Affiliate marketing business model is extremely popular and lucrative, especially for those who just start an online business. You don’t need to create a product, take care of the shipping or customer support. Your only task is to promote affiliate products.
Sounds simple?
Well, when you already know how everything works and have your own strategy, it becomes easy. Nevertheless, if you’re new and have no idea how to start with affiliate marketing figuring things out can become overwhelming.
That’s why we’re happy to share a few ways of how you can approach affiliate marketing, promote affiliate products, and start earning your commissions.
Here’s what we’re going to cover:
- Ways to start with affiliate marketing
- How to choose your approach
- Choose affiliate products to promote
- Final thoughts
Ways To Start With Affiliate Marketing
There’s a number of ways to promote affiliate products. The best approach though, is to choose one of them in the beginning and put your effort into it until it starts bringing results. After that, you can move to the next strategy.
So, let’s see how to start with affiliate marketing!
Blogging
Blogging is one of the basic ways to promote affiliate products. You can create reviews of affiliate products or compare them with alternative products emphasizing benefits. This kind of posts attracts hot leads because, in most cases, they already know about the product and want to buy it but are looking for some additional information that will help them to make a decision.
Another kind of posts you can create around affiliate products is the so-called “How to” posts. These posts attract warm leads that have a problem and are looking for a solution. In your posts, you may explain how your product can solve their problem.
Although blogging is a great way how you can start with affiliate marketing, it doesn’t bring you results right away. It takes some time before your blog posts start ranking for the keywords you used and bring you sales.
But don’t get discouraged! In the long run, you can reap all the benefits and earn passive income from your blog posts.
YouTube Channel
If you’re not shy to be in front of the camera, then this method of affiliate products promotion may be the right fit for you. You can do product reviews and demonstrations, create video tutorials, and so on.
Same as for the blog posts, you can create videos on topics related to your affiliate products and promote the product in the video. These videos can give you more exposure and provide your customers with the information they’re looking for.
Moreover, when your channel grows you can start monetizing it which will create an additional source of income for you.
Promotion On Social Media
Promoting products on social media is, probably, the most popular way how you can start with affiliate marketing. Facebook is one of the most prevalent platforms for that as it gives you a wide variety of tools like text posts, photos, videos, or even live content.
Moreover, you can use your personal profile, business page for promotion or even create a Facebook group for people who may benefit from using your affiliate product.
Social media platforms give you unlimited possibilities to promote affiliate offers; that’s why they’re so popular among affiliate marketers.
Email Marketing
If you have an email list, you can use it to promote your affiliate offers. Don’t forget that you shouldn’t just pitch your subscribers! Provide them with some valuable content that can solve their problems, offer some freebies or incentives, and once in a while make an offer to buy from you.
This way, you can build a great relationship with your audience and position yourself as a person who cares about their success, and not just tries to sell them.
Build Sales Funnels
Another way how to start with affiliate marketing is by building sales funnels for your affiliate products. Simply put, a sales funnel is a series of pages put in a particular order to convert your prospects into buyers.
Don’t freak out! It’s not something technically complicated! If you have the right software on hand, you can create a sales funnel in less than an hour without any technical background.
We love using ClickFunnels to build our funnels as it’s an easy-to-use and intuitive software with great functionality.
Here’s an example of the flow a standard sales funnel follows. You offer your leads a valuable freebie in exchange for their email address. Next, you present them your affiliate product complimented with some incentives from you to get them to buy through your affiliate link. You may also offer them some upsell or downsales on their way to the order completion.
The best and most efficient way to learn how a funnel works and actually build one is to take the One Funnel Away Challenge. It’s a value-packed 30-day training that will teach you the basics of funnel building, offer creation, sales psychology, and marketing.
If you’re curious to learn more about what the training can teach you, read our detailed One Funnel Away Challenge review.
How To Choose Your Approach
As you can see, there’s a bunch of activities you can do to promote affiliate products. To decide which strategy is the best fit for you, think about two things.
First, think about what you’re good at or already have some skill/experience. Why is it important? Let’s say you decide to create a Youtube channel to promote your affiliate offers, but you just hate to be on the videos. How much fun do you think it’ll make for you to regularly film videos? Your enthusiasm to grow a YouTube channel won’t last long then.
At the same time, if you already have some writing skills or know the basics of SEO, it’ll make sense for you to start a blog to promote affiliate products.
Secondly, consider how much time you can devote to the affiliate activities. Not all the approaches require the same time investment.
For example, writing a search-engine-optimized blog post takes a few hours while creating content for social media takes less time.
Choose Affiliate Products To Promote
Affiliate products you choose to promote are also one of the crucial factors of your success as an affiliate marketer.
The first thing you may look at when choosing the products to promote is recurring monthly commissions you get paid during the lifetime of the users you refer. You also want to promote a reliable product which, you know, provides value and solves problems of your audience. It wouldn’t hurt to make sure that the company which creates affiliate products has great customer support.
You can read more about how to choose affiliate products to promote in our recent blog post. Or just grab our list of the best affiliate programs that pay high recurring commissions.
Final Thoughts
There’s a bunch of ways how you can promote affiliate products. You can choose one depending on your skills, preferences, and experience.
Some of the methods require a higher investment of time; some will bring you results faster. It’s up to you to decide what strategy to choose.
Now, you can try to figure everything out yourself or let successful affiliate marketers guide you. If you’re not sure how to start with affiliate marketing, the Affiliate Bootcamp training is what you need!
It’s a highly valuable training from top ClickFunnels affiliates who explain how they would build up their affiliate business if they had to start from scratch. It means that you’ll get 15 proven strategies on how to succeed with affiliate marketing… for FREE!
Share in the comments what’s your favorite method to promote affiliate products?
How To Start With Affiliate Marketing F.A.Q
How do I start affiliate marketing as a beginner?
Here is a quick recap of what you need to start with affiliate marketing:
1. Choose your niche.
2. Research and choose affiliate products you can promote in this niche.
3. Choose the way you’ll promote your products.
4. Produce useful content.
5. Build an audience.
6. Promote your affiliate products.
If you don’t want to figure everything out on your own, sign up for the Affiliate Bootcamp, a FREE training from top Clickfunnels affiliates.
How much money can you make as an affiliate marketer?
Monthly affiliate income may be inconsistent; therefore, it’s better to look at the annual numbers. A decent affiliate can make anywhere from $10,000 to $400,000 a year. Some super affiliates make around $1,500,000 a year.
How much does it cost to start affiliate marketing?
It depends on the platform you choose to promote your affiliate products and affiliate programs you pick. A lot of companies don’t require you to use their product in order to promote it, but some ask you to be their active user. If you decide to promote your products on social media, it doesn’t require any investment. The same goes for Youtube, although at some point, you may want to invest in better video equipment.
What is the best affiliate marketing training for beginners?
One of the best free affiliate marketing trainings is Affiliate Bootcamp created by ClickFunnels. The training includes 15 strategies described by Clickfunnels’ top affiliates on how they would bring their affiliate business from zero to making a full-time income. You may promote any affiliate products using these strategies.
