Affiliate marketing

Imagine all you needed to make money online was a free website. You don’t have to create your own products or offer a service. Sounds good? Welcome to affiliate marketing.

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.

Here are four reasons why you should consider affiliate marketing:

1. Low-cost and low-risk

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.

2. Passive income potential

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.

3. Work from home or anywhere in the world

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

4. Easy to scale

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.

How to get started with affiliate marketing

Step 1: Choose your niche

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:

What am I good at?

What do I like doing?

What am I curious about?

What do other people tell me I’m good at?

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.

Step 2: Decide on a content platform

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

Website

YouTube

Social media (e.g., Instagram, TikTok)

Newsletter

Podcast

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.

TIP

Whether you’re creating a website, YouTube, or something else, note that you’ll need to disclose the fact that you’re including affiliate links. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires you to be transparent when receiving income from an endorsement.

If you’re building a website, create a standalone page or include it in the footer of your website

Step 3: Find affiliate programs to join

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

High-paying, low-volume — Niche products with fewer buyers. For example, HubSpot sells only to businesses but their affiliate program pays well (100% of first month and 15% monthly recurring commission.)

Low-paying, high-volume — Products with mass appeal, e.g. PS5 games. For example, Amazon only pays up to 10% commission. But the good thing is they offer commissions off the entire value of the purchase (and not just the product you recommended.)

High-paying, high-volume — Expensive products with mass appeal, e.g. credit cards. An issue is that these programs tend to attract affiliate marketers with deep expertise and pockets and willingness to black-hat tactics.

Step 4: Create great content

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.

Step 5: Drive traffic to your affiliate site

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:

A. Paid traffic

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.

B. SEO

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:

Understanding what your target customers are searching for

Creating content around those topics

Making sure Google understands clearly what your page is about

Acquiring or earning links to push your pages higher in the search engines

Ensuring Google can find, crawl, and index your content

Step 6: Get clicks on your affiliate links

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.

A. Link placement

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.

B. Context

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

Your introduction probably shouldn’t look like this:

Today, I’m reviewing the best chef knives.

The links look out of context and spammy.

This would make more sense:

Today, I’m reviewing three different chef knives you can buy on Amazon for under $50. These are, product name 1, product name 2, and product name 3

C. Callouts

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.

Step 7: Convert clicks to sales

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:

A. Public income reports

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.

B. Ask questions

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.

C. Use your intuition

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.

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:

Ahrefs — All-in-one SEO tool that’ll help you research keywords to target, audit your website, research your competitors, find content ideas, and more.

Rank Math — WordPress plugin that ensures your pages have optimal on-page SEO.

Google Search Console — Find and fix technical errors on your website, submit sitemaps, see structured data issues, check your Core Web Vitals, and more.

Google Analytics — Provides crucial data and analytics for your affiliate website.

Thirsty Affiliates — Keep track of your affiliate links, see statistics to know which links are getting the most clicks, and prevent others from easily copying your website and swapping the links with their own affiliate IDs.

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

What is EPC in 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

What is cookie duration in affiliate marketing?

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.

How do you start affiliate marketing on Amazon?

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.

How do I do affiliate marketing without a website?

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.

How do you do high-ticket affiliate marketing?

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

Final thoughts

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.