How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Free – The Easiest Guide

 

Since you are looking to learn how to start affiliate marketing for free, I assume that you are a bit newbie in this field and still you aren’t sure about where to start from and don’t want to start the wrong way and lose money on expensive tools and affiliate marketing training courses that might not be worth the money.

 

You are completely right with this mindset! Unfortunately, there are a lot of scams and overpriced training programs out there that are being promoted as the “best program to make money online overnight”. And many of these programs are either not  created by people who have been long in the industry, and hence, not much of a real value, if any. Or maybe they are good but overpriced and don’t provide you with the good free tools to start with.

 

This is where many people get scammed and start with some of these programs and don’t see real results from what they are doing, and they eventually give up on the best way for generating passive income online, Affiliate Marketing.

 

I have been at this stage earlier and this is why I’m writing this article: to help newbie affiliate marketers start for free and understand the basics of what it takes to create a profitable affiliate marketing business and build the foundation for their business before they pay any money.

 

And most important, I don’t want you to get scammed by purchasing and overpriced training program. This is why I’m going to lead you to the most comprehensive affiliate marketing training platform, Wealthy Affiliate,  that have both unlimited free and paid membership plans. Not only that, but both plans provide you with the necessary tools to create your affiliate marketing business for no extra cost! This is something you won’t find at any other program.

 

So now, let’s first understand the basic elements you need to create your affiliate marketing business for free, and why you need them:

 

1 – Get Involved In One Proper, Free Training

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Why do you need a specific training while there are lots of articles and YouTube videos? Well, it is because there are a lot of articles and YouTube videos, you will get confused instead of getting educated.

Many bloggers and YouTubers provide wrong or insufficient and unorganised information, teach outdated stuff, or worse, many teach black-hat methods that you should not practice as these will get you lose your efforts by getting punished by the search engines; the best source of free traffic to your business.

 

While by following a proven, high quality training that is developed by people who have been in this industry for + 14 years, such as Wealthy Affiliate University, you will learn only the legit ways which, if applied properly, will guarantee stability in your business in the long run.

 

2 – Build A Free, Easy To Work With Website

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Why a website? well, because you are going to build a business that is going to stay there for years to come. And for that to happen, you will need a place where you can build your brand at. And don’t worry, using a WordPress website won’t require any technical expertise.

 

Using a website for affiliate marketing is the best way to get free traffic consistently.

 

If you were planning to promote products as an affiliate through the social media platforms, whether free posts or paid ads, then you are not building a consistent, sustainable business. Many of social media platforms ban promoting affiliate products and programs if you try to drive people directly from the Social Media platform to the product’s website. You need to drive them to your own website, and then, from your website to the product’s website.

 

Another reason why you need a website, is that content on social media platforms doesn’t last long. If you post something on Facebook or Twitter today, people can only see it today and maybe tomorrow. After that, it will not show in the news feed to anyone. Which means you need to keep posting the same content over and over again, or worse, keep paying for the expensive adds so that you keep your posts showing in front of people who might not always buy the products you are promoting.

 

While if you have a website, and you optimize it to rank on Google and other search engines, then you are going to get FREE consistent traffic from people who are actively looking for the products you are promoting through reviews with a high intention to buy these products. Search Engine traffic is the best to monetize your website.

 

Don’t worry if you are not a techie person, at Wealthy Affiliate, you can get a free website that is really easy to work with without any prior technical knowledge. If you can use your Gmail account then you can use their web hosting platform and create your website in only 30 seconds. Yes, 30 seconds and not 30 minutes. Not convinced? Click here to watch a video lesson on how create a website within 30 seconds.

 

3 – Use A Free, Advanced Keyword Tool In Order To Find Opportunities

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A Keyword Research Tool is a tool that you use to see what terms people use the most to look for answers, information and products using the search engines.

What you are mainly going to do is that you will see which keyword phrases people use in their search and write articles related to these keywords and rank your content on the search engines so that it appears to people using these search terms in the future.

 

There are many free keyword tools, such as Google Keyword Planner,  that will give you good insights on the possible keywords that you can target while creating your website’s content. But you will need more advanced tools that make your life easier. This is because some keywords that you will find through Google Keyword Planner have already been used by many other website owners and it became difficult to rank your new website under those keywords.

 

But if you use an advanced keyword research tool, you will be able to know how much competition (other websites) there is on each search term that you might target while writing your articles.

 

Unfortunately, most advanced keyword tools are expensive, starting from $49/month or even more. But luckily, at Wealthy Affiliate, whether you have a free or paid membership, you can enjoy using their advanced keyword research tool for no additional cost.

 

The following screenshot is an example of a research I did to find opportunities for writing articles in the Basketball niche, You can see that there are many ideas to write about. The search phrase “best basketball training equipment” has around 96 average monthly searches, and has only 69 competing articles on other websites. This means that you can potentially target this keyword and  target and get ranked on page one of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

 

 

4 – Start Content Creation With A Great Editing Tool

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While you can still use Microsoft Word for writing the content before you publish it to your website, you would still need to do lots of editing after you copy and paste it to your website.

 

But at Wealthy Affiliate Platform, you can use their content creation and management tool that will help you with creating neat, grammar and spelling mistakes free content with the possibility of easily adding and editing images within your articles before publishing them into your website.

 

You can even use this tool to plan a head how many articles you want to write in a specific period of time, how many keywords in every article, and more important, you can create templates for your articles that would make it easier to start every new article later.

 

Following screenshot is from the tool I’m mentioning here. The interface is very clean. And see below how it gives you the number of words, paragraphs and headings that you have used while creating a piece of content.

 

 

 

5 – Set Up A YouTube Channel And Create Video Content

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A YouTube Channel is a very great tool that you can utilize to build your brand and drive more traffic to your website. If you want to explain something that is difficult to describe in words, then you can make a video about it, publish it on YouTube and leave a link to your website in the description of the video.

This way, more people might get to know your website, which means, more possible clients.

 

YouTube is free to use, and Screencast-O-Matic is a video creation tool that have a free plan.

 

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So, the above mentioned tools are the ones that you would need to start with. And as your website grows and you create more content, you would want to use other tools that will help your business improve and grow even more.

 

Following are other tools to use not necessary in the beginning, but after you have built a good foundation, you can start utilizing them.

 

6 – As Your Business Grows, You Would Want To Build An Email List, You Will Need A Free Autoresponder

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This is not a step you take from day one. You need first to create some quality content, get it indexed and ranked on the search engines, start getting some traffic, and then, you can integrate your website with an Email Autoresponder Service so that you start collecting your website’s visitors’ email addresses.

 

You need this because you will able to reach your Email subscribers at any time, send them links to your new articles once you publish them, or you can send them offers of products or programs that might be useful for them, …etc.

 

There are many great paid Autoresponders out there, but most of them don’t have a free plan. They might have a free 14-30 days trial and then you have to pay.

 

Luckily, Mailchimp Has a free plan that you can start with and keep using without the need to upgrade to a paid membership. Unless, your list grows into a big number of subscribers, then you would need to upgrade to a paid plan. But as beginner, the free plan is more than enough.

 

You can learn how to easily integrate an Email autoresponder software with your website through the many training video lessons available at wealthy affiliate. So, don’t worry if this seems scary to you 🙂

 

7 – Integrate Google Search Console And Bing Webmaster Tools Into Your Website

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These two tools are free of charge great tools that you can easily integrate with your website in order to help Google, Bing and Yahoo to understand your website and help your content getting indexed and ranked faster.

 

These are not necessary as a beginner, but as your website grows, you will benefit a lot from using them as you can get insights on the status of your contents’ rankings on the different search engines. You can use these insights in order to further optimize and tweak your website content in order to improve your rankings.

 

Don’t worry again, these are not mandatory, yet helpful. And most important, they are very easy to integrate with your website. There’s a lot of training material on that at wealthy affiliate.

 

Following is a screenshot from Google Search Console showing the data for a new website, how many times the website pages showed up in the SERP, which keywords the website is ranking for, position of website for each keyword, number of clicks, …etc.

 

 

 

8 – Integrate Google Analytics Into Your Website

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This free tool is not necessary at the beginning as well. But you can use it later when you have traffic flowing to your website in order to get insights about your website visitors.

 

You can tell which traffic sources they are coming from, which pages on your website they visit the most, how long they stay on each page on average, and many other useful data that you can use to measure how effective your efforts are at building your website. And from there, you can see what works the best and replicate it, and what doesn’t and try to  understand why and fix it.

 

 

9 – Build A Social Media Presence

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Although I said earlier that this is not a sustainable source of traffic that you can use, however, it can help in getting some traffic that might also help your website get higher rankings on the search engines.

 

Most important though, is to understand your audience and know which platform is better to utilize based on your affiliate marketing niche. While some niches can work well on Facebook, some might work better with LinkedIn, and some can work just fine on both. And the same applies to other social platforms.

 

 

Conclusion

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So, you are now ready to begin with affiliate marketing the right way. You have all the necessary training and tools in one place for you to take your time and learn for free and without paying for expensive tools that you will not need at the beginning.

 

And most important, you won’t get scammed by someone’s overpriced training program, as I provided you with the necessary platform that provides you not only with the best training for affiliate marketing, but also with all the necessary tools you will need to start you affiliate marketing business for free.

 

Click here to read my review for wealthy affiliate, and you will find a blue button through which you can get to join for free, no risk, no credit card requested. And you can stay for the free membership forever. Do it now without further research, or you will never start your affiliate bushiness.

 

 

And if you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section below and I will be happy to answer them!

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