What is Affiliate Marketing & How Do Affiliate Marketers Make Money

Updated: 14/07/2023

Affiliate marketing is one of the lucrative side hustle ideas that allow you to make money online, either using your blog or other advertising channels to promote affiliate products and services to customers.

A person without any formal education can also start an affiliate business due to the fact that the skill can be learned based on knowledge accumulation over time. However, there is a bombardment of information that is associated with the term ” affiliate marketing”, and the question you want to get clarified is how to get started with affiliate marketing for beginners.

If you want to become an affiliate marketer, you should keep reading to find out how this popular passive income method work. The following is a list of explanations, which aim to help you get familiar with affiliate marketing and techniques you can use to make money online.

1. What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the small section of digital marketing, where you earn money by successfully promoting other merchants’ products and services. In other words, Affiliate marketers will receive commissions from companies by promoting products to customers.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a website or blog to get started with affiliate marketing. Someone I know uses social media to directly promote affiliate products and earn money. However, owning a blog will give you a competitive advantage because large entities may prefer to work with reputable sites.

Some big tech firms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon ( Amazon affiliate program) have an affiliate program that allows bloggers to join in. As a blogger, you have the freedom to make money from home by using your site to reach your customers and receive commissions from merchants.

Related reading: Best Email Marketing Tools for Online Businesses in 2023

2. How does affiliate marketing work?

Generally speaking, depending on the type of affiliate network you join, the commission you receive is based on each company’s affiliate program. In particular, some companies prefer to pay a fixed amount of commission money when affiliate marketers successfully promoted products to their customers.

Other merchants offer to pay commission by following options:

• CPA is a fixed amount of commission that will pay to affiliate marketers.
• The hybrid commission is an ideal solution for earning passive income because affiliates will receive a further commission if their customers continue to purchase the same product and service online.

To help you further understand how affiliate marketing works, here is a simple 6 steps that help you get familiar with it.

1. First and foremost important is to select the best-shared web hosting after selecting a niche
2. Take time to search for a reliable affiliate platform
3. Join an affiliate program that you believe gives better commission than another.
4. Choose merchants’ products and services to promote, which are based on your blog niche.
5.  You have options to promote on a blog, website, or even using different social media platforms like Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, and Twitter.
6. Check on the conversion rate, and see how much you earn money on the dashboard.

3. How to start affiliate marketing for beginners

As mentioned earlier, affiliate marketing is a learnable skill, which means you become an expert in the field based on the time and effort you invest over time. And, the most efficient way is to attend a seminar or podcast that teaches affiliates everything about affiliate marketing.

In particular, some companies have an education program to give affiliates further training on how to successfully make the first sale. It’s completely free to sign up and attend the virtual training program. Remember back then, I got invited by the Rakuten affiliate program team, they aimed to provide me with various tools and strategies that help me to make increase my chance of landing the first sale.

The most important thing to embark on your journey as an affiliate marketer is to highlight what industry or niche you aim to dive deeper into. For example, if you are an expert in personal finance, then you should solely concentrate on promoting products and services within this field.

After you identified the industry that you want to stay focused on. The following are several proven approaches on how to get started with affiliate marketing for beginners.

• Starting a blog is the most effective approach to promoting products and services to your readers. With a little investment upfront, you only need to pay for web hosting costs and continue to add content to your site. As a result, you not only deliver value to customers by helping to find the right products but also earn passive income from your blog.
• Running a podcast is another great way to get started with affiliate marketing, you can recommend products or services to your listeners based on the topic that you talk about each week.
• Creating a Youtube channel is not an easy path to promoting products. It’s because there is an influx of the number of Youtubers in the market, which makes it even harder for you to drive traffic to your channel. However, if you know how to create quality videos that can create value for your fan, then you are on the right path to promoting products to them.

The thing to keep in mind is that focusing on creating quality content and driving traffic to your site that is considered the top importance. It’s because you can increase the conversion rate from your affiliate business if your site has a large number of fans and readers.

In addition, email marketing tactics capture a large number of emails from your loyal customers. In this case, they tend to sign up for your site account registration if they feel that your content is delivering value to them. Importantly, do not spam them by sending an influx of messages to their email as they do not like this type of activity at all.

4. How much money does an affiliate marketer make?

According to Taboola, affiliate marketers make thousands of dollars each month, the average income for affiliates is around $65,000, and the higher earners make around $82,000. This statistic indicates affiliate marketing is a profitable business, where there are more and more people joining the industry to make money as a side hustle.

Some successful affiliate marketers I know, run a blog that makes 7-figure income- millions of dollars on their business. It normally takes them a few years to build a reputation and drive traffic to their site. For this reason, they can directly promote products and services to their loyal customers.

Advertising marketing is one of the best ways to make money blogging because you could earn money a lot of money by promoting affiliate products to your audience. In particular, some companies tend to give bloggers a piece of commission based on the sale value, which means you may get a commission of up to 50% if partnered with a great brand.

Here is a list containing popular affiliate marketplaces that you can consider promoting on your site.

• ClickBank
• Amazon affiliate program
• Commission Junction

Overall, creating a blog is the most popular and effective approach to promoting products and services across your content. Most bloggers use their sites to drive traffic and earn money from companies after successfully offering products to customers.

5. Guide to start affiliate marketing for bloggers?

To get started with an affiliate business, you first need to create a website, as long as it looks professional and has engaging content to help your readers improve general knowledge, then you are on the right track to drive traffic to your site. 

In addition, the higher traffic to your blog, the better conversion rate you would get to earn extra money in terms of promoting affiliate products.

Over time, your readers will be able to build trust in your blog based on the quality content you deliver because the information from your site creates value to improve their daily lives. Thus, they will most likely purchase products or services from your suggestion.

The following is a list of several steps to help you get started with affiliate marketing. In other words, these approaches show you how to make money blogging for beginners.

1. First and foremost important is to decide on a niche in which you are going to build content on your blog
2. Come up with a great domain name, and double-check if others have currently used the same domain as it helps to legally protect your business against any legal case
3. Select the best cheap hosting platform to run a blog
4. Find affiliate products or services based on your blog niche.
5. Concentrate on building quality content around those affiliate products.
6. Continue to find ways to drive traffic to your site ( learn the most effective approach of SEO)

Conclusion of Affiliate marketing side hustle for beginners

Affiliate marketing is one of the lucrative side hustle passive income ideas that you may consider starting a side business without quitting your full-time job and being able to make extra income.

Indeed, “it easy said than done” because you first need to stay committed to delivering little by little work every week, which means patience for the long term is also considered the key to making it happen.

In the beginning, the Amazon affiliate program is an ideal starting point for most beginners due to the fact that Amazon e-commerce is the largest platform in the world with millions of affiliate products, which you may find easier to promote reliable items to your followers.

In addition, if you just starting out a blogging business, the ideal way to make money online is to sign up with the highest-paying ad networks, including AdMaven and Google Adsense.

Here are additional coverages on affiliate marketing and make money online ideas. You should continue to read for more information:

> The Ultimate Guide to Amazon Affiliate Program 2023

> How to Start a Blog And Make Money: Guides to Launch A Blog

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