You’ve heard about affiliate marketing – now you want to know what it is, how it works & how affiliate marketers actually money, right?
Well, you’re in the right place.
In this blog post, I’m going to explain everything you need to know about affiliate marketing, including how you can get started with it (and begin making money from it) even if you’re just a beginner.
What Is Affiliate Marketing? | How Does It Work? | How Do Affiliates Make Money? | How To Get Started As a Beginner | Bonus: Get 1-on-1 Coaching (For Free)
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing, in short, essentially involves promoting products or services for companies online in return for commissions which are paid on successful sales.
So as an example you could sign up to become an affiliate of Amazon (which is free to do) & then you’d gain the ability to promote their products & earn money if any of the people you promoted them to then went on to buy them.
Make sense?
And the great thing about affiliate marketing is that it’s really easy to do, even if you’re brand new because you literally only have to focus on the “promoting” side of things.
You don’t have to handle customer support, refunds, or anything like that.
Heck, you don’t even have to talk to anybody at all.
You just promote and get paid… Plus the other great thing about it is that there’s literally no limit on the amount that you can earn with it.
The harder you work at it, the more you stand to earn with it.
As a result, many affiliates are known to earn as much as 5-figures per month.
Some, even earn as much as 6-figures per month.
Pretty crazy stuff… But what’s crazier is the fact that those kinds of figures actually aren’t overly unrealistic. They can be achieved by anybody that’s willing to put in the work.
And almost all companies that have an online presence have an affiliate program these days, including the big names like Best Buy, Walmart & even Amazon like we just mentioned.
Amazon’s program, for example, is called Amazon Associates, as shown below:
They pay people up to a whopping 12% in commissions when they manage to refer somebody who then goes on to make a purchase, which I think you’ll agree is a pretty nice commission.
Especially since as we mentioned above, you literally don’t have to do anything other than send them to the website. Amazon handles everything, yet you still get paid.
So it’s safe to say that affiliate marketing provides an excellent way to earn money.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
The affiliate marketing process is actually pretty darn simple. In fact, it’s so simple that after hearing about it you’ll probably wonder why you haven’t gotten started with it already.
You see, when you join an affiliate program, you basically get assigned with a unique membership ID.
So again, using the Amazon example from earlier, let’s say that you sign up to their affiliate program (Amazon Associates) and you get assigned the membership ID #123456.
You’re then able to link to the Amazon website and attach this ID onto the end of the URL, which means that when somebody goes via that link, they’ll be traced back to you.
It’s called an affiliate link, and here’s an example of what it would look like:
www.amazon.com/?aid=123456
When somebody clicks it, you’ll be able to see that you’ve received a “click”, and when somebody makes a purchase, you’ll get rewarded with the commission for the sale.
Plus, most affiliate programs will still pay you commissions even if the visitor you sent ends up buying a different product to the one that you sent them to, or they’ll pay you commissions on the total if they end up purchasing multiple.
But I know what you’re probably thinking…
What if somebody clicks that link, then shuts down their device & comes back later to make the purchase?
Do you still get paid?
Well here’s the deal. Most affiliate programs leverage something called “cookies”, which is a small text file that is saved to a users device in the background via their web browser.
The “cookie” can contain a little bit of text, and an expiration date.
So what the companies tend to do when somebody clicks via your affiliate link is set a small cookie on the user’s device containing your affiliate ID to track the purchase to you if they do indeed come back later.
If they come back to the website & the cookie is still present on their device, you still get the commission.
Cool, right?
But it’s worth pointing out that how long the cookie sticks around depends on the individual program & their policies. Some companies, like Amazon, only save them for 24 hours.
Other companies though save them for 30 days… Some, even longer.
And there’s always the chance that the user may happen to clear their cookies manually – but either way, this is a fallback plan anyway because most people make their purchases right away.
The setting of the cookie is just an “extra earner”, just in case they don’t.
How Do Affiliate Marketers Make Money?
There are many different ways that affiliate marketers make money. Some promote their affiliate links via social media, some promote their links using paid advertising…
And some use an awesome, free & easy method known as search engine optimisation.
Search engine optimisation is my all-time favourite method for affiliate marketing & it’s also my top-recommended method for anybody that’s new & looking to get started.
All you need to do to see success using the search engine optimisation method is create small, simple webpages (and there’s a free tool that’ll let you do this which I’ll share with you in a moment).
You see, if you create content online, search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing etc automatically discover it & list it within their results as an option for people to click on.
So as an example let’s say you had an interest in dogs, and you decided to create a random little webpage about what you believed to be the best dog toothbrushes.
That page would then get discovered by the likes of Google & listed within their results whenever somebody searched for something related to “dog toothbrushes”, like this:
This means that you’d then begin getting visitors coming to that page because when people find themselves looking for dog toothbrushes, they’d get presented with that result & click on it to find out more.
So guess what you can do?
You can promote something to them as an affiliate… Which is exactly what the owner that webpage has done:
As you can see, next to each of the dog toothbrushes listed on that webpage there is a button which takes the visitor to the product page on Amazon via the owner’s affiliate link.
This means that from am a small one-time effort of creating that page, the owner of it will now be generating a completely passive income & that could keep on paying them for many years to come.
What’s better though is that there’s no limit on the amount of these pages you can create. The more you create, the more money you stand to make – it’s as simple as that.
How To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing
Now that you understand how affiliate marketing works & how affiliate marketers make money, you’re probably wondering how you can actually get started with it… Right?
Well, the good news is that this is also easy too.
There’s a platform called Wealthy Affiliate that’ll provide you with the step-by-step training & all of the tools you need (including the webpage builder), along with community support.
The best part? You don’t have to pay a thing.
Wealthy Affiliate offers you the ability to create a completely free Starter account. You can get inside, make a start on the lessons, build out your first website & chat with the community.
And free really means free.
You don’t have to give any credit card details, just an email will get you in. It’s 100% risk-free.
And in case you’re nervous about entering your email you can actually check out the first 10 lessons of the training course without signing up at all by clicking the buttons below:
Then, if you decide you like it you can opt to upgrade to the Premium membership.
The Premium membership gives you access to literally everything inside of Wealthy Affiliate & I want to stress that there are absolutely no upsells or “hidden costs” after that.
You can see what’s included here.
It costs just $49 per month if you pay monthly, or you can even bring that cost down to just $30 per month by paying for the full year upfront all in one go (for $359).
Definitely the best place to get started with affiliate marketing in my opinion & I too am actually a Wealthy Affiliate myself (I only recommend things I believe in).
Here’s a screenshot of my own personal Wealthy Affiliate profile:
Extra Bonus: Get My 1-on-1 Coaching (For FREE)
Here’s the deal. If you decide to join Wealthy Affiliate via my link & happen to go Premium, I’ll get paid a commission through their affiliate program at absolutely no extra cost to you.
With or without my link, Wealthy Affiliate will cost you $49/mo (or $30/mo if you pay for the full year).
However, if you do go via my link then in order to say thank you I will offer you my personal 1-on-1 mentorship & support to help put you on the fastest track to affiliate marketing success.
Sound fair?
I hope so.
And you don’t even need to go Premium right away either – you can still check it out first as a free Starter member, but just know that when you do go Premium, I’ll be ready to help.
So if you’re ready, you can create your free Starter account here right now.
I hope to see you on the inside & I’ll be looking forward to helping you launch your business. If you still have any questions though, then, of course, don’t hesitate to leave them below.
P.S. here’s the link to my Wealthy Affiliate profile again in case you want to reach out to me directly.
