In this guide, I’ll show you how to get started in affiliate marketing with no money. But I’ll be honest with you; it is not easy because it needs hard work, patience, dedication, and Proper Training.
Affiliate marketing offers several benefits to affiliates, one of which is its ease. Your side of the equation simply involves handling the “marketing” side of building and selling a product—educating customers. You don’t have to worry about the harder tasks, like developing, supporting, or fulfilling the offer.
Affiliate marketing is a low risk. Since there’s no cost to join affiliate programs, you can start making money with an established affiliate product or service without any upfront investment. Affiliate marketing also can generate relatively passive income through commission—the ideal money-making scenario. Though initially, you’ll have to invest time creating traffic sources, your affiliate links can continue to deliver a steady paycheck.
Table of Contents
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. The affiliate simply searches for a product they enjoy, then promotes that product and earns a piece of the profit from each sale they make. The sales are tracked via affiliate links from one website to another.
According to Business Insider, 15% of e-commerce revenue can be attributed to affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is often referred to as performance-based marketing, with CPO (cost per order) being the payment model. This means that when an affiliate contributes to a transaction on the advertiser’s website, the affiliate gets paid a commission. As of this, it becomes a cost per order for the advertiser. Another benefit of a performance-based setup is the lowered risk it entails for the advertiser.
Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic that lets a product owner increase sales by allowing others targeting the same audience—“affiliates”—to earn a commission by recommending the product to others. At the same time, it makes it possible for affiliates to earn money on product sales without creating products of their own.
Simply put, affiliate marketing involves referring a product or service by sharing it on a blog, social media platform, or website. The affiliate earns a commission each time someone makes a purchase through the unique link associated with their recommendation. Done well, this performance-based opportunity can go from a side hustle to a profitable business by netting you a very well income.
What are Affiliate Program and Affiliate Network?
Affiliate program.
An affiliate program is a campaign set up by a company that sells products, whereby they agree to pay commission for any traffic or sales on their website that third-party affiliate marketers provide. The traffic or sales will come from individual websites that talk about the products and promotes them to their audience. Amazon’s affiliate program is a well-known and very popular affiliate program across the world.
Affiliate network.
An affiliate network commonly serves as the link between advertisers and affiliates. The network offers a solution for tracking conversions while handling support and payments. Affiliate networks are specialized in the field of affiliate marketing, and help advertisers to set up successful affiliate programs that are attractive for affiliates to promote. ClickBank, ShareASale, and Commission Junction are very well-known Affiliate Networks.
Lots of brands set up affiliate programs as an easy way to connect with people who want to market their products. These people can be other brands, professional affiliate marketers, or solo bloggers like you.
It’s in a brand’s best interest to set up a program that is really helpful and useful to the people who want to promote their product. After all, the more you sell the more money they make too.
How does Affiliate Marketing work?
Affiliate marketing business is probably one of the most profitable you’d likely to come across and if set up correctly, it can be very lucrative. An affiliate’s payment is based on affiliate commission from the company they are an affiliate of or are paid via an affiliate marketing program or networks such as Amazon and ClickBank. The buttons, links or banners of the products you are trying to sell contain your unique user ID when you embed the HTML code into your blog that makes the ad appear.
When the user clicks that ad / link / image and chooses to buy the product, the company will be alerted that you were the affiliate that led them to that purchase. As such, you will receive a commission from the company for being responsible for driving traffic and new customers to their website.
To participate in an affiliate marketing program, you’ll need to take these five simple steps:
- Find and join an affiliate program
- Choose which offers to promote
- Obtain a unique affiliate link for each offer
- Share those links on your blog social media platforms, or website
- Collect a commission anytime someone uses your links to make a purchase
Commission rates vary dramatically, depending on the company, the offer, and the product. On the low end, you’ll earn about 5% of the sale but, with some products, you can earn as much as 70%, usually when promoting digital products, classes, or events. There are also affiliate marketing programs that provide a flat rate per sale instead of a percentage. Products that have subscriptions allow you to get the recurring commission as long as the subscriber uses the product and you’ll get your money on autopilot monthly.
A lot of times, affiliate programs can give you extra freebies like graphics or videos and even sales copy that can really help you promote products.
When you first sign up with an affiliate program you’ll often be asked to provide your contact information, payment preferences (check, direct deposit, or PayPal payouts are common)
What is an affiliate link?
An affiliate link is a traceable link that has a special combination of letters/numbers/symbols that is an identifier for you. It could look something like this:
How to start your Affiliate Marketing?
Choose your Niche
Niche is just a fancy word that means a distinct segment of a market, in other words, an “audience”.
One of the most important steps in starting with affiliate marketing is narrowing down your niche because you will be doing a lot of writing about the topic you choose. So if you have selected a niche that you don’t really like, your website is not likely to last very long.
Your hobby, interest, previous knowledge, or expertise can be highly useful in niche selection, and do some research to narrow it down because this segment of the market you’re going to target with your niche website.
Let’s say that you select the Weight Loss niche which is very broad, so need to narrow it down to sub-niche, for example, Diet, and you can narrow it even further to micro-niche, let’s say Keto Diet, I think you got the idea
To start searching for a niche, it is important to see what people are actually looking for when searching for your topic of choice. You can use various tools to check the popularity and search results of various keywords.
Google has the largest database in the world; why not use it to find new niche ideas for your affiliate site?
Two sections in Google Search, People Also Ask and Suggested Searches, are especially useful for niche research. Just type your main search query in Google without hitting the enter key to get search suggestions by Google autocomplete.
Let me type “Keto Diet for” and see what comes up.
You can immediately see different angles from where you can approach the keto diet niche. You can do this for any search query and immediately get ideas that you can research for niche profitability.
Now hit the enter key to any of those search terms and scroll down to the “People Also Ask” section in Google Search results.
These are the most common questions people are searching for on Google about the “Keto Diet”.
When you click on any question, Google adds several more relevant questions to this list.
For some topics, this section can expand into hundreds of questions.
It’s a goldmine for niche researchers because it gives you amazing insights into your target audience and gives you so many angles to approach your target niche.
If you find it too complicated you can Get Your Free Step By Step Training Here, to help you research and choose from 1,000,000+ different niches and how to turn your idea into a profitable business.
Choose a product within your niche to promote
You have most likely narrowed down the original list of niche ideas to just a handful of topics that enjoy popularity online. Now, how can you choose a product that will earn you the highest amount of money?
Affiliate marketing has to do with the recommendation of services and products to readers. So, it is now time to find out which of the niche topic ideas has products and services that people are willing to buy.
Here’s what you need to do: take your list of niche ideas and list the problems that people within that niche face alongside each item. You should then list the products in your niche likely to solve the problems.
For instance, let’s assume that Weight Loss is your chosen niche idea. Problems that your audience are likely to face may include finding, how to lose weight fast or how to keep satiated when they’re on diet. So it’s now your job to find products that solve these problems and present them to your audience on your website.
Amazon is probably the largest retailer online and runs an interesting affiliate program for niche websites. However, the website is also useful when it comes to finding out whether various products are selling.
Search your niche keywords on Amazon and see just how many results you get. Hopefully, you will get thousands of results for general niche keywords.
Building your niche website
Now that you have decided on the niche, and the products, you need to consider the actual website itself. Your website is the foundation of your business. It is where all of your traffic is ultimately going to come to, where you are going to build brand and trust within the industry, and where you can promote products/services and generate $$$!
Now you need to register at this Platform for free (No Credit Card Required). Here you can get 1 Free Website with Domain and Hosting for literally $0/month, as Starter Member just to get you to start with your business.
Building a website sounds like a “complicated” process, but it’s not, because you’ll get access to the most advanced and powerful Site Builder Platform in the world, called “SiteRubix” which let’s build your website in 30 seconds, watch this video.
There are 3 steps in the website building process, which I’ll explain briefly here:
Step 1- Choose your Website
As a starter member, you’ll choose the website “On a free domain” as shown below, you will be building a website on the.siterubix.com domain, which is a completely free website
Later on, if you decide to upgrade to Premium member you can register your own domain.
Step 2- Choose a domain
Here you’ll choose an appropriate domain name that matches your niche and it will be your website name as well. In this step, I’ll choose a name for my website and placing it in the “domain name” field and this will be my website URL.
If you remember from earlier when I used the “Weight Loss” niche as an example, therefore as you can see below, I have added my brand “Keto for you” into the domain field.
When you type in your domain, it will let you know if it is available or not. In my case it was, but if your first choice is not available simply; do another search until you find a domain name that works for you.
Your Domain (Website URL): ketoforyou.siterubix.com
Website Title: Keto For You
It’s as simple as that and you’re done.
Step 3- Choose a Design.
The last step is to choose a design for your website. As a starter member, you can choose 1 theme that has been hand-picked for quality, speed, security, and overall theme design. But if you upgrade to Premium, you’ll get access to more than 3000 themes at your disposal.
There you have it; you have your website officially up and running online without paying a dime.
Find an affiliate program/network to sign up with.
The very first step you need to do is to become an affiliate of the products. This could be done via Affiliate networks or you can also join direct affiliate programs.
You need to pick products that resonate with your skillset or the topic you talk about the most. If you are an existing blogger, YouTuber, or influencer, it will be easy for you.
Another way to find this information is to do a simple Google search. For example, one could place the following phrase into Google Search: “(product name) + affiliate program”.
If I go back to the Weight Loss niche and do Google search and type “weight loss affiliate program”, and you can see the results that come up below:
There are tons of affiliate programs inside the WA platform that you can search for. If I go back to my previous search on “Weight Loss” affiliate program and do the search using a very powerful tool called Jaaxy you can see the results:
You can pick any product from the list and start promoting it on your website.
There are many affiliate marketing partners out there available for you to choose from, and one of the most popular ones is Amazon Associates. Their program is the largest affiliate marketing program in the world with over one million registered associates.
Below I have listed down some popular affiliate marketplaces that you can sign up with:
Create engaging content and start promoting
Now, your new website is up and running, you will want to provide content for your site visitors.
Create the content on your website in the form of tutorials, review posts, compression page, or webinar so you can use your affiliate links, but what I recommend most is good old fashion written content.
Without a doubt, content creation is the key to your success. Without great content on your site, you’ll never gain enough visitors to earn any sort of significant living online. You want to make sure that any content you create is high quality, interesting, and relevant to your audience. You also need to create as much content as possible and keep updating the content on your website routinely.
People coming to your site are in search of something. They could simply be looking for general information about a topic or for information on the reliability or usability of a product.
Whatever the reason, it is worth spending time assessing and identifying the areas that customers are looking for and tailoring content to fulfill that need.
Here is where you can make sure that your affiliate links and products are leading your site visitors to the answers, they seek
As part of your website promotion efforts, social media is an easy and free strategy that can increase awareness and click-through rates to your website.
Using social media can be a great way to build your audience and generate a following. You can post photos of new products, highlight any special offers, link to new blogs, and generally just create a positive rapport with your customer base.
There is also the option of using paid advertising on any of the social media sites. You can always go that route if you wish, but for now, we are focusing on the free methods.
Final Word
I have just shown you how to get started in affiliate marketing with no money, but keep in mind, this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Just like building any business, it will take time, patience, and dedication to get the results you want.
Much of it can be trial and error until you determine what works best for your specific niche or industry. It is not an overnight process. Gaining the necessary levels of traffic you need, can take time, and it’s easy to get frustrated.
However, the information included in this article should give you some great resources on where to start, what to include, and how to successfully identify opportunities.
This should help you successfully build and monetize your affiliate marketing website.
I hope you find this post is useful and please don’t hesitate to leave your questions or comments and I’ll be more than happy to answer them.
Best of luck
FAQ.
How much money can you make as an affiliate marketer?
Affiliate income is not consistent. You’ll to look at income from an annual basis instead of monthly. A decent affiliate can make anywhere from $10,000 a year to $500,000. A super affiliate can make over $1,000,000 a year.
Is affiliate marketing a pyramid scheme?
No, it is not. Think of it as a commission-only sales job. You only get paid every time you drive a sale to a business.
How much does it cost to join an affiliate program?
There is no charge for joining an affiliate program; however, your total cost depends on what promotion technique you are using. For example, a blog post doesn’t cost a dime, but PPC marketing, email marketing, and advertising come with various price tags.
Is affiliate marketing harmful or illegal?
No, it is neither harmful nor illegal, as you will simply be using the affiliate link provided to you rather than a direct link to any site.
However, in certain jurisdictions, you are supposed to disclose that you may be compensated for endorsing the product. Readout guide on Affiliate disclosure to learn more about it.
What is the difference between Affiliate Marketing and MLM?
With multi-level marketing or MLM you can only promote products from the program you are a part of. With affiliate marketing, you can promote dozens of different products or services at any time, nothing is holding you back.
It’s also important to keep in mind that there are right ways and wrong ways of doing affiliate marketing too. There are some people out there who are trying to make a quick buck and take advantage.
That’s the wrong way to do it.
A great rule of thumb to follow is that you should start out by promoting the products and services you already use and like. You really can’t go wrong if you do it that way.
