Learn Affiliate Marketing Step-By-Step

Want someone to help you learn affiliate marketing step-by-step?

Then you have come to the right place.

I have been doing affiliate marketing for almost three years now and I have made many mistakes that I can help you know about them so that you avoid them and don’t waste your time doing the same thing.

I have created this 7-Steps Affiliate Marketing Learning process for you in order to know what you should do in order to become a successful affiliate marketer, so, stay with me.

And most important, don’t worry if you didn’t understand one of the steps, as I will lead you in the last section of this article into this great community that can help you learn affiliate marketing in more detail and in tiny steps.

But first of all,

How Does The Affiliate Marketing Model Work & Why Is It A Great Model?

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Affiliate marketing is a business model that works on rewarding you (the affiliate), on every new customer that you bring to a merchant who sells something online.

And in order to make this process happen properly and really make money with it and get credited for that money (affiliate commission), there are certain steps that you and the vendor or merchant must take in a certain sequence.

Here’s a brief on how the affiliate marketing model works in three steps:

1. You find a problem that people are looking to solve or something people want to buy.
2. You find an existing suitable solution, offer or product that they would benefit from buying.
3. you match both together (people/referrals & product/affiliate offer) and get a commission if people use the solution or product you recommend.

This is how simple the affiliate marketing model is when it comes to making money with it, especially that with this model:

• You DON’T need to create your own product.
• You don’t Ship anything.
• You don’t worry about customer support.
• You don’t deal with refunds & returns.
• No Face-to-face selling or even phone calls.
• You can do it virtually from anywhere as long as you have your laptop and an internet connection.
• You can choose the time you want to work because you won’t be talking to people directly.
• And many other benefits of learning and applying affiliate marketing to make income online.

And that’s why this is a great model and this is why I considered it to be the best way to create a passive income online.

However, despite being a simple model to understand and apply, affiliate marketing still needs some tools, skills and detailed steps to be taken in order to make sure that you:

• Reach the right audience.
• Find the right solution that suits them so that they buy it and you get the money.
• Use the right platform in order to build a sustainable affiliate marketing business that makes you money on the long run.
• Learn how to scale your affiliate marketing business.
• And much more.

And in order to learn all what you need and start the right way since the beginning of building your affiliate marketing business, I have created this simple 7-Steps process for learning affiliate marketing.

 

Learn Affiliate Marketing Step-By-Step

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1 – Research & Select A Group Of People To Help (Niche)

Here’s your first step in learning affiliate marketing.

You need to find a group of people who have something in common between them.

And this is what we call: a niche.

These people could be one of the following:

• People interested in the same topic (astrology, self-improvement, dating tips, …etc.).
• Have the same passion or hobby (painting, singing, playing piano, bicyling, …etc.).
• Something they own that needs supplies and tools (a pet, a gaming console, a garden, an RV, …etc.).
• Practice the same sport (basketball, football, …etc.).
• Practice the same profession (software engineers, accountants, lawyers, …etc.).
• Interested in fixing a certain type of problem (healing an injury or dealing with a health issue, fixing a broken appliance, …etc.).
• Looking for a solution to something (reducing the utility bills, fixing credit score, getting a loan, …etc.).

These are just some of the many ideas of how you can find a group of people to help and make money through affiliate marketing.

The importance of finding a niche comes from the fact that you will be spending time and effort researching a certain topic before you find answers to people’s questions and matching them with solutions, and if you want to do affiliate marketing in many niches, then you need to spend the same time doing the same steps over and over again for every niche, which will take long time from you without making any money.

While if you focus on one niche, then you can start creating content and promotions faster because you have done a big part of the research already.

And in order to find the niche that you want to build your affiliate marketing business around, you can either think of something that you already know about, or something you are interested in, such as:

• A hobby or a sport that you practice or you want to start practising.
• Skills you learned through your career.
• A certain pet breed that you know about.
• Stuff you like to read about or watch on TV such as comic books, DIY, diet programs, cooking, …etc.
• And so on.

Or you can go to an online marketplace such as:

• Amazon, eBay, Etsy and other marketplaces that sell physical stuff.
• ClickBank: A Marketplace that sells digital products such as online courses and ebooks.
• Udemy: An e-learning platforms that sells courses on almost every topic.

 

Another way is to go to online communities in order to find a group of people interested in a certain topic, such as:

• Reddit, where there’s a sub-Reddit on almost everything.
• Facebook Groups.
• Forums.

And you can dig deep inside the categories, subcategories and even products or courses in order to find ideas for a niche to choose for your affiliate marketing business.

And now, after you have found a niche to work on, you need to check if there are enough products to promote as an affiliate and make money with, which you will learn in the next step.

Last tip on choosing a niche for affiliate marketing: Use keyword tools such as Jaaxy and Google Keyword Planner in order to find if there’s a good search volume on topics related to your niche, and study the competition as well, like it is in the following screenshot from the tool I personally use, Jaaxy.

Do you have a niche in your mind that you want to study? Enter something related to that niche in the following box and you will be able to find results similar to the screenshot above using the same tool (Jaaxy).

 

You can also use Google Trends in order to find if the niche is stable, booming, dying, or if it is a seasonal niche in order to build a sustainable income with it.

For example, in this comparison that I made using Google Trends between Yoga, CryptoCurrency and Climbing, you can see that CC has peaked during the end of the year 2017 and then died off to a large extent.

However, both Yoga and Climbing remained popular and steady around the year during the last five years with an annual peak for Yoga around the month of January.

2 – Find Related Affiliate Products & Affiliate Programs

Now in order to promote something as an affiliate and get a commission when someone buys it through your recommendation, you need to get a unique link (affiliate link) that takes people to that product’s website/page and tracks the purchase when it happens so that you get credit for it and get paid your earned commission.

And this is why there’s something called an Affiliate Program.

The Affiliate Program is the system that defines and operates the agreement between you, the affiliate marketer, and the merchant or vendor who sells the product.

The affiliate program will let you know:

• What products or offers you can promote.
• How much you will get paid for each new sale or customer you bring.
• What your affiliate link is.
• How and when you will get paid.
• What tools can help you in your promotions.
• And more.

And in order to find products to promote in your niche, you need to look for the affiliate programs that allow you to promote such products.

I wrote an article about the different ways for finding affiliate programs, but here are the easiest two methods:

The first method is through going to Google, type in the search bar the name of your niche or a certain product along with the phrase “affiliate program”, and you will get a list of the available affiliate programs in that niche.

For example, you can type in “basketball affiliate programs”, or you can niche it down to “basketball drills affiliate program” or “basketball gear affiliate program”, and you will get a list of many affiliate program that you can apply to join and start promoting what they sell.

Another way to find products to promote through affiliate marketing is through going to the well-known online marketplaces (amazon, Etsy, Walmart, …etc.) or specific online stores (NFL Shop, NBA Store, …etc.) and scroll all the way down to the footer menu and look for links named as: “affiliate program”, “referral program”, “partner program”, …etc.

And you can click on that link and find the terms and conditions and apply to join these programs.

Note that some programs might have certain conditions such as having an active website or blog and could have a reviewing process, and some might approve your application immediately.

You can find the different products and the different affiliate programs for each product and compare the conditions of each program such as the commission rate, payout, country eligibility, …etc. in order to choose the program that you want to join.

For example, Amazon pays a commission of %1- on every item depending on the physical product category, while a vendor that sells an online course or ebook (dog training guide for example) might pay you up to 50% or even up to u or more of the course price because they have a better margin and much less cost to replicate the product.

Other companies, like web hosting companies might pay a fixed bounty for every new user you bring like the A2 Hosting affiliate program that pays $60/referral you bring, and Shopify affiliate program that pays $58/referral.

Make sure that there are many products and many affiliate programs in your niche in order to ensure sustainability and diversity in building your affiliate marketing business.

See also if these products are actually being purchased by people and they are happy with them through the reviews available online.

3 – Choose A Platform To Reach People & Help Them

Here you will choose a place where you will place your promotions through creating the helpful content that solves people problems, and matches them with the offers or products you want to promote.

And while you can use certain free platforms such as Facebook pages and groups, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, forums, …etc., and many ways for doing affiliate marketing without a website.

However, these methods come with lots of limitations as some of them don’t accept posting affiliate links on them.

And there’s the risk of being unsustainable as you build your business on platforms that you don’t own, and therefore, you risk losing everything overnight if your account gets closed for some reason on the platform you choose, or when they make changes to how they work like how Facebook dropped the organic reach of posts from pages.

Add to that the fact that people on social media platforms don’t necessary look for the stuff that you promote.

So, what is the right platform to build a sustainable affiliate marketing business?

A simple WordPress blog is how you should build your affiliate business.

WordPress is an easy-to-use, open-source, content management system (software) that allows you to easily create a website or a blog without any technical knowledge, coding or experience.

Add to that, the WordPress software is not owned by a certain organization or company, which means that no one can take your website away from you, it is yours, and you can choose where to keep it, on your own server, or on a shared server by a reputable company such as A2 Hosting or SiteRubix.

Don’t worry if this scares you, the last section of this article below will help you find a platform where you can learn how to create an affiliate website in 30 seconds and how to manage it without technical knowledge or experience.

4 – Find Their Questions & Create Helpful Answers & Content That Gets Traffic From Google

And after you build your website, you can now start creating content (blog posts) that answer people’s questions and help them solve their problems, and you can use different ways in order to drive people to your blog.

But the best method by far is by optimizing your content through small actions in order to make it appear in search engines such as Google and Bing FOR FREE when people look for what you have already written in your content, like the guy at the bottom of this screenshot.

I have written in detail about this in my blog post seo checklist, feel free to check it out.

This is a more evergreen and sustainable method than just posting links to your blog on Facebook or on forums because these platforms are often temporary and posts there won’t last for long.

While when you have good content on your blog that Google finds useful, it will remain available for a very long time and it will get you website visitors for free from Google.

And traffic from search engines is the best for affiliate marketing because these people are actively looking for the solutions or products you are promoting, and they are more likely to purchase compared to someone who is scrolling the Facebook feed watching funny pet videos.

5 – Monetize Your Content With Affiliate Products

Now after you have created the helpful content, it is time to monetize it with affiliate products.

Of course, there are many ways to monetize a blog other than affiliate marketing such as displaying banner ads and sponsored posts, but the best way is affiliate marketing because you have the most control over what promoted on your website, while with display ads you don’t have that much of a control.

Also, with affiliate marketing, you have many options to choose from if you follow the methods I mentioned in step #3 above in order to look for products to promote as an affiliate.

And in order to make your promotions convert and lead people to take the action you want them to take by purchasing something you promote or downloading something, you need to place your affiliate links in the right places in your content and tell people what they should expect to find if they click on them.

For example, if you are explaining to your audience how to take a certain measurement on an electrical device or on a cable, or if you teach them how to measure the blood pressure, you need to write the step-by-step procedure and when you mention the tools they need to use, you can say something like “click here to check the tool availability on Amazon” for example.

Or if you are writing a product review, let’s say: a certain Golf Club model or a DSLR camera model, you list all the main features of the model you are reviewing, the pros and cons, the price range, whether they should buy it or not, and finally, you leave a CTA (call to action) button that says: “click here to buy” or “click here to check the price”, like in this example:

 

6 – Scale With Other Methods Of Driving Traffic To Your Content

Now after you have created and monetized your content, and after you started getting organic traffic from Google and other search engines, and you have seen what posts people interact with and what they buy, you can start scaling your business by driving more targeted traffic to your blog through many other free methods, or even paid ads, such as:

• Affiliate marketing with YouTube the right way by creating a YouTube channel where you create video tutorials that explain what is difficult to explain with text, and lead people from their to blog posts on your website that have affiliate links and promotions.
• Be active in helping others on forums and Q&A platforms where people ask for help in your niche and you can give comprehensive and helpful answers and tips and then, lead them to your blog for getting more resources.
• Create a Facebook group on your niche and create helpful posts, and from time to time, you link back to your blog posts that have affiliate products.
• Start building an email list by collecting your blog’s visitors’ email addresses and sending them automated messages using an autoresponder like GetResponse or Aweber, and in your emails, you provide value and teach people more about important topics and useful products in your niche, and you also lead them sometimes to your blog posts where you have affiliate promotions.
• Use paid ads in order to get more targeted traffic in a shorter time through the detailed targeting you can do using Facebook ads, Google search ads and YouTube ads.
• And many other ways.

But before you start using all of these methods, you need to create a good amount of useful content that really helps people and tells them how would they benefit from buying something before you ask them to click on your affiliate link and buy what you promote.

7 – Rinse & Repeat Steps 4-6 In Order To Become A Successful Affiliate Marketer

After you have found some success and made money with some of the posts you have created and after you have scaled those posts, you can now go and create more helpful blog posts answering other questions and helping more people, and you can monetize those posts as well and scale them with other sources of traffic in addition to seo.

And in order to know how to write more blog posts quickly and scale your affiliate business with content, you need to organize your work by batching some tasks together, and maybe, hire others to write content for you, as follows:

• Research and find new topic ideas to write about or questions to answer. (Decide on a number of posts, let’s say 5-10)
• Decide on the sub-topics in each blog post and what you want to promote inside those posts.
• Start by writing the content for all of the blog posts in row, or you can hire freelance writers to write them for you.
• Edit the first draft and correct any typos or grammar mistakes and add relevant images and videos if needed.
• Optimize your posts for seo and publish them in different days in order to maintain consistency.

And keep repeating the same steps mentioned above, along with the main steps #4-6 mentioned earlier in order to scale with both, content on your affiliate blog and traffic sources.

And if you want to scale faster, then hiring freelance writers might be the best option for you on online freelancing platforms such as iWriter, Guru, Upwork and Fiverr for anywhere from $10-$50 per article depending on the niche, article length and quality, speed, …etc..

Even by hiring only one qualified writer can be helpful and can free your time to focus on more critical tasks such as finding new opportunities, ideas, products to promote, traffic sources to scale with, …etc.

And now my friend, you have learned the affiliate marketing step-by-step process.

And if you still are confused, then don’t worry, because I promised you earlier that I will provide you with the community that will help you in your journey and with the resources and tools you need to start with, which you will find in the last section of this article.

 

How Much Can You Make With The Affiliate Marketing Model?

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How much you can make with affiliate marketing depends on many factors that are related to the steps you learned for doing affiliate marketing such as the niche you go after, the quality of the content you publish, the products you promote, the consistency in adding content to your affiliate blog, how fast you scale your affiliate business.

Important to know is that you don’t make a full-time income overnight with affiliate marketing or with any other method of making money, online or offline.

You need to put in the consistent work for 3-4 months in advance and your website’s traffic, and your affiliate income would increase gradually with time if you keep a steady pace in building your affiliate business.

Some people might reach the point where they make $10k+ a month in affiliate commissions, while others might never make a dime because they quit too soon and they go to look for another method that makes them rich overnight, and they never find it.

I wrote in another article about 13 tips for becoming a successful affiliate marketer, but the main trick to making money with affiliate marketing is by following the step-by-step process you learned here and by trusting the process by being consistent, persistent and patient.

There are no magical push-buttons for making money online as others try to push on you in order to sell you their expensive magical systems and shiny objects.

 

Conclusion – Want Someone To Take You By The Hand In Your Journey Of Learning Affiliate Marketing, Step-By-Step?

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I promised you at the beginning of this article that I will guide you to the place where you can find all the resources you need in order to learn the affiliate marketing step-by-step process, and the place that will provide you with all the necessary tools you need in order to build your affiliate marketing business and grow it.

And this place is a great platform and community that is called Wealthy Affiliate.

This is the same place that I joined when I was frustrated unable to make money with affiliate marketing, before they showed me the right way and provided me with:

• The step-by-step affiliate marketing training courses.
• The keyword tool that helped me find opportunities in order to know what to write about.
• The program research tool that would help you find affiliate programs in any niche.
• Most important, the web hosting and website builder that would allow you to set up an affiliate marketing website in 30 seconds, and without having to deal with any technical issues as they provide you with premium support.
• An amazing community support from more than 2 million members.

And much more.

The nice thing about this platform and community is that they provide you with all of what you need at one place so that you save your money instead of joining different platforms and tools and pay for them, and most important, is that they provide you with the premium hosting for your affiliate websites (up to 25 websites) for no additional cost at all so that you don’t have to deal with the technical stuff by yourself.

 

That’s why I’m still a member of Wealthy Affiliate and I will always be there.

If you are willing to learn affiliate marketing in detail, and if you want to find help with all of the aspects and use all the necessary tools that you need as an affiliate marketer, then you can join this amazing platform after reading my review of Wealthy Affiliate here and start even with the FREE membership plan. (No credit card required, 100% Risk-Free)

 

This is the right place to learn affiliate marketing, step-by-step, and I wouldn’t recommend it if I wasn’t a member of this platform and community by myself.

 

And if you have any questions about how to learn affiliate marketing, or if you have an experience that you want to share with us, please, leave it in the comments’ section below, and I would be happy to come back to you asap 🙂

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