How Do I Start Affiliate Marketing?
My very first commission from Affiliate Marketing was $1.49 – and I was so excited to see that what I had learned to do and put into action was really working!
So How Do I Start Affiliate Marketing? My number one recommendation is to get some quality training and support and start step-by-step. I did exactly that after many months of trying to piece it all together on my own, and wasting a lot of time reading and researching.
It takes time and work and you won’t make money straight away – but if you are willing to put in the effort it WILL work and you WILL earn commisions – and that’s passive income!
In this article, I’m going to cover off the 6 BASIC steps you need to follow to get started with Affiliate Marketing.
6 Steps to Start Affiliate Marketing
Step 1: Start by Choosing Your Niche
The first thing you are going to have to do is to decide on your niche – or, in other words, the area of interest you are going to be targeting.
You’re going to be writing a lot about your niche and promoting products or services complementary to your niche, so you need to choose something that is sustainble for you.
If you haven’t decided on this already, the best place to start is with something you are interested in, or that you are knowledgable about, or even a hobby.
When choosing your niche, make sure you are not too general – for example “books” or “music” are too broad for a niche.
Using the examples above, you could narrow your niche down to be “self-development books” or “country music”.
You can really enjoy building your business if you choose something that you are passionate about – any niche can be profitable!
Step 2: Build a Website
The majority of Affiliate Marketers start out with a website – this is the best place to start to build your business and attract your affiliate marketing customers.
It could be a good idea for you to start with a free site, and once you are more comfortable with what you are doing, you can register your very own web domain and move your content over.
I recommend SiteRubix because they offer free WordPress site building – and I highly recommend WordPress as it is the most flexible site platform out there and your site can be easily moved from place to place.
Starting free is a really good way to get a grip on the basics before you commit to your own domain and hosting.
Don’t go with “page builder” site offers as these are usually unique systems and it is very difficult to get your site off one of these.
Step 3: Start Writing your Content
You’re going to have to build out your website with content before you can start joining Affiliate Marketing programs and making money.
Most Affiliate Marketers will actually look at your site and potentially your traffic before they will approve your application to join.
So, there’s going to need to be some meaningful content on your site – you’ll need content relevant to your niche that your audience is going to find compelling and useful.
And you’ll want to write some content with reviews around products and services that are specific to your niche too – you can add affiliate links to these later.
Here’s an example from one of my own affiliate marketing sites in the high quality toys niche:
I’d recommend a great home page and at least 4-6 unique blog posts or articles before you go ahead and try to join any programs.
If you need help and inspiration in doing this, I urge you to do exactly what I did and get some training and support. I’ve been a Premium Member of Wealthy Affiliate since February 2017 and that’s where I started and continue to learn.
Read my Review of Wealthy Affiliate for 2020 and see if you think this could work for you too.
Step 4: Join Affiliate Marketing Programs
Once you’re happy with your content, you’ll need to find affiliate marketing programs that are relevant to your niche.
Don’t worry – there’s thousands and thousands of affiliate programs and networks you can join.
Let’s say your niche is “kitchen gadgets”.
Type into Google “kitchen gadgets + affiliate program” and you’ll get something like this:
What I’m showing you there is just the very top result in pages and pages of results!
The same thing works if you have a specific merchant in mind – let’s say KitchenAid for example.
Type into Google “KitchenAid + affiliate program” and you’ll see the results here:
In the example above, you’ll see that the first result is actually a site called Viglink.
This is an Affiliate Marketing Network and there are hundreds of these networks that manage the affiliate marketing for thousands upon thousands of merchants.
By joining a single network, you gain access to all of these affiliate programs in one place and you can narrow down directly to your niche once you have joined.
Some of the most well known Affiliate Networks are:
- Commission Junction
- Rakuten
- ShareASale
- LinkShare
- Digital River
Of course, I can’t NOT mention the Amazon Affiliate Program here as they provide a marketplace for MILLIONS of products from just about every niche known to man.
Apparently Amazon has over 500,000,000 products on their website – and although they don’t pay huge commissions, so many people around the world shop at Amazon that you really should join the party!
Step 5: Add Affiliate Links to Your Content
Now that you’ve joined some Affiliate Programs, you’ve got access to products to promote.
This is how you are going to make money from your site.
You need to write content around these products or services and add your affiliate links so you can sell them to your audience.
When a reader clicks on one of those links in your content and makes a purchase – you get the commission!
You can add your affiliate links in text or images, and affiliate programs often have banners and ads that you can also add to your site.
In the example below from my own toys site, you can see I have affiliate links in the highlighted text, the image of the wooden jeep, and there is also a Banner Ad in the sidebar.
The affiliate links are provided to you in several ways by the merchant and they are unique to your affiliate account.
There is usually a general link that covers the entire site, a link for every individual product, and links that apply specifically to banner ads.
No matter what though, WHATEVER your customer buys from the affiliate site, you get a commission from the sale.
So it doesn’t matter that I have a specific link above to the Fagus Wooden Jeep – if the customer clicks the link and ends up buying ANYTHING from that site, I still get the commission.
This is pretty cool, and particularly with programs like Amazon where people might just buy a fridge even though they got there through your link to a wooden toy!
Your affiliate link will place a cookie in your customers browser so that even if they don’t buy anything straight away, if they go back the next day or the next week and buy something from that site – you still get the commission.
The life cycle of these cookies varies from 24 hours to 30 days or longer, each program will tell you this when you join.
Step 6: Drive Traffic to Your Website
There’s no point building your website if nobody can find it – and you have to have traffic in order to make sales.
What you want is for people to find your site and the content you have written when they do searches in Google and other search engines for information about your niche.
Rankings lead to traffic and making commissions.
If your content is ranked on Page 10 of search results, then very few people are going to be finding those results.
To get good rankings in search results, you need to build your site using Search Engine Optimization techniques and tools.
The most relevant technique you should be using straight away are Keywords.
Your keywords also need to be well-researched so that a search engine shows it as a top ranking result – you don’t want too much competition.
For example, my toys site is in the niche for high quality and handmade toys – if I just wrote content around the keyword “toys”, then the competition would be massive!
So, I want my pages to rank high when someone types into the search engine the exact phrase – “handmade toys”. Other keywords could be “wooden toys” or “handmade wooden toys” or “Fagus Wooden Jeep”.
You need to write your content around the exact keywords you want to rank for – and they need to be specific.
AND You want to be sure you are using White Hat SEO or you’ll be penalised by the search engines!
How Do I Research Keywords?
The easiest way is by using a keyword research tool.
You simply type in your keyword and the analysis tells you how often the keyword is searched for, the amount of competition (ie. how many others are already using that keyword on their sites), and the likely traffic it may generate.
I use a keyword research tool called Jaaxy because I get it for free as part of my membership of Wealthy Affiliate. It’s a fantastic tool and offers much much more than just keyword research.
In the screenshot below you can see what Jaaxy has told me about the keyword “wooden toys” – from this I can see that this keyword is searched on average 8,554 times a month!
That’s all potential traffic – but there’s a fair amount of competition too.
From these results, I would probably fine tune my keyword to something even more specific, like “handmade wooden toys” or “wooden toy trucks” – this is why you need a tool like this!
For a free tool, you could also use the Google Keywords Planner – it does the job, however to get started with that you need a Google Adsense account which makes accessing it a bit tricky.
I have tried Google’s tool myself to see if I was missing something – lots of people use it and it is definitely useful – I just find that Jaaxy is so much better!
Researching and finding keywords and how to implement them into your content takes time, trial and error.
In fact, earning an income through Affiliate Marketing is a constant learning experience, and there are plenty of strategies too that will come into your plans once you’ve got the basics set up.
What I’ve tried to do here is give you an outline of how to actually start – once your business is actually online, it’s an exciting journey and can take you down many different roads!
What Are The Key Steps To Start Affiliate Marketing?
- Step 1: Find Your Niche
- Step 2: Build A Website
- Step 3: Start Writing Your Content
- Step 4: Join Affiliate Marketing Programs
- Step 5: Add Affiliate Links to Your Content
- Step 6: Drive Traffic to Your Website
WAIT - There's One More Step!
Next Step: You need to GET STARTED!
The 6 steps to Start Affiliate Marketing I’ve outlined in this post really are the basics for getting started in Affiliate Marketing, but pulling all this off without any guidance along the way is tough – I know because I tried that myself!
If you’ve read my story then you’ll know that I spent months searching and wasting time trying to find out how I could do all of this on my own.
And during that time, I didn’t START anything – I was just looking for a way to begin. I wasted a lot of time looking!
I highly recommend that you do exactly what I eventually did – get yourself some training and support to get up and running with the fundamentals.
After reading countless reviews and doing endless research, I finally joined Wealthy Affiliate in February 2017 and I haven’t looked back since.
You can start with a free account at Wealthy Affiliate and you don’t even need a credit card for that. This will give you access to 10 lessons for free in 2 streams (so 20 free lessons!), and if you’re like me, you’ll want to continue on.
If you choose to go Premium, your first month membership will be only $19 and this will give you access to a HUGE training resource – that’s a very small investment for a whole month’s worth of invaluable education.
Read my review of Wealthy Affiliate for 2020 and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what’s on offer.
It worked for me, and it might just work for you too!
Either way, my final piece of advice is to stop thinking, and GET STARTED TODAY.
Great information! Will definitely implement this to my life!
Thanks Hans – I hope you have awesome success! You really just need to follow through with the steps and I highly recommend getting some training! Cheers, Lindsay
I’ve read your informative blog post about getting started with affiliate marketing and totally agree that these 6 steps are the way to get started. You are so right that you can learn all about these six steps by joining Wealthy Affiliate University (WA). WA is simply the best place to learn all about affiliate marketing and building a WordPress blog site. There are many, many Premium members at WA who have suceeded in reaching their financial goals. Nice post. -shirley
Thanks for your comment Shirley – I’m really glad you made the decision to join Wealthy Affiliate too! I would not be doing what I am today if it wasn’t for the training and help I gained getting started through the Wealthy Affiliate community, and still get today after almost 3 years as a member. Cheers, Lindsay
Great tips! Personally I have experience only with the Amazon affiliate program. I think it’s important your site is established enough to already have some traffic because you have to get a sale within the first 6 months I think or they will cancel your account.
Do you have experience with CPA offers? I have a site with some decent traffic but the conversion rate with Amazon isn’t that great. Most of the visitors are seniors, so I would love to try if CPA offers would convert better. I haven’t found a CPA network that would seem legit so that has kept me from trying them out.
Hi Jukka – Glad you liked my post! With Amazon, you need 3 sales in 180 days to stay active – and yes, it is a good idea to have built up your content before joining up so you have some traffic built up. You do need patience as it all takes time to gain momentum. The same applies to CPA, in fact CPA networks are much harder to join and you need to prove your site has traffic and is gaining authority – Clickbooth and MaxBounty were the top 2 rated for 2019 and they are 100% legitimate. Good luck with your efforts! Thanks, Lindsay
Hi there and thanks for this timely article
I stumbled across this having been almost ‘sucked in’ by someone on my facebook group advertising some get rich quick scheme. It involved selling water coolers – something I have absolutely no interest in. The information was very hard to get; you just had to sign up and pay money to get the information drip fed to you. What you describe here is very transparent and seems legitimate
Hi Marketa – there are many get rich quick scams out there and I’m glad you didn’t get roped into one! I guess anything that asks for money upfront in that manner could be classified as a scam. The great thing about Wealthy Affiliate is you can start for free and have a good look around before you decide to commit, and even then you can just pay $19 for the first month and then decide to back out if you want to. Thanks for your interest! Cheers, Lindsay
Hi Lindsay,
Thanks for this great blog!
There are many things to think about when starting your own affiliate marketing business. And you’ve laid them out beautifully!
I tried starting on my own for the first couple of years, and needless to say, I failed miserably. LOL.
It wasn’t until I joined Wealthy Affiliate that I realized all the important SEO techniques that helped me find my traffic. Their lessons are great and I’m so thankful I found them.
I hope your readers take a look at WA. It’s more than worth the membership costs, which is small anyway!
Cheers,
Suzanne
Thanks for the positive feedback on Wealthy Affiliate Suzanne – I was exactly the same and tried to put it all together on my own at first. I really wanted to share with people how awesome the training and support is at WA and to help them get the right start!
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