Start Affiliate Marketing

Start Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing For Beginners: (in 30 Days or Less)

It’s 11pm on a sleepless night in Bangkok.

I had to flee the country about a week ago due to a government crackdown, and I had already had to leave my apartment due to the constant gunfire and grenades that had been going on for 48 hours. (Seriously, true story).

My (now) good friends Derek and Clay had an apartment in the city that they had just moved into. Despite only knowing them for a short time, they let me crash for a few days while I figured out my next steps.

While all this was happening, author Chris Guillebeau was launching his latest product called Empire Building Kit. Among other things, it featured a year of emails and was designed to help you build a business in that time.

I had done very little in the previous year to monetize Location Rebel. But when it came out, I thought, “Why not?” and wrote a review talking about how great the program was.

I went out to get a coffee and when I came back and refreshed my inbox it was 11:05 - 5 minutes after the sale started.

I refreshed my email as soon as I got back, and I couldn't believe my eyes.

There were 4 emails, each one saying "Sean Ogle you just referred a sale! You got $126.99 in commission." Empire Building Kit Sales.

In 5 minutes, I could have made $500.

I had never made money with my website like this before. But at that moment I really understood the power of building an audience and monetizing with affiliate links.

In this post I'm going to walk you through everything you need to know to start affiliate marketing on your blog, even if you've never made a cent online before, don't have a lot of visitors, or even start building your blog. Blog website from scratch.

We clearly have a lot of work to do, so let's get started!

Table of Contents

How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: Some Common Questions Answered.

Here’s how to start affiliate marketing on your blog in 8 steps:

Types of Affiliate Products: Physical vs. Information vs. Services

How to Promote Physical Products as an Affiliate Marketer

Why Choose Affiliate Marketing Over Other Forms of Blog Monetization

How to Promote an Affiliate Offer

A Quick Note About Video Affiliate Marketing

A Few Last Affiliate Marketing Tips

Affiliate Marketing Alternatives: 4 Other Online Businesses to Complement Your Affiliate Marketing Business.

What I Recommend You Do to Start Affiliate Marketing Right Now

How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: Some Common Questions Answered

This is one of the most in-depth videos on how to start affiliate marketing, so tune in as you read this post:

What is Affiliate Marketing

Start Affiliate Marketing, This is one of the most common questions we get, and it’s really quite simple:

Affiliate marketing is a way for you (the affiliate) to earn commissions for recommending products or services to your friends or readers.

To make it simple, here’s a 5-step process for how to get started with affiliate marketing:

Find a product you want to promote

Search the affiliate program for “product name.” If it’s on Amazon, you can promote it.

Sign up for their affiliate program

You’ll get a special link that allows the merchant to track people who click on your link.

You’ll get a commission if they buy the product.

Pretty simple, right?

It could be much more advanced, but in this post, we’re just going to start with the basics and get you to the point where you’re ready to make your first commission.

Still not clear? Check out “What is Affiliate Marketing” for a little more detail.

How does affiliate marketing work

Start Affiliate Marketing, There are several ways to track affiliates these days, but almost all of them are based on clicking on your special tracking link.

The most common and basic type of tracking is through cookies.

When an affiliate link is clicked, a small file called a cookie is stored on the user’s computer. Then when they purchase a product, the merchant can see that they were referred to you.

There are more advanced methods based on the email or IP address used – but we won’t get into those here, we’ll stick to the most important things you need to know.

How much money can you make with affiliate marketing

Okay, part of you is probably saying, "How much money can I make with affiliate marketing? Is it worth my time to figure out how to do it?"

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that the sky is the limit.

You can really make as much or as little as you want because there are all kinds of products that you can promote.

Here's an example from my golf site, Breaking This.

Now, I'm not saying this to brag, but to give you an idea. I promote dozens of products and this is just one product. So that's a commission on one product for less than six months.

Affiliate Marketing Product Commission

Start Affiliate Marketing, That's a pretty big number.

And so if it's one of many different products, you can see that there's a lot of potential here.

I've been doing this for years. It doesn't happen overnight.

But if you start getting serious about affiliate marketing now and use this strategy to build your brand, it’s a great way to generate passive income and do what you love. It gives you freedom, flexibility, and time to do more than you could ever imagine.

This is why I’m a fan of affiliate marketing as a business.

How do you become an affiliate marketer?

Here’s the thing, you can pick any product you can buy online and have an affiliate program that will pay you a finder’s fee for referring a sale.

However, just because you can promote anything doesn’t mean you should.

The most important thing to consider when choosing a product to market is, “Is it relevant to your audience?”

For example, trying to advertise dumbbells on Position Rebel probably wouldn’t be the smartest thing for me to do, since 99% of my audience could care less about them.

However, for me, WP Engine makes a lot more sense than promoting a WordPress hosting company – since almost every one of my readers has considered or started a website.

Recently, we’ve been promoting Streak as a great tool for freelancers to use to track leads directly from their inbox. Again, this is something that speaks directly to the audience.

Here’s how to start affiliate marketing on your blog in 8 steps:

Step 1: Create a website or a blog

Step 2: Choose an industry, and then narrow it down

Step 3: Research products in your niche that you can review

Step 4: Sign up for the Amazon Affiliate Program

Step 5: Find affiliate programs for other products you want to review

Step 6: Create content in the form of tutorials, review posts, resource pages, or emails, and use your affiliate link.

Step 7: Optimize the page and track your rankings on Google

Step 8: Rinse and repeat!

I thought about walking you through this entire process within this post, but honestly, it’s all pretty straightforward and a lot of it’s stuff you probably already know.

So instead of doing that, I want to focus on creating a good affiliate product and understanding how to promote it successfully.

If you’re looking for a complete breakdown of how to create and monetize an affiliate blog or niche site, check this out.

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Types of Affiliate Products: Physical vs. Information vs. Services

There are three different types of affiliate products you can promote as a marketer

Physical Products
Information Products
Services

Each of these has its pros and cons, and we’re going to look at them now.

How to Promote Physical Products as an Affiliate Marketer

Physical products are probably the easiest things 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 to any product on the site, earning a (small) commission on it!

As it currently sits, you can earn anywhere from 1 to 4.5% on any product you promote through the Amazon Affiliate Program. The percentage depends on which category it falls into. You can see the breakdown here.

I get a 3% commission on most of the things I promote.

One of the nice things about promoting through Amazon is that you get a commission on anything a shopper buys – not just links to specific products that they didn’t click on.

So let’s say I’m promoting some golf balls on my golf website.

The balls cost $50, so I’ll only earn $1.50. But, what if that same person buys a set of golf clubs for $1,000 and a new golf rangefinder for $300?

Then suddenly $1.50 becomes $41.50.

Amazon has a 24-hour cookie. So that means if someone clicks on your link, they have 24 hours to get the credit.

It doesn’t have to be for the product they clicked on. What if they click on your golf ball link and then buy a new TV? You still get the credit!

Lately, it seems like Amazon is breathing some life back into their affiliate program as they are giving cash bonuses to some marketers for hitting referral goals. The bonuses were bigger than I expected, so it was nice to see after they cut their commissions a few years ago.

Other Ways to Promote Physical Products

Start Affiliate Marketing, In many ways, Amazon is like the gateway drug to affiliate product promotion because it’s so easy, and millions of people use it every day.

But as you get more experienced, you’ll find that there are more profitable ways to promote physical products.

For example, the REI affiliate program has a 5% commission and a 15-day cookie. If you have an outdoor-themed website, you have the potential to make almost twice as much money from the products you promote, and you can give people more time to shop.

Do you buy from REI like many people buy from Amazon? No, but in your niche, you can make REI a favorite and more trusted brand with your readers.

Many companies offer their own affiliate programs where they pay even higher commissions.

In the golf world, I work directly with over 30 companies that have affiliate commissions ranging from 5-20%. With most falling in the 10-15% range.

To give you an example, I promote golf rangefinders.

With a brand, if I sell a $500 rangefinder on Amazon? I make $15.

But if I sell the same thing directly through the company’s affiliate program? I make $50.

Not many people buy directly from the website, but I make 3x more per sale, it's worth promoting there!

In a recent month for this particular brand, I sold 140 rangefinders on Amazon with a $1,377.15 commission.

I promoted it directly through their website, where I only sold 53 rangefinders, but earned $1,687.83 in commission.

This doesn’t take into account other products that people are buying on Amazon at the same time – but it does give you an idea of how it might be beneficial to expand into other physical product affiliate programs.

How to Sign Up for Amazon’s Partner Program

Start Affiliate Marketing, Signing up for Amazon’s affiliate program is a great starting point.

Why?

Because chances are good that you already use Amazon, are familiar with it, and so are your readers.

You can sign up here and get links directly from the Amazon affiliate program.

If you want to learn more about Amazon affiliate marketing, we’ve got you covered.

Consider Other Affiliate Networks

Most large companies will use an affiliate network to host their products. These are sites where you sign up that can represent dozens of brands and how you get your own special links and marketing materials.

Other smaller companies may do it in-house, so it’s worth reaching out and doing a little research.

But the main affiliate networks I’ve used are:

FlexOffer
CommissionJunction
ShareASale
Rakuten
Impact

Many large companies work with them (for example, many of the golf companies I work with), and building relationships with a larger affiliate network can help you get leads that you might not otherwise get.

Affiliate Marketing for Information Products

Honestly? I love promoting information products.

What is an information product? It’s a digital product, course, or community created by an expert in their field.

For example, our flagship product, Rebel Academy, is an information product.

There are many reasons why information products are so great to promote:

They often have a high price tag, which means high commissions

They can have a personality behind them, which builds trust and makes them easier to sell

They often have a full marketing funnel behind them that helps drive sales

They solve a problem or provide a solution that your readers are looking for

Typically, becoming an affiliate for these products can be a bit more work because often the manufacturers are a bit more protective about who they allow to market their products.

There is no central place to join like Amazon. Typically, you will have to speak to the author directly or find an “Affiliate” page on their product site.

Another notable benefit of promoting information products is that they usually earn higher commissions than physical products.

30-50% is pretty standard when it comes to promoting information products. Why? There are no hard costs associated with it.

And what if a product manufacturer could give an affiliate a percentage of any sale instead of spending a significant amount of money on advertising? It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

When I promote information products I usually look for high-value products created by people who are good at marketing. Why?

Because all I have to do is send traffic to their funnel and they convert into sales. My work is relatively minimal.

I mentioned my Bangkok story above, but one of my first real big wins came from marketing an information product to build a software business. Over 12 months I made over $20k in commissions from one blog post, 2 webinars, and a handful of dedicated emails.

That’s it.

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

Affiliate Marketing for Service Products

The third type of product you can promote is a service. This is another big one for me because of the nature of what I’m writing here.

My business doesn’t work without hosting, a theme, email software, etc.

So it can be easy to sell on services because if I personally love and use them, you can too.

If you’re lucky, you might find a service that pays recurring commissions based on monthly payments.

For example, SEMrush has been paying a 40% referral fee every month for the life of the account for years. So what if I refer someone to join for $99/month? I’ll make about $40/month for as long as they’re a customer.

We’ve seen a lot of companies move to one-time payments these days. Now, SEMrush pays a flat fee of $200 for each new customer. Still, not too shabby.

Interact Quiz Maker offers $40 for new signups.

Scale Content, which is an AI writing tool that I actually recommend, makes 15% recurring revenue for each subscriber. Considering their base price is $500, this has the potential to be a pretty serious income stream.

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If you make a purchase, we earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

But if you can find those recurring commissions, you can build a solid stream of passive income if you promote them properly.

Think about what services you use and whether it makes sense to promote them on your site. You can typically expect a commission of between 15-30% on service products – sometimes more or less depending on what it is. Or if it’s a one-time payment, you can expect it to be the equivalent of 2 months’ worth of payments.

My Favorite Affiliate Programs for Online Services

Start Affiliate Marketing, If you have a website related to online marketing, blogging, or business, fortunately there are many solid affiliate programs for a variety of services.

I wanted to share a few of my favorites so you can understand what an affiliate program entails and start to get a feel for what might work for your site.

SEMrush – This is the affiliate program for SEO research tool SEMrush. I use it religiously at Location Rebel and their affiliate program gives you all the resources you need and pays $200 for each new referral.

Bluehost – On top of being my favorite web host for brand new bloggers, Bluehost starts by paying a generous affiliate fee of $65 for every new sign-up you refer. Their affiliate managers are great, and I’ve had great results with their service.

WP Engine – I host all of my high-traffic sites on WP Engine and have had nothing but positive experiences with them over the years.

Content at Scale – This is a surprisingly good AI tool for writing long-form, SEO-related content.

Interact – This is the tool I used to 5x my email list for my golf niche site.

Why Choose Affiliate Marketing Over Other Forms of Blog Monetization

Most new bloggers assume that ads or banner ads are the best way to monetize your site.

Up until a few years ago, I’d say you couldn’t be more wrong.

Because you needed a lot of traffic to make a significant amount of money, and ads on their own would devalue your site and make it look awful.

These days, that’s not true.

If you get 50k views per month, you will be able to qualify for certain ad networks (I like Mediavine) that actually pay pretty well for display ads.

They are still ugly, but you can make some serious money as your traffic grows. About 3 years ago I decided to put ads on my site for a 3 month trial. I wanted to see if anyone would complain, and what the revenue would be like?

I have no complaints about the ads in that entire time. And in 2023? I will be making close to $100k for doing literally nothing extra. Hard to argue with that.

Mediavine Numbers

If you are interested in making passive income through display ads, check out this video:

But this post is about affiliate marketing.

So why would I choose affiliate marketing as my primary income stream over display ads?

Many reasons, but here are a few:

They won’t clutter your site and ruin the aesthetics

You can get started even if you don’t have a ton of traffic

When done right, affiliate links can help build trust with your visitors instead of alienating them

You can pay for products they already use and love.

Over time, you can get free products to review

These are just a few reasons why affiliate marketing is a great way to monetize your site, but they’re certainly not the only ones.

And remember, the two are not mutually exclusive. You can have display ads and affiliate links. Just make sure you don’t try so hard to make money that you lose faith in the process.

Here’s an example of a recent post I did on Breaking Eight, where I reviewed the best golf launch monitors. I wrote a post, and shot a video. I have affiliate links for all of the products.

Not only that, but for some of the products I was able to negotiate coupon codes with the company, which provided discounts for my readers. The best part? If that coupon code is used, I also make a commission, just like when they click on the link.

How to Promote an Affiliate Offer

Okay, now for the most important part.

By now you should have a good idea of what affiliate marketing is, what products you want to promote, and how to get your affiliate links for them.

But if you don’t know how to promote them properly, that doesn’t matter right now, does it? No.

In this section, we’re going to look at some of the easiest and most successful ways to promote an affiliate offer.

Affiliate Marketing with Product Reviews

Product reviews are a great way to generate some sales if you’ve built a lot of trust with your audience. This works for all three types of products you might promote, and I’ve personally seen success with each one.

The key to a successful product review is honesty.

I’ll usually review things that you like, but if there are any flaws or little things that bother you – be upfront about them. Most people know that no product is perfect, so if you set expectations and are open with them, there’s a good chance they’ll buy it anyway.

Make sure you include the following items in any product review:

Have a clear title that includes your desired keywords (for example, “Product Name Review”). Here are some blog post title ideas if you’re stuck.

Have clear links to where to buy at the top and bottom of the page.

A clear recommendation

A personal story about how you use the product or why you recommend it

I’ve done this with great success at Breaking Eight.

Here’s a review of a golf product that sells dozens of products a month. I say what I like, what I don’t, and then explain why I’m okay with those negatives. Arcos Caddy

And another one I did at Bluffworks, a great pair of travel pants that I love for traveling.

This post goes into more detail about how to make money with affiliate marketing through product reviews.

Affiliate Marketing with Tutorials

Tutorials are one of the most effective strategies for driving affiliate sales, especially for software products. They can take a long time to put together, but they’re totally worth it.

So what exactly is a tutorial?

Simple, you create a post that shows people how to do something step by step – then you make a product or service one of the key ingredients to success.

I’ve done a few of these.

With my How to Build a Niche Site post, I talk about all the steps you need to take to get a niche site up and running. So it includes some tools that I know and love, like hosting services and ConvertKit.

I have another post, How to Set Up a Blog , that walks people through step by step using Bluehost. Readers can go through that post without a website and be ready to rock their site in less than 15 minutes using the tutorial.

You can also do this with video. I walk you through how to do keyword research using SEMrush in an affiliate post here.

Affiliate Marketing with Comparison Posts

These can be another effective strategy for generating affiliate sales.

This works well when two products are very similar and people are thinking about one or the other.

A great example would be comparing the PlayStation 5 vs. Xbox Series X.

If people are looking for a new gaming console, it’s probably going to be one of the two. That said, I wouldn’t recommend choosing one of them because of the overwhelming amount of information about them – it would be difficult to rank well in search engines for any terms related to them.

A recent example I did is this post comparing Mevo Plus to Skytrax+.

Mevo or Skytrax

These are two golf products that consumers often try to choose between.

Here’s an in-depth post that compares and contrasts different hosting options – and helps users choose the best option for them.

Affiliate Marketing with a Resource Page

This is something that probably isn’t going to generate a ton of sales for you, but it’s a great thing to have on your site – since it’s very easy to do:

Create a resource page.

No matter what your business is, there are tools, products, and services that you use to run your blog or business. By bringing all of your tools and resources together on one page, you’re creating something that’s shareable, as well as useful.

You can also change this up and create a gift guide.

Our Best Gifts for Writers is a good example of this, and it brings in a nice income during certain holidays.

Using an Email Series to Start Affiliate Marketing

This is one of the most effective (and most advanced) methods we’ll talk about for making affiliate sales: your email list.

Once you’ve gotten to the point where you have a large list, you can create a series of emails to promote a product. This works best if it’s an information product with a relatively high commission.

For this to work well, you should have the following:

A list of at least 1,000 people

A product that you’ve used and had success with or have a really good story/reason to promote

A product that converts well (talk to the creator about this)

I’ve found a 3-email series to usually work well for this, but don’t start going this route until you’ve gained experience with email marketing or other affiliate strategies we’ve talked about.

A Quick Note About Video Affiliate Marketing in 2024

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing on a blog for over a decade. It’s by far the most profitable platform. But there’s a catch.

With the advancements in AI, we’re going to see a ton of AI-generated competition in 2024.

This will make building trust more important than ever.

I think the best winning combination right now is to do video and written content.

Because AI can’t copy you on video. I mean, it probably could. But for all practical purposes, it…still can’t.

So when you combine video and written content for both types of audiences – you’re doing something that very few people can do well.

I think this is the secret sauce for affiliate marketing in 2024 and beyond.

It’s more work and a steep learning curve, but what if you build an affiliate review brand and you take both your written and video content seriously? You’re going to see significant growth and revenue in the coming months.

It’s been almost 18 months since I started making videos with Breaking Eight. Since then, the brand’s traffic has more than doubled, revenue has more than doubled, and our email list has quadrupled.

There’s power here, so if I were you and I was serious about making six-figures from affiliate marketing I would do things in this order:

Create and set up your website

Create a YouTube channel

Build your email list

Do other social media

These are the first 3 priorities – other social media that you can think about down the line.

I’ll probably do a dedicated post about this soon, because this is a big thing that has changed in affiliate marketing in the last few years.

But for now, know that you can make money with any platform, but if you really want to see success, I’d put together a written and video review.

Some Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Tips

If you follow the strategies above, you’ll be making affiliate sales on your blog in no time.

To further improve your chances, I’ve got a few more tips for you.

Use a link management tool (I like Lasso)

I’ve been using Lasso for a few years at Breaking Eight, and I absolutely love it.

The main benefit of this is that it basically gives me an affiliate link database. So what happens if my link changes? I can update it in one place, and it will update it across every single link on the site.

It does a great job of displaying affiliate links in a way that makes them more prominent and more clickable.

Here’s an example:

Lasso: Affiliate Link Manager for WordPress

14-Day Trial

Find new revenue opportunities, increase clicks, and measure how much money you’re making by managing your links with LASSO.

Sign up for Lasso today!

We earn a commission when you make a purchase at no extra cost.

Build a good relationship with affiliate managers

Most major affiliate programs for physical products or services will have an affiliate manager whose sole job is to help you generate more sales.

You’ll need to prove to them that you have some potential, but do your best to get them on the phone before you launch any major promotions. They’ll be able to give you a good idea of what works, what doesn’t, and they can potentially increase your commission.

A phone call, especially to a hosting company, almost doubles my commission.

Don’t Make These Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

There are a lot of pitfalls when starting out with affiliate marketing. Hopefully this post has addressed many of them, so you can get started with affiliate marketing the right way.

But if you’re still worried, here’s a list of 5 really common affiliate marketing mistakes. I made these mistakes so you don’t have to! So make sure you read this to make sure you’re not missing anything obvious.

Affiliate Marketing Alternatives: 4 Other Online Businesses to Complement Your Affiliate Marketing Business.

Freelance Writing – The easiest way to start an online business, start building some skills, and build confidence in your ability to do something like affiliate marketing successfully.

Niche Sites – Once you get the basics of affiliate marketing down, you can really do well to repeat the process and create niche sites on all sorts of different topics.

Blogging – A huge component of every good affiliate marketing site is a blog, take that skill set and translate it into another business.

Physical Products – Want to create a physical product that connects to your niche and then sell it online? There are plenty of opportunities here if you want to work on it.

Here’s what I recommend you do to get started with affiliate marketing right now

We have a course at Rebel Academy called “Make Money Blogging”. It’s literally the most step-by-step course I know for building a money-making affiliate niche website.

So if you’re looking for community support, support from us, and a dozen other blueprints to build an online business? I think you’ll love the Academy.

However, if all this has you thinking freelancing might be a good fit? Then take our free 6-day course that takes you through all the basics of getting started.

This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you click on a link and purchase one of the products on this page, I may receive a commission (at no additional cost to you!) This does not influence our opinions or our reviews. Everything we do is to benefit you as the reader, so all of our reviews are as honest and unbiased as possible.

Start Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing For Beginners: (in 30 Days or Less)

Start Affiliate Marketing