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The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Guide for Beginners – Step by Step

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Do you want to learn how to get started with affiliate marketing from the ground up?

One of the most common and successful approaches to earning money online is through affiliate marketing. It enables you to incorporate a reliable source of cash into the monetization strategy for your site.

In this beginner's guide to affiliate marketing, we will walk you through the fundamentals of the industry, including how it is structured and how you can get started right now.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of internet marketing in which a commission is paid to the affiliate when a customer makes a purchase after clicking on the affiliate's unique referral link.

Affiliate marketing is paid for on the basis of a CPA (cost per acquisition) or CPL (cost per lead), in contrast to other forms of advertising, which pay depending on the number of clicks or views. To put it another way, you won't get paid a commission unless someone uses your link to complete a desired activity, such as making a purchase or signing up for a test drive.

When compared to Google AdSense and other types of advertisements, affiliate programs offer far greater commissions to publishers. This is due to the fact that there is significantly less risk involved for the advertiser.

A more hands-on approach is required for successful affiliate marketing. You need to look for a good or service that you believe will be beneficial to the people that visit your website. After that, you will need to put it in a way that is strategic to your blog posts and other parts of your website so that your users can buy the product by utilizing your referral link.

Here are some examples of prominent blogs that focus on affiliate marketing to help you get a better idea.

Wirecutter

A well-known website that provides product recommendations, Wirecutter is owned and operated by the New York Times. It offers product reviews and "best of lists" for a wide variety of affiliate items, such as those sold in the categories of kitchen tools, home decor, pet supplies, and software, among others.

Lucie's List

A blog for new parents and those who are expecting, Lucie's List is an example of affiliate marketing. You can discover buying guides for strollers, car seats, bottles, high chairs, and a variety of other baby products scattered across the blog. These buying guides include affiliate links.

NerdWallet

NerdWallet is yet another well-known website that brings in revenue from the sale of financial services and goods to its user base. It publishes reviews on the various banking services, including credit cards, mortgages, and other financial products.

How Does Affiliate Marketing / Tracking Work?

To begin, you will need to locate a business or product that you are interested in promoting. You need to decide on a good or service that you believe will be appropriate for the subject matter of your blog and helpful for the people who read it. It is common practice to refer to the product or business that you select as the "Merchant."

The next step is to become an official business partner with the company by enrolling in their partner program. By doing so, you become what they call a "Affiliate." There are additional businesses that use the phrases "associates" and "partners."

You will be provided with a one-of-a-kind affiliate ID after you have joined their partner program, which is also known as an Affiliate Program. When you add affiliate links to your website in order to promote the product, you will be required to use this affiliate ID in each of those links.

You can market the product in a variety of different ways, such as by adding in-depth reviews of the product, suggesting it in your articles, displaying banner ads, sending an email newsletter, etc. All of the traffic that you send to the retailer's website while logged in with your one-of-a-kind ID will be tracked.

You will be entitled to a commission every time one of your users makes a purchase. When your profits have reached a certain threshold, often between 45 and 60 days, you will receive your payment.

How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

To begin, you need to check that you are using the appropriate blogging platform and that it is okay for you to run affiliate marketing campaigns on your website. If you are, then proceed to the next step.

If you are using WordPress.com, for instance, there are certain limitations placed on the kinds of goods and services that you can link to on your website. See our breakdown of the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org for further information.

If, on the other hand, you have a website that is self-hosted using WordPress.org, you have the ability to add any affiliate link that you want and to manage your affiliate campaigns in an effective manner.

You are free to get started right away if you haven't already established a website for your business. You can be up and running with your blog in fewer than thirty minutes if you simply follow the directions in our comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to launch a blog.

Next, you will need to add a disclosure page to your website in order to inform your visitors about the ways in which you profit from it. Check out the disclosure page on WPBeginner, and feel free to use it as a model for your own work.

You will also need to incorporate a page detailing your terms of service and privacy policies within your blog.

These are some of the pages that every WordPress site absolutely has to have. Not only will they protect you from potential legal problems in the future, but they will also assist you in gaining the audience's trust.

Finding Affiliate Products and Services to Promote

You can identify companies and items with whom to form an affiliate marketing partnership in a variety of different ways. The following are some of the most straightforward approaches to locating products that you are able to advertise.

1. Become an affiliate for products you already use

To begin, you need to consider the goods and services that you are presently making use of and that are beneficial to you. Since you are already aware of the benefits and drawbacks of the product, it will be simple for you to persuade your users to purchase it.

After that, navigate to the website of the product in question and perform a search for key phrases such as "Affiliate program," "Partners," or "Affiliates." Because so many businesses are always looking for affiliate marketers to sell their products, the footer section of their websites almost always has a link to the affiliate page that they maintain.

2. Look for products other blogs are recommending

Investigating other blogs that are analogous to your own is another another method for finding products. You will have the ability to uncover a large number of blogs that are comparable to yours and that make money through affiliate marketing.

However, how can you be sure that they aren't just pushing their own products?

First, navigate to their website and check for any banner adverts that are large, bold, and easy to spot. If you move the cursor over the banner ad, you will notice that the status bar of your browser has a link.

In most cases, an affiliate ID will be associated with this link. Merchants are able to track which affiliate partner is providing them traffic and purchases with the assistance of Affiliate ID.

These links may sometimes appear to be internal links; nevertheless, when you click on them, you will be taken to the website of a product, and the affiliate marketer's ID will be included in the link. You'll also see affiliate links that are very similar to those throughout their content.

3. Join bigger affiliate networks

Joining affiliate networks is yet another method for finding things to advertise in your business. These websites serve as a go-between for affiliate marketers and the businesses that they promote.

You will discover that many of the items and businesses with whom you are interested in forming a partnership already make use of an affiliate network. This makes it much easier for you to locate a large number of products that you can immediately begin promoting on your website.

In the next part, we will discuss affiliate networks in further detail and provide our top suggestions.

4. Reach out to companies

You can send an email to the company if you have any questions about their affiliate program or if you are truly interested in promoting a product but can't find any information about it online.

There is a possibility that some businesses are not aggressively promoting their affiliate program. If they do have an affiliate program, they might ask you to sign up for it if they do.

What are Affiliate Networks? Why You Should Join Them?

Affiliate networks play the role of an intermediary between you, the affiliate marketer, and the merchants who use your services (companies that want to sell their products).

They offer their platform as a service to merchants, allowing them to advertise their products, track the traffic from affiliate links, manage affiliates, and deliver payouts.

They provide affiliate marketers with a platform that is simple to use for searching for items, signing up to become an affiliate, and tracking the performance of their campaigns as well as their earnings.

The affiliate networks listed below are some of the most well-known ones that allow new members to sign up.

Which of these affiliate networks should you become a member of?

You should become a member of affiliate networks that are already stocked with the goods you intend to sell. You are free to sign up with as many affiliate networks as you like for a variety of items. We make advantage of all of the aforementioned networks as well as a few more.

Make it a habit to double-check the network program policies at regular intervals. In addition to this, you need to examine the policies that are associated with the program for each individual product and retailer. You will have an accurate picture of your profits, payments, further incentives, and other relevant details as a result of this.

Affiliate Marketing Tips to Increase Earnings

Following our discussion of the fundamentals, let's move on to learning some more advanced strategies for monetizing your affiliate marketing efforts.

1. Choose good products and companies to promote

You, as an affiliate marketer, do not have any say in the direction that the items that you promote will take in the future. Because of this, it is imperative that you make certain you are only suggesting the highest quality items manufactured by trusted businesses.

The most effective way to accomplish this is to provide recommendations for goods and services that you have already employed yourself. Feel free to get in touch with them if you want more information about a product that you think would be helpful and that you wish to recommend.

If you ask respectfully, most businesses will be happy to provide you with a free trial account or copy of their product so that you can evaluate it.

2. Keep your audience in mind

When making your selection, keep in mind both the people that visit your website and the things that they are interested in. For instance, if you operate a blog about fashion, you should promote fashion accessories, apparel, and other things that readers of your blog would be interested in purchasing if they were in your position.

In addition to this, you need to be sure that you are not merely recommending things because you will receive a greater commission for doing so. If a consumer follows your recommendation to purchase a product and finds that the thing you suggested to them is not useful, then they will never trust your recommendations again.

3. Offer highly useful and valuable content

You have complete control over the placement of banners and links to affiliate programs on your WordPress website. The addition of links alone will not, however, result in your consumers actually purchasing the products in question.

It is necessary for you to persuade your users by providing information that is both helpful and valuable regarding the product. A good number of affiliate marketers accomplish this by publishing in-depth product reviews, video reviews, comparisons of products that include pros and disadvantages, and other forms of content.

4. Start an email newsletter

One other effective strategy to increase the amount of money you make from your affiliate marketing is to promote affiliate products in an email newsletter.

Email marketing has this advantage because it is both direct and ongoing. When someone subscribes to your newsletter, they will immediately begin receiving amazing discounts and suggestions for additional products directly in their email inbox.

Utilizing a tool such as OptinMonster is one way to increase the number of people who sign up for your newsletter.

The most effective technique for collecting email addresses currently available is OptinMonster. You can quickly create eye-catching newsletter optin forms by utilizing the drag-and-drop builder and the over 400 templates that are already built in.

Check out this guide to learn how to construct your email list using OptinMonster in WordPress.

5. Sell dropshipping products

You can further diversify your income by engaging in dropshipping in addition to monetizing your website through the promotion of affiliate products.

When you engage in dropshipping, you take orders from customers but do not retain any of the products in stock. When a consumer makes a purchase from your website, you are responsible for placing the order with the original vendor. The original vendor will then ship the product to the buyer in a timely manner.

You can acquire additional information by reading our comprehensive dropshipping guide for WordPress.

Affiliate Marketing Plugins and Tools for WordPress

Your site will continue to develop, and as it does, you will begin to recommend a variety of things. Because of this, it will be challenging for you to handle all of the affiliate links, banners, and advertisements that are dispersed over your website.

You are in luck because WordPress offers a wide variety of good plugins and tools for affiliate marketing that you may utilize to assist with management.

1. ThirstyAffiliates

As your site expands, the process of manually adding links to your content will become increasingly challenging. Every time you make a reference to the product, you will have to find the URL that contains your affiliate ID and copy it before pasting it into WordPress.

Here is where ThirstyAffiliates can be of use to you. This WordPress plugin is a management tool for affiliate links that makes it simple to insert links into posts and pages using WordPress.

Additionally, it enables you to transform lengthy affiliate links into hidden, attractive links that are easier for users to navigate.

You also have the option with ThirstyAffiliates to automatically replace keywords with affiliate links, which can be a huge assistance to you in increasing the revenue you make from your affiliate marketing.

2. AdSanity

Every affiliate marketer has to have AdSanity in their toolbox since it is the best ad management plugin for WordPress and it is a must have. It enables you to publish banner advertisements on your WordPress site and manage all of those advertisements from a single dashboard.

Additionally, AdSanity makes it simple to place advertisements inside the posts, pages, and widgets on your WordPress sidebars. You can also use it to handle advertisements from third parties, such as banners and advertisements served by Google AdSense. See our step-by-step guide on how to manage advertisements in WordPress using AdSanity for more specific information.

3. MonsterInsights

The WordPress plugin MonsterInsights offers superior Google Analytics functionality. It gives you the ability to track not only where your users come from but also what they do when they are on your website.

You can also use Google Analytics to keep track of your outbound affiliate links thanks to this feature. This gives you the ability to determine which affiliate links are clicked on more frequently and assists you in locating possibilities that you may have overlooked.

Right from the dashboard of your WordPress site, you have access to this comprehensive information in the form of a single report that is simple to read.

MonsterInsights has the capability to determine whether or not you are managing your affiliate links with ThirstyAffiliates. This indicates that it is able to automatically track all of your affiliate links, regardless of the link prefix that you are using.

Tracking of eCommerce transactions, tracking of file downloads, tracking of form submissions, and a great many more useful functions are all included in MonsterInsights.

Author: Youssef from The best free SEO tools website