What is Affiliate Marketing: The Definitive Introductory Guide

It has been estimated that 84% of publishers, in other words those who have a website, utilize Affiliate Marketing as a monetization method.

We might as well say Affiliate Marketing is practically used by everyone.

In this mega-guide I will introduce you to Affiliate Marketing, in all its components.

Reading the entire content all the way through will be like accessing a map that will allow you to take your first steps in the right direction and avoid the most common mistakes.

Let’s get started right away.

Affiliate marketing definition

Affiliate marketing is a method of online promotion of products or services. Affiliates promote the products of others online, and are paid only if the visitors they were able to bring to the seller’s site make purchases or specific actions.

Doing Affiliate Marketing, in other words, means advertising the products or services of other brands, but getting paid only if this advertising generates concrete returns in the seller’s pockets.

This is why Affiliate Marketing is considered a type of Performance Marketing.

The Affiliate gets paid only according to the performance it manages to generate.

How affiliate marketing works

Affiliate marketing consists of three basic components:

  1. the seller
  2. the tracking system or the affiliate link
  3. the affiliate

The online seller, or reseller has a product or service to promote and sell, but it does not want to pay for an advertising campaign, it only wants to pay for advertising if it has actually generated sales.

He uses an affiliate platform that gives him the ability to generate affiliate links and assign a unique code to each affiliate. The affiliate link serves precisely to be able to recognize the origin of users who have passed through that link to get to the seller’s site. The vendor can then know which affiliate was responsible for the sales that were generated on his site.

The affiliate uses marketing strategies to reach out to users on the Internet and try to convince them to buy the vendor’s products or services, but passing through his specific affiliate link. Only then can the seller know that those visitors come from his efforts, and only then will the Affiliate receive compensation if the visitors brought by him make purchases or specific actions.

Examples

Let’s give three examples of Affiliate Marketing, or rather describe 3 situations in which you may have found yourself within an Affiliate Marketing strategy without even knowing it.

You are interested in buying a new notebook. You Google “best notebooks”, you click on the first result and you end up on a blog where the 10 best notebook models are compared. Each model contains a review, pros and cons, and a button that says “Buy at the best price” that sends you to Amazon or an online electronics store. That very button is an affiliate link of the blog owner.

You need legal advice, and you are looking for a lawyer, perhaps willing to give you an online consultation. You do a few Google searches but can’t find what you’re looking for. Then, while you’re on FaceBook, an ad pops up promoting XYZ Law Firm with online counseling options. You click on the ad, and you end up on a blog with a review of XYZ where all the services offered are described. Convinced of your choice, you click on the link “Visit XYZ for an online consultation.” You end up on XYZ’s site, and you are asked to fill out a form and leave your name, email, and phone number to be contacted. In this case, you have not made a purchase, but the blog owner will still get paid because he or she brought in a visitor with a high chance of becoming a customer.

You visit the Easyjet website to buy airfare for your next trip. As you are about to complete the purchase process, Easyjet starts offering you car rentals through Hertz company or others, and hotel reservations through Booking.com website. This, too, in a way, could be considered a case of Affiliate Marketing, in which Hertz and Booking.com will pay Easyjet for every customer that comes to them.

How much money can you make with Affiliate Marketing?

Several market surveys show that on average the top 10% of affiliates earn more than $100,000 per month. Beginners, on the other hand, usually earn less than $1,000 per month.

The truth is that answering this question is quite complex.

Affiliate marketing in essence is a strategy applicable to a myriad of scenarios and industries.

The first variable in determining affiliate marketing earnings is definitely the market niche.

There are niches where the products or services sold cost more, and more importantly, the commission paid to affiliates is higher. This is what is called High Ticket Affiliate Marketing, where commissions per sale paid to the affiliate on average are $100 upward.

Some examples of niches in High Ticket Affiliate Marketing are:

  • Finance
  • Luxury
  • Hosting
  • SaaS

The second variable in determining how much you can earn with Affiliate Marketing is whether you are using organic traffic or paid traffic.

With paid traffic you can start earning money faster, because you can generate traffic in a very short time, precisely because you pay for it. Conversely, paying for traffic means decreased profit margins. On top of that, it is a very difficult method, with lots of competition and often very high costs.

Organic traffic, on the other hand, is much less expensive, in a sense free, and thus the profit margins on each sale remain almost unchanged. Conversely, organic traffic is very slow and again there is no shortage of competition, so it will take time, usually a few months, to see the first tangible results.

Working with organic traffic mainly means working with a blog, and on average affiliate bloggers earn $30 EPMP (Earnings Per Mille pageviews).

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Low initial investment
  • You don’t have to create a product
  • Easy for beginners
  • Easy to diversify (various niches, various products, various channels)
  • Flexible
  • High income potential
  • Infinite niches
  • Work from everywhere
  • Help from affiliate managers

Cons

  • Easy to start, not easy to do
  • Lot of competition
  • Your income rely on others
  • No control over the product
  • No control over the affiliate program
  • Some programs are fraud

Affiliate Marketing review: is it easy or hard?

I understand you want to get an idea about the real difficulty of doing Affiliate Marketing.

You want to understand what it really takes, what you should expect.

As with all things, in Affiliate Marketing there is an easy part, and a difficult part.

The easy part

The easy part is definitely the almost no upfront costs, and the fact that you don’t have to create a product to sell.

With Affiliate Marketing all you need is a website plus a few plugins or services, and in general all this can cost a few tens of dollars a year.

You don’t have to deal with the design and manufacture of anything, you just have to choose a product to promote, knowing that it is a product that has already proven to please people.

It is true that the products to be sold could also and mostly be digital, so if you wanted to create it yourself, all you would have to do is write. But I can assure you that it is not as easy as it may seem.

Writing for the Web is a skill that must be learned. You will still have to do it, because in order to get traffic, one way or another, organically or for a fee, you will have to hone the art of both SEO and Copy Writing.

I say learn how to write first, get traffic, make money with Affiliate Marketing, and then eventually jump into creating a digital product.

The hard part

I always say that the best way to start with Affiliate Marketing is with organic traffic (free from search engines) by creating a blog.

I say this because in case of failure, all you might have lost is some time.

In fact, even organic traffic is not that easy to get, especially if you want to work in the most competitive niches.

I said that the easy part of Affiliate Marketing is the initial part, because of the absence of cost, but at the same time it is also a very difficult part.

In the initial stage you will indeed have to choose the market niche in which to work, and niche selection is not so easy.

First you will have to figure out whether there is actually money to be made in that niche.

Then the niche will have to be small enough that you don’t have too much competition, but large enough that you can achieve sufficient traffic volumes to make enough money.

Assuming you can make the right choice, then comes the challenge of SEO, which is the art of writing your texts in such a way as to get more visibility therefore more traffic from search engines.

You can do SEO in a thousand different ways, but I think there is no need to make it too complicated. However, it is still a not-so-simple activity that requires commitment and dedication.

Affiliate Marketing Types

There are several ways to categorize Affiliate Marketing.

Only three ways really make sense to me, for a total of 7 Affiliate Marketing types:

  • Based on the type of relationship the affiliate has with the product they are promoting
  • Based on the type of traffic it uses to promote it
  • Based on the price of the product and the relative commissions

Considering the type of relationship, we have three types of Affiliate Marketing.

Unattached: You have almost no connection to the product, you don’t use it, you don’t even know it that well, all you care about is getting people to see your advertising and click on your links. You usually do this through paid campaigns.

Related: you have some connection to the products you promote, but you still have a somewhat non-partisan approach. Both paid and organic techniques are usually used.

Involved: you are a kind of ambassador of the product(s), you know them like your own pocket, you use them firsthand, and you would even recommend them to your friends. Here organic traffic with a blog, Youtube and Social Media is the way to go.

Then there is the type of traffic, and here we have essentially two roads.

Paid traffic: means using advertising platforms to reach users in an effective and targeted way. The two most popular platforms are Google Ads and Facebook Ads, but there are dozens of others. It can be an extraordinary channel for Affiliate Marketing, but it requires advanced skills and the risks of not making a return on investment are very high.

Organic traffic: could be translated to “free,” because no money is directly required, but time, dedication and expertise. You get this traffic by being found by users searching on Google, YouTube, but also, for example, by readers who open your newsletter emails. Organic traffic is the absolute best method to build an asset that can generate great profits in the long run with Affiliate Marketing.

Then there is the distinction between Low Ticket and Hight Ticket Affiliate Marketing.

High Ticket: expensive products that generate commissions of at least USD 100.

Low Ticket: low-to-medium cost products and commissions of a few dollars or tens of dollars.

Deciding what type of Affiliate Marketing you want to focus on is essential.

I tend to recommend a Related or Involved approach with organic traffic via Blog, and then to follow up with YouTube, targeting medium to high ticket products.

Traffic channels

If the one about types of Affiliate Marketing was a more theoretical talk, the one about channels is definitely more practical.

There are several channels to do affiliate marketing. Here are the main ones:

Blogging: can be done in a number of ways, but in summary it is about writing content that will interest readers in a certain niche so that they can place advertisements or affiliate links for specific products of interest.

Review-Comparison site: can overlap and integrate with blogging, and it means creating the most interesting content for those about to make a purchase, namely reviews and comparisons with other products, also with comparison tools that require some web design and programming skills.

Paid Ads: Paid traffic is based on the use of specific platforms, and can be called in various ways, one of them being PPC (Pay Per Click). It can be done on search engines (SEM), on social media, with advertising on other sites (Media Buying or Native), on mobile (Mobile Ads).

Social Media: Social Media can also be used on a free (or semi-free) basis to reach users. This is what most Influencers do. They continuously post content to enlarge and grow their fan base, and promote products through affiliate links or promo codes.

Email list: Creating an email list is an activity that can be done in conjunction with all the others, and it is often referred to as the smartest way to greatly increase your earnings. Creating a mailing list means having an audience of people interested in your niche that you can reach when you want to. In other words, it’s an asset that is 100 percent yours that no algorithm or platform change can ever take away from you.

Coupon site: There are a lot of consumers who start shopping by immediately looking for a discount, or put another way, a coupon. A coupon is nothing more than the alternative to an affiliate link. When an online store sees that a new customer has used the Coupon Code it had assigned to you, it will know for sure that that new customer has come because of you, and will be able to pay you, while the customer will get the discount. This is what a lot of influencers do on Instagram, however, you can also do it through a website.

Cashback site: many consumers look for the possibility of cashback when they purchase certain products. You can be the one to provide this possibility, but this requires a certain level of technical expertise, or at least the use of specialized platforms.

Fully understanding affiliate marketing channels and finding the one that best suits your style and condition is one of the most important strategic activities for an affiliate marketer.

Payment models

There is no one way to get paid when it comes to Affiliate Marketing. Advertisers can use different payment models depending on their strategy.

Affiliate marketers need to know them thoroughly and understand how to adapt their strategy accordingly as well.

Here are the main ones:

Pay Per Sale: or Cost Per Sale, you receive a commission every time a user has made a purchase. This is the most classic of options, the one on which Affiliate Marketing was born.

Pay Per Action: or Cost Per Action, you receive a commission every time a user takes a certain action, such as filling out a form, making a deposit, signing up for a newsletter, etc. This makes the possibilities for Affiliate Marketing virtually endless.

Pay Per Install: you receive a commission every time a user installs an app on their smartphone or a program on their PC. Very popular, indeed, for campaigns on mobile traffic.

Pay Per Lead: or Cost Per Lead, you receive a commission each time a user fills out a form and effectively becomes a lead, i.e., a potential customer for the seller.

Pay Per Click: or Cost Per Click, you receive a commission every time a user simply clicks on your affiliate link and visits the seller’s website. In essence, the vendor pays you to receive traffic.

Pay Per Mille: or Cost Per Mille, you receive a commission every time you succeed in getting a particular advertisement seen by at least a thousand online users. This model is very popular with the use of banner images.

Revenue Share: can be declined in various ways, but in essence you receive a share of the profits that the seller generates from the customer, for a limited period or even for the lifetime of the customer. In many cases it is the most attractive model for those who want to do Affiliate Marketing seriously and over the long term.

Each payment model in affiliate marketing has its own peculiarities, and must be specifically managed and addressed if revenues are to be optimized.

If you have to promote an expensive service with an ongoing revenue share commission your strategy (blog plus email list) will be completely different than promoting a free app to install on your phone (paid campaign on mobile traffic).

How to start with no money

It is absolutely possible to start affiliate marketing completely without money.

The important thing to understand is one: you will need a desire to write or create videos and patience.

If you are willing to make this sacrifice, then you have a good chance of succeeding in creating the most important thing in affiliate marketing, even without money.

We’re talking about traffic.

Traffic is the one thing you simply cannot do without in affiliate marketing as in digital marketing in general.

Fortunately, there are several ways to get traffic absolutely free, or at negligible expense.

Let’s look at them together.

Blogging

Blogging is a completely free or extraordinarily low-cost alternative for affiliate marketing.

Buying a domain and paying for a hosting service now costs a few tens of dollars a year.

But if you really don’t want to spend, there are viable alternatives that are completely free, such as Medium.com, or Linkedin itself by creating real blog posts.

Immagine che contiene testo

Descrizione generata automaticamenteAll that is needed here is:

  • writing quality content
  • conduct in-depth research to best meet users’ interests
  • optimize texts from an SEO perspective
  • promote your content as much as possible
  • learn link building

For me, blogging is the best solution for a beginner who wants to start with affiliate marketing.

It is the method that allows you to take your time, get a good understanding of what needs to be done, and build one brick at a time the foundation of a business that could bring you traffic and commissions for months and years to come.

Social media

Surely you have noticed the presence of a lot of advertising in social media channels (Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Tik Tok), and you might think that to get traffic on these channels you need to spend.

This is true, but the truth is that on social networks you can still generate traffic for free. You just need to dedicate yourself and find the right strategy to create content for each channel to properly and effectively place your affiliate links.

The strategy for affiliate marketing on Tik Tok will definitely be different from that for Linkedin. In any case, the ability to write quality texts and a cell phone to take photos and videos will be all you need to work with social media.

Also, if this field in general is your passion, it is good to stay up-to-date on new trends, and the emergence of new social networks.

Whenever a new social network is born, in the early stages it is much easier to get free traffic, precisely because the channel creators want it to be easy, so it attracts new users and new creators.

Therefore, jumping on board new social network when it is about to explode can be a very good strategy.

YouTube

Many people consider YouTube a social network, but the reality is that it is now much more than that.

As of today, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world after Google.

If you have a cell phone with a good camera, then you have everything you need.

Even for editing videos there are many free options, with all the basic functions you need to create good quality videos.

YouTube is also great because it allows you to work in two ways: you can work “SEO style” or you can work “clickbait style”.

SEO style means that you can create content to respond to searches that users make on the YouTube search engine. In this case you have to work SEO oriented, using all the necessary strategies to climb the rankings.

Clickbait style, on the other hand, means creating content that does not necessarily respond to a users’ search, but that is likeable and entertaining and can even in some cases go viral.

Either way, you surely must have found some “link in the description” in a YouTube video. Here are your affiliate links.

Forums

You may have already seen or used Quora and Reddit, two popular platforms which in essence are two large forums that are completely free.

In addition to these there are also all the classic industry forums.

The important thing here is to know from the outset what the terms of the forum are regarding self or other product promotion, or the use of affiliate links in general. If you disregard the terms, or go too far in certain practices, you will almost certainly be banned.

Immagine che contiene testo

Descrizione generata automaticamenteIf everything is okay, then you can use the forums to help other users, answer their doubts and questions, post your experiences with certain products or services.

All these will be opportunities to place affiliate links.

Niche selection

Affiliate marketing can be done in different ways.

Whichever way, at some point it will be necessary to select the field, the industry, and as they say in this case the niche in which to work.

This is especially important if you decide to work in Affiliate Marketing with a website or blog and organic traffic from search engines.

Let us now see together what are the main factors to consider when it comes to Affiliate Marketing niches.

Brainstorm your interests

Forget about looking for a niche where you make a lot of money. This is not the right place to start, for a very simple reason.

You will have to work in that niche for months and years, writing content and researching those topics.

It is critical to start Affiliate Marketing with a niche you like, a topic you are passionate about, where you will have no problem spending hours.

If you choose a niche for other reasons, but it does not resonate with your personality and interests, you will have to rely mainly on your willpower, and it will be very hard.

So start by brainstorming all the topics, hobbies, and products you like and are passionate about.

They will be the starting point of your research, because obviously passion alone is not enough to select a good niche.

Is the niche dying?

One of the first questions to ask is surely “Is this a dying niche?”.

What do I mean by this?

Consider the topic “paleo diet.” Until a few years ago it was very much in vogue. Then it slowly faded away.

It is certainly possible to get traffic and commissions from such a niche, but I would avoid vertically placing 100% on it alone.

That is, I would avoid calling myself onlypaleodiet.com.

So, in general, consider and check that the niche is not a topic that is dropping in popularity, but favor those topics that are growing, or those that are evergreen.

Traffic volumes

How many people are interested in this topic?

How many are actively seeking products and solutions that I can promote?

These are other key questions, because a niche will not work if there are not enough potential customers willing to spend.

How to figure this out?

First you have to analyze the volumes of keywords related to your topic, with this you can figure out how many monthly searches you could intercept.

Then, consider whether there are advertisers who are spending to run paid ads on those keywords. If they are spending money on advertising, it is because they know there are potential customers in that niche.

One free tool with which you can do both is Google Ads. Even better, you can use SemRush’s 7-day free trial.

Find a sub-niche but prepare to scale

Find a big enough niche, but then start with a sub-niche that is easier to attack, with less competition.

If nutrition is your passion, don’t start by talking about diets in general. Find a sub-niche first, such as food plans. Go down further, e.g., food plans for athletes, and maybe even further, with food plans for female athletes (either way, it’s almost certainly a niche already saturated).

Nutrition > Food plans > Athletes > Female

Start small, but allow yourself the opportunity to grow, i.e., don’t call your site FoodPlansForFemaleAthletes.com, but perhaps plangoodmeals.com (currently available for purchase on Godaddy).

Earnings and potential

Before jumping on the train of your favorite niche, it’s good to at least have an idea of how you plan to monetize it.

The first option, the one that always applies in any case, is to place banner ads on the site. This allows you to monetize simply by the fact that users enter your site.

But if you want to monetize better and more with Affiliate Marketing, then you need to know what products or services you can promote in your niche.

Also, it is important to find opportunities to earn high commissions on every single product you sell, the so-called high ticket products.

Competitors

It is almost impossible to find a niche with good traffic and good profit margins that has not already been at least partially addressed by competitors.

The problem is figuring out how much.

How much space is left unexplored?

How many topics have not yet been thoroughly covered?

What questions are still left unanswered precisely?

Answering all these questions will help you understand what the real level of competition is.

Traffic sources

Is your potential audience also very active on other channels?

Is it active on FB or Instagram? On YouTube? On Linkedin? On forums?

Is this a suitable area for PPC advertising on Google or FB (i.e. do you always see lots of ads when you search for those topics)?

Would your readers appreciate a mailing list to stay up-to-date with?

These are some questions through which to understand what potential traffic channels might be additional or complementary to your main channel.

One example out of all: start with a blog, but then soon integrate the creation of a mailing list, and to follow up with a YouTube channel.

Find your uniqueness

Finding your uniqueness, or Unique Selling Proposition (USP) as it is technically called, is not so much a matter of saying things in an innovative way.

It is first of all finding those market inefficiencies to exploit, so that you can be the first to do or say certain things in a certain way.

To give an example, everyone can list the products available in a certain area, but maybe few or none are actually trying them out to do real reviews.

If you do that, you will be the first, and you will be really helpful to your readers. That’s all the USP you’ll need.

Niche list

Here is a micro list of the main niche markets that can be used with affiliate marketing.

  • Technology
  • Finance
  • Luxury
  • Fashion
  • Education
  • Digital Marketing
  • Travel
  • Entertainment
  • Career
  • Adult
  • Gaming
  • Home
  • Health
  • Nutrition
  • Gardening
  • Beauty
  • Sport
  • Pets
  • Art
  • Parental
  • Lifestyle
  • Mobile

Tips to succeed and mistakes to avoid

The topic how to succeed with Affiliate Marketing deserves to be covered separately, but for completeness I list here the most important factors for success.

Start with one channel, one strategy, and master them. The enthusiasm will be high, and the desire to try different strategies, techniques, tools, etc. will be great. Don’t. Choose a path and follow it with focus. Specifically, in my opinion a beginner should start with creating a blog for organic traffic.

Take your time to find opportunities with low competition. This is perhaps one of the most underrated elements, but it is the element that can most easily make you successful even before you start. Finding a niche with little competition means you have already partly won the game.

Start with one niche you like, and master it. If you are patient enough to search, you may find more than one niche with little competition, and you may be tempted to start working on multiple sites at once. Just don’t. Writing and developing a blog at the right speed can drain you of your energy. Better to do it on one site at a time, at least in the beginning.

Stay focused, be disciplined and have patience. Whatever strategy you choose, particularly if you choose to start with a blog, it means basically seeing nothing even for a few months. No traffic, no commissions. Don’t give up. It takes time. Most affiliate marketers give up just before the first results come in.

Work with different affiliate programs. Try not to depend on one product, and one affiliate program. Things can change, the product can be taken off the market, or the vendor can change the terms for affiliates. Diversify to be more protected.

Learn to track and analyze data. You can improve your performance only if you measure it accurately. Measure everything, traffic with Google Analytics, Search Console and other tools, and sales performance on the affiliate platform.

Learn to A/B test. With the data in hand, you can start testing, and the most effective are split tests. Divide your audience into two parts, and show them two different things or send them on two different paths. Observe which one performs or converts better, and follow the winner.

For SEO, learn search intent, topical authority and link building. SEO is critical to the success of your website, and these three concepts are key. In particular, Topical Authority theory is something that will be increasingly predominant in the coming years. If you start now, you will definitely have a competitive advantage.

For paid ads, learn compliance, how to build a landing page and CRO. So many people start Affiliate Marketing with paid ads because they think they can start earning money quickly. That may be true, but what usually happens is that they don’t even give themselves time to understand the rules of Google Ads, and they get banned, sometimes really permanently. Then give yourself time to learn how to handle a landind page builder and study Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

Best affiliate marketing programs and networks

Here is just a sampling of the best affiliate programs or networks you can find on the Web.

Courses and resources

There are so many things to learn in Affiliate Marketing, and it can seem like a titanic task. Fortunately, there are courses to help you discover everything.

Affiliate Lab

Matt Diggity is one of the most famous names in the SEO and affiliate world. This course is a comprehensive roadmap for starting from scratch and ending up knowing how to hire and manage all the professionals needed to run a website empire.

Authority Site System

A very similar version but with a slightly different approach, Authorty Hacker’s is an equally good course for learning Affiliate Marketing and website creation from A to Z.

Project 24

Income School’s Project 24 is another mega-course, with a less technical approach at times, but not necessarily any less effective. It contains an excellent course for YouTube as well.

Commission Hero

For those who are intent on jumping into the difficult (and expensive) world of paid ads, in this Robby Blanchard illustrates with examples and ready-made material his method for creating Facebook campaigns and generating revenue on ClickBank.

ClickBank Success – Affiliate Marketing Without a Website

This course is extremly basic, but it is a great starting point for understanding how to set up paid campaigns, in this case with Microsoft Ads, without even needing to have a website.

Mobidea Academy

There are also good free versions to learn how Affiliate Marketing works. One of these is offered by Mobidea, in the Academy > Learning Path section.

Compliance

It is also good to explain some words for the concept of Compliance.

What do I mean?

I have seen too many cases of people approaching Affiliate Marketing with the sole purpose of making quick and easy money while ignoring the rules.

Let me tell you, it is not an approach that pays off.

Much better to understand how it’s right to do it, and know from the start what the rules are to follow.

With merchant

The mere fact that you have been accepted into an affiliate program does not mean that you are authorized to promote the product in any method, lawful or unlawful.

The vendor has created Terms that you must follow. There will be activities you cannot do, marketing strategies you cannot follow, specific phrases you cannot use.

Each situation will have its own particularities.

Not following these terms will lead to your exclusion, and also to non-payment of commissions generated.

With platforms

The simplest example is with Google Ads, which is not exactly “friendly” to affiliate marketers.

Starting to create campaigns on Google Ads, perhaps following some of the hundreds of tutorials that are on YouTube to “make money in 24 hours,” is an assured recipe for getting banned.

There are several concepts and terms you need to know in order to do campaigns on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.

If this is the path you want to pursue, you need to spend time learning them.

With others

There are many who simply try to copy what has been created by others, particularly content posted on their blogs.

Again, this is a short-lived strategy because Google has become increasingly good at recognizing and penalizing cheaters.

In addition, by copying you also risk being reported for copyright infringement, and you could be fined or even banned from your hosting, which means you would lose your site completely.

For merchant

Affiliate marketing is effective not only on the marketers’ side, but also and especially on the sellers’ side.

After all, they are the ones who provide the opportunity to be able to work by opening doors to affiliates by creating an affiliate program.

In the case of merchants, Affiliate Marketing is a very powerful tool for two main reasons.

The first, it is advertising for which you pay only after you have made a sale, so the upfront costs are very low.

The second, having hundreds or thousands of sites and/or influencers talking about your product greatly increases the strength of your brand.

The benefits obviously don’t stop there, but these in my opinion are the two main ones: cost effectiveness and brand growth.

Today, the tools and platforms to enable merchants to open and manage their affiliate program are many and of high quality.

What is necessary to do is:

  1. Set up the platform
  2. Create terms and conditions
  3. Set up a payment system
  4. Set up systems and controls antri-fraud
  5. Establish rules for affiliate selection

Case studies

Still not convinced of the potential of Affiliate Marketing?

Here’s a brief roundup of real-world case studies to discover what others like you have been able to achieve.

1. Niche Site Success Case Studies by Project 24

“Concrete examples of people who followed the courses to the letter and replaced their income in less than 24 months.”

2. How We Sold An 18-Month-Old Site For Mid 6 Figures

“And The Exact Tactics We Used To Grow It This Fast”

3. Project Cashflow: How to Build a Niche Site from Day One

“I entered a new niche I’ve been eying for over a year — and I’m not looking to get in and out quick. I’m in it to win it for the long-haul, and you’re invited to join me on the journey.”

4. Going From Zero To $10K In Monthly Revenue

“Follow the steps we are taking to grow a content site from $0 to $10k a month in under 24 months.”

5. Helping Choose Wheels Grow 124%

“Their site had been hit with a Google penalty and traffic was down 80%. See how we helped one affiliate partner to recover [and grow 124% in 6 months].”

6. Zero to $20k/month in a Year

“Helping people make decisions is a big business! In fact, these two Side Hustle Show listeners started a website to do just that, and it’s now bringing in $17-20k a month.”

FAQ

Can a beginner do affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is especially good for beginners because it allows them to start a business without the need for start-up capital. The training material also free of charge is a lot and well accessible.

What is an example of affiliate marketing?

An example of Affiliate Marketing is when you search for a product on Google, e.g., “best cheap blender,” enter a site that compares the top 5 models, click on a model, end up on Amazon and buy it. The last link you followed was an affiliate link. Amazon will pay the website owner a commission for your purchase.

How do affiliates get paid?

In affiliate marketing, affiliates are paid on performance. They receive a commission of various kinds only after a specific action has occurred, usually a sale, or a registration, or the viewing of an advertisement.

How can I become an affiliate marketer?

To become an affiliate marketer, you need to have a strategy and a means of generating traffic (usually a website), select a niche market, sign up for an affiliate program, and start promoting the relevant product to earn on sales.

What is a Super Affiliate?

A Super Affiliate is often defined as an affiliate capable of generating more than USD 100,000 per year. In reality they simply mean those affiliates who perform significantly above average within a program or affiliate network.

Filippo Ucchino

I've been doing affiliate marketing in the past 12 years in some of the most competitive niches, mostly through blogging, but also with paid advertising and other channels.

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