HOW DOES AFFILIATE MARKETING WORK – STEP BY STEP
When I started making money on-line, i’d heard of affiliate marketing and had a vague idea what it was but I didn’t truly understand it, or the real power of it.
The thing I love about affiliate marketing is how easy it is to get started. Even if you have absolutely no experience at all, you can start and learn as you go along.
There’s no limit to the amount you can earn and today I want to share you with you, exactly how it works and how you can make a great income from home by getting involved.
So, let’s break this down and answer your questions…..
What Exactly is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is essentially where you promote someone elses product.
So, if you want to make money by selling something and don’t know what to sell, or don’t want to create or buy products to sell, then this is the easy way around it.
By promoting someone elses product (the creator), you earn a cut of the revenue. You do this without holding any stock or having to send anything out to anyone.
You are essentially an Affiliate or sometimes you might also be called a Publisher.
How Can I Promote Products?
This is where you put your marketing hat on, but don’t panic, you don’t need any experience whatsoever. All you really need is a pc or phone and either experience or believe in the products you are promoting.
This will give you conviction when you are promoting something.
There are various ways you can promote products.
You can promote products through social media. This can be particularly lucrative.
Do you spend a lot of time talking on social media? Then why not get paid for it!
You can also promote products on your own website or blog. Or maybe you would prefer to use various free and paid for advertising platforms.
What are the Ways I Can Promote Affiliate Marketing Products?
- Writing a product review and placing it on your website
- Writing a blog post and including the benefits of the products
- Recording reels and videos for Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook or Youtube
- Simply writing a sentence and posting an image about the product on social media
- Placing banner ads on your site or through advertising networks
- Sending out e-mails to your e-mail list can also be one of the best ways to make money with affiliate marketing.
How Do I Actually Make Money from Affiliate Marketing?
Once you’ve decided how you are going to promote your chosen products, you then share links to the products on your chosen platform. It really is that simple.
The links are provided to you by the Affiliate Marketing company and they are tracked so that every time a customer makes a purchase, you are paid a percentage.
The percentage varies for each product and programme.
Where Can I Find Products to Promote?
You can either google the product followed by the word ‘affiliate program’ or contact companies or small businesses directly to become an affiliate but I find the best places to find products are through affiliate networks as they have databases of lots of companies and products to choose from and are usually fairly easy to sign up with.
Signing up to these is free.
My favourite Affiliate Networks are:
Digistore
Amazon Associates Programme – Sign Up Here
Clickbank
Amazon is great because people know and trust Amazon and are very likely to make purchases based on their comfort of knowing it’s a reputable company.
Related: Is Affiliate Marketing Legitimate
Awin and Maxbounty allow you to promote some of the largest well known brands across the world too which also make these great affiliate networks to join. Clickbank and Digistore are better for high ticket products (this simply means you receive a higher commission per sale).
What Products Should I Promote?
The amount of products you can promote is vast but don’t be tempted to try and promote all of them. It’s very easy to get sucked in by the amount of money you can make here, but try to stick to products and services in your niche.
If you have a health and beauty interest, you could promote an antiaging cream or hair products but it wouldn’t make sense for you to promote a book on how to make money because that’s not what you are talking about.
Promote products that you’ve either tried yourself or you know to be good otherwise you will lose credibility with your audience. Creating trust is paramount when promoting other people’s products.
On this blog I only ever promote products or services that I’ve used myself or know to be brilliant products.
For example, I promote Bluehost as this is the company I use to host my blog. I’ve found them helpful, reliable and great when I was a beginner blogger to answer any queries I had. To start your own blog only costs $3.95 per month with them. It’s so cheap and easy to set up, so I feel comfortable promoting them because I use the product myself.
When talking about the product in your promotion, be genuine and sincere and your audience will thank you for it.
You can promote physical products such as household items, toys, beauty products – or digital products, such as on-line courses, e-books, etc.
If there is something you’re passionate about or something you simply use and love it, it’s easy to talk about it genuinely.
I talk about making money from home because that’s what I do. I love talking about it and I love helping people who are interested in doing the same. That makes it easy for me to be genuine.
Where Do I Get My Links?
Each network is different but there will be a page where you can copy your link and paste it either onto your site or your social media platform.
Always check the rules for each promotion because some creators don’t allow their links to be promoted directly onto social media and some do. Some prefer you to use their banner ads and some are happy for your to create your own.
Don’t be phased at how complicated this is, once you get into it, it’s a fairly simple process. If I can do it, anybody can! You’ll simply learn as you sign up to each network.
How Much Money Can I Make with Affiliate Marketing?
The sky is literally the limit but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to work.
Affiliate Marketing is an amazing way to make money from home on-line, working flexible hours and around your family commitments. However, you do need to commit to putting in the effort just like any other work. Whether that’s for an employer or your own business, you never earn money without some effort.
There are plenty of people making six -figure incomes from affiliate marketing and have written courses and programs showing you exactly how you can do the same.
I recently started a program which has taught me exactly how to use affiliate marketing and digital marketing to generate $5K plus/month. I’ve created this FREE ebook that you can download here to help beginners get started straight away.
I hope I can be the reason you start making your money.
If you enjoyed this post, please do let me know in the comments.
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6 comments on “How Does Affiliate Marketing Work Step By Step”
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Thanks for the advice its quite exciting, I’ve been looking for some extra help now I’ve started my consulting, based from home. The affiliate marketing sounds interesting I had a look around and amazon might be worth a go, you ask your friends and colleges if they want to buy, they click the link on your website and you get a very small percentage of the amount they spend 🙂
Thank you for this! I’ve been trying affiliate marketing for a few months so it’s nice to get resources like this that give me some more details of it. Thanks for such an informative post 🙂
Hi Nicola, thank you for the comment, i’m glad you enjoyed the post. Good luck with your consulting!
I’m glad you found it useful, good luck with your affiliate marketing!
Hi Michelle, thank you for the advice it has helped me a lot. I want to start affiliate marketing but I don’t have a blog or website. Do you think I can do it just on Pinterest
Thank you, i’m so glad it’s helped you. Yes you can make money with affiliate marketing on Pinterest but check with the affiliate network or company you are promoting first to make sure it’s within their rules as some don’t allow direct links. Good luck with it :).