Affiliate Marketing For Beginners (Ultimate Guide)

Original article by Hasan

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the easiest and fastest ways to make money online. In this Ultimate Guide, I will go with you step by step to help you start today your online business with affiliate marketing and make your first passive income Online.

What do I mean by passive income?

Passive income means that every month, you earn a couple of thousands of dollars without doing anything. so even if I take OFF the whole month, I will still earn almost the same number every month. Nice Haa!

In this article, I will give you some tips that may help you to start with affiliate marketing, and then I will show how to scale and reach 5–6 figures after a year or so.

What is really this Affiliate Marketing?

Simply, affiliate marketing is promoting products and services for other people and companies and earning commission per sale.

So, what's nice is that you will not worry about creating and buying products, you will just promote an existing product. this is why it's easy to start with. and even you can start with a 0$ budget as you will see later.

So Affiliate marketing is a great choice for anyone in any part of the world who wants to start a business online and make money without investing or even without having that much skills online.

Let's Start!

Simply, affiliate marketing is based on two things:

• Selecting the correct product to promote.
• Promoting the product.

It's that simple, select a product, promote it, earn money!

Let's start with the first part, which is Selecting the correct product.

1. Select the correct product to promote:

It’s very important to understand and learn how to select the best product or service to promote because simply, with the same effort and time you will make much more money if you select the correct product.

Example: Let’s say you are promoting a service that costs 200$ and your commission is 60% per sale.

You promoted this service and you were able to get like 50 sales each month.

Simple calculations:

50$ * (200*0.6) = 6000$ per month. Nice!

And your advertising costs (In case of running paid Ads) are 3000$. Then you earn 3000$ every Month.

Per Year: 3000$ * 12 month = 40000 $ 

Great! BUT in this case, you will need to promote every month, pay for advertising every month, effort and Time every month!! Yes?!

NOW, Let's Tweak the scenario!

We selected a product at the same price: 200$. Your commission is only 40% and not 60%.

But what is different here, is that the product you selected gives recurring commissions, so you will get 40% every month without promoting again and again.

Let's say now, you promoted this service and you were able to get like 50 sales in a month.

Simple calculations:

For 50 sales per month:

50$ * (200*0.4) = 4000$ / First month

And your advertising costs are 3000$ then you earn only 1000$ for the First Month.

But then, 4000$ for the next months without any advertising or efforts (It's recurring!) Did You Get It!

So the next months you will earn 4000$ without paying anything!

Per year: 1000$ + ( 4000$ * 11) = 45000 $ with much more less effort and time!

Which scenario you go with??

I think, Obviously, you will go with the second (recurring commission), which will become 90% passive with the same revenue or even more!

This is a small example, of how selecting the correct product (even with lower commission) may be critical in affiliate marketing.

Of course, I am not saying that you should not go with 1-time commission products! NO.

I am just showing the importance of selecting the correct product and how it may reflect on your work!

Small advice: select at least two products to promote, one recurring, and the other is 1-time commission.

Top Affiliate Products And Networks to choose from.

Ok friend, after we knew the importance of selecting the affiliate product, the Big Question now is: “Where can I find affiliate products to start promoting?“

To make things simple for you, I will go over more than 10 Affiliate programs and products that you can join even if you are a total beginner. and I will show you both recurring and single commission products and services.

Single Commission Affiliate Products.

I will share with you now what I think the top 5 affiliate networks that you can start with and find different products to promote.

1. ClickBank: probably you heard about, Clickbank is not a product, it's an affiliate network where you can find thousands of products to promote.

There is only a small drawback here, that it's not available in all countries. Ooops there is still hope

2. CJAffiliate: CJ is also one of the largest Affiliate Networks available Online. I do work with CJ, and I promote some products.

3. JVZoo: It's also a large trusted affiliate network with thousands of Affiliate products to start with.

4. Warrior Plus:  this This is the first I ever started with. Thier Network is Great for beginners, simply because it's simple to join, and it's available anywhere worldwide.

5. Envato Market: One of my best. This company provides digital products and assets like website themes and templates, audio, video templates, source codes, and much more. you can check it out and choose whatever product you want to promote.

I think this is enough for affiliate networks. Let's move now to my preferred list of recurring commission affiliate services and products.

Recurring Commission Affiliate Products.

Here is the best part, working with recurring commission products and earning 10X more money per year with the same effort!

1. ClickFunnels: The Clickfunnels affiliate program is one of the most generous commissions for a Service As A Service (SAAS) company. They pay 40% life-time affiliate commissions on all purchases.

They also have something called a “sticky cookie”, which is a bonus to affiliates because if your share your link to a customer it follows them across all of their devices. This keeps people you refer attached to your affiliate account, no matter where they are.

Aside from their software, Clickfunnels also comes up with new products all the time that you can also earn money on such as live events and training courses.

2. SEMRUSH: It's also an awesome Service to promote with a 40% commission rate, SEMRUSH is an SEO tools company that helps anyone rank their websites and get more free organic traffic.

3. Tube Buddy: You can earn up to 50% Recurring commission when you refer people to Tube buddy.

Tube Buddy helps content creators, brands, and networks save time and grow their channels. So you can market and advertise it to content creators to help them grow their YouTube Channels.

4. Get Response: One of the Top Email Marketing Services out there, and offers an awesome Affiliate program.

As you can see it offers to programs, one is a single 100$ commission per sale. and the other is 33% recurring commission every month.

What's nice about Get response and similar services, that it's hard for users using such platforms to leave it, since all their mailing lists, data, analytics will be saved in the system, so migrating will be somehow a problem.

This is a great thing if you think in terms of recurring commission, so when you refer someone, its like 95% he/she will be a long term customer.

Anyway, almost all products and services have an affiliate network, so you can check whatever product or service you want, contact them, and ask for their affiliate program.

For a full list of affiliate programs and products, please check this post.

Promoting The Affiliate Product.

After we learned what is affilitae programing, and the importance of choosing the correct products to promote, and I showed you some of the best affilitae networks and programs that you can start with. Now it's time for the real work!

Choosing the product or the service may take like 10 minutes or a maximum of 1-2 days. But what is essential now is How to promote?! It's all about Marketing.

When it comes to marketing, we have two paths:

1. Free Advertising.
2. Paid Advertising.

Free Advertising.

Let's start with Free promotion, and see how we can promote affiliate products and services for free.

1. SEO: Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is the best way to promote affiliate services and products and to turn this online business into almost 99% Passive Income. why?

Before, I say why, Let's explain SEO in brief.

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization, is simply a method, or a techinique used to rank your websites and articles on Top of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

You know, when people wants something on the internet, they search for it on search engines, and usually people will open results from the first page only.

So your goal with SEO is to make your website rank on the first page for certain search queries. so you can get a lot of free organic traffic to your website.

Let's take this simple scenario, You wrote an article on your website about an affiliate product, for example, “Top 10 Microphones for YouTubers” and you ranked this article on the first page of Google.

Now you can imagine how much money you will make with the amazon affiliate program promoting “Microphones affiliate links” and getting free traffic from Google, It's money on autopilot!

Now you may say, Ok Great! But how do we rank our articles? in other words, what the hell is SEO!! and how do we do it!?

Of course, Going through SEO in deep is out of the scope of this article, but at the same time, I will try my best to help you understand how to start and work with SEO in few lines. I will not let you go out of here missing anything!

The Idea is Simple, we mainly have three steps to go through in the process of ranking your articles:

1. Know what people are searching for (Keyword Research)
2. Optimize your article for these keywords (On-Page SEO)
3. Off-Page SEO (Building Trust, Social Signals, and Link Building…)

I'm summary, the trick is knowing your keywords, mentioning the keywords in the post title which will be the H1 tag on your website for this article.

This way, Google and search engines can know that this article is about this topic

You may ask, from where I get these keywords, and How can I know the best to choose? SIMPLE! use a keyword research tool.

You can use free keyword research tools like H-supertools or maybe some advanced SEO tools like SEMRUSH.

So open the H-supertools free keyword research tool and just write the topic you want in the box, and press find. 

The tool will automatically give you keyword search volume data and help you choose the best keywords.

Then the last step is off-page SEO, which is trying to get some backlinks and social signals to your website. as an example, you can link to your blog from your social profiles.

I hope this gives you an idea of how SEO works and how to start with it. Let's move now to the next strategy in promoting affiliate links which is YouTube!

2. Promote Affiliate with YouTube.

YouTube is one of the best sources to promote anything! not only affiliate services. You create videos about your affiliate product and link back to it.

Now the Big Question is How to Grow Your YouTube Channel and get more views?

In general, there are two ways to grow your channel.

1. YouTube suggestions: where YouTube will start suggesting your videos on the top of other popular videos.

Ex: you pick a trending video or topic and you create a similar High-Quality Video, and optimize the metadata (Title, Thumbnail, Description, and Tags)

2. Video SEO: which is ranking your videos on top of YouTube search results by optimizing your title, and metadata for a specific keyword. you can use tools like Tubebuddy, H-supertools, and others to grow your channel.

3. Forums and Q&A Sites.

Search for forums related to your content and help others by sharing what you know and link to your article or page where you are promoting the offer (DON’T SPAM).

Also, don’t forget, Reddit, which is a great place to get free traffic.

5. Social Media

If you have some followers on Facebook, maybe Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Twitter, all these helps you to get traffic, (you can automate posting on all platforms using a social media management software like Content Studio. you can get Lifetime access by send a message in my "contact us" page.

Of course, when I say social media, I don't mean to spam groups and people, NO, just try to build connections, give value, build trust, and then you can link back to your pages.

6. Free Ebooks and Courses

You can also create small free ebooks and publish on ebooks sites like this to get traffic or even you can publish a free course on Udemy which has millions of students out there and link back to your site. 

7. Email Marketing.

Always make sure to build your email lists, which will be one of the top sources of traffic for your websites by sending newsletters to your Subscribers.

8. Paid Advertising.

When It comes to paid advertising, we have several networks and places to market on like:

• Facebook Ads.
• Google Ads
• Native Ads
• Quora Ads

Going through all these requires a 300-page book each! So I will go over each one, in brief, to put you in the right direction.

Promote Affiliate products with Facebook and Google Ads

If you are looking to promote affiliate products with Facebook or Google Ads, Keep in mind the following:

First: Don’t run ads directly to your affiliate link. Facebook and Google are generally not a huge fan of affiliate links, and doing so too much could end up getting your ad account shut down.

Instead, you want to send them to your landing page in between the Ad and the Affiliate product page.

Secondly: make sure that all of your landing pages are compliant with Facebook and Google GuideLines.

Create Your Landing Page.

Now, what you have to do is to create your landing page. This could be a simple page where you pre-sell whatever it is you’re promoting…whether it’s a piece of pre-launch content or the sales page…and invite them to click through to download it.

Or, even better, you can use this as an opportunity to grow your list by turning these people into subscribers to YOUR list, and then sending them onto the content or offer you are promoting.

Run your Campaign.

A small note to consider is whenever you start your campaign, be sure to select the correct audience and narrow down as much as you can to target specific people. You can also use AD retargeting, which is a great weapon when running paid ads.

Also, Don't forget to start your campaign with low bids and different Ad sets to test, and to know which is the best to scale with.

Promote Affiliate products with Native Ads.

For affiliate marketers, native ad networks like Outbrain, Taboola, Mgid, and others are an ideal platform, proven to bring great results.

Ads on search results (like Google) and social media (Like Facebook) are not the same as ads on native networks. Why?

Simply Because there’s a big difference between scrolling a social feed, searching for something specific on Google, or browsing a favorite news site (where Native ads are shown). With the latter, users are in “discovery mode.”

They are primed to discover content that interests them.

Promote Affiliate products with Quora Ads.

 Why advertise on Quora?

Quora enables your organization to:

• Reach a coveted audience: Quora has a worldwide audience of more than 300 million unique visitors. In the US, Quora users are highly educated and primarily live in West and East Coast metropolitan area.
• Deliver your message in a premium environment: On Quora, your message will only appear alongside content that’s on par with your brand. Quora is known for the quality of its questions and answers, and an internal team of moderators, along with the Quora community, is dedicated to maintaining that high bar.
• Target for greater efficiency: Quora offers contextual and behavioral targeting options to reach your audience. You can choose to target certain content on Quora or reach people signaling an interest in your product or service. You can also further filter by location, platform, browser, and gender.

Hope this article gave you all the information that helps you with your online business journey as an affiliate marketer.

Let the Knowledge spread like fire..