What is affiliate marketing? It’s when you earn a percentage of the income made by a store owner for promoting their product. Your words convinced a customer to buy the product. It’s a smooth online process where a purchase made via your affiliate link confirms your involvement. 

Many people think of affiliate marketing as easy passive income. It is to some extent. Once you have regular oncoming traffic on your website, you can get commissions from links you posted years ago. It’s the getting started part that requires some hard work. So, let’s find out how to start.  

What is affiliate marketing? 

When you want to buy a lamp online, what do you do? First, you head over to Amazon and look through the options. Then, you check the reviews and still can’t find a suitable one. 

 So, you search for ‘best lamp for living room’ on Google. You get several results for the 10 best lamps from several websites. Then, you read the blog owner’s thoughts, pros, and cons on each lamp. Sometimes, you click on the link to the product from the blog and hit checkout on Amazon.  

Affiliate marketing is when the blog owner earns a commission because you used a link from their website for the purchase. 

Affiliate marketing can come in many forms. It’s not always blogs. Social media affiliate marketing also exists. So is earning via posting links on various forums. Email marketing is another medium via which affiliate marketers earn. 

The crux of the matter is that someone clicks on a link to the product you, the affiliate marketer, promoted and buys it. The link has a unique code that helps the merchant track the number of products the affiliate marketer sold. 

• Amazon has its own affiliate marketing program. 
• Shopify’s affiliate program allows for product sell-through seminars, online courses, Youtube videos, and blog posts. Along with promoting Shopify merchants, the marketer also promotes Shopify. 
• Some affiliate marketers get paid for clicks instead of sales. The merchant pays you for bringing traffic to their website. 
• Instead of product sales, there are also subscription and software download schemes. 

How to get started with affiliate marketing?

The broad strokes of affiliate marketing are these:

• Find a niche product you know a lot about and review products you don’t have knowledge about. It will require more research. For products you use yourself, you will have a better idea. 
• For example, if you’re an avid book reader, you can set up a blog focusing on Kindle books. 
• On that note, decide on the medium you want to target for affiliate marketing. You can be a course creator, blogger, social media influencer, etc. 
• Build an audience surrounding the product by talking about it on your chosen platform. 
• We recommend focusing on a niche because it helps with SEO. Your content is likely to show up for people interested in the product. It’s because the algorithm knows you’re an expert due to your consistent content on it. 
• By niche, it doesn’t have to be a singular product style. It can be a range of similar products. You can sell DVDs and iPADs with books. 
• Once you have a loyal audience, you can start applying for affiliate marketing programs. 
• When you have a huge audience, many independent merchants will contact you. In fact, you might earn way more by promoting products from individual store owners.

Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing is months of lonely work before you see the result of your hard work. Taking care of your blog or creating effective courses can be a challenging journey. But, if you don’t create quality content, your audience won’t stay. Jake Markets can guide you through each step of the process with excellent results in a shorter time.