How To Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing (For Beginners)

So, you want to make money online with affiliate marketing but you don’t know where to start?

Maybe you barely even know what affiliate marketing is!

Well don’t worry, because it’s probably the easiest online business you can get into, and it doesn’t require THAT much investment. In fact, it can be done for FREE.

Let’s dig in!

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Okay well first off, what is affiliate marketing exactly?

For a detailed explanation, the “nitty-gritties”, as well as the pros and cons of it, you can check out My Post Here (don’t worry it’s also beginner friendly).

But essentially affiliate marketing works as following:

1) You choose a product to promote

2) You get your personal, magical affiliate link

3) You put your link in front of potential customers

4) And if that customer makes a purchase you get paid

And there you have it. Easy! That’s how you become rich!

(if only it were that easy…)

90 something percent of affiliate marketer don’t make a single cent with affiliate marketing. Ever.

For this to work out, you’ll have to find a balance between what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, where and HOW (plus, there is a ton of competition too). So it’s simple, not necessarily “easy”.

What Products Do I Promote? 

For this part, it’s probably best to find some sort of product in a niche that you are interested in and already have some experience with. That’s the dream.

An example of this could be a dog training course, a diet supplement or a monthly membership program for a product you might have bought in the past, that you love and have no problem recommending.

Now all of this is great…however, make sure that there is an actual audience for that interest!

If there’s something you like, but you haven’t found another soul on the planet that is even remotely interested in it…that’s probably not it.

You feel me? 

PS: If anyone wants to start a professional, blindfolded pine climbing team with me. Reach out! It’s…so lonely 🙁   

Anyways, hope you get the picture.

Don’t worry though, since finding something that floats a lot of peoples boats, is freaking easy as heck. The more passionate the audience, the better.

Q: Does this mean you necessarily have to sell products that you’ve tried or are interested in and nothing else?

A: Obviously not. But as a beginner it’s best to choose something that you are interested in FIRST. It will make things a lot easier. In the example later on, you’ll see why. 

How To Find Products To Promote

Okay so there are many platforms out there we can use to find products to promote. Some of the more popular ones include: ClickBank, Amazon.com,  jvzoo, Offer Vault…to name a few.

Go through the different platforms and choose one product that you’re interested in. Make sure it’s something that feels good with you, you think is useful and pays out fairly good commissions, or has rebill. 😉

ClickBank is easiest for beginners because it doesn’t require you to have any previous experience like other platforms, where the vendors might look through your history to see if you have a good track record.

Also, clickbank has a huge list of products in multiple niches and has been online and well for like 20 years. So i’d suggest to look there.

When in ClickBank, make sure to look at the gravity score of the product. The higher the gravity score, the better. It means that the product is actually good, actually selling and that there are affiliates actually making money with it.

How To Promote Your Product

Now that we’ve found our product we have to decide how we are going to promote it.

Let’s just go through an example case, and let’s imagine we’ve chosen a dog training program on ClickBank: Brain Training For Dogs.

This is actually not a bad offer, and i’ve promoted it somewhat in the past.

Let’s see what this offer has going for it:

-It gives out 75% commissions which is okay, and has a $1 trial too.
-The sales page looks very neat (usually they suck big time).
-They have a lot of support for affiliates (vids, promo emails, pdfs).
-Product has monthly rebill for that sweet passive income. 
–High gravity, aka: It actually sells.

Okay, great.

Now, as for promoting, there are two main ways to do it, also known as “getting traffic”: paid and free.

FREE TRAFFIC

Alright, so obviously since we’re going to do this online, our customers are going to be…ehm…online.  

Yes. Our customers are online. But…WHERE exactly? Where would our potential customers spend time? We need to introduce the product to them, but where could they be “hanging around”? 

I’m thinking facebook, (which is free) because almost every dog has a facebook account created by it’s owner (except mine). 

However, since it might take too much time to create a facebook group, get a bunch of people in and add content to at some point recommend my product…(which was my first thought) i’m going to go for something a bit less “laborious”.

Let’s say we’ve chosen YouTube as our method instead. It’s still free and i feel our reach will be a bit wider and a product review video would be a better choice.

What we would now do is we would go to YouTube and create a channel that relates to our niche and afterwards, create a youtube video.

It’s best here, to have actual access to the product or to create a video testimonial of it. You can also ask the vendor for a review copy to help you sell the product.

This is where already knowing a bit about the product or the industry, will come in handy! Create the video and go through the product and add your affiliate link, from ClickBank to the description.

If you’re too camera shy you can create a PowerPoint presentation and record slides! 

When uploading the video to your channel, make sure it has similar title, description and thumbnail to videos you are trying to compete with, to have the highest chance of ranking.

PS: It’s really good practice to shorten the ClickBank affiliate link with a link shortener like Bitly.com in fact I would suggest you never use the raw affiliate link, anywhere at all. They should always be cloaked or shortened.

PAID TRAFFIC

If you have some money to spend, you can try out paid traffic instead of doing that youtube reveiw video. This is where you’re trying to reach your target customer through ads.

Paid traffic is a bit more advanced since you’ll need to optimize, have a bridge page, test a lot and try to actually make it profitable. The good part is, you can hone in on a specific demographics and audiences.

Since our customers are going to be in some sort of social media like Facebook or YouTube or looking exactly for our products through search we’re…going to register with those ad platforms as an Advertiser.

The big ad platforms, are Facebook and Google, which let you advertise on their platforms plus Instagram and Youtube. Kickass.

NOTE: Remember that most ad platforms absolutely HATE affiliate links. They want to see you’re sending their users over to a legit site, otherwise they might ban your account straight out (happened to me before).

PAGE BUILDER

For this, you’ll need some sort of landing page or bridge page, which will serve as a “bridge” between platforms. This could be a little website page with a short video and a button that redirects to the offer.

To create one of these, you should get a domain plus A Page Builder.

This might feel like a kick in the nuts, but it’s CRUCIAL to have a page of your own when driving paid traffic.

It allows you to add pixels, and retarget users who have alredy been to your site, not to mention branding and “capturing” the traffic to lower ad costs.

Now, there are a few combination you can use out there, but for beginners, i think Affilixpro is really really good. It’s super cheap. It gives you a subdomain and a pro version page builder. Plus it might have a dog brain training template, i haven’t checked 🙂 

Facebook Ads

To be able to promote your product through facebook ads, you would have to create a fan page and narrow down on a target audience you think might be able to purchase the product.

The vendors of a good product usually have the target audience demographic to give to you to make things easier, so that helps

A very important thing to note is that Facebook users aren’t on Facebook to buy which means that your ads have to interrupt the user, but also intice the click! Something like a puppy picture works amazingly.

Since this is an overview, i don’t want to go too deep down the rabbit hole… but facebook ads is absurdly complex and allows for a ton of things from pixeling pages, retargeting, custom audiences, look-a-likes… it’s a lot. But essentially, it’s about testing.

Google Ads

With Google ads you’ll need an ad account which is free to sign up with, and you’re going to be bidding on keywords and paying for clicks. 

Since this is a “overview”, i’m not going to go too deep into google ads ppc here either… but, we would probably want to put up an ad for the exact phrase “Brain Training For Dogs” or “Brain Training For Dogs Review”.

This is different from facebook ads. In facebook, you’re letting the users know you exist (to put it in a way), whereas in google, they’re already “searching” for you. 🙂

Notice the difference? These people are already looking for “Dog Brain Train” the product. These people know about it and want to know a bit more, maybe they need a little push to acuallt buy the product.

There is no ad placed on either search term, and the 1rst organic spots are for the product review. They go over the product and recommend it. You might be able to set an ad there and get cheap clicks and sales!

Alrighty everyone, that would be it, only some of the basics on how to make money online with affiliate marketing as a beginner.

It went a little further than expected, but hopefully, it was well worth the read. 

See if you can do the experiment of finding a product you like, and choosing one of the different ways to promote it!

It could be through instagram, or twitter ads or free facebook traffic, youtube review or ads, it’s up to you! Test test test.