Affiliate Marketing FREE Guide for Beginners

If you want to earn passive income from affiliate marketing, this post will be your go-to guide.

Not only am I going to teach you the basics of becoming an affiliate marketer, but we'll also get into some real examples of professional affiliate marketers making thousands or even millions of dollars a year without spending money on PPC or anything else. of that nonsense.

We'll promote products on Amazon, creating SEO content that ranks on Google. Create an email list, promotion strategies, choose the best affiliate program, and give you a step-by-step guide through the entire process so you can earn affiliate commissions in no time.

Generally, it's a method for getting a commission on a sale.

If you've been listening to us for a long time, you've learned that bloggers make money by building an audience that trusts them and then offering products or services that will really help that audience.

Affiliate marketing is just a quick way to offer products and services. Without having to create your own products and services you can earn money.

For bloggers, this means finding a product or service you like, promoting it to your readers, and earning a share of the profit on every sale you make.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the promotion of the products or services of another person or company in exchange for a commission on the resulting sale. Join affiliate programs, find reputable products to promote, and then sell those products.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketing can get quite technical, even for those who are well versed in digital marketing.

• When a partner joins the seller's program, he or she is given a unique ID and specific URL to use when promoting the company's product.
• Affiliate will include the link in their blog content and/or through their email marketing efforts and invite readers to click on it for more information.
• When a buyer clicks on the link to visit the site, an identifier is placed on their computer. The cookie ensures that the publisher is credited with the referral sale, even if it happens days or even weeks later.
• Whenever a buyer buys the item, the merchant checks the sales record that identifies the source of the referral.
• If the merchant finds a cookie with a partner ID, the sale will be credited to the partner.
• The merchant makes reports available so that the affiliate can see his referrals (clicks) and sales.
• The merchant pays affiliate commission at the end of each payment period (i.e. sharing income).

So let's take a look at a blogger's typical progression making affiliate marketing a major source of income.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing in 4 Steps

Step 1: Choose a Product to Promote as an Affiliate

Then run your remaining options through this checklist for Good Affiliate products:

You have previewed the product so that you know the quality

Refund policy that you trust.

• They provide good customer support.
• You can share your experience with the product.
• The offering fits the needs of your audience and does not take advantage of the trust you have built with them.
• The products that tick all the boxes are your best bet for a partner's income. Over time, add as many of these products to your mix as you want.

You have found your first product! Sign up through the seller's process and start promoting.

If you put your toe into the affiliate marketing channels, this first option may be enough to get you started.

Option #1: Find Products Via an Affiliate Network

If you don't have direct experience or knowledge of products in your niche that can help your readers, you can often find good affiliate products on affiliate networks (? our detailed guide).

But be careful - this approach requires you to invest time in research and money in buying products to try, more than the first option.

That's because less trust and prior knowledge is involved from the start. You must do your due diligence to protect your reputation and the credibility you have built with your readers.

When working over a network, you usually don't know the salesperson in advance and usually don't build a relationship with him (your business relationship is with the network).

The list of popular and reliable affiliate networks includes ClickBank, CJ Affiliate, the eBay Partner Network, ShareaSale, CJ Affiliate (aka Commission Junction), and the Amazon Associates Program. Some networks will even assign you an affiliate manager to lend a hand and show you the tricks of the trade.

Many newbies start out by becoming an Amazon partner and then scale up to other types of more profitable affiliate offerings.

Step 2: Get Yourself Set Up as an Affiliate

Whether you are working directly with a merchant or over a network, you must apply, be approved, and provide certain information so that you can be paid.

You must provide at least the following:

Your contact information for tax and reporting purposes.

Your bank account where the commissions are sent.

An affiliate link. Every time you post about the product, use this trackable link. It has a long tag with your affiliate ID at the end of each link.

You will also usually be given some tips and helpful resources on how to market the product 

These can be a guide to partners and instructions on how to use the platform and a summary of policies such as payouts.

Online marketing tools such as banners and sidebar images.

Preview email/web page swipe copy.

Continuous communication from the merchant about promotions, new products, etc.

If you use a network like Amazon, you will get your own link for each of the specific products you are promoting.

Please refer to the help or support pages of your specific network for more information.

Step 3: Start Promoting Your Chosen Affiliate Offers

Ultimately, all your hard work to find and evaluate products pays off only if someone takes your advice and makes the purchase, right?

For that to happen, you need to present your recommendation to your audience. More importantly, you must make your recommendation reliable.

This is where many affiliate marketers make a mistake. They think it's all they have to do to put a few banners on their blog that links to affiliate products.

Option 1: Create your blog

It promotes many different products, but it also organizes them based on different types of readers and what they need at the time. It also explains why those products would be useful to them.

In other words, it's not just a sales pitch. It's educational. Since it has a lot of high-quality content and is well optimized for SEO, it also ranks well in Google search results and gets organic traffic. It also gets good conversion rates.

Chances are, you can put together a landing page like this in a matter of hours. Your readers will also appreciate that you put all of your recommendations in one place for easy reference.

Option 2: Create/Promote Custom Content

This content marketing strategy is the backbone of your affiliate promotion efforts.

Use as many of the following different techniques as making sense to your blog and audience.

A) Write reviews

You can focus on a single product or compare similar products side by side.

The second approach arguably builds more trust but also distracts people by making them many different recommendations.

If you want to rate multiple products, one of the options is to create a review site with only reviews and offers from partners.

B) Write final content on a related topic

You can write a final, comprehensive post on your site to educate your readers and "soft sell" your products, then work on getting it in the search engines.

For example, you can write an ultimate guide to set up a WordPress blog and include your affiliate links to your favorite hosting providers.

An example here at Smart Blogger is our post on freelance writing jobs. It's a detailed, definitive guide for freelancers looking for online jobs, but it also allows us to offer one of our writing courses.

Whatever the topic, make sure it's always green content - information that's likely to be useful and valuable for years to come.

You can create blog posts, videos, infographics, or the like, but whatever you do, it shouldn't be a sales page. Focus on building trust and authority.

Finally, you should pay close attention to SEO - make sure you optimize for the right keywords, get WordPress running fast, and build links to your content to get a steady stream of traffic from Google.

C) Create valuable bonus content

Assuming it's allowed by your affiliate agreement (sometimes not), you can create bonus content, exclusive to your readers, that help people get even more value from the affiliate product.

People love bonuses! You can create many types of bonuses quite quickly and easily while still giving your readers excellent value.

By the way, this is a great way to differentiate yourself from other bloggers who represent the same products.

Here are some sample bonuses you could offer:

• Step-by-step checklists
• Quickstarts
• Video overviews or demos
• Additional or discounted services

Step 4: Comply with Legal Requirements

Don't be afraid to be transparent. People will want your honesty and support you to pay you back for making their lives better.

So wherever you share an affiliate link, be it in blog posts, web pages, or emails, let your readers know that you can earn a small commission if they buy through you - and if they choose not to use your link, don't worry.

Assure them that you would not recommend products if you had not used them yourself or were sure they could help them.