Recently updated: May 25th, 2023
As more and more people are looking for easy ways to make money with little or no investment at all, affiliate marketing is gaining huge momentum. This business model allows bloggers, entrepreneurs, influencers, and website owners to drive tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue annually.
What’s makes this passive earning method more versatile is that about 80 percent of brands have affiliate programs. Meaning, no matter what niche you choose, you are likely to find great affiliate programs and boost your savings.
However, most beginners fail to make the desired amount of money with affiliate marketing. It’s not because affiliate marketing works only for some people. The roadblock they face is due to the mistakes they make while trying affiliate marketing.
Fortunately, you can better prepare yourself for affiliate marketing and earn a steady income by knowing about affiliate marketing as much as you can.
In this affiliate marketing guide, you will learn:
- What Is Affiliate Marketing?
- How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
- How Much Can I Earn Through Affiliate Marketing?
- Steps You Need to Follow to Start Affiliate Marketing Successfully
- Research Well and Choose Your Niche
- Determine the Platform for Affiliate Marketing You Find Comfortable
- Select Affiliate Programs Based on Niche, Volume, & Commission
- Create Optimized Content Based on Your Affiliate Programs
- Take Measures to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Platform
- Track Your Progress and Find More Ways to Increase Revenue
- What Are the Latest Affiliate Marketing Trends to Follow in 2022 and Beyond?
- How Will AI and Automation Transform Affiliate Marketing?
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a business marketing and advertising model where brands connect with third parties (such as content creators and social media influencers) to generate traffic or collect leads and compensate partners with commission fees in exchange.
The increased use of the Internet over the past decade and especially after the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic has created a boom in the affiliate marketing world. Even though affiliate marketing is an older marketing scheme than the Internet itself, advancements like digital marketing, analytics, and cookies have made affiliate marketing a billion-dollar industry.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
In short, the more sales you can make happen for an affiliate brand, the more you will earn. Let’s understand this in detail.
Let’s say you have a website, a social media account, or a YouTube channel that receives steady traffic.
- Through an affiliate network, you join a brand’s affiliate program that aligns with the type of content you share.
- You create/repurpose content and optimize it based on what you aim to sell through that affiliate link.
- You get an affiliate link and share it with your content.
- A customer clicks on your affiliate link and is redirected to the brand website.
- The customer is tracked by the affiliate network through a cookie.
- The customer makes a purchase.
- The brand/affiliate network identifies that you make that sale happen and issues you a commission.
- The commissions that you earn per sale appear on your affiliate dashboard.
- You get paid finally.
While reading this, you encountered some technical terms that you should understand properly.
Affiliate Network:
Typically, most brands create their affiliate programs and set them on third-party platforms called affiliate networks. They act as an intermediary between you (content publishers) and brands’ affiliate programs.
Some of the top examples of affiliate marketers are:
- CJ Affiliate
- ShareASale
- Awin
- Impact
- Amazon Associates
- Rakuten Advertising
- SKIMLINKS
- Lemonads
Cookies:
They are small-size text files that websites send to the devices of their visitors so that they can remember information related to their visits. Cookies usually tend to have a life of 15 to 30 days but their lifespan can vary from 24 hours to a year or more.
It matters for you because customers may not purchase the same day and come back to buy a few days after they first click on your affiliate link.
How Much Can I Earn Through Affiliate Marketing?
As per PayScale, the average annual income of an affiliate marketer in the US is $52,367, where the average income ranges between $39,000 (for the bottom 10 percent) and $73,000 (for the top 10 percent affiliate marketers). On the other hand, the average income of an affiliate marketer in India is ₹3,60,000.
So, you can see that if you learn how to do affiliate marketing the right way, you can earn a n impressive amount of passive income that will ultimately help increase your wealth and savings. Just make sure that you have enough patience and dedication for affiliate marketing.
Steps You Need to Follow To Start Affiliate Marketing Successfully
Here, we are sharing the key steps that will help you get started with affiliate marketing:
1. Research Well and Choose Your Niche
Note that not all niches allow you to make a high amount of money. While some niches are highly rewarding, others have less earning potential. So, before you start anything, research properly to find which niches can bring more monetary value to you. It is best to choose a niche that has high earning potential and will help you make money for years to come.
Tips to Research Niche for Affiliate Marketing
- Search for “profitable niches for affiliate marketing” online.
- Assess which of these niches are related to your hobbies, experience, or passion.
- Focus on niches that will stay strong in the future as well.
- Analyze the competitive landscape for niches.
- Learn about affiliate programs that brands offer in the niche of your choice.
- Create a content plan with the help of niche research tools, such as Google Trends, Localized Trends, Answer the Public, Answer Socrates, etc.
Top Profitable Niches for Affiliate Marketing
- Lifestyle and Wellness (Market value by 2025: $6 trillion)
- Technology (Market value by 2024: $2.5 trillion)
- Personal Finance (Market Value by 2025: $300 billion)
- Gaming (Market Value by 2025: $256.97 billion)
- Beauty (Market Value by 2025: $122 billion)
- Pet Care (Market Value by 2025: $48.49 billion)
Look for niches with medium competition because it can be difficult to tap into high-competition niches without significant experience and knowledge. On the other hand, very low competition niches can mean you will earn little money.
2. Determine Platform for Affiliate Marketing You Find Comfortable
Once you have a niche in mind and content plan, you need to determine what type of content you want to create and where you are going to post it.
Type of Affiliate Content:
- You can write blogs, articles, reviews, and guides.
- You can create videos and vlogs.
Type of Affiliate Platform:
You can start with affiliate marketing with:
- A Website
- A YouTube Channel
- A Social Media Account
- A Twitch Account
Which Platform Is Best for Affiliate Marketing?
For affiliate marketing, blogs and review websites are the best platforms to earn money. If you have a big fan following on social media and you are used to making videos for your followers, then your social media account also makes a great choice to post affiliate content and help your followers understand why they should invest in certain products (that you are promoting).
These days, YouTube and Twitch seems like an excellent platform to grow your audience and build a brand (which they are especially for ultra-competitive niches). However, if you are a beginner, video-based platforms can be difficult for you to make money with affiliate marketing. It’s because video creation takes more time and requires video editing skills. If you haven’t done it before, it will take additional time for you to post videos and start making money from them.
Besides, it’s difficult to outsource video creation especially if you are the face of the channel. And you can’t collect e-mail subscribers through YouTube. Note that emails are another effective way to do affiliate marketing.
Another reason to prefer creating a blog website is that YouTube channels don’t make as much money with affiliate marketing as one can make with optimized blog posts.
Nonetheless, to maximize your passive income, you can use all of these platforms to promote products if you want to.
3. Select Affiliate Programs Based on Niche, Volume, & Commission
Finding affiliate programs and signing up for them is quite easy. However, to make more money, you want to find profitable affiliate programs that actually work in your niche.
Tips to Choose Profitable Affiliate Programs
- Keep three things in mind: Competition, Brand Reputation, and Earning Potential
- Dig deeper to see what affiliate programs your competitors are heavily promoting. It’s an indication that you might do well with those programs too.
- When researching for brand reputation, also analyze a brand’s website to see if it is user-friendly, mobile-friendly, attractive, more likely to collect leads, and has positive reviews.
- While some affiliate programs pay less commission per sale, others pay hundreds of dollars for a single sale. Programs with lower commission rates are easy to join and promote but they need you to make a higher number of sales for the same amount. So, choose accordingly.
- Check the cookie duration of the affiliate program and prefer the one with the longer cookie duration.
Some of the top affiliate programs are:
- Flipkart Affiliate
- Amazon Affiliate
- Fiverr Affiliate
- Bluehost
- Elementor
- Wix
- BigCommerce
- Shopify
The good news is that you can join as many affiliate programs as you wish. Still, it is best to choose a limited number of affiliate programs with good commissions; otherwise, you might drown yourself with loads of content creation requirements.
4. Create Optimized Content Based on Your Affiliate Programs
Once you join one or more affiliate programs, it’s time to create content for affiliate marketing. Always remember that customers are likely to trust you only when you provide them with high-quality and original content. Content that adds value to the research they do before purchasing a product!
When creating content, the easiest way for you to lure more customers is to provide them with useful information and insights. It entices them to make a buying decision on a product directly on your website.
Best Content Ideas for Affiliate Marketing
- Product reviews
- Product comparisons
- Tutorials
- Compiled list of tools and resources
- E-books
- Informational videos
- Gift guides
- How-to guides
While creating content, you must place affiliate links in the content where they are more likely to get noticed and clicked.
Best Ways to Placing Affiliate Links in Your Content
- Create Visible and Noticeable Buttons (such as Buy Now, Check the Price, and See Similar Products).
- Use Text Boxes to Display Stats and Features that help customers to move ahead in their buying journey.
- Use Graph, Charts, and Comparison Boxes with Buttons as Affiliate Links.
- Stand out with eye-catchy and interesting banners.
- Display Popups for discount codes and limited time offers at the right time.
5. Take Measures to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Platform
After creating content and sharing your affiliate link, you need to do everything you can to increase traffic to your website.
To drive traffic to your affiliate content, you can:
- Share your posts on social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
- Post your content link on LinkedIn with a good caption.
- Promote them by using email lists (if you have any).
- Ask your site visitors to subscribe to get updates regularly.
- Perform SEO to improve the ranking of your content pages.
- Share your content on Reddit.
- Share your content link in WhatsApp groups.
- Use Pinterest for images and infographics you have created for content.
- Try to answer through your content on Forums where people ask questions.
All of them are free traffic sources but require some time and effort to drive traffic. So, have patience. If you are wondering which of them is best, then you should devote more time to SEO and affiliate marketing through email.
In the real world, not every person who visits your website or channel is not at the stage of making a purchase. So, build a strategy for the affiliate marketing funnel. Meaning, create content that targets all stages of a customer’s buying journey:
- Problem/Need Recognition
- Informative Search
- Evaluation
- Purchase Decision
- Loyalty
6. Track Your Progress and Find More Ways to Increase Revenue
With continuous content creation, also start tracking so that you get insights into what’s working and what’s not. When you find out what is helping you to make more money, you can focus on those strategies, affiliate programs, and content ideas more.
With affiliate marketing, there are two ways of tracking and both ways are good for you.
- The tracking that the affiliate network does for you by identifying your sales and telling which products are being sold through your links.
- The tracking that you should do yourself by analyzing which pages, links, content, text, and visual elements are performing better through tracking tools.
Identify which blog posts are underperforming and make some improvements by adding charts, comparison tables, switching the text on call-to-action buttons, inserting links of alternative affiliate products, etc.
What Are the Latest Affiliate Marketing Trends to Follow in 2022 and Beyond?
The affiliate marketing industry is seeing a boom as more and more businesses are shifting to digital platforms and trying to attract more customers and generate revenue online. So, to stay at the top of the game, always remain familiar with the top trends in the current year and the near future.
Trend 1: AI and Data-Driven Affiliate Campaigns Will Be the Next Big Thing.
Brands will be looking for not content creators or influencers but partners who can produce content and know how to use AI more strategically as third-party cookies are going to become obsolete by 2023.
Trend 2: Subject Matter Expertise Will Be More Popular.
Affiliate marketers who wear so many hat partners will succeed and see growth in the future by gaining expertise and building strong personal relationships.
Trend 3: Higher Budget Will Be Allocated to Micro- and Nano-Influencers.
Brands with limited budget will seek micro and nano influencers for affiliate marketing. To get quality leads and maximize revenue, a higher budget will be allocated to these two categories and mega influencers.
Trend 4: Loyalty Marketing Will Become a Part of Affiliate Marketing.
To increase the number of repeat customers, brands will be giving incentives like charity donations, cash-back, and points.
Trend 5: Live Shopping Will Become Mainstream.
You will witness social media influencers taking advantage of Livestream Shopping. While YouTube hosted a live shopping week in November last year, the trend is already becoming popular on twitch.
How Will AI and Automation Transform Affiliate Marketing?
Google has shifted to AI-based ranking that helps identify new search patterns, find correlations between different signals, and assess the relevance. This major shift is pushing the growth of custom-made and personalized search features, such as Instant Answers, the Shopping Graph, and more results combined with text, images, and videos.
AI and automation will bring a dramatic change in the affiliate marketing industry. AI tools will help brands save time, energy, and resources and boost sales. The AI assistance can vary from finding influencers and affiliates to tracking the performance of affiliate programs to having an AI affiliate and increasing engagement through Chatbots.
Are you ready to become an affiliate marketer? Keep the above tips and recommendations in mind and get started right away to make money.
