According to Statista, business expenditure on affiliate marketing will hit an all-time high of $8.2 billion in the U.S alone by 2022.  Like most people, when you join affiliate programs, your main goal is to make money by recommending products so that you can wake up in the morning to the kind of money that people will think you do illegal things, not knowing it’s all from the comfort of your home and through affiliate marketing.

And it’s all very possible, so if you want to learn how to take part in this market projected to hit $8.2 billion in 2022, keep reading.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when you recommend other company’s products for a commission. When someone buys the company’s product through your affiliate link, you get a commission.

As an affiliate, you are technically a salesperson for the company. Anytime you help to make a sale, the company rewards you. The best feature of affiliate marketing is that you can do it at any scale. 

The average salesperson only sells products from one company, but as an affiliate marketer, you can promote and sell products from many different companies and earn commissions from all of them. That’s such another great thing about affiliate marketing. 

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

The merchant provides each affiliate a unique link so they can track who is responsible for a sale. When a visitor clicks that link, a small file called a cookie is stored on their device. 

An affiliate cookie does these two things:

• It helps the merchant assign the sale back to the right person;
• It (usually) holds an expiration date, but you still get paid even if the buyer delays their purchase.

Here’s an example of how this works.

Imagine that a customer visits your blog about the best gaming laptops. She clicks on your affiliate links, leading them to a product on Jumia, Konga, or Amazon.

But she realized she has to pick up their kid from school. So she leaves the house, picks up their kid, has lunch and dinner, and then finally goes back to Amazon, where she finds the product again.

Since she is already shopping on Amazon, she decides to purchase some external HDD too.

Here is the good news. Earlier, when she clicked on your affiliate link, a cookie was stored on her device. And because Amazon has a 24-hour cookie time limit, you get compensated for both the laptop and the external HDD—even though you didn’t promote the latter.

How much money can I make with affiliate marketing?

To the major question, everyone asks, how much can I earn with affiliate marketing? The answer to that question that there is no limit. It all depends on the niche and the amount of work you put in.

You won’t make the big bucks right off the start, but don’t let that discourage you. The success of others should tell you that with hard work, time, and the right knowledge, you too can get to those levels.

How To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing

We will start by following these seven simple steps.

Decide on a platform

Choose your niche

Find affiliate programs to join

Create great content

Drive traffic to your affiliate site

Get clicks on your affiliate links

Convert clicks to sales

Step #1: Decide on a platform

Hypothetically speaking, you can do affiliate marketing on any platform. Even Instagram works. 

However, it is much easier to build your audience and increase your affiliate sales through either a blog, website, or YouTube channel.

Starting a blog today is mostly easy and cheap. There are various tutorials online that will teach you how to get started. And the best part is it will likely only cost you a few dollars per month.

Once your website is up, you should optimize it for search engines so that you have a better chance of ranking for certain keywords that users search for. Next, you add affiliate links to your content. 

The other platform is YouTube. Making and uploading content to YouTube is free, which makes it ideal for many people. You can also consider optimizing your videos for SEO and include affiliate links in your description.

Note that you will need to disclose the fact that you are including affiliate links. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires you to be translucent when receiving payments from an endorsement.

If you are using a blog, create a standalone page or add it to the footer of your website; if you are doing it on YouTube, it’s best to include it in your description. This goes without saying, but you will likely get more clicks from a blog than on YouTube.

Step #2: Choose your niche

Let’s be candid: if you are starting a blog today, you are going to be facing a ton of competition. Statista projects that the number of bloggers in the U.S alone will reach 31.7 million by 2020.

To have a chance of success, niche down.

Select a topic that focuses on a specific category. For example, the topic of “laptop” can be vast. Rather than focusing on that, try something more specific, like ” best ASUS gaming laptop.”

Keeping your topics specific can help you build a more focused audience and potentially help you rank higher in search engines.

Of course, it won’t be specific all the time; as you cover the bulk of this category and build traffic to these web pages, you can now expand into other areas.

If you are outsourcing the content, it is better to work with seasoned experts in the niche. Experts can aid you in creating high-quality, reliable work, which can lead to more traffic, engaged visitors, and more affiliate sales.

Step #3: Find affiliate programs to join

It’s not that easy to find affiliate programs, some are too demanding, and some pay less that you will have to work harder than a 9 to 5 job to even make rent. So we are here to aid you in finding some decent ones.

There are three different kinds of affiliate programs to pick from.

A. High-paying, low-volume affiliate programs

These are affiliate programs for niche products with a high payout.

For example, ConvertKit’s affiliate program pays about $700 per month if you get just 80 customers to patronize them. However, as they sell CRM software for small business owners, there is a limited supply of buyers. 

There is also the case of competition for affiliate programs with high commissions. And since you are probably just starting, it will be quite a challenge to make a meaningful amount of money competing against skilled marketers with deep pockets.

B. Low-paying, high-volume affiliate programs

These are affiliate programs for products with a low payout but with huge mass appeal.

For example, take PS4 games. A lot of people play PS4, but the average cost of a game is only around $50(N18,500), and the affiliate commissions are mostly in the single digits. This means you will earn $2–3 (740-1100)per sale if you are lucky.

The redeeming quality of these types of affiliate programs is that they usually offer lots of products to sell. Take Amazon’s affiliate program, for example. You can make up to 10% commissions on almost anything Amazon sells.

The other good thing about this kind of program is that you often get commissions on the entire value of the purchase rather than just the product you promote.

To enjoy the benefit of these types of affiliate programs, you will need tons of traffic.

C. High-paying, high-volume affiliate programs

These are affiliate programs for products with mass appeal, which also pay high commissions.

A great example is credit cards.

Everyone uses a credit card, and most users stay with the company for years (sometimes even decades!)

The problem with these types of products is that they enthrall affiliate marketers with lots of experience. Some also use spammy strategies that you just cannot compete with.

How do you select which affiliate programs to join? Well, that solely depends on your niche and level of expertise.

If you’re targeting consumers, you will likely go with the second model of low commissions and higher sales volume.

If you’re going after a business audience, you will likely go for the first model, which is high-paying and low volume. The most popular programs here are mostly for software and web hosting-related products.

However, if there is a product you would really like to promote without a public affiliate program, reach out to the company and see if they would be willing to build an affiliate relationship with you.

Step #4: Create great content

If you want your affiliate site to thrive, you need to create high-quality content where your affiliate links fit naturally.

Don’t just blindly promote products from Amazon’s best sellers. Go the extra mile and ensure your content solves the visitor’s problem. 

If you are doing reviews, actually purchase the product and test it. 

If you do not have the funds to buy every single product, you can always start with the ones you have at home. For example, if you have a blog that is about tech, you could create reviews on the devices you own.

Step #5: Drive traffic to your affiliate site

You have created great content. The next thing is to get people to read it, so they can click on your affiliate links; after all, the end product of writing those content is for them to buy the products you are promoting. 

To accomplish this, it’s best to consider these three traffic strategies:

A. Paid traffic PPC(Pay-Per-Click)

This is when you pay for traffic to your site. You can do this using PPC ads.

The advantage of this strategy is that the moment you start paying, you get traffic. Its effects are instantaneous, and all marketers use this strategy to bolster their efforts.

However, it is not all green; there are some downsides.

Firstly, running ads will eat into your profits. It is quite normal for advertisers to lose money before they make it but are you?  You should be realistic about how long it will take to improve on a paid traffic campaign.

Secondly, once you stop the paid traffic campaign, your traffic will reduce drastically or even stop.

Honestly speaking, ads are a great traffic strategy if you are part of a high-paying affiliate program and can make the numbers work.

But if you are entirely new to paid marketing and have no marketing budget or are working with low commission programs like Amazon Associates, then it might not be such a great idea.

B. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the method of optimizing pages to rank high in search engines like Google.

If you can rank high in the search engines for your target keywords, you will get consistent and passive traffic to your site. A great feature of SEO is the traffic doesn’t stop, once you put out content there, it’s there, and it can even be helpful in the next ten years to a user needing that product.

SEO is about:

• Knowing what your target audience search query is; Making content around these topics (blog posts, product pages, etc.);
• Taking care of the “technical” side to push these pages higher in the search engines (which includes link building).

C. Build an email list

Email lists let you communicate with your readers anytime and keep them engaged and updated with your site.

You can use email to tell fans about new content and keep them coming back to your site for more. This helps generate more affiliate clicks and sales. You can even send email promotions with your affiliate link embedded in your list directly.

To build an email list, you’d want to encourage the readers on your site to sign up. Which often involves offering something valuable in exchange for their mail.

There are many things to offer in exchange for their mail; it can be free eBooks, an email course, a coupon code, etc.

Be creative.

Step #6: Get clicks on your affiliate links

Just because you have an incredible piece of content doesn’t mean people will click on your affiliate links. It would be best if you did more to get that click.

There are some things you need to consider.

A. Link placement

If most or all of your affiliate links are at the bottom of the page where people rarely scroll, clicks will be few and far between. On the other hand, making every other word a link in your introduction, and your content will look spammy.

It would help if you learned how to balance link placement with other factors.

B. Context

Let’s say you are writing an article on the best Tv for under $200(N74,000).

Your introduction probably shouldn’t look like this:

“Today, I am reviewing the best TV in Nigeria.”

The links feel and look out of context and spammy.

This would make more sense:

Today, I’m reviewing the three best TV you can buy for under $200. These are TV 1, TV 2, and Tv 3.

Step #7: Convert clicks to sales

One crucial factor to note, in affiliate marketing, two conversions are needed to take place for you to earn money.

The first conversion is the click to the product page.

You are 100% in control of this action. Use the different tactics listed above to improve your chances of getting that click.

The second conversion is the customer purchasing the product. In this case of affiliate marketing, the merchant regulates the checkout, and their conversion rates are out of your control.

The trick is to play the game to your benefit and look for merchants with programs that convert well.

And there are a few ways to find them:

A. Public income reports

If people are making money from an affiliate program, they will likely convert well.

How do you know people that are making money?

Look at public income reports where bloggers publicly reveal how much money they are making from their affiliate deals. You can easily find these reports on Google.

For example, if you do a google search for “income report for amazon affiliate”, you will see a few blog posts showing how bloggers have made money from Amazon Affiliates. And if you are in the same space, you can also look at where other affiliate income comes from and potentially promote the same products.

B. Ask questions

A proverb goes, ” One is afraid of asking questions is afraid of learning.”

If there isn’t much information available about an affiliate program you want to join, then ask questions.

For example, you might want to determine what a product’s average conversion rate is or the figure of their top earners’ monthly commissions.

This can aid you in determining if the affiliate program is worth promoting.

C. Use your intuition

Sometimes, it is best to go with your instinct.

If the product or program you are recommending feels or looks “off,” or if you would personally never recommend the product to a friend or family member, then don’t promote it. Your reputations matter a lot.

Final thoughts

No affiliate marketing strategy was reinvented here. These are all the essentials that everyone should know, and applying them will get you off to the right start.

Just don’t expect life-changing income or the liberty to quit your 9–5 job. Affiliate marketing takes time.

You should focus first on making your first affiliate sale. As your website grows, set new goals, milestones, accomplishments and continue experimenting.

This is how to build up a website that will eventually generate a decent income.