Affiliate Marketing: Free Lesson For Beginners

What is affiliate marketing? For beginners, they might think this is a rocket science way to make money online which is not true by the way.

Hi, Akid here.

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is a recommendation. 

For you to understand what it is let’s take a moment to flashback to the past. Because we have done this unintentionally a few times in our life. You may have bought a really good product. It is so good you tell it to your friends & families. After that, they bought it too (except you’re not getting paid).

What you do here is you give them a recommendation.

That’s what affiliates are. But this time when someone buys from your recommendation you will be getting paid via commissions. While marketing means is a way to inform your potential buyer about the product. If you are serious about making money online and looking for ways to do it, affiliate marketing is something that works.

How Much Can Affiliate Generate In Revenue?

One of the most awesome things about affiliate marketing is the potential revenue.

It has NO LIMITS.

Because you’re not tight to just one side when you join a certain affiliate program. So you can join up as many as you can.

The more you join, the higher your potential income. It’s a game of numbers.

And we’re talking big numbers here. 10K per month? 30K per month?? 80K per month??? There’s no limit to it.

There are many affiliates out there who earn way more than their day job. One example out there is a blogger named Adam Enfroy. As stated in his blog income report his earning is 80K PER MONTH.

With that as proof, I hoped you now believe make money online as an affiliate marketer is really a gift from God. And if you’re interested, want to get involved with it then this article is for you.

Keep on reading.

How Does The Process Work?

There are two ways. You give recommendations in a form of :

Product review – You do a review of what the product is all about based on your experience using it. Tell your audience every detail

– the price, ins and out of the product, the pros and cons, the benefits, how you feel when you’re using it, etc.

Peoples buy things if it’s proven to fulfill their needs or the product can solve their problems. Let your audience know if the product falls into one of those two categories.

When readers are interested after reading your review, provide them a link to the sales page.

I have written a format that you can use to do a product review. Check it out.

Reverse product review – Not all product is created as an equal. There will be times when you will be reviewing poor products.

So what do you do?

You give other alternatives over the poor product and it must be in the same categories.

For example, you reviewing poor autoresponder service. So tell your potential buyer about other good autoresponder services such as AWeber.

For the alternatives recommendation, you don’t need to do a full review about it. Just highlight what it can do/solve, what the poor product can’t.

And also don’t forget to provide the link to the sales page.

What Do I Need To Get Started As An Affiliate Marketer?

There are 8 things you’ll need to get you started:

1. Your chosen niche
2. A Blog or
3. Youtube channel
4. Autoresponder
5. Landing page
6. Traffic
7. Affiliate programs to promote to
8. Content

To start first you will need to choose your niche. The top 3 niches usually people’s picks are :

• Make money online
• Health & fitness
• Self-development

The above niche is a favorite pick among most marketers because simply it is what most people were looking for.

People always looking for ways and how to make money online so they can improve their finances. The same goes with health & fitness, they want to improve their healths and want to look good by improving their physique. Self-development for people who want to change their certain bad habits that’s been damaging their life.

1. Choosing A Suitable Niche

If all niches above are not your cup of tea, don’t worry.

You don’t need to follow the crowd. Because literally, anything can be a niche, either your passion or something that is related to your expertise. The most important thing about the niche is you must love it, and you just have to be sure it can be monetized.

For example, if you love gaming then it can be your niche. You can monetize it by promoting gaming accessories, gaming pc, etc.

One way that really helps you when choosing a suitable niche is by asking yourself – how well my experience about it? If I’m creating content around it, do I have to think really hard?

If your answer is little experience and yes, then I recommended chose something else.

There is no right or wrong niche by the way. But I don’t want you to feel discouraged when you having a hard time creating content related to your niche.

So take your time thinking about what’s best for you.

What Platform You Gonna Use? A Blog Or Youtube?

After you get a suitable niche, you need a platform to present your review.

This platform will act as a “source of information” where your audience can come to visit. Either blog or youtube. Some affiliate marketers use both.

Can we just use social platforms to present our review such as Facebook? Or at forums such as Quora?

Yes, you can.

But unfortunately when someone searches for something at Google, usually they will not include keywords “Facebook” or “quora” together. This means they will not found your content at SERP (search engine result page) if you using Facebook or quora.

So your content will not get any traffic from search engines and since no one found you, your opportunity to make money with organic traffic is slim to none.

2. Blogs

There are many blog services out there. WordPress, Wix, Blogger, etc. But I recommend using WordPress.

There are many benefits to WordPress users. Here are 3’s that you should know that will benefits your business in the long rung.

• You don’t need to know to code – if you are, that’s great. But if coding it’s not your field, that’s ok. Since WP is user-friendly even for beginners.
• Support provided – WordPress even has its community, literally everywhere. They’re really helpful too. If you’ve got any questions, just ask.
• Have SEO optimize plugin – All in One SEO or Yoast plug-in, can optimize your blog coding and make it SEO friendly. With this, your blog has a higher chance to rank on SERP. All you have to do is install it and follow the setup wizard.

How To Setup Your WordPress Blog?

In this article, we will focus on blogging.

To make things easy for you, you can create your blog for free at a website platform called Site Rubix within Wealthy Affiliate. They provide a very comprehensive, step-by-step guide and easy to follow.

All you need to do is signup and try the level 1 and level 2 training  (yes it’s free too) that’s gonna cover building your website.

 

3. Youtube Channel

Some choose Youtube over a blog. Because reviews in video form are much easier to create and save time. Plus there’s a study that shows video is more converts than text.

Here’s what you need to do :

• Choose a niche that can be monetized
• Create your youtube account
• Shoot your video about chosen niche
• Upload your video to your channel

If you feel video review is much more dear to you. by any means go for it. But I suggest used both to maximize your revenue.

4. Autoresponder

An autoresponder is a service-based program that was designed to help you :

• Receive and stored emails you get
• Automates email replies
• Blasting your message to all emails at once
• Do email marketing 

In short, traffic + autoresponder is like bread and butter.

Without traffic, your blog is dead, and without an autoresponder, you can’t do email marketing to monetize the traffic.

Have a looked at the top dogs of your niche. All of them were using it.

They knew just relying on traffic is not enough to build a successful business and be profitable in a long run. They need to communicate to build a relationship and establishing trust with potential buyers. There’s no other way that enables them to do it other than using an autoresponder service.

You can start with using an autoresponders service from Aweber for free until you have 500 email subscribers. Plus they also provide you a free tool and newbie-friendly training in creating your landing page.

5. Landing Page

After you’re done registering the autoresponder service, you can start creating your landing page.

What is a landing page? As having a blog and autoresponder are important, so did the landing page.

To put it in simple terms – a place for “trade-in” emails.

You can use WordPress plugins to do this or just used one that is provided by your autoresponder service provider. It’s really simple as you just need to drag&drop; – boxes to create a landing page. Then hardcoded it with your autoresponder link.

If you’re creative, make it beautiful and eye-catching. Beautiful landing pages tend to attract more people to opt-in. If you want to use an image, pick a sharp one and have a professional feel to it.

Below is an example of one of a good landing page.

But if you’re like me who are not creative (I’m so sobbing right now), just design a simple one. All you need is just a one-typed background color, headline, lead magnet description, and a call to action.

Next, create a simple lead magnet. Give it for free, in exchange for their email.

Tip – Lead magnet must be something that reflects a solution to their problem. Example: a how-to guide/tips & tricks. If you don’t have time to create landing pages and lead magnets, you can outsource the work to Fiverr.

If you don’t want to use landing pages, there is another way. You can plant an opt-in form at the end of your article.

Or, at the blog sidebar.

Or you can use popup opt-in.

6. TRAFFIC

The lifeblood of business in whatever niches you’re involved in. In a nutshell, traffic is a visitor. No traffic means no one reads your content, which leads to no sales.

This is the types of traffic that we have out there :

• Organic traffic
• Paid traffic
• Free traffic
• Viral traffic

What is organic traffic? – Visitors that come to your blog from search engines. In other words, people found your content on search engines.

What is paid traffic? – A service that you paid to get your content promoted to a mass audience such as Facebook ads.

What is free traffic? – Visitors that come from the result of you sharing your content to a site like Facebook. Viral & organic traffic is also another form of free traffic.

What is viral traffic? –The results of content being shared/forward/mention by other peoples without you asked them for.

Every Typed Of Traffic Has Its Own Purposed

To be able to maximize our revenue, we should take advantage of all 4 traffic sources above.

The key here is when to utilize it.

For beginners, this subject probably is the number 1 obstacle. They did not know how to generate traffic. But even if they did know, they didn’t know how to amplify it.

Without a doubt, our ultimate goal is to be able to drive traffic from search engines. But there’s a catch.

If your blog is still new, your content will not rank on first-page SERP in an instant. This is due to a few important factors such as –

• Domain authority
• The quality of your content
• SEO optimization

It will take time, roughly 3 – 6 months for your content to get ranked well. Although you have to wait, I promise it will be worth it.

So in the meantime, start with free/paid traffic. You can use paid traffic too (if you have excess money). As for getting viral traffic, your content must be engaging, unique from your competitors, controversial, and mindblowing.

7. Affiliate Programs

This is where the exciting stuff begins. We are about to make money.

Affiliate programs are a place where you can join to promote things to sell. Be it digital products, physical products, or a service. One common example and well-known is Amazon Associates and Fiverr.

Affiliate programs are just a game of numbers.

To maximize your revenue as an affiliate, join up as many as you can. On a condition, the products or services are relevant to your blog niche.

I’ll give you a few affiliate programs you can join down below.

Types Of Affiliate Programs

First, you need to know there are two types of affiliate programs out there.

The first one is an affiliate network.

An affiliate network is a place where there are more than 1 category and more than 1 product listed. It’s like centralized collections of items. If it has 1000 products in it, that means you can join 1000 affiliate programs under one network.

Here is the well-known affiliate network that you can join For beginners, it is recommended to join up to at least three networks.

1. Clickbank

2. Awin

3. Linkshare

4. Commission junction

5. ShareASale’s

Second, an Indie affiliate program. Also referred to as “independent” affiliate programs.

This type of program is self-hosted, from individuals or a company that does not tie to other affiliate networks. Just because it’s unheard of, doesn’t mean the programs are not worth it. Because most lucrative and big commission products/service you can only find here.

Like Villiers Jet here.

Villiers Jet is a travel-service niche where you can book a private flight through it and they covered 40,000 destinations worldwide.

They do have an affiliate program. What jaw-dropping here is the potential commission you can get – 5000$ to 10,000$ PER SINGLE SALE!

How To Find An Indie Affiliate Program?

To find an indie affiliate program, just type in the related products in your niche + affiliate program at any search engine.

For example, if your niche is health & fitness, you can type in “weight gain supplement + affiliate program”.

For beginners, it is recommended to join at least one related indie affiliate program. By the way, that is just from one single product. In every niche, you have more than one product that you can monetize.

Really your potential earnings here are endless 🙂

SO HOW DO I GET STARTED?

Let’s recap what you have learned so far –

1. Choose your niche
2. Create a blog or youtube channel
3. Subscribe to an autoresponder service
4. Create landing page
5. Learn how to generate traffic
6. Understand the different types of affiliate programs
7. Creating content

Now I will cover about content. If you think deeply, you’ll notice people jumped to the internet just for two reasons:

• To find a solution for their problems
• To be entertained

So for content creation, the main purposed will be about solving problems, or maybe a combination of the two.

Don’t just publish content for the sake of you need to update your blog.

I’ve done that and It’s not gonna work.

The odd thing though, when you aim your content is about solving problems, you will notice an increase in traffic, subscribers, and revenue from time to time. To understand this “phenomenon”, think about it this way –

When you do a good deed, you will be repaid with the same thing.

That’s what I recommended for you to do too. Put value first before expecting any commissions.

8. Creating Content – Find Low Competition Keyword

The first step of creating content is to start by doing keyword research around your niches.

This has a number of its reason :

1. To make sure you only write what peoples want to read
2. To help you get an idea about what to write
3. To determine what problem your potential buyer might have and what kind of solution they might be looking for

To be able to do keyword research, you need a tool. A great tool isn’t just about finding keywords, but it has to be equipped with other data-measured. Such as Jaaxy which I also used within wealthy affiliates.

What’s great about Jaaxy is you’re not just getting the right keyword but it will generate important & useful data like :

• How many average numbers of searches per month for a certain keyword

• how many competitors for a particular keyword

• How much traffic you’ll get if you ranked on a first-page search engine

The keyword research tool is a must-have if you want your content to get rank.

For beginners, you may have to spend time researching low-competition keywords. This is for increasing your chance to good get rank on SERPS. The downside of this, traffic for low competition keywords is less than high competition keywords.

If that’s the case, why not just straight on using high competition keywords?

High competition keyword means there are a lot of blogs were using it and their domain authority (DA) usually above 50+.

Google loves higher DA as they are more trusted in delivering valuable content. With that said, you won’t be able to compete with the top dogs for now as your DA is still zero.

But don’t lose your steam yet. The idea here is to SCALE.

Traffic from one low competition keyword may look nothing because of less traffic, but imagine if you have 10-20 content with 10-20 low competition keywords each?

Traffic will easily pile up.

This is a marathon, not a sprint that gets to the finishing line first. So ignores high competition keywords for a while. You can start tackling high competition keywords as your DA grows later.

Spy Competitor On Particular Keyword

To get a good ranking position in search engines, knowing what keyword to use in your content is not enough.

You have to spy on your competitor’s content (that’s using the same keyword) and create more compelling content than them. So Google sees your content as being more relevant than others – thus will help it ranks better.

What factors should you look at your competitor?

1. How much for the content length?
2. How many pictures/infographics they insert?
3. How many videos do they embed?

For counting words, you can use the word counter plus chrome extension. Simply highlight all the words in particular content, right-click then click its icon. A popup will show telling you how many words particular content have. For images and video, you manually count it.

After you get all the numbers, write down the answer for each question and you simply pumped those numbers up.

Let’s say they wrote 2000 words of content. You then wrote 2200 words. They insert 6 relevant images, you insert 8.

Brainstorm Context & Start Writing Content

After finished gathering data on your competitors, it’s time to brainstorm the context of your content.

You need to get at least 5-7 points for a content length of 1000-1500 words.

In this brainstorming process, you can start with questioning problems that you had within that niche. Get a simple, basic version of the idea, and then you reason up from there.

For example, if you write about travel niche (assuming you have experience traveling), you may want to identify related problems you might have faced before such as the cost of transportation is too expensive. From there, you would want to think of solutions – other transportation agency that is cheaper.

After you have done getting 5-7 points of context, begin writing your content.

Keyword placement at the title

For SEO content optimization, the keyword must be at the title.

Write your article title like this –

KEYWORD – words extension (that catches people’s interest to read).

For example, if I’m writing about forex and I’m using “forex-trading” as a keyword, my article title will be:

Forex trading <— (keyword) – (words extension) –> A Beginner’s guide

It’s not just for making your title attractive but also from an SEO standpoint, this is the best practice you can do. This is how you place a keyword at the title.

Keyword placement at content

Place the keyword in the first paragraph.

As a general rule of thumb, placed the keyword at the start of the first paragraph. But you have to make your content looks natural so there’s a possibility the keyword will be in the middle of the end of the first paragraph.

For example, check out my article profitmailrr review

Keep in mind you don’t want to stuff the keywords all over your article.

The result of doing these does not help your particular content ranked, but Google won’t let it ranked at all. Because looked spammy. So after you are done with the first paragraph, write your content naturally without stuffing the keyword in all paragraphs.

Organize your content structure

To make it readable for your audience, your content needs to be organized. If you make it hard to read, no one gonna read it except you.

I have read soo many blogs with poor content structures.

No paragraphs, no bullet points, the colorful font on the wrong color background, etc… Just a full plain text from top to bottom…

Not long before I give up because it’s hard to read it and looks “too wordy”.

Don’t let this happens to you. So make good used of all the tools on your writing platform :

• Paragraphs
• Headings (not just improves readability but also good for SEO)
• Bullet points
• Text bold for keywords and points you want to push out
• Stick with a black color font for white background

1 – 2 paragraph for the intro, 5 – 7 headings for context plus few paragraphs for it (will vary) and 1 – 2 paragraph for outro (conclusion/recap) is good for organizable content.

This will also benefit you for SEO as the heading has its own benefits.

Adding Your Affiliate Link To Your Content

Without a special link, you can’t make money from online affiliate programs.

After you register into the affiliate program, you are entitled to your own unique link.

This special link will identify you as the referring affiliates for their product or services and allowing the publisher to credit you a commission if someone purchased through your link. Usually, they have a separate page for you to get the link.

What you got to do now is :

1. Copy your affiliate link
2. Highlight certain related text in your content
3. Click insert/add link tool from your writing platform and paste the link there.

Now that related text will be clickable and if someone clicks on it, they will be redirected to the product or service page.

For example, I’m promoting an affiliate program called a wealthy affiliate. I want to put my referral link. So I would choose “best affiliate course” sentences there to add the link.

You can start adding your link as you work on your article or, you can add it after you finished writing.

Content Lenght – Is It Matter?

Your article length should be at least 1000 – 1500+ words minimum.

That’s assuming if your competitor wrote less than that. But if they write more, then one of your only chances to be able to compete with them is to write longer content than them.

I understand if you feel it is tough.

But hear me out.

The world of blogs has changed so much.

It’s not like 10 years back where content with 500 words can rank easily. Now It’s getting harder and harder to rank with that kind of length because Google sees short-length articles are not delivering enough information for readers anymore.

Since Google has changed its rules, so did the majority of bloggers. Since then, the world of blogs has become a massive scale war of information.

Who’s providing the best and outstanding information WINS.

To be able to write longer content, you’ve got to have a sense of perfection, hunger, and like to gather feelings of satisfaction.

You’re obsessed with gathering satisfaction from readers who benefit from reading your content. Because it’s the only way that makes you feel alive.

It feels like you don’t actually care for revenue. But you’re just in hunger for delivering a total complete content that is soo good, your audience won’t even bother to read other people’s blogs anymore.

Use Some Media – Insert A Picture And Video

After you’re done writing your content, now it’s time to insert some media into it.

No one likes to read pure plain texts. Because it’s boring. Plus we are not writing books here.

So make good use of related pictures and videos to make your content more engaging and interesting. So you may want to take some time when choosing a picture.

The ideal placement of pictures and video is at the beginning of each subtopic. From an SEO standpoint, this is a good practice too.

The longer the content, the more picture you’ll need.

For 1000 – 1500+ words of content, you need at least 4 related pictures and 1 related video.

You can find sharp and beautiful images with a license-free at Canva. For video, you can shoot your own or take from youtube but be sure to leave credit to the owner.

To Finished It Up

Once you’re done inserting pictures and videos, there’s one more thing you’ll need to do.

Check your spelling and grammar. If it’s severe, no one will understand what you wrote. But you don’t have to do it manually. Here’s a tool that can help you – Grammarly.

These tools will auto-highlight sentences that are wrong in spelling and grammar. Just click on it, a popup will appear suggesting a correction. If you think the suggestion makes sense, by all means click it.

If you are poor in spelling or have poor grammar like me, I recommend using Grammarly.

Or if you using a writing platform such as site content on a wealthy affiliate, you already have a grammar checking tool built-in.

Share Your Content

Congratulations, you’re done creating your 1st content!

Now it’s time to drive some traffic to it.

There’s a piece of advice from 10 years back that says you need to have at least 10-15 articles before you can start drive traffic. Now we’re at 2021, I believe that advice has become obsolete. There’s nothing wrong with driving traffic even you just got started.

What matters here is, if your content is great but no one reads it, then what’s the point of you creating it in the first place?

Of course, our ultimate goal is to drive traffic from search engines. But since you just started, it will take some time before you start receiving traffic from it. So would you just let it be?

Of course not.

You can start drives traffic with the free traffic method, or paid traffic, or both.

For free traffic, start by share your article in a related Facebook group. Or create your own group which consists of people who are interested in your chosen niche.

To drive traffic from sites like Quora, search for unanswered questions that are related to your content. Provide an answer to the question first, then share your article URL at the end.

So What’s Next?

By this point, you’re now done with all the processes needed to make money online with affiliate marketing. Congratulations!

Now all you have to do is repeat creating content until you finally start receiving traffic from search engines. Keep in mind to generate traffic from search engines, it will take 3 – 6 months before you start seeing results.

One of the ways to speed this up is to make Google trusting your blog more and more by updating your blog with new content regularly. 3-4 times a week is a good frequency. The more quality content you produced in a good frequency, the faster it is Google trusts your blog.

As you progress, you can join more related affiliate programs so you will be able to increase more revenue too.

Conclusion

To sum it up here’s what you have learned.

1. Choose your niche
2. Create a blog or
3. Youtube channel
4. Subscribe to an autoresponder service
5. Create landing page
6. Learn how to generate traffic
7. Understand the different types of affiliate programs
8. Creating content
9. Rinse and repeat step 8

That’s all you’ve got to do to start earning revenue as an affiliate marketer. It’s true it takes some time to see results. But if you’re looking to generate serious revenue, this the way to do it.

I hope this article helps you especially for beginners who are looking for honest and legit ways to make money online.

See you in the next article.