Affiliate Marketing Tutorial For Beginners Part 1

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when one party earns a commission from marketing another company’s products. It’s the easiest way to start an online business with little or no money.

You don’t have to worry about buying the product or storing it, you don’t have to ship it out or worry about providing customer support, it’s all done by the company. You’re just the middle man that brings buyers to the product and makes a commission for the sale. Easy. Right?

All  famous YouTubers, all  tech reviewers, Instagram people, all these fitness people. The large name brand companies like Uber, Paypal, Walmart and many more. Amazon is built on affiliate marketers promoting their products.

Do I Need a Website?

You don’t need money or a website to do affiliate marketing. All you need is your affiliate link to the product and a way to drive traffic to it to make sales and earn your commission.

Now you might be asking how do you get this link from a company? One way to do it is google the company that you want to sell products for and see if they have an affiliate program and how much they pay affiliates. Then fill out the registration form to apply. 

Now some may require you to answer questions of how you’ll be promoting and even ask for a website address. If that’s the case, then find another company or marketplace. There are plenty that don’t ask for any information about how you’ll be promoting it and you can still get the affiliate link. 

Pro Tip: I only promote products that I get at least 50% commission or are a recurring subscription and I can make passive monthly income from it. I don’t promote offers that I need approval for, it takes too long sometimes and quite often the product isn’t worth it.

The BIG affiliates don’t just do 1 method and then stop. No, they have a variety of offers and methods to drive traffic to as well as different platforms they use to get their offers in front of the eyes of thousands of targeted buyers.

What Affiliate Network Should I Use?

There’s different affiliate networks that you can sign up to as well. ClickBank is one of the top affiliate marketplaces for virtual products and you don’t have to apply to the vendors (there are only a few that do).

Why are they one of the top ones? 

They have a variety of top money making products that thousands of affiliates are promoting and many different niches and categories.

They have excellent customer support and getting refunds is very easy. These are things you must look for when promoting any offer. You don’t want to promote crappy products or worse yet, products that offer zero customer support.

Why Virtual Products? 

Unlike Amazon, there’s no inventory to keep track of and you never run out of stock. You can keep selling that product for years. There are many virtual marketplaces and products that are shipped as well.

You don’t want to limit yourself to just 1 marketplace either. Have several that you use. Like CPAGrip. That’s another type of affiliate site where you can earn money from someone just submitting an email for an offer and not actually purchasing it. You make a couple of dollars to get that company the email lead. It’s not as much as 50% commission, but if you get enough of those and you can make some pretty good money, especially if you’re driving a lot of traffic to it.

Other affiliate sites I’ve used: 

Digistore24.com
Markethealth.com
Maxbounty.com
OfferVault.com
CPAGrip.com
CJ.com
JVZoo.com
Amazon.com

Many people want to sell on Amazon. I was both an Amazon seller and an affiliate. 

Pro Tip: What you need to know is that you have to have money for inventory to be a seller on Amazon. As an Amazon affiliate, you only make 1% commission, which is very low compared to 50% commissions. This is another one that you need to drive a lot of traffic to make money.

Other affiliate programs to make money in are web hosting, website builders, VPNs, travel, finance, fashion, beauty, and fitness. They should include emerging verticals like cryptocurrency, makeup tutorials, traveling, workouts and marijuana/CBD oil.

Other great affiliate programs to join are for tools that every business needs, like these:

Bluehost.com
Dreamhost.com
Hostgator.com
A2Hosting.com
Siteground.com
Aweber.com
Getresponse.com
Groovesell.com
Elementor.com
System.io
Canva.com
Wavevideo.com
Viddyoze.com

Pro Tip: You can make a lot of money promoting services and software. Plus it’s a reoccurring monthly fee so you’ll get a commission every month as long as they stay active. 

That’s where you start making the real money!

As an affiliate marketer it’s very important to take your integrity very seriously and only sell good products. In other words, sell products that you’ve used and tested or know someone who has. Don’t just sell anything or be a scammer. 

This is where affiliate marketing gets a bad rap because there’s a lot of just scammy people in this industry unfortunately. Don’t be that guy/gal.

Treat your customers the way you want to be treated and ONLY promote products that deliver.

At least do your due diligence to look at the stats, read other reviews and see what other people are saying about the product. Look at the refund rate of every product you want to promote, look at the gravity, the rating, etc. Get a good understanding of whether this is something that you want to attach your name to or if it’s just crap. 

Move on if it’s not something you should promote, don’t promote crap just to make money.

Focus on high quality products that will help them in some way and that way they’re less likely to refund, plus it’s the ethical way to do business.

What Are The Top Affiliate Marketers Doing?

If you really want to be successful, handle this like a business and not a hobby. Take the time to set things up right the first time. Set yourself up for success and you will reap the rewards down the line.

Sign up for top quality high ticket offers, quality low ticket offers, cpa offers, subscriptions and more. That’s what top affiliates do. It’s a number games and the more variety of ways you have to make money the better chances you have of earning commissions.

Don’t just sell anything! Sell products you’ve used or recommend, not crappy products. You want to have integrity and build rapport with your community. Promoting crappy products will not accomplish that, even if you make money it won’t be ethical. So don’t be that guy/gal. 

Another thing new affiliates don’t do is collect email addresses. This is a BIG mistake that I made starting out. You’ll hear the gurus often say that ‘‘the money’s in the list.’ It’s absolutely true, growing a list of targeted buyers is a huge asset. You can make sales in any economy if you’re actively emailing your list with more offers.

Which means at some point you will need to have a funnel built to drive traffic to an optin page. Here you will have your leads sign up to an autoresponder so you can collect those email addresses and build your list of subscribers. Most autoresponders start out free then you have to pay a monthly fee, which goes up usually after you have 500 subscribers.

What’s an Autoresponder?

An autoresponder is a service that you pay a monthly fee to automatically send out emails to a group, or to several different groups, of people that sign up to your landing or lead capture page, also known as a funnel.

These are a couple that I’ve used in my business:

Aweber.com
Getresponse.com

You will collect their emails when they optin to your funnel, they will get a welcome email automatically upon signup. Then they will receive 1 email a day with free content and more offers. There’s a methodical method to do this effectively.

Pro Tip: Be consistent in your email marketing and keep sending them offers along with FREE content to build their trust. People buy quicker from people they like, know and trust. 

Once you sign up to the top affiliate marketplaces and find some products you’ll need to pick a few methods to drive traffic to your links.

Some really effective methods are:
YouTube. You can create short videos about the product and put the affiliate links in the description to drive traffic to it. No website needed!

You can also use Pinterest (another search engine with targeted buyers) . Simply use those same short videos to drive targeted traffic from Pinterest to your offers.

You can do this with Facebook, Instagram and even Twitter. The more networks you use the more traffic you’ll get.

You can also use Quora, Medium, LiveJournal and other article writing websites to drive traffic to your offers as well. Also FREE classified websites work well too.

Cookie’s also play a big role in affiliate marketing.

What are cookies? 

Not the eating kind either. lol

Cookies are small files that websites send to your device that these websites use to monitor you and remember certain information about you — like what’s in your shopping cart.

Do you ever notice that after you’ve shopped for something online, you start seeing ads for that same product? That’s because of cookies!

Some companies might have a 30-day cookie length or a 90-day cookie length which means that if they click on your link and then they don’t buy anything for 29 days but on day number 29 they buy something you can still end up making a commission. Those are the details you want to learn to pay attention to.

Pro Tip: Some of the offers I promote have cookies up to 365 days or even lifetime cookies. Those are the offers you want to promote. 😉

Final words: These are the basics of affiliate marketing to help beginners get started right way.

Start with the basics, set everything up so you can drive traffic to an automated system that collects emails that you can promote offers to and give valuable content to on a regular basis.

Yes, you have to be consistent and promote high quality offers that the majority of affiliates are not promoting.

I’ll be making some videos showing you the process step-by-step.

So keep an eye out for that, in the meantime >> watch this video!