplace for unique handmade items. Etsy items are best for use as unique gifts for weddings or any kind of special event. If you have a good number of articles approved in your blog you can get it approved easily. The commission is mostly paid per sale with an exact percentage. Etsy was founded in 2005 and has its headquarters in Brooklyn New York.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners?
It’s easy to start and join an affiliate marketing platform. There are a few steps on how to start with affiliate marketing. All the affiliate marketing companies are FREE to join.
The first thing you need to do before you join any platform is to choose a niche. It’s better to stick with one niche however you can do multiple categories if you want.
After you decide on the niche make sure you join one of the reputed platforms mentioned above. Once you do that, you can obtain your affiliate links. And let’s see in the next part how to promote your affiliate links to consumers.
How to Promote Affiliate Marketing Links?
Well selecting the best niche and the best affiliate platforms, and signing up for all the affiliate networks is an easy part. The Most Important and hardest part is how to promote your affiliate links to customers.
Many people fail in this part because they don’t know the most effective ways of getting sales. Today we are going to stretch a bit on this thing, as this is vital for your success in affiliate marketing. The affiliate links can be promoted in 2 ways:
Well, when you go for paid traffic it is fast and you can get results quickly if you do things correctly. But before you invest in the paid traffic sources you need to understand the types of paid website traffic and what kind of results it can give for your business.
So let’s see the Top 5 Paid Traffic Sources that can give you good results.
1. Search Engine Traffic:
This is the best-converting traffic of all the website visitors you can get from any source. The search intent traffic is called buyer traffic because people intentionally come to the search engines to look for what they want. You don’t need to approach them, but they intentionally come to you.
That’s why huge companies invest a lot of money to get organic paid traffic to their sites. You can use Google Ads & Bing Ads to get search intent traffic to your affiliate sites. Make sure you do proper keyword research before you run a campaign. If you invest in the right buyer keywords you can make a good return on your investment.
2. Display Ads:
This is also called banner ads and is also a very attractive advertising method. There are few banner ad networks like Buysellads where you can display banners to other people’s websites. You can also use native ads; push ad notifications which are very effective and cheap.
Top 5 Banner Ad Networks:
Top 5 Native Ads Companies:
Top 4 Push Ad Notification Companies:
3. Social Media Ads:
A Few years back social media ads were considered the best-converting ads. However, after the native ads were launched the use of social media ads decreases especially Facebook ads which are considered pretty expensive. If you want to go for social ads the best-converting traffic is from Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, and Snapchat.
YouTube Video ads are the most effective ads in the world if you combine this with search intent keyword search traffic. This converts like crazy if you do proper keyword research and get some buyer keyword lists. If you know how to do keyword research you can have huge success with these ads. If you don’t know how to do buyer's keyword researches hire someone from Fiverr.
If you are not aware of what is a solo ad: it’s buying an email advertisement from an email list owner. I kept this last because I normally don’t recommend this if you are a new marketer. Because when you buy an email ad from a solo ad vendor, chances are those lists are bombarded with offer after offer.
So conversion will be less in most cases. However, if you are good with follow-ups, you still can convert those into sales. Udimi is one of the largest solo ad vendors.
This traffic source is free and there are several platforms where you can drive free website traffic. Free traffic sources are slow and the conversion of sales may vary based on how good you are at driving that traffic. If you are driving organic traffic through SEO that will convert much better than any other traffic source. So here are the top 5 sources of Free Website Traffic
1. Free Search Engine Traffic:
You can get free search engine traffic for years to come in two ways
There are 10,000’s people who are making a fortune with blogging and article marketing. If you are very consistent and do things correctly you can get a lot of free traffic every single day with blogging. Read more on How to Start a Blog.
Video marketing is the most effective marketing for getting website visitors for free. YouTube is Huge and 70% of all the internet traffic comes from video marketing. Read more on how to start a YouTube Channel Here.
2. Free Social Media Traffic:
Social media is something that everybody uses and you can get traffic pretty fast with this. This depends on how good are your social following and the interactions you have with your fans or friend.
If you want to promote something through Facebook, look for the related groups in your niche. Make sure you provide valuable information first before you directly approach sales. Nobody wants people selling to them. You need to learn to build a relationship first and build trust.
3. Free Traffic with Influencer Marketing:
Influencer marketing is a very simple and powerful concept. With this concept, you will leverage the power of social media through someone who is famous with lots of fans or followers.
Influencer marketing can be done by paying or free as well if you know how to create a win/win situation for both parties. Instagram Influencer marketing is the most popular in this domain. When you choose an influencer always look for how good the engagement is in their profiles.
A survey indicates that 50% of people are likely to buy if it’s recommended by someone whom they trust. If you use influencer marketing in the right way you can get thousands of traffic overnight to your website.
4. Quora Traffic:
Quora is the world’s biggest Q&A (question and answer) site in the world right now. Google loves Quora and any article that has good content ranks very high in the search engines because Quora is a high authority site.
Users come to post their questions and the community answers them. Unlike other paid traffic you don’t need to spend anything because it’s referral traffic. The website visitors you will get from Quora are highly targeted and convert pretty well.
The best way to get traffic from Quora is to write an article related to the question in your niche and link that to your blog post. The two have to be relevant to one another.
5. Guest Blogging:
Guest Blogging is the best way to improve the SEO for any blog or website. This works very well in the long term and improves authority for your website. There are two types of guest blogging free and paid guest blogging. The free one is when you provide high-quality content to a website owner and put that content with your blog links.
The paid one is you pay to put an article on other people’s websites. Google doesn’t allow anyone to pay for links and is not recommended. Through guest blogging also known as guest posting, you will get do-follow backlinks which boost your domain authority.
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Pros & Cons of Affiliate Marketing Business:
There are always positive and negative sides to affiliate marketing programs. In fact, the concept of affiliate marketing was started by Amazon.com in 1996.
Since then it’s booming and every industry realizes the potential of affiliate marketing for their business. As a promoter or an affiliate marketer, you have some pros and cons of an affiliate marketing business.
Pros:
A Minimum Investment is required for you to start compared to starting a traditional Business.
It’s extremely easy to get started.
You promote a ready-made product or service.
Extremely flexible and you can work anytime you want from home.
High-Income Potential and the sky is the limit for you.
Can market any product from any niche.
You can do business in almost all countries.
You can make money while you sleep.
Cons:
There is always a huge competition when you sell online.
Need a lot of hard work and patience to succeed.
Choosing the right product can be sometimes confusing from 1000s of products.
You will work as a third party not an owner of the product.
You might experience some Fraud merchants.
There may not be guaranteed revenue.
Final Words About Affiliate Marketing:
If you really want to succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to educate yourself every single day. The tools we mentioned above are some of the most powerful tools that have doubled our sales and conversions. Our favorite tools are the Keyword research tool, the Free Funnel Builder, and the Chatbot software. This Chatbot software is the Ultimate sales generating machine that every website owner should have.
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How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing: A Beginner's Guide
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