Becoming an affiliate marketer is a great way to make money online. But how does one go about it? Here are the steps you need to take:
- Choose your niche – Find a niche that you love and know well. For example, if you love makeup, then finding a product or service in the makeup industry would be ideal. It’s important that you’re passionate about what you’re selling because this will help you succeed in the long run.
- Choose your products – Once you have chosen your niche, choose products from different companies that offer those products or services within that niche market. This will help diversify your income stream and protect yourself from failure in case one company goes out of business or doesn’t perform well anymore due to unforeseen circumstances like lawsuits or other legal issues with their competitors (like lawsuits over patent infringements). You can even choose different types of products within this category if there are many options available; for example, instead of just focusing on makeup brands like Sephora or Ulta Beauty Inc., consider expanding into other areas such as haircare products sold at places like Target stores nationwide so that people who shop there don’t feel left out when they see an ad on their Instagram feed advertising.
How To Become And Affiliate Marketer
What is Affiliate Marketing?
This is one of the most common questions we receive, and it’s actually quite simple:
Affiliate marketing is a way for you (the affiliate) to earn a commission for recommending products or services to your friends or readers.
To simplify it, here’s the 5 step process for how to start affiliate marketing:
- You find a product you want to promote
- Do a search for “product name” affiliate program. If it’s on Amazon, you can also promote it
- Sign up for their affiliate program
- You get a special link that allows the merchant to track the people who clicked your link
- If they buy the product, you get a commission.
Pretty simple, right?
It can get much more advanced, but in this post, we’re just going to start with the fundamentals and get you to the point where you’re ready to make your first commission.
Check out our more detailed post for a bit more about the specifics of what affiliate marketing is.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
There are a lot of different ways to track affiliates these days, but nearly all of them are based on someone clicking your special tracking link.
The most common and basic type of tracking is via a cookie.
When an affiliate link is clicked, a small file called a cookie is stored on the user’s computer. Then they buy a product, the merchant can see that they were referred by you.
There are also more advanced methods based on the email used or IP address – but we won’t get into those here, we’ll stick to the most important stuff you need to know.
How Much Money Can You Make With Affiliate Marketing?
The amount you can make will vary wildly – it honestly falls somewhere between zero and millions.
Your income will be directly related to the type of offers you promote, how much traffic you get to the site, and your grasp of other online marketing skills like email marketing and SEO.
But in this post you’ll get a pretty good sense of the earning potential from different types of promotions.
I personally make multiple six figures a year through affiliate marketing.
But it wasn’t always that way:
How Do You Become an Affiliate Marketer?
Here’s the thing, you can pick just about any product that you can buy online, and there will be an affiliate program that will pay you a finders fee for referring a sale.
However, just because you can promote anything, doesn’t mean you should.
The most important thing to consider when selecting a product to market is, “is it relevant to your audience?”
For instance, for me to try and advertise for dumbbells on Location Rebel probably isn’t the smartest thing, because 99% of my audience could care less about them.
However, for me to promote, say, WP Engine a WordPress hosting company – makes much more sense, since almost every one of my readers either has or has considered starting a website.
And just recently, we promoted Streak as an awesome tool for freelancers to use to monitor leads right from their inbox. Once again, that’s 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 Niche 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 the 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 in Google
- Step 8: Rinse and Repeat!
I thought about walking you through this whole process within this post, but honestly it’s all pretty straight forward and a lot of that is stuff you probably already know.
So rather than do that, I want to really focus on the specifics of understanding what makes a good affilaite product, and how to successfully promote it.
Go check this out if you’re looking for a full breakdown of how to build and monetize an affiliate blog or niche site.
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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 pros and cons, and we’re going to look at those now.
How to Promote Physical Products as an Affiliate Marketer
Physical products are probably the easiest thing 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 for any product on the site, earn a (small) commission on it!
As it sits currently, you can earn between 1 and 4.5% on any product you promote through the Amazon affiliate program. What that percentage is depends on the category it falls into. You can see that breakdown here.
Most of the stuff I promote I get a 3% commission on.
One of the nice things about promoting via Amazon is that you get a commission on everything the buyer purchases – not just the specific product link they clicked on.
So let’s say that 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 also buys a set of golf clubs for $1,000, and a new golf rangefinder for $300?
Then all of a sudden that $1.50 turns into $41.50.
Amazon has a 24 hour cookie. So what that means is that if someone clicks on your link, they then have 24 hours to make a purchase in order for you to get credit.
It also doesn’t have to be for the product they clicked on. If they click on your golf ball link and then buy a new TV? You still get credit!
Other Ways to Promote Physical Products
So in a lot of ways, Amazon is like the gateway drug to promoting affiliate products because it’s very easy, and hundreds of millions of people use it on a daily basis.
But as you get more experienced, you’ll find there are more lucrative ways to promote physical products.
For instance, 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 nearly twice as much money on the products you promote, and you’re able to give people more time to buy.
Do as many people buy from REI as Amazon? No, but within your niche, you may find REI to be preferred and more trusted by your readers.
Many companies also offer their own affilaite program where they pay even higher commissions.
In the golf world I work with about a dozen companies directly that have affiliate commissions of between 8-20%. With most falling in the 10-15% range.
To give an example I promote golf rangefinders.
With one brand, if I sell a $500 rangefinder on Amazon? I make $15.
But if I sell that same one direct through a company’s affiliate program? I make $50.
Not as many people buy direct from the website, but considering I make over 3 times as much per sale, it’s worth it to promote it there!
In a recent month for this specific brand I sold 140 rangefinders with commissions of $1,377.15 on Amazon.
I also promoted it directly through their website, where I only sold 53 rangefinders, but made a commission of $1,687.83.
This doesn’t take into account other products people bought at the same time on Amazon – but it gives you an idea of how expanding to other physical product affiliate programs can be beneficial.
If you’re serious about Amazon affiliate marketing? I’d recommend you check out “The Affiliate Marketing Video Course” it’s a small investment, and the dude behind it is the smartest affiliate marketer I know. I can’t recommend the course highly enough.
How to Sign Up for Amazon’s Partner Program
Signing up for Amazon’s affiliate program is an excellent starting point.
Why?
Because the chances are good you already use Amazon, are familiar with it, and your readers are too.
You can sign up and get links immediately from the Amazon Affiliate program right here.
We’ve got you covered as well if you want to learn more about Amazon Affiliate Marketing.
Other Affiliate Networks to Consider
Most larger companies will use what’s called an affiliate network to host their products. These are sites you sign up for that might represent dozens of brands, and it’s how you get your special links and marketing materials.
Other smaller companies might do this in house, so it’s worth reaching out and doing a little research here.
But the major affiliate networks that I’ve used are:
- Flex Offers
- Commission Junction
- Share-a-Sale
- Rakuten Advertising
- Impact Radius
Many of the largest companies work with them (for instance many of the golf companies I work with), and building a relationship with a larger affiliate network can lead to more opportunities that you might not have found otherwise.
Affiliate Marketing for Information Products
Honestly? I love promoting information products.
What is an information product? It’s a digital product, course, or community that is created by an expert in their field.
For instance, our flagship product Location Rebel Academy is an information product.
There are a lot of reasons that information products are so great to promote:
- Often they are higher priced, which means higher commissions
- They can have a personality behind them, which builds trust and makes them easier to sell
- There are often full marketing funnels behind them aiding in sales
- They solve a problem or provide a solution that your readers are looking for
Generally, it can be a little bit more work to become an affiliate for these products because often the creator is a bit more protective of who they let market the products.
There’s also no central place you can go to join like you could with Amazon. Usually, you’ll need to talk to the author directly or look for an “affiliates” page on their product site.
Another significant benefit of promoting information products is that they usually have higher commissions than physical products.
30-50% is fair standard when it comes to promoting info products. Why? There are no hard costs associated with it.
And if a product creator can pay a percentage of any sale to an affiliate rather than have to spend significant amounts of money on ads? That’s a win for everyone involved.
When I promote information products I usually look for high-priced 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 the sale. My work is relatively minimal.
I mentioned my Bangkok story above, but one of my first really big wins came through marketing an information product for building software businesses. Over 12 months I made over $20k in commissions from a 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 from, 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 write about here.
My business doesn’t function without hosting, a theme, email software etc.
So it can be easy to make a sale on services because if I personally love and use them, there’s a good chance you will too.
If you’re lucky, you can find a service that pays recurring commissions based on monthly payments.
For instance, SEMrush for years paid 40% referral fees each month for the life of the account. So if someone I refer joins for $99/month? I’d be making nearly $40/month for as long as they were a customer.
These days we’ve seen a lot of companies shift to one time payments. Now, SEMrush pays a flat fee of $200 for each new customer. Still, not too shabby.
But if you find those recurring commissions, you can build a solid stream of passive income if your promote it properly.
