How to Start Affiliate Marketing Step-by-Step in 2023
If you’ve ever looked into ways to make money online, you’ve probably heard about affiliate marketing.
I know when I first started researching different side hustles and online business ideas, it was something I frequently came across.
Believe it or not, “How to make money online” is searched for on Google 370,000 times per month globally according to Ahrefs.
To make a long story short, I tried a lot of ways to make money online.
- Dropshipping
- Day Trading
- Reselling
- Amazon FBA
Just to name the online-based businesses I’ve tried.
All of these are things you may come across when you search for “how to make money online.”
All of those business models do work and there are entrepreneurs who make A LOT of money with them, but there is one business model that actually worked for me.
Affiliate marketing.
Which brings us here today.
This is my comprehensive and complete in-depth guide on how to start affiliate marketing, even if you have NEVER made a dollar online before.
I’m going to give you everything you need to know to get started as a brand-new affiliate marketer right here in this blog post.
Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. If you click a link and make a purchase I may receive compensation at no additional cost to you.
Who Am I And What Makes Me Qualified To Teach You How To Start Affiliate Marketing?
Great question.
The reason you should listen to me is because this is all I do.
For the past 2+ years, I’ve been working at home full-time as an affiliate marketer.
In those 2+ years, I’ve been able to scale my online business to consistently bring in $15,000 per month in affiliate revenue, mostly from monthly recurring commissions, I’ve also coached 500+ students and helped them get started and handle specific struggles they were having.
Just take a look at a few of these:
I’ve done all the tests.
Ran the paid ads and threw money away.
I’ve built large audiences of 400,000+ followers to figure out what works.
I’ve split-tested sales funnels and email marketing strategies to get the best results possible.
And because I’ve made the mistakes and ran all of the tests, you don’t have to!
Listen…
Affiliate marketing is a very popular and trending industry.
The industry is worth $17 billion dollars as of 2023.
It’s simple and has the potential to supplement your income or completely free you from the bind of finances forever.
Just as it has done for me.
Believe me when I say this: Anyone can do it.
It’s going to take work, dedication, and getting out of your comfort zone.
The results aren’t going to come overnight either.
But if you follow this guide and take the necessary steps…
YOU. CAN. DO. THIS!
So let’s get into it.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a way for companies online to get more customers without having to do any of the marketing themselves.
When you become an affiliate for a company and send them a customer through your unique affiliate link, they will pay you a commission for that.
Sometimes that can be a percentage of the sale and other times it will be a flat fee. In some industries, companies will even pay you just for sending them a lead.
The process of affiliate marketing is quite simple:
Let’s look at a few.
Getting Paid A Percentage Of The Sale As A Commission
The percentage of the sales you get paid varies a lot by the type of product and the industry you are promoting. This can range from 1% all the way up to 200% of the sale.
For example, if you want to become an Amazon affiliate then your commission percentage is going to be small. You’ll be working with cheaper, physical products that have to be manufactured, stored, shipped, and still leave a little room for profit.
The margins on products like that are low so your commission percentage will be low. I like to call this “chasing breadcrumbs”
Look at all that money you’re leaving behind.
Those can be good for additional promotions or filler stuff, but what you really want to be promoting is digital products.
Digital products are created one time and then sold over and over again. The profit margins are a lot higher because the overhead usually just consists of:
Software and online courses are great examples of digital products that are going to have higher commission percentages, usually 25% or more.
You also will get the benefit of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) when you promote digital subscription products.
If we take a look at a company like Clickfunnels, which we’ll be talking about further down in this post, they charge $97 per month to use their software and pay affiliates 40% of that in MRR.
Which equals out to be $38.80 per month, per customer in earnings.
Let’s not also forget about high-ticket affiliate programs, which can pay you very high earnings for a single sale – some over $1,000 for just one customer.
Getting Paid For Leads As An Affiliate Marketer
The other way to get paid is just by sending leads to a company.
A lead is just someone who enters some information into a form on their website, expressing a level of interest in their product or service.
For example, Hiscox, a small business insurance company, will pay you $25 for every person you send their way that completes an insurance quote.
Keep in mind, regardless of the action that needs to be taken in order to earn that revenue, you are just connecting customers, or potential customers, to companies.
You don’t have to close the sale or deliver the product.
That’s what makes this business model so great.
Now that you fully understand how affiliate marketing works and how to get paid, let’s cover the steps you need to take in order to actually do it.
How To Start Affiliate Marketing in 8 Steps
I’ve come up with an 8-step process that will guide you through getting everything set up so you can get your business up and running and get some money coming in.
Make sure you keep an open mind and follow these steps in order, without skipping any.
Just as a reminder, this will NOT happen overnight. There is a lot to learn in this process.
Don’t let yourself get discouraged if this is not happening fast enough for you. It took me 4 months of grinding it out to start seeing substantial results.
But If I were to do it again knowing what I know now, I could have earnings in less than a week. That’s where you want to be.
Step 1: Choose A Niche
A niche is just a topic or category that you will be specializing in. Choosing the right niche is extremely important if you want to be a successful affiliate marketer.
A common idea that a lot of newbies have that they’re going to look for a bunch of random high-paying and high-converting affiliate products and promote all of them.
This is just wrong.
Unless I end up explaining to them why, they always find this out on their own.
The correct approach is to pick a specific niche that you are going to build your business around, build authority in that space, and then curate a pipeline of products and promotions that all work well together.
A few niches worth looking into might be:
These are popular niches to go after because they are evergreen, which means they’ll always be relevant.
People will always have money problems, they’ll always have relationship problems, and they’ll always have health problems.
And when people have problems, we can come in and solve those problems.
People buy products to solve their problems.
When you are choosing what niche you want to go into, I want you to ask yourself these few questions:
This shouldn’t be a very hard decision to make.
Put ALL of the stuff you’ve heard about choosing a product first, which industries pay the highest commissions, and just “do what everyone else is doing” right in the garbage.
It doesn’t work that way. That is a guaranteed recipe for failure.
Answer the questions above and you should arrive at your destination.
In my case specifically here’s how I answered the questions:
- What am I an expert in currently?
I know a lot about business, and I’ve run a few of them successfully, I’ve also gone through a lot of training courses and mentorships and got good at marketing after applying what I learned. - What things do I want to talk about every day?
I want to talk about business, marketing, the research and tests that I’ve done, and my journey of getting to where I am from where I came from, to name a few. - What major problems have I had, that I was able to solve with a product?
When I got started I wasted a lot of time trying to figure it out on my own, I invested in a training course designed to teach me the skills, and then I got good at it! - What things have I experienced, that others are also experiencing and will find extremely relatable when I’m talking about my experience?
I’ve tried a ton of different ways to make extra money to not have to rely on a job. I’ve started businesses that I hated running, I’ve had business partnerships that failed, and I’ve gone through MANY periods of doubt where I felt like quitting.
The obvious answer for me was to go into the wealth niche and help you make more money. Not because of a product that pays a high commission or because anyone else was doing it.
It’s purely because I know what it’s like to want something so bad, but have it be so far out of reach.
I know what it’s like to feel like I would never have the lifestyle that other people around me had, just because they had more money than me.
And it’s because I KNOW that what I am teaching you will help you make money, and I never get tired of seeing others succeed.
As cliche as that sounds, its the truth.
So that concludes step 1, choosing a niche.
Step 2: Create A Business Plan
This is the part that YOU CAN NOT SKIP!
You may have to come back to this later after you finish reading this article, and that’s okay.
But do not skip this step.
Everyone does for some reason and they end up running around without a head, and without money.
So just write the business plan.
The business plan is going to be your outline for your whole business.
It’s going to outline who your target audience is, what your affiliate marketing strategy is going to be, how you’re going to drive the flow of traffic, and how to stay focused on the goal.
All of these things are extremely important to know because as a marketer, you will need to be able to grab their attention, identify their problems, and present them with a solution.
Be as specific as possible when dialing in who your target audience is.
For example, my target audience looks like this:
“Ryan is a 25-55 year old blue collar guy that is working 50+ hours every week. He leaves early in the morning and often doesn’t get home until late at night. He is exhausted during his time off and struggles to be motivated to spend time with his family.
He even feels guilt that his family wants his attention but he doesn’t have the energy to appease them like he wants to.
As the days go by, he goes through more and more moments of “why am I even doing this’ ‘ and looking back he wishes he had that desk job that he said he would never get or wouldn’t work for him.
He feels like he is stuck in his current career because he doesn’t know anything else.
“What else can I possibly do that will be of equal or greater pay and be easier” is a VERY common thought.
His back, knees, and shoulders are very sore and he has to make many trips to the chiropractor.
He has researched different ways to make money online but is skeptical of a lot of the opportunities because they seem “too good to be true”. He dreams of a life where money is no issue because he doesn’t want the stress of paying bills and would like to have more luxuries in his life and the time to enjoy them.
He’s done a lot of research on different online side hustles, bought courses, and even tried a few but hasn’t succeeded because there was either a missing piece or he didn’t have the confidence in his success to keep going and eventually gave up.
Ryan has even taken action after watching some YouTube videos and quickly became confused so gave up after a single sitting.
Deep down he has a mentality of “if they can do it then I can as well” but hasn’t got enough discipline to dedicate himself to anything long enough thus far to see results and there’s always a feeling of “this will be a very long journey.”
And it has been a long journey. Reading that again really takes me back.
The important thing is, now that we know ALL of this information about our target audience, we know how to talk to them.
We know what to say at the beginning of our videos to grab their attention, we know how to present the solution in a way that is interesting to them, and we can make them say, “yeah, I know exactly what you mean”.
We can build trust.
And knowing all of this, I know not to create content or ads talking about preparing for retirement or something like that.
Retirement is going to be VERY important to a different audience, but not mine.
Which brings us to the next step of writing the business plan.
Coming Up With A Marketing Strategy
How are we going to get ahold of the person we are targeting?
Based on what we know about our target audience, are they on social media? Are they on YouTube? Maybe they are mainly reading blog articles and making purchases from there.
If you are marketing a B2B offer maybe LinkedIn would be the best place to go.
But you want to figure out where the best place is going to be to get their attention and exactly how you’re going to go about doing it.
Should you be making Tiktok videos?
Or should you create an affiliate marketing blog and write articles?
To be totally honest, you can likely do all of these things and see success with most audiences.
EVERYONE uses Tiktok to burn time.
EVERYONE uses YouTube for entertainment.
And EVERYONE goes straight to Google when they are looking for specific information.
My advice here is going to be to start off with social media and create short-form videos unless you have strong reason to believe that your audience isn’t there.
Whatever you decide to do, just make sure you can grab their attention, retain the attention, and get them to take a specific action, join your email list and click your affiliate link.
How To Capture The Sale
This part is going to be relatively the same, always.
You want to use a two-step sales funnel and get them to join an email list.
There isn’t really a reason to do it any other way. This way just works too well.
But you also need to determine what the products are going to be that you’re going to offer at this point.
Now that you know what their problems are that they want solved, you need to have a solution to present to them.
This is where you’ll either do your product research and find something that is a really good fit or just resort to something that has helped you in the past that you know will work based on your experience.
Once you find those products, you’ll want to make sure that there is an affiliate program for you to join and get accepted into it.
Step 3: Join An Affiliate Marketing Program
Now that you have chosen a niche and written up your business plan, you can start moving forward. The next step is to join an affiliate program for the product you want to promote.
There are a few ways to find affiliate programs:
Browsing Through Affiliate Networks
An affiliate network is like a marketplace for affiliate programs. You create a profile in them as an affiliate, give them some information about you and how you want to be paid, and then start applying.
Here are a few popular affiliate networks you can look at:
- Clickbank
- Shareasale
- Digistore24
- CJ
- Impact
You’ll notice that the interfaces of these are quite different but they all operate pretty much the same. Let’s walk through the process.
Suppose I want to promote a pet affiliate program so I’m going to browse through the CJ affiliate network.
First I’ll log in to my dashboard, hit the “Partners” dropdown, and then click on “Find Advertisers”
After that, I want to search the keyword “Pet” in the Keywords field and make sure the status is set to “All”.
Then you will see the list populate with all affiliate programs in the CJ affiliate network that are relevant to the keyword “pet.”
Then search through the list for a company that you would like to promote.
As a beginner, I recommend choosing one with higher approval odds, and not one that has a manual application review or lower approval odds.
In this example, we can see that Bully Stick has higher approval odds, so we click on “Apply To Program”
Immediately after clicking, we get an instant approval message and are now a part of the Bully Stick Affiliate Program.
Then I can go back to the “Partners” dropdown and click on “My Advertisers.”
Then select “Bully Stick” from the list and expand the program information.
In the top right I can click on the link icon and my affiliate link is now displayed for me to copy and use.
Thats it!
Now you’ve successfully applied to an affiliate program, gotten accepted, and found your unique affiliate link.
If someone clicks on that link and makes a purchase, you will have earned your first affiliate commission.
In-House Affiliate Programs
But not all affiliate programs can be found in a network. Some of them are managed in-house and will have a dedicated dashboard and log-in, supplied to you by the vendor.
To find these, they usually start with a Google search.
If you are in the research phase and still looking for the company you want to promote, then you will type into Google, “[NICHE KEYWORD} Affiliate Programs.”
The results will generally contain blog posts that other affiliates have put together to list the programs that they like most. An example of that would be this blog post I wrote about High Ticket Affiliate Programs.
You would sift through these lists and see if you find something that you like.
If you already know what company you’re after, then you can search for “{COMPANY] Affiliate Program” and if one exists, you’ll find it.
Let’s use one of my favorite affiliate programs, Munch, for this example.
First I go to Google and search for “Munch Affiliate Program.”
The search results show Munch’s affiliate program in the number 1 spot in the search results.
After clicking, we are brought directly to the page that tells us exactly what to do so we can apply for their affiliate program.
Once approved, the dashboard will be displayed with your affiliate link on it for you to start using and earning.
That’s it.
Those are two 2 ways you’ll end up finding and getting approved for affiliate programs. Now that you’ve gotten access to the affiliate link, you can start promoting products.
But don’t abuse it, there are rules to follow.
You aren’t going to just spam your affiliate link all over the internet, in the comments on Facebook, or in Reddit forums.
That is how you get banned from affiliate programs.
Instead, you need to create a sales funnel.
As an affiliate marketer, you will use one type of sales funnel 99% of the time, the two-step sales funnel.
This consists of two pages, a landing page, and a bridge page.
You’ll create each page with a specific goal in mind.
On the landing page, your only goal is to get your visitor to enter their name and email address and proceed to the next page. This isn’t the place to promote your offer or sell them stuff. You want to make entering their name and email irresistible.
On the Bridge page, your only goal is to get them to click on your affiliate link, which will usually be embedded into a button.
I get this question all the time, “Do I need a bridge page? Why can’t I just send them to the offer from the Landing Page?”
Yes, you NEED a bridge page. Here’s why…
Reason #1: You want to collect as many emails as possible on the Landing Page, sending them directly to the affiliate offer from that page would require much more information, which adds complexity. We don’t want complexity, we want simplicity, that will ALWAYS result in more opt-ins.
Reason #2: When you’re promoting an affiliate offer, one thing that will make it convert so well is having a personalized recommendation and testimonial for them to see before clicking. If we are delivering all of that information on the Landing Page, then we are distracting them from the value provided by opting in to our email list.
The process looks like this:
People see your marketing content and along with that marketing content, you will share a link to your sales funnel.
When people click on your sales funnel link, they will immediately see the Landing Page where they can enter their information.
After they enter their information, their name and email address will be sent to your email list, also known as your autoresponder, and it will trigger the first email from your campaign to be sent. While all of that is happening on automation, the Bridge Page is loaded.
On the Bridge page, you will make your recommendation and introduce the offer you are promoting.
Then they will click your affiliate link which takes them to the affiliate offer, where they can purchase products from the company you are promoting and you can earn money when they do that.
That’s it! It’s a pretty simple process.
How to Create a Sales Funnel Step-By-Step
The first thing you need to create a sales funnel properly is going to be a domain name.
Pro Tip! You don’t need to subscribe to a bunch of affiliate marketing tools to get started. The essential parts are all in this post. Over time, you will need to build up your affiliate marketing toolkit, but to get started, keep it minimal.
I highly recommend grabbing one from Godaddy as well as a Professional Email Address.
The domain name should be something personalized,
FIRSTNAME-LASTNAME.com is the BEST way to go.
Also, while you are going through GoDaddy’s checkout process, add Microsoft Essentials to your order.
These items will likely cost you between $30 and $45 for the year.
The domain name you purchase will become the link that your audience clicks on to enter your sales funnel and view the Landing Page, the Professional Email will be the address you send your marketing emails from.
IMPORTANT NOTE: A Pro email is required by law if you want to send automated emails from an autoresponder, do not skip this step!
Once you own a domain and pro email, you’re ready to build your funnel.
There are a lot of software’s available that you can use to build funnels, but I use Clickfunnels Classic for this, it is the best funnel builder on the market and has been for many years.
Once you have created your Clickfunnels Classic account, head on into the account settings and click on “domains”.
You will be able to add your domain into Clickfunnels here, the whole process is a tutorial so you shouldn’t have any trouble connecting it.
Once that is done, you’re ready to build your funnel, assuming you already know what product you are going to promote and have access to your affiliate link.
Click on “Build A Funnel” from your dashboard, then “Collect Emails” and then give the funnel a name.
Then you’ll see your two funnel steps on the left, OPT IN and THANK YOU.
The Thank You page is just another name for the Bridge Page, same thing.
Select a template that you like for each page to be your foundation.
Now enter the editor for your landing page, this is where you’re going to collect their name and email address to be added to your email list.
Look back to your business plan and write a headline and some relevant text that your target audience will find irresistible.
Make sure you have a field for name and email address, as well as a button.
The button action should be set to “submit the page.”
I built the Landing Page you see below in about 10 minutes.
Remember, keep it simple.
This shouldn’t be an 8-hour-long process, you can always come back and make changes later. Just get something together that can work.
Now it’s time to move on to the Bridge Page.
Save your changes, exit out of the editor, and enter the Bridge Page editor.
This is where you’re making your recommendation.
The design should be similar to your Landing Page and you should be totally focused on getting them to click your affiliate link.
When creating it, think about your target audience.
And your page should end up looking something like this:
This is a funnel I built to promote an online course that teaches marketing. (I can attribute A LOT of my success to what I learned in this program)
It’s simple and has everything I need, a good targeted headline, a video testimonial, instructions on what to do, and then a button with my affiliate link in it.
At this point, you can share your domain name, your traffic can click into your funnel, you can build your email list, and you can earn commissions.
Step 5: Set Up An Email Marketing Campaign
Now that your funnel is adding leads to your email list, you want to have some emails set up to start sending to them.
Emails are responsible for over 80% of my affiliate commissions earned in 2022, and that is remaining consistent for 2023. It’s definitely something to be on top of.
Your email campaign will primarily do two things:
Your social media profiles aren’t something you own, but your email list is.
Any day without warning Tiktok, Instagram, or any other traffic source can decide to shut you down. But no one can come and take away your email list.
As this list grows, the profit you can earn will compound.
100 subscribers on a list aren’t worth much, but when it begins to add up and you have 10,000, 25,000, 100,000+ email subscribers, that means every time you send an email, that many people will receive it.
It becomes a numbers game.
If there are a lot of subscribers on your list, you can earn a considerable amount of affiliate income every time you send an email.
How To Set Up Your Email List
Setting this up isn’t too complicated.
There are plenty of autoresponders to chose from, you just need to make sure you chose an affiliate friendly autoresponder.
I use and will always recommend Aweber for all of your email marketing needs.
There are a few steps to getting this up and running.
The first thing to do is to head over to Aweber and create an account, they have a free plan you can use to get started.
Then you want to click on your name in the bottom left corner and click on “account.”
Then click on “domains & addresses,” and you want to add the professional email address that you grabbed earlier from GoDaddy.
Aweber will be able to perform an automatic setup, go through that process and then go back to the dashboard and click on “List Options” then “List Settings” from the dropdown.
Scroll down to your “From Name & Address” and select your pro email address.
This is an important step, it is against anti-spam laws to send marketing emails from a non-domain email address.
Once that is done, you can go back into Clickfunnels and integrate your Aweber account in the Clickfunnels account settings and in the Landing Page settings of your sales funnel.
Now your Aweber account is set up and you can create your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Creating Your First Email Campaign
Navigate to the “Automations” tab and select “Campaigns” from the drop-down menu.
There will likely be a template here already, go ahead and delete that and then click on “Create A Campaign.”
Select a blank one and you’ll be brought to the campaign workflow.
In here, you can create the order of emails that go out and their intervals, we are interested in two actions, “Send Message” and “Wait.”
One email per day is totally fine and if you can get 6 emails in here to start off that is ideal.
Drag a “Send Message” into the campaign, click on “Create A Message” on the right and select the drag-and-drop builder.
In there, you’ll add your subject line, body text, and any affiliate links you want to send.
The first email should just be a welcome message. Thank them for joining the list, talk about your offer a bit to follow up on that, and tell them what to expect in the future.
Once your email is complete, hit “Save & Exit” and you will be brought back to the workflow.
Now you can drag a wait into the workflow so it waits a day before sending anything else, and then add another “Send Message” after it.
Rinse and repeat.
These first few emails should be evergreen and always relevant. Every lead that joins your list will receive these emails so you don’t want to talk about anything time-sensitive or temporary.
Once you’re happy with your campaign, activate it and all of these emails will start sending to your leads when they subscribe to your funnel!
Sending Email Broadcasts
Automated campaigns aren’t the only way to send marketing emails, you also want to get familiar with sending broadcasts.
The difference between a campaign and broadcast is that the campaign will send, in order, to everyone that subscribes to your list WHEN they subscribe to your list, whereas a broadcast is an email you create and schedule to get sent to your ENTIRE LIST all at once, just one time.
Broadcasts are what you will use to send current and relevant emails, including time-sensitive promotions.
For example, every time I publish a new post to my affiliate website, I send a broadcast to my list with a link to the article to notify them of the new post.
Another example would be seasonal offers. Every February and March I send emails to promote a company called TaxAct, which is a tax preparation service that I am an affiliate for.
I don’t want to add emails for that to my automated campaign, because then my leads will receive emails about it in the off-season, which just wouldn’t make sense and can even lead to unsubscribes.
Under the “Messages” tab in the left menu, you will see “Broadcasts.”
The drag-and-drop builder will be available to use here, and when the emails are ready, just hit “Schedule” and tell Aweber when to send them out.
I usually send between 3 and 5 of these emails per week. It will become part of your weekly to-do list as an affiliate marketer.
Step 6: Make Sure You’re Compliant
You want to make sure you are completely aware of the Do’s and Don’ts of affiliate marketing compliance.
This is not something you want to skip.
A lot of people neglect to educate themselves on this and you don‘t want to have to pay the price for it.
Some of the lower-end ramifications are things like getting your social media accounts banned and emails kicked back, but some of the higher-end penalties can be $10’s of thousands of dollars, issued by the FTC.
I’m not a Lawyer, I’m a Digital Marketer, so consult with a professional who is licensed to advise you on compliance and laws when it comes to marketing, but I can give you a few guidelines to follow:
Again, make sure you consult with a professional and get educated on compliance laws.
A great option for getting guidance and professionally made policies and disclaimers is Amira, she is a business lawyer who specializes in helping bloggers and marketers and can provide you will all of the things you need to be compliant.
You can check her out at the button below.
Step 7: Start Driving Traffic
Now that you have a plan, a product, a funnel, an email campaign and you know you are compliant, it’s time to start marketing.
This is the last piece to making Affiliate Marketing work.
There is a lot of ways to do it, but I’m going to give you the BEST way to get started as a beginner who has never made a dollar online before.
Free Organic Traffic.
It’s the best because it doesn’t cost you anything but time and I’ve seen it work as fast as the first week.
In fact, A LOT of newbie marketers in our community have seen their first commissions in less than a week with this strategy and it is also the strategy used by marketers who are earning more than $1,000 per day.
I’ve also used this strategy to build an email list of over 90,000 subscribers and a following of over 400,000 people on Tiktok.
Here’s how it works.
First, decide on a social media platform that you like. It doesn’t matter which one.
It could be TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, just pick one.
Eventually, you want to have a presence on all of these platforms, but there’s nothing wrong with starting off and getting good at using one of them.
You want to make short-form vertical videos.
Create an account and start writing down some of the topics you will be creating content about that the target audience you want to reach will watch.
For example, if your target audience wants to lose weight, talk about simple at-home workouts they can do, healthy meals they can make easily, and make informational videos about calories and how the body burns fat.
You can also cover more interesting topics that are relevant like ingredients that are in fast food they didn’t know about, water fasting, or how processed foods are made.
The idea is actually NOT to promote the product in your content.
Your content should be made for the viewer first and you can add promotions where they fit.
Otherwise, your page will look like a billboard, and that won’t net you many followers.
You can also look at media sites, Reddit forums, or Quora to find trending questions or topics that your target audience is already interested in.
You want to go through a pretty heavy growth phase in the beginning, so just focus on creating videos that will go viral AND attract the correct audience.
An example of what NOT to do is post cute dog videos to go viral when your goal is to promote a weight loss product. Not all views are good views. Stay on topic.
By starting discussions in your content, you will get more engagement and interactions. Make video responses to the comments on your videos every chance you get!
After a few weeks of just focusing on a few video topics and delivering those videos in different ways, look for patterns. This will allow you to cross off ideas that didn’t work and double down on the ones that did.
A great example of this is one of my favorite creators, Ugolord on TikTok.
He calls himself the “TikTok Attorney,” he’s an affiliate marketer and an excellent content creator.
If you click the link in his bio, you will find an offer to get legal help, not from him, but from another attorney whom he is an affiliate for.
When you watch his high quality content, you will notice a few things.
First, NONE of it is promotional. He doesn’t show up every day just to tell his viewers about an offer and to click on his link.
The next thing I noticed is that he uses his expertise to create engaging content that his viewers will want to watch. He found a great content strategy that works and he sticks with it.
Also, every video is a two-part series, the first part is created in a way that starts a conversation and gets his audience to leave loads of comments.
In the second part, he will always choose a comment from the first part to make a video response to, keeping all of his original viewers in the loop.
All of the pieces put together are the perfect storm and have gotten him millions of followers and traffic on TikTok.
He is an excellent example of someone to strive to be as a content creator.
When you can create content like that, there is no need to be overly promotional in your videos to get clicks, leads, and sales.
Social media isn’t likely going to be an overnight success affiliate strategy, you want to give all of your video ideas a fair opportunity to fail and succeed.
Don’t assume it will never work after trying it just once, and never assume it will continue to work after it does. The magic is in the repeatable successes.
Do this successfully and consistently, and you will start seeing clicks on your funnel, leads on your list, and sales in your bank account before you know it.
Step 8: Scaling and Optimization
After you’ve launched your affiliate business and gotten some content posted, you want to take a look at your overall performance.
Closely analyze your content and automations to see where you are excelling and falling short.
When you see that certain types of content are performing well, do more of it.
When others are not getting you anywhere, trash them.
Try disconnecting yourself from views and pay closer attention to real metrics like comments and shares, these are the content metrics that will move the needle.
You also will benefit from identifying which specific videos resulted in more clicks on your link.
If you are able to track these things, you’ll always be improving.
Beyond content metrics, there are 3 things that are very important, clicks, leads, and sales.
Using the stats provided by Clickfunnels and Aweber you can easily see your overall performance.
Simply put, your clicks on a weekly basis should always increase, your opt-in rate on your funnel should always increase or remain high, and your conversion rate should also either increase or remain high.
These metrics will help you figure out where there is a loss of performance in your system.
For example, if your opt-in rate is really low, but you are getting an increasing number of clicks week over week, that likely means there is a misalignment in the messaging from your content to your landing page or your visitors aren’t seeing the value in opting in.
At this point, you would make some changes to your landing page and see if you can improve that metric.
The beautiful thing about increasing your overall percentage metrics is that you can drastically increase revenue without increasing traffic. So it is always something good to be mindful of.
Time To Get To Work
If you’re reading this conclusion for the first time, it’s highly unlikely you’ve implemented everything yet.
Use this post as your guide, I will update it when necessary information needs to be added and you can always refer back to it.
Make sure you bookmark this page on your browser.
This information is everything you need to get started as a complete beginner, just take it one step at a time and you will be able to get up and running.
Also, BE RESOURCEFUL!
Resourcefulness is one of the most needed skills to have if you want to be an entrepreneur.
If you approach this with an employee mindset and feel like you need hand holding or explicit instruction for every step, then I’m sorry to say this but you don’t stand a chance.
Others are going to fly past you if you spend any time crying in the corner.
I’m not trying to be mean, I’m being real with you.
This won’t be easy even though it is simple.
There are some links scattered throughout this post that will bring you to other articles that I’ve written that may dive deeper into certain topics, so make sure you use those if needed.
As I mentioned, this is your starting point.
There is always much more to learn and plenty of advanced strategies that you will want to be familiarized with to scale your results.
Basics will only get you so far.
I know there is a lot of information on my blog that will help you along the way, but the best way to make progress fast and stay relevant is to join a community of like-minded people who are on a similar journey.
A community where you can not only get a lot of additional information but also have people to fall back on when you have questions or need a little bit of help.
This is where I would recommend joining the community that has pumped out more successful affiliate marketers than anywhere else I have ever seen, myself included.
In fact, just today I saw 7 posts in the community from brand new members sharing that they just earned their first commissions in their business.
That would be the Legendary Marketer community.
The CEO, Dave, is someone I’ve worked very closely with over the last 2 years, he is a mastermind in the affiliate marketing industry.
He put together a 15 Day Challenge that is designed to push you and get your business online in those 15 days.
His community of close to 90,000 other entrepreneurs will come along with that challenge.
So, you are more than welcome to dive straight into the process and start putting your business together.
But when you do hit those roadblocks that we all hit, you’ll be glad that you are part of a supportive community to fall back on.
Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. If you click a link and make a purchase, I may receive compensation at no additional cost to you.
