Affiliate Marketing: Money-Making Guide for Beginners (2024)

In the simplest form, affiliate marketing is a form of online marketing where a publisher recommends products or services to others and, in return, earns an affiliate commission after that visitor converts into a buyer.

Tobin developed the concept of affiliate marketing in 1989 when he launched his affiliate program on the Prodigy Network for his company PC Flowers & Gifts.

The result?

By 1993, Tobin’s products generated $6 million annually for Prodigy. Talk about success!

This success resulted in Tobin patenting the concept in 1996, which was later granted in 2000.

Following Tobin was a company called CDNOW which launched its BuyWeb affiliate program in 1994:

It was an affiliate offer where various music sites could review music albums and refer visitors to the CDNOW website to purchase albums in return for a commission of sales generated.

Considered by many as late to enter the market, Amazon launched its affiliate marketing program in 1996, which attracted global interest.

Founded by the University of California at Santa Barbara students, Commission Junction entered the scene in 1998, followed by Clickbank, founded by Tim and Eileen Barber.

Essentially, these affiliate networks became a platform for affiliates and merchants to promote themselves and their offers and form affiliate partnerships.

Commission Junction and Clickbank became known for creating a platform that allows retailers that aren’t quite as massive as Amazon to get a piece of the affiliate marketing pie.

Today, these two platforms remain two of the most extensive affiliate marketing networks ever.

In 2000, the FTC released affiliate marketing guidelines that aim to regulate the online advertising industry.

The regulations require publishers to disclose their relationships with the companies they promote.

You can see an example of this in any of my affiliate posts, as it is required to provide a disclosure statement if you are adding affiliate links within your content:

Now that we’ve briefly covered the history of affiliate marketing let’s get into the different affiliate marketing types you can add to your affiliate marketing toolbox.

Anyone interested in affiliate marketing should know the three different affiliate marketing types.

Unattached affiliate marketing is pretty straightforward, as it is explained exactly how it sounds.

This form of affiliate marketing is where the publisher has no presence or authority in the niche of the products or services they promote.

Therefore, they are unattached.

Typically, unattached affiliate marketers will be the ones running basic pay-per-click (PPC) affiliate marketing campaigns to drive traffic and sales, as you can see in this search engine marketing (SEM) example below:

Rather than being the face of their brand, this affiliate marketer has no connection between themselves and the end consumer.

Suppose you’re this type of affiliate marketer.

In that case, you will generally rely on traffic sources such as Google Ads, social media ads, or PPC campaigns to get more eyes on your affiliate offers.

While attractive at first glance, as it doesn’t require building solid trust and a reputation with your target audience; it has many disadvantages as you rely solely on paid ads and hope for the best.

If you try this form of affiliate marketing and get high conversion rates, you should probably consider yourself lucky, as it is no easy feat.

Related affiliate marketing refers to those who have established an online presence (via blogging, podcasting, vlogging, or on social media) and link to affiliate products in their niche that they do not necessarily use.

This form of affiliate marketing can be a banner sidebar on your website or via text links throughout your blog post.

For example, a food blogger may have ads and affiliate offers for a particular cookware they don’t use.

Maybe the brand offers a healthy commission rate, and it also happens to be relevant to the blogger’s niche and audience, so they choose to promote the offer.

Moving onto the final type of affiliate marketing, involved affiliate marketing reads how it sounds.

You could think of it as the publisher being more involved with their audience and the brands they choose to promote.

Essentially, this type of affiliate marketing is when the publisher has personally used the product or service they are promoting and fully believe in it when promoting it to their audience.

Typically, this happens in a more natural context, such as within your content, rather than in an ad at the top or side of the page.

You will often see this type of involved affiliate marketing on my blog:

As a publisher, your involvement with the brand and product/service makes your recommendation believable and authentic and tends to lead to the highest conversions.

Now that we’ve covered the different affiliate marketing types let’s discuss the different kinds of affiliate marketers.

If you thought the only way to monetize affiliate marketing was via blogging, think again. Luckily for publishers, many options are available to promote affiliate offers.

Let’s go ahead and dive into the most popular.

Blogging is one of the most popular forms of affiliate marketing today and only continues to grow.

So what is YouTube affiliate marketing?

It is pretty similar to blogging, except you create videos instead of blog posts.

And often, the two go hand in hand.

YouTube affiliate marketers make money by creating videos and converting viewers into buyers for the recommended product.

You will typically see affiliate links in the video or SEO below in the video description.

The next type of affiliate marketer is an affiliate website set up by search affiliates.

Search affiliates are those who leverage landing pages and web pages along with search engines and other forms of paid advertising:

As you can see in the above image, the first two results are for a promoted ad by affiliate marketers.

Rather than focusing on content marketing, search affiliates will drive traffic to their landing page to promote an offer. Here is an example of that if we click on the first ad shown above:

This affiliate website, in particular, starts with a few-question quiz to discover the user’s needs before sending the user to their lead magnet.

Here, the user must exchange their contact information in exchange for the quiz results, of which software will best meet their needs:

Review sites are another common form of affiliate marketing. These differ from full-on blogs, as review sites serve one purpose only — to provide product or service reviews.

If you own a blog or website, you already do email marketing.

And if not, you’re missing out on some serious revenue potential by neglecting to build an email list and push your affiliate offers to said list.

However, some affiliate marketers focus on email marketing entirely and take this strategy to the next level.

By building an email list, you have a traffic source that you own and, therefore, significantly reduce the reliance on unowned traffic sources such as Google Adwords or social media ads.

One of the gold mines of affiliate marketing, big web properties can be an excellent brand marketing channel.

Generally, these corporations publish major digital magazines and other online web properties, generating massive traffic.

These sites typically generate upwards of one million or so visits per month in traffic.

These websites are significant players of the affiliate game and typically follow a revenue share or CPA (cost per action) model for affiliate marketing.

Now that we’ve discussed the different types of affiliate marketers let’s cover four of the highest-paying affiliate networkers that affiliate marketers can use to start building their online business.

Rather than working directly with the company of your choice, affiliates can become members of various affiliate marketing networks to connect with different companies within their niche that they may have never found otherwise.

Ready? Let’s take a look.

In a nutshell, ClickBank is an affiliate network that acts as a marketplace to connect the people who create digital products and services (brands) with affiliates or publishers.

You could also consider Clickbank as a middleman between the two parties.

Minus the headache of complicated paperwork, talk about a win-win.

Yet another high-paying affiliate network, Commission Junction (CJ), pays publishers around $1.8 billion annually in affiliate commissions.

Boasting over 3,000 merchants, CJ is home to some of the world’s largest brands hosting their affiliate programs, such as Barnes and Noble, Lowe’s, Priceline, and more.

Commission Junction is free for publishers to sign up and connect with brands.

Moving onto yet another popular and high-paying affiliate network, Shareasale has built a solid reputation over the last twenty years and counting.

Best of all, it’s easy and free for affiliates to sign up and start earning their piece of the pie.

With over 4,800 merchants, affiliates and publishers will have no trouble finding the right offer to promote their audience.

As for earning affiliate payouts from Shareasale, they offer two different models to choose from:

• Pay Per Lead: Get paid every time a user follows your affiliate link to a merchant’s lead capture form and completes it in full.
• Pay Per Sale: As obvious as it sounds, pays per sale is when you earn a commission for visitors following your affiliate link to a product or webpage and making a purchase.

Like the other affiliate networks, Shareasale has merchants and offers to promote in various niches.

While dropshipping may be the buzzword of the century, Amazon Associates may as well be the next best thing.

No product inventory is required, and affiliates can still make a healthy online income as Amazon affiliates.

After all, there is a reason it is one of the largest affiliate marketing networks in the world.

If I have you convinced it’s time to start your own online business as an affiliate marketer, let’s discuss how you can be successful as a publisher.

In truth, as an affiliate, you are in the driver’s seat in the partnership between yourself and the brands you work with, which means you ultimately hold power.

It’s important to remember this as you work with affiliate and marketing managers, as they all will have specific revenue goals, which their affiliates can majorly impact.

All that you must do, at least initially, is focus on building an audience.

Once your users purchase through your affiliate links, you earn credit for the sales you generate while sharing the profits with major brands.

Plus, once consistently generate sales for brands, you can quickly negotiate higher commissions leaving you uncapped earning potential.

It is one of the best ways to earn an income online today.

To start, choosing a niche is one of the most important keys to your success.

And not just any niche, but a profitable niche. Many publishers and bloggers often make the mistake of following their passions rather than treating them as a business.

But to succeed as an affiliate marketer, you must treat it as the business it has been.

Choosing a profitable niche will require a bit of upfront market and competitive research and following current trends to see what consumers are actively buying and what products show future potential.

You may love fitness, for example, but you must analyze how the market looks and overall competitiveness and your unique advantage when researching.

Ask yourself whether your chosen niche will be easy enough for you to break into and if it looks promising regarding monetization potential.

It goes without saying that if you’re publishing any content, it needs to always be of the highest quality.

If you create content to create more content, it is unlikely that it will rank in the search engines or even resonate with your target audience.

Again, as an affiliate, you should only promote products or services you have tried, tested, or at least believe in.

Remember that authenticity is the aim; users will see right through it if you’re trying to make a quick buck.

Not only that, but it also helps with your content creation if you are already familiar with the products and services.

If you’re a genuine fan of whatever you’re trying to convince others to buy, it will go a long way, and users can sense your enthusiasm before they, too, get behind a product.

While I respect the hustle and eagerness to get to 500K or even 1M monthly viewers as quickly as possible, one must also realize that this business is a marathon, not a sprint.

To avoid burnout or disappointment, it’s crucial that you set reasonable goals and expectations from the get-go and work in baby steps toward accomplishing them.

For instance, maybe you could strive to hit 500 users for your first month and then try to double and triple that every month or quarter, working your way up the ladder.

You must continuously refine, test, and optimize to stay on a constant progression path.

What types of content resonate the best with your audience? What are they responding the most to?

Which posts or videos lead to the highest number of click-throughs or purchases?

These are just a few things you should continuously analyze as an affiliate marketer.

Review your best-performing pieces of content and the worst. Spot the differences. See how you could tweak the messaging and run an A/B split test with different copy variations or other elements to see how it performs.

Without testing and optimizing, you will fail to identify improvement areas and continue trekking upwards in performance.

Now that we’ve covered success tips for publishers let’s look at how brands can generate affiliate marketing sales.

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing for brands is identical to having an indirect sales team.

Let’s face it, brands can’t be everywhere all the time and rank for every keyword, so they need affiliates to amplify and scale their message.

Brands should aim to rank for their non-brand keywords and be positioned in the best possible light by high-ranking affiliates.

For example, when searching for “e-commerce platforms,” you will see that BigCommerce ranks in the top 10 for this keyword:

For example, when managing digital at BigCommerce, I aimed to rank and be the #1 recommendation in as many affiliate articles as ranking on page one.

Overall, brands need to win searchers’ hearts and minds, and affiliate marketing gives your brand SERP influence.

This influence is mainly created not by the quality of the product but by the quality of your affiliate program and relationship-building skills.

Let’s be honest; if you’re responsible for managing an entirely digital team, likely, your affiliate marketing program isn’t getting the attention it deserves.

To stay competitive, I highly recommend hiring an affiliate manager or outsourcing your affiliate program to an agency that can help your brand stay on top.

It can be a big step, but it will pay dividends as you have someone or a team of people to actively manage your affiliate program while your company continues to reap the rewards.

Don’t expect new affiliates and publishers to find your affiliate program out of thin air magically.

It takes work to get the word out, promote your program, and convince new affiliates to join.

It’s essential to continuously recruit new affiliates through inbound sign-up pages, email outreach to significant sites, relationship building, social media, and so on.

Don’t be afraid to reach out if you see someone who seems like they could be an excellent fit for your affiliate program and form a mutually beneficial partnership.

Chances are you have affiliates, but maybe they are no longer active.

Sometimes, activating dormant affiliates can be easier than recruiting new ones. After all, they joined for a reason, and maybe they need a little reminder or kick in the right direction.

Activating dormant affiliates will help you kickstart sales by providing commission bonuses, incentives, and pre-written content that your affiliates can leverage.

If you have affiliates performing exceedingly well, don’t leave them hanging.

I highly recommend meeting regularly, providing updates, content, and negotiating commissions with your top affiliates to keep the partnership ongoing and mutually beneficial.

Remember, if this affiliate is doing well, there is a high chance other brands are reaching out to them as well, and the last thing you want is someone to provide them with a better offer.

The key to building a long-lasting relationship so that affiliates will come to you when this happens and give you a chance to negotiate rather than leave you out to dry.

Affiliate Marketing Dos and Dont’s

Here are a few tips to help you have a successful affiliate marketing journey:

Dos:

In this post, we’ve covered what affiliate marketing is and how beginners can start different types of affiliate networks one can join. Tips for both publishers and brands to generate sales with affiliate marketing.

I hope this post has given you the information and resources you need to start cashing in on the monetary benefits of affiliate marketing, whether as a publisher or a brand.

And now it’s your turn!

Let me know what you learned or your questions about affiliate marketing in the comments, and I’ll do my best to lead you in the right direction.