How to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing in 2022 (Step-By-Step)

Struggling with your online business and trying to figure out how to succeed in affiliate marketing?

And now you are probably questioning the whole industry and whether you can make money with it or it is just a myth.

Don’t worry, I have been in your place!

And that’s why I wrote this article in order to give you 13 helpful tips on how to become a successful affiliate marketer in this ever-growing industry.

These tips will help you, with time, to know how to approach your audience and promote to them what they could benefit from and what would make you money in the process.

 

So, without further ado, let’s dive in with the 13 tips on becoming successful with affiliate marketing:

13 Tips to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing?

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1 – Make Your Intention to Help, Not to Make Money

And this applies to every other kind of business, online and offline.

The thing with making money online is that most people see it just as a method of printing free money without giving something in return.

And this is why most people fail in making money online with any method in general, and with affiliate marketing in particular.

If you think about any successful online or offline business, then you will find that the MAIN reason behind its success is because it provides value to people and helps them solve their problems or improve their lives.

It is a two-way road, like in this image.

Take Amazon for example, the reason they have achieved this success is that because they provide the best experience for the user when it comes to shopping online due to the security of the payments made by customers, the return policy, the convenience when you are using their platform to shop and buy online and the fast shipping times at the lowest possible cost.

This is the unique value of this company that made it achieve this level of trust and success.

And the same applies to any other successful business.

If you don’t make something useful to people, then you are not going to make any money.

 

How does this apply to succeeding with affiliate marketing?

It applies by the fact that our mission as affiliate marketers is to help people solve their problems and improve their lives by recommending the products and the programs that really help them at the lowest possible cost, and not by recommending crappy products sold at high prices just so that we make big commissions.

2 – It IS a Business, Not a Hobby

Another fatal mistake that makes most of the people fail online, and I don’t blame them.

The main reason of this mistake is that most people who try making money online have never started any business in the offline world and don’t know what it really takes to make an income generating business in the first place.

Instead, people come with the employee mindset and think that they can just do a specific task a few times a week and that’s it, the money will start pouring in.

Or worse, they see some fake guru’s pitch in a sales video that promises them to make a million dollar in the first month by clicking few clicks a day on their phone screen and that’s it.

And this is wrong.

Making an income online means creating a real business that takes time and energy before reaping the rewards.

You need to put in the real effort consistently in order to create something of value that helps others and makes you money.

And that’s fine.

Actually, that’s great. Because it if was that easy, then everybody would do it and it would stop working.

Also, at least with an online business, you can start a real business for as low investment as under $500, like it is with affiliate marketing.

In addition, with affiliate marketing in particular, you can choose which hours of the day you want to work and where you want to work from instead of committing to working 9-5 from an office.

3 – Choose a Profitable Niche for Affiliate Marketing to Work on (And One That You Would Love to Work on)

You can read my guide on how to Choose a profitable niche for affiliate marketing, but for the purpose of this article, I’m mentioning the niche selection because it is one of the big reasons why most people give up too soon when trying to make money with affiliate marketing.

For example, people might go for a niche because they saw someone in an affiliate marketing training course building a business around that specific niche, and thus, they think it is safer to go after that niche and replicate what their coach did.

And this is why they fail, it is because they end up using the same method, content, advertising campaigns, audience targeting, …etc. in order to promote the same offer to the same people that their trainer promoted to.

Soon enough, that niche becomes over-saturated due to the huge number of affiliates in it, which makes it too competitive and unprofitable.

In addition, as explained in the previous point, in order to succeed at affiliate marketing or any other business, you need to treat it as a business and give the consistent effort for not a short period of time and be patient before making any money.

And in order to be patient, you need to choose a niche that you would like to work on for a long period of time, and not for a month or two.

And this is why and where most people give up on affiliate marketing.

They go after a niche because they heard that there’s money in it, or because many affiliate marketer are in that niche, and they think it is safer to join the big crowd, which is WRONG.

You can make money and succeed with affiliate marketing in almost any niche, but the key is to put the effort consistently until you start making money, and that’s why you need to select a niche that you like or a niche that you are interested in.

Joining a crowded niche just because you saw others in that niche might set you up for failure because after a while, you will feel exhausted and you won’t be able to continue.

 

So, what if you had already started with a niche that you are not interested in?

Simply, take a smart and courageous decision and start over with another niche that you would like to work on for a long period of time, like years for example.

Starting over with a new niche is better than continuing in the same niche where you are not moving the needle because you are not really interested in it, or worse, moving to another method of making money online because as you know, it always looks greener on the other side.

This niche could be a hobby that you practice, something you are passionate about, something you learned from your job (and you like it), or maybe something you are really interested in learning about.

4 – Get a Brandable Domain Name & Create a Simple Website (Even if You Start with a Free One)

You might ask yourself: why do I need a website? or can’t I succeed with affiliate marketing without a website?

And while you can succeed with affiliate marketing without a website through different ways, but it is still not something that I recommend as not owning your own website doesn’t help you build a long term, sustainable income stream.

For example, if you rely on a Facebook page or group in order to promote products as an affiliate, then you can’t control who will see your offers because the reach on such platforms is continuously decreasing.

In addition, with such platforms, you need to keep posting everyday in order to show your offers to people, which turns to become spammy if you do it.

And on top of that, you don’t even own the group or the page you created because the platform (Facebook or YouTube) has the right to shut it down at anytime for a simple mistake you make that is against their terms and conditions.

While if you have a website, no one can take it away from you.

And you can use a website and get visitors to your offers from any traffic method including the social media platform.

But your website remains their and it remains your asset.

And most important, is that if you write content that is seo friendly, then you can get the traffic from Google search engine for a long time for every single post that you created instead of posting daily on Facebook, Twitter or any other place.

And creating a website today is not that difficult, actually, you can start by creating a free affiliate marketing website in 30 seconds only thanks to the easy website builder at Wealthy Affiliate.

And you don’t need to worry about the technical stuff or about having any experience with websites. Thanks to WordPress cms, you can create a simple, good-looking website and manage it without coding or technical expertise.

In addition, the support team at Wealthy Affiliate will take care of managing and maintaining the servers in order to ensure working smoothly and securely all the time.

5 – Research What People Need & Create Quality Content to Help Them

Now that you have taken care of creating your website, now it is time to do the real work that will help you succeed at affiliate marketing and make money online.

Your role as an affiliate marketer is to research your niche, see what your audience need help with, and create useful content (blog posts) that helps them and offers them solutions for their problems through your affiliate link.But the key is to make the research and to put the effort into creating helpful content for the things they need help with.

And in order to make people able to find your content, then you need to optimize it for search engines so that Google will find it and rank it high on the search engine results page.

And this doesn’t require learning technical skills or coding as everything can be easily managed through the keyword research you do and through optimizing your blog posts properly for search engines inside your website’s WordPress dashboard.

6 – Find Profitable Affiliate Programs Related to Your Niche & Promote Them

Now that you have created the content that helps people solve their problems or improve their lives, it is time to monetize your blog with the right affiliate offers.

And there are affiliate programs in almost every possible niche for every type of product that you can think of.

For example, Amazon’s affiliate program allows you to promote almost anything that is sold on Amazon as an affiliate.

And there are many other affiliate programs that are either hosted on the merchants’ websites, or hosted by an affiliate network like ClickBank and Maxbounty.

You can check my guide on how to find affiliate programs for the 7 completely FREE methods and tools for finding affiliate programs that you can succeed with.

But remember, if you want to become a successful affiliate marketer, then you need to promote what really helps people and provides value, and not just to promote the overpriced crappy products like many affiliates do.

Affiliate marketing is a legit way of making money online, but some affiliates make it look like a scam because of dishonest practices and recommendations that they intend to use in order to make money quickly without providing value to people.

I wrote more about what to do and what to avoid in order to be a legit affiliate marketer in my article: is affiliate marketing legit?

Feel free to check it out.

7 – Be Consistent, Persistent & Patient

Remember when I said that this is a business and not a hobby? Then treat it as such!

If you come with the mindset of an employee, then you are expecting to get paid starting from the first week, which is highly unlikely to happen with any kind of online business, including affiliate marketing.

Most people give up too soon and don’t succeed with affiliate marketing because it takes a few months of doing the work before starting to make any money, and that comes from the reasons mentioned earlier regarding the cheesy sales pitches they saw earlier from someone who is trying to sell them his “make thousands today formula”.

And when they start and don’t see the money rolling in during the first few days, they give and think that affiliate marketing is a scam.

Or maybe they go after the wrong niche, and after one month or more, they get demotivated when they see that they are doing something that they don’t like, and they give up as well.

The key to succeeding in any business is to keep going, learning from your mistakes, adapt, and then go harder.

If you found that the niche you are in is not interesting to you to an extent that makes it difficult for you to keep working on, then switch over to another niche that you would like to keep working on.

But if you are thinking of ditching the whole affiliate marketing thing because you think that some other method is easier, then let me tell you that every single method of making money online or offline has its own learning curve that takes time to go through.

And actually, Most of other methods of making money online need you to put more work on consistent basis in order to make money with them, like dropshipping where you need to fulfill orders by yourself, or like trading where you need to keep following up with the news on daily basis in order to maybe, be able to anticipate the market from time to time.

Affiliate marketing is my #1 recommended method of making passive income online as it is the most passive one, and it is the one that is associated with the lowest possible risk and one that you can start for the lowest possible investment.

8 – Track Your Progress, See What Works & Double Down on That

Another mistake that make people unable to succeed with affiliate marketing is that they don’t track their progress and analyze their results.

After you have made the effort into creating helpful content and you started promoted products as an affiliate, you need to track your progress and see what worked, why it worked and double down on that.

And you need to see what didn’t work, analyze it to learn the reasons, fix it, and avoid doing the same mistakes in the future.

And that’s why you need to use tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other tools such as the ranking tracker tool at Jaaxy in order to stay on top of your rankings and traffic in order to see how well you are doing.

9 – Don’t Put All of Your Eggs in One Basket

And this doesn’t contradict the previous tips.

Like any other business, I don’t recommend that you put all of your eggs in one basket in order to not risk losing everything overnight due to something unexpected.

For example, if you build all of your business around promoting one specific product and that product dies off, or if you were promoting one software or digital product, and for some reason, the owner of that product decides to shut down the affiliate program, or maybe, to discredit you for your commissions or cut the commission rate in half like what Amazon did several times, or in some cases, they decided to stop selling that product, then you risk losing all of your income overnight if you couldn’t find an alternative to that product.

 

That’s why if you want to succeed with affiliate marketing on the long run, then you need to build it around a niche and not around a single product.

That way, if some affiliate program stops working for some reason, you can easily find an alternative product to promote to the same audience.

Another point to take note of is the web traffic sources.

Although I highly recommend that you start your own affiliate website and that you consider SEO to be the main method of driving traffic to that website and to your offers, as it is the most evergreen method and the one that has the highest ROI, but I also recommend that you also consider other traffic methods when necessary such as the paid ads on Google itself and on social media platform, or maybe some of the 13 effective ways of increasing your blog traffic for free.

And most important, start building your email list when you start getting enough traffic.

This way, you minimize the negative effect your blog might get due to some update in Google’s search algorithm, and you also make the best out of your current blog content by promoting it to wider audience that might be interested in what you offer, but they might not search for it on search engines.

10 – Scale Your Business to Become a Super Affiliate

This is related to the previous two points where you need to find what works and brings you more traffic and customers or money, and double down on it by promoting it to other audiences using the paid ads or email marketing campaigns.

And this includes as well creating more of the content that will lead more traffic to your best performing offers, or by looking for other products that you could promote and make money with through seeing what kind of affiliate offers is making you money.

This is how you transform yourself from a normal successful affiliate marketer into a super affiliate and you create more stability in your business and income.

Or maybe, after having a solid website, you can expand it to other sub-niches within the same big niche you are in, or maybe you start looking for other marketing angles to promoting the same products you are already making money with.

 

11 – Use The Necessary Tools

Succeeding with affiliate marketing, and any other business, although relys mainly on your efforts and on how you treat it, but it also can be greatly affected by the quality of the tools you use.

For example, if you are hosting your website on a hosting server that goes down continuously, or on one that is slow or insecure, then don’t be surprised if people who visit it will keep bouncing off to other websites, which will eventually make Google drop your rankings.

You need a good hosting in order to have a reliable website and offer the best user experience to your audience and help convert them into buyers and make money in the process.

And same for many other tools such as the keyword research tool that you need in order to know what people are searching for and create content for them, or like a content editor and checker that will help you create grammarly correct content that makes people trust you and take by your recommendations.

Luckily, I use many premium tools for affiliate marketing including the premium managed WP web hosting for FREE as I have a premium membership at Wealthy Affiliate where I got the best training on affiliate marketing.

And what is great is that even the free Starter membership at this platform provide some access to many of these tools for free.

12 – Join Affiliate Marketing Communities & Learn from Others

Entrepreneurship is hard and lonely.

And you, as someone who trying to figure out how to start your first online business and succeed in affiliate marketing, you will feel doubtful from time to time, especially that you won’t make money from the first day.

And such doubt, if you let it grow, it will eventually make you give up before seeing any results.

And that’s why it is important to stay in contact with other people who are doing the same, and with people who are had already created success with affiliate marketing.

Seeing people who already did what you are trying to do will keep you fueled and will keep you on the track knowing that what you are doing works if you give the time.

And more important, communicating with other successful affiliate marketers will help you learn about some of the tips that can help you succeed faster and bigger, and can also help you learn about the mistakes that these people did in the past so that you avoid doing the same and wasting your time on what doesn’t work.

There are many communities and forums for affiliate marketing out there such as Warrior Forum, AffLift, the Super Affiliate System, Lurn Insider, Affilorama, Savage Affiliates, Affiliate Marketing sub-Reddits and FB groups, and many others.

But my favorite is Wealthy Affiliate is it the one that has a bigger community (1.4 M+ members), and it is the one that is most active where everyone is willing to help others succeed.

This is in addition to the fact that this platform provides me with all what I need in order to succeed as an affiliate marketer from the step-by-step training, to the weekly live webinars, to the premium web hosting, keyword tool and many other tools all for no extra cost as long as I had already joined for the training.

13 – Keep Learning to Stay Successful

Learning is a never-ending process.

This applies to any field that you want to succeed at, including affiliate marketing.

You need to learn from others in order to expedite the process towards finding success in your affiliate marketing business and in order to stay on top of things when it comes to new trends, tools and opportunities that you can utilize in order to build a successful affiliate marketing business that makes you money.

And you can find the information anywhere by reading articles, joining other affiliates email lists, watching YouTube videos, …etc.

But if you are just getting started, then you might get overwhelmed with the huge load of information out there.

And in this case, the best way to increase your chances in becoming successful in affiliate marketing is to learn from a step-by-step training that shows you every single detail in an organized manner instead of confusing yourself with many sources, teaches and “gurus” that either provide you with an outdated information, or sometimes with what might actually harm your progress instead of helping you.

And there Are many training programs that are great for both, beginners and advanced affiliate marketers, but my top recommended programs are:

1. Wealthy Affiliate (offers a free plan and many tools without upsells)
2. Project 24 by Income School (No free plan)

You can click on the link of each one above in order to learn more about them through my detailed reviews, but my top recommendation is still Wealthy Affiliate due to the 13 reasons why you should to join Wealthy Affiliate that I wrote about earlier.

And after you have learned from the scratch into becoming a successful affiliate marketer, you can then expand and join other communities and learn from other programs and courses in order to increase your knowledge and skills and finally, make more money.

 

Conclusion – Is it Difficult to Succeed at Affiliate Marketing?

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No, it is not difficult to succeed with affiliate marketing if you follow a proper guidance and if you follow the above mentioned thirteen tips and stay patient and consistent, and if you make your job to help people in your niche.

Your Next Step?

My advice, if you are still a beginner, or if you are already making some money but not enough for a full time income, then my opinion is to choose one training program and follow through it to the end instead of going here and there to learn something small every time.

As I mentioned earlier, my recommendation in this case is Wealthy Affiliate as it is where I personally learned affiliate marketing and because it provides all the tools and support you need for no extra cost as long as you have joined the training they provide.

This is in addition to the amazing and supportive community there.

And most important is that there’s no risk in joining them as they provide a free Starter membership that you can join today without entering your credit card info.

You can learn more about this platform and community through my detailed Wealthy Affiliate review here where I show you how it looks from the inside.

And if you have any question about this article, or if you have other tips worth adding to this article that would help others become successful in affiliate marketing, then feel free to leave it below in the comments’ section and I would be happy to reply to you asap 🙂

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