How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing for Beginners in 2022
Do you want to learn make money online with affiliate marketing? Read this full blog post to educate yourself as a newbie how can you make money through affiliate marketing in 2022.
Do you know that affiliate marketing becoming a multi-billion dollar industry and the US solely held more than 11,400 affiliate programs?
Nowadays, making money online through affiliate marketing is one of the effective channels to earn a decent income, boost sales and increase brand awareness.
The craziest thing is that the worth of investment in starting an affiliate marketing business is very minimum. For those who became exhausted from working nine to five and want to become independent entrepreneurs, affiliate marketing can be a great option to make it happen.
In this guidepost, we’ll be going to discuss the step-by-step guide on how to make money with affiliate marketing for beginners in 2022.
Table of Contents
- What is Affiliate Marketing
- How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
- Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?
- How Much Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing?
- How to Become an Affiliate Marketer in 6 Steps
So, let’s dive into full discussion:
What is Affiliate Marketing
Generally, affiliate marketing is a type of marketing model which allows an online retailer or company pays a commission to an external website for generating traffic and sales from its referrals.
According to Ahrefs, “affiliate marketing is where you promote another company’s product or service in return for a commission on the sales you generate. Commissions are typically a percentage of the sale price, but can occasionally be a fixed amount”
An example of affiliate marketing can be website owners and bloggers creating a direct link to an Amazon product or service page and getting a commission if a referral covers a sale.
In simple understanding, affiliate marketing is a marketing method by which you can earn a commission by promoting another company’s product or service online.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
It is the most common question of all new affiliate markers that how does affiliate marketing work?
Well, the concept of affiliate marketing on the internet was first originated by William J. Tobin, the founder of PC Flowers & Gifts. In 1998, PC Flowers & Gifts invented the affiliate business model of paying a referral commission on sales to the Prodigy Network.
Amazon.com (Amazon) started its associated program in July 1996. Amazon associates could put text links or banners on their site for individual books, or create direct links to the Amazon home page.
When the user clicked on those links it redirects to the Amazon website and the associate will receive a commission if the book was purchased.
Though Amazon was not the first merchant to start an affiliate program, its program was popular enough which serve as a model for other subsequent programs.
Before starting to understand how does affiliate marketing work, let’s look into 4 key players in the affiliate marketing model:
The Merchant
They are also known as the brand, the retailer, the company, advertisers, or the creators. Typically, affiliate marketing merchants produce products, services, or content.
Any industry ranging from telecom, retail, direct-to-consumer, financial services, broadband, e-commerce, B2B that sell products or services can be an affiliate merchant.
The Affiliate
They are also known as publishers, distributors, or partners. They can be single individuals to whole organizations. The affiliate marketers promote one or more affiliate products or services and try to acquire a potential customer to decide on the purchase.
The affiliate products can be promoted through niche content sites, social media posters, product review websites, personal websites, shopping sites, mobile apps, coupon and reward websites, etc.
The Affiliate Networks
An affiliate network performs as an intermediary role between affiliate partners and merchant affiliate programs.
In addition, the affiliate network also monitors all tracking, reporting, and payment to affiliates.
Through affiliate networks, the merchant can establish their affiliate programs and publishers can search networks to find potential affiliate programs to promote. Clickbank or Commission Junction can be prominent examples of affiliate marketing programs.
To earn a commission, you need to sign-up and generate a custom affiliate link to any affiliate network. Once any purchase happens through an affiliate link, you will receive a referral affiliate commission.
So, right now, we’ll be going to discuss how can an affiliate marketer join an affiliate program?
Well, as an affiliate marketer, you can visit the direct company website or search through any affiliate network like Clickbank or Sharesale.
After registration as an affiliate seller, your merchant will give you a unique link to monitor and track the purchase history.
When any user clicks that link, tracking software saves a cookie on a user’s browser. If the customer performs the desired action within the cookie period, the affiliate commission award will be distributed:
An affiliate cookie functions in two ways:
· It assists the merchant to allocate commission to the right person.
· It contains an expiration date, so you receive your payment if your buyer purchase in delay.
Here, we’re giving some example of how does affiliate cookie works?
Suppose, during lunch break time a reader visits your blog post regarding the best budget-friendly kitchen pressure cookers.
They click on the affiliate link which directs them to the Amazon product page. But, as lunch time is over, so the customer returns to their work keeping the purchase incomplete.
After office hours, they browse the Amazon product page again, to purchase a pressure cooker. Even, they also decide to purchase a vegetable chopper.
As Amazon affiliate cookie duration is 24 hours, so you will receive affiliate commission for both pressure cooker and vegetable chopper — though you didn’t promote the later.
Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?
It is one of the common queries of merchant and affiliate publishers that whether still affiliate marketing is beneficial or not.
To find out the most relevant and correct answer to these questions, let’s highlight some facts and figures:
· More than 80% of brands run affiliate programs.
· Nearly 65% of affiliate marketers drive traffic by blogging.
· Advertisers earn between 15% and 30% of all sales from affiliate programs.
· 94% of affiliate marketers use multiple affiliate marketing programs.
· USA is the dominant player in the affiliate industry with a 39% of share.
· Affiliate marketing generates 16% of eCommerce sales in Canada and the US.
· The top affiliate networks have more than 100,000 affiliates.
· Affiliate marketing is the biggest customer acquisition channel for 40% of US merchants.
Considering the above important data, it is crystal clear that the myth of “is affiliate marketing dead?” is completely wrong.
There are some key benefits of running affiliate marketing that explains its clear worth in 2022:
Low investment: It requires low investment to run an affiliate program as you don’t have to spend on an advertising team or purchase ad space. You can depend on your affiliates for marketing promotions of your product and service.
Saves money: It saves money as major marketing activities are done by the affiliates. In other marketing models such as PPC advertising, you need to pay for every click. But in the affiliate model, you will pay a commission if sales are made through affiliate links.
Increase visitors: It drives a large number of potential visitors to your website. More website visitors mean more sales and conversions.
Boost brand value: It boosts your overall business reputation and strengthens your brand through a strong affiliate network. Trustworthy affiliate networks are one of the leading channels of customer acquisition.
Flexibility: It provides immense flexibility as a professional. You can take it as a full-time or part-time profession, even as a freelancer as well.
Extend networking & connections: It creates a valuable opportunity for building strategic partnerships and networking. As an affiliate, this opens the unlimited business opportunity for professional expansion and growth.
How Much Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing?
It is one of the fundamental questions that how much can you make through affiliate marketing?
Usually, affiliate marketing commission rates differ product and service-wise. At the same time, there are vast differences between earning potential of “top affiliate marketers” and “beginner affiliates”.
According to Statista, it is predicted that affiliate marketing spending will reach $8.2 billion by 2022.
Let’s check some important statistics about affiliate marketing earning potential:
· Maximum affiliate marketing specialists promote 1–10 products.
· Amazon associates program owns a 35.7% share of the global affiliate market.
· Amazon affiliate marketers can earn up to 10% of commissions.
· 35% of affiliate marketers earn more than $20,000 a year.
· 86% of affiliates expect that their revenue will stay consistent or increase in the future.
· According to PayScale, the average annual affiliate marketing passive earning is $51,217. The bottom 10% of affiliate marketers income $37,000, and the top 10% earn $71,000.
· According to ZipRecruiter forecast, the highest affiliate marketing passive income is $154,700 a year. It also forecasts average affiliate monthly income at $12,892, and weekly average income at $2,975.
· According to Glassdoor, the average annual income for affiliate marketers is $65,800, with the range between $42,000 at the low end, and $83,000 at the top end.
The above facts and figures of affiliate marketing clearly state its profitable feature of earning potentiality. The income of top affiliates like Pat Flynn, Missy Ward, Finch Sells, or Zac Johnson are more than that.
How to Become an Affiliate Marketer in 5 Steps
Follow these 5 simple but effective steps
Train with Affiliate Marketing Fundamentals
To make money online with affiliate marketing in a sustainable manner, you need to learn the nitty-gritty of this popular marketing model. Though it is known as an easy and flexible sales model, ideally, it is not the get-rich-quick-model of income.
To prove yourself as a successful affiliate marketer, you need dedication, commitment, and expertise.
To hone your skill in the marketing model, get enrollment into popular affiliate marketing courses which build a strong foundation to perform further.
The top few affiliate marketing courses are:
· Affiliate Marketing Side Hustle Guide
· The Learn How to Build High Quality Websites Course
· Autopilot Affiliate Marketing Success
· Beginner Affiliate Marketing To Start In 1 Day- For 2022
· Affiliate Marketing+SEO:Amazon Affiliate Marketing
The completion of these courses will give you below knowledge and wisdom related to affiliate marketing:
· The core fundamentals of affiliate marketing
· How to research and select the right affiliate product for promotion.
· The basic rules that need to follow when using affiliate links.
· Learn how to spread the links online
· How to create high-quality affiliate websites.
· How to make compelling content for higher conversion
· Introduction of different affiliate programs and their modality.
The initial investment in these types of courses gives you the upper hand to establish your affiliate marketing career. As much as you upgraded your skills and experience, your income potential through affiliate marketing will be at its peak over the period.
Select Your Marketing Channel
As an affiliate marketer, you need to select the right marketing channels for the promotion of your affiliate products.
You may use a single platform or a combination of platforms for wider accessibility.
Here, few popular publishing platforms for affiliate products are:
Websites
You can make great money by utilizing your blogs for affiliate marketing and it is quite easy to get started. Through your website content which based upon affiliate products, you can build loyal followers who can pursue your affiliate links. You can view tutorials on how to start an affiliate blog as tons of resources are available online.
For sustainable affiliate business, create SEO-optimized unique and useful content. Try to follow the proper SEO method, so that your website will be appeared instantly with the searcher query at the search engine. This will enhance affiliate conversion.
According to Federal Trade Commission (FTC), you need to be transparent while earning from an endorsement.
When you use a blog for affiliate promotion, use a disclaimer announcement in the footer of your website.
YouTube
YouTube is another mega channel for making money online through affiliate marketing. It is expected that YouTube users will be 2.8 billion by 2025 and it stands as the second most popular social media channel in the world.
Considering this, you need to grasp this immense opportunity to lure customers for your affiliate products by leveraging this platform.
It is estimated that 68% of customers watch YouTube videos while taking any purchasing decision. By producing high-quality YouTube content, you can maximize your passive income through affiliate marketing.
You can put your affiliate link in various places on your YouTube channel, such as:
· Description box
· Pinned comment
· End of the video
· YouTube cards
· Community posts
The top 5 popular YouTube contents for promoting your affiliate products are:
· Product review videos
· Trending videos
· Round-up videos
· Unboxing videos
· Tutorials
Social Media
Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest but evergreen forms of marketing in social media.
According to Hubspot, 84% of marketers were able to drive high traffic with as little as six hours of effort spent on social media per week.
Affiliate marketing through social media can easily access a wide range of loyal customers and content creators will earn instant passive income.
Influencer marketing allows content creators to utilize their social media presence for promoting affiliate products. They generate affiliate income by posting product or service links to their Instagram stories, Facebook Groups, Pinterest pins, or tweets.
The only negative side of social media channels is that you need to post frequently for its algorithm requirements and posts have a short life span.
Despite that, social media is a convenient and profitable platform to build a trusted affiliate community.
Email Marketing
It is estimated that the number of total active email users is over 4.258 billion worldwide as of 2022.
According to Statista, the number of email users will increase to nearly 4.4 billion in 2023.
Considering these facts and figures, email marketing is one of the significant channels for promoting affiliate products.
If you have a large email subscriber, you can send recommendations of potential products or services by segmenting your customer by location or interest.
As email extends personalized and direct access to your targeted audience, so you should leverage this channel as an affiliate marketer.
Before starting your affiliate email marketing campaign, follow some basic practices:
· Select the right affiliate product to promote
· Check your email provider support affiliate link.
· Segment your email groups based upon their location, interest, gender, or behavior
· Examine A/B testing on campaigns.
Choose Your Affiliate Niche
To become a successful affiliate marketer, choosing the right niche for your affiliate promotion is the most crucial part. Generally, it is recommended by all experts that you should select your niche based on your interest, market demand, popularity, and profitability.
If your niche is the combination of all above then you get desired monetary benefit from that. Having little expertise and passion for a particular industry will be an added advantage to working with that affiliate product.
It is estimated that there are 600 million blogs on the internet out of the 1.7 billion websites and as of 2020 the number of active bloggers in the US is 31.7 million.
Considering this hectic competition, you need to select a niche of a specific category or micro-niche. Suppose, you have interest to work in “Kitchen & Dining” products is itself a broad category. So, you may niche down it on “Kitchen Appliances”.
If you keep your niche very specific and build high-quality content based on that subject area then there is a higher chance to rank higher position at the SERPs to attract the right audience for your affiliate product.
Generally, you can use below useful tools to research your targeted niche for affiliate marketing:
· Google trends
· Google search console
· Answer the public
· SEMRush
· Ahrefs
· UberSuggest
· Subreddit stats
· Localized rankings
· Statista
Some profitable niche ideas for affiliate marketing:
· Technology
· Personal Finance
· Lifestyle and wellness
· Pet care
· Gardening
· Travel
· Weight loss
· Yoga
· Fashion & jewelry
· Personal development
Join Right Affiliate Program
After selecting a profitable niche, the next steps come for an affiliate marketer to choose the right affiliate program. It is quite an intriguing question how to decide which affiliate programs to join?
Well, this selection is largely dependent upon your niche and level of competency.
You can choose your decision based on below three types of affiliate programs:
High-paying, low-volume affiliate programs
There are affiliate niches that have high payouts. Though as a beginner affiliate marketer, it would be quite challenging to compete with other competent marketers in this category.
Here, the top high-paying affiliate programs are:
· Hostinger
· Bluehost
· HostGator
· Elementor
· Hubspot
· Fiverr
· GetResponse
· WP Engine
· Cloudways
· Shopify
Low-paying, high-volume affiliate programs
These category affiliate products have huge consumer demand with low payouts. If your target mass people, then you select this type of affiliate program.
The top retail affiliate programs that may boost your affiliate program are:
· Amazon
· eBay
· Home Depot
· Target
· Etsy
· Hobby Lobby
· AliExpress
· BestBuy
High-paying, high-volume affiliate program
These types of affiliate products not only have mass appeal but also have high pay-out. For example, financial products or dating products have higher demand along with high returns.
To make successful conversion of such affiliate products need an affiliate marketer who has in-depth expertise & mastery in this field. As a beginner, it is quite challenging at the initial level to get success.
Create Valuable and Useful Content
Once you chose your affiliate program, now you need to produce high-quality, unique content to attract the targeted audience for your affiliate products. If your content seems ordinary and flat, you can hardly make money online from affiliate marketing.
According to some statistics, more than one-third of high-earning bloggers mention that the market demand for high-quality content is higher than ever. 34% of buyers will take an unplanned purchase decision after reading quality content and 32% of reader conveys that content accuracy is the most crucial part of quality content.
If you want to attract potential clients, then you have to create affiliate content that resolves customers’ long-standing problems.
In the case, of product reviews, it would be great if you purchase that product and test it from your end before public presentation.
As an affiliate marketer, you can be adept at creating the below types of text and video content ideas:
Text Content:
· Product reviews
· Product comparisons
· Product content and guides
· Blog post
· Customer success stories
· Case studies
· How-to guides
· Ebooks
· Tutorials
· Listicles
Video Content:
· Product reviews
· Tutorials
· Unboxing videos
· Product try-ons
· Top X lists
· Favorites/Best of videos
Start Promoting Your Affiliate Links
After creating great content, now time to share your piece with the targeted mass. In such a case, you need to promote your content, so that people will click on your affiliate links.
Below are some marketing strategies we’re suggesting so that you can drive traffic to your affiliate website:
· Run Facebook ads and PPC advertisement
· Follow traditional search engine optimization tactics for a long-term result.
· Acquire customers with new sales offers and coupons.
· Share on relevant social media platforms.
· Build a strong e-mail list and start an affiliate campaign
· Showcase affiliate banner and display ads on your website.
· Promote on forums and question-and-answer websites like Quora and Reddit.
Summary
After this prolonged discussion, we can say that affiliate marketing is undoubtedly a straightforward method for making money online by a beginner marketer.
If you acquire the right skillets along with applying the right marketing tools and strategies, you can successfully earn money by promoting your passionate affiliate products to your engaged followers.
