What Is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work? (Explained in 5 Minutes)

What is affiliate marketing and how does it work? (Understand it in FIVE minutes!)

This is a popular question amongst people who want to make money online or people who have blogs and websites and looking for a lucrative way to monetize them.

And although it is easy to understand the affiliate marketing model, but it might get confusing if you tried to look for an explanation about affiliate marketing because there are many methods for doing it and there are many people teaching NOT the right way of starting with affiliate marketing and they overcomplicate the process.

That’s why I decided to write this article where I explain affiliate marketing in simple steps, and will help you know how to start your own affiliate marketing business TODAY if you were interested.

Let’s start!

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

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Affiliate marketing is a performance-based model of marketing, where you can market other people’s products and get a commission for every new purchase that comes through your promotions.

The cool part is, the more sales you bring, the more commissions you get.

 

And affiliate marketing is one of the most popular and lucrative ways of making money online for many reasons, such as:

• You don’t need to create your own product.
• You don’t need to hold any inventory of any product that you promote.
• You don’t ship, deal with logistics, customer support, refunds and returns, …etc.
• You don’t have to call anyone or meet anyone in person, it can be completely done online.
• You don’t need to “invite” your friends and family to join something like the MLM scams.
• There are many ways of doing it, and some of them (like the one I will explain in the next section) allow you to enjoy a passive income after a while because you can take breaks from your affiliate marketing business and still generate income on daily basis.
• It’s a beginner-friendly method of earning money online and comes with the lowest level of risk.
• You can start it as a side hustle and work on it until it starts making you money.
• If you do it the right way, you build a real business, it is NOT an online job where you keep trading time for pennies.
• It can be started at the lowest possible cost ever compared to other online businesses, and even for free thanks to platforms like Wealthy Affiliate.

And many other reasons.

And the nice thing is that almost anyone can start an affiliate marketing business without prior experience and make money with it if they put in the effort on consistent basis in advance.

But first, you need to understand how affiliate marketing works and the right way of doing it before you start making money with it.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

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Affiliate marketing works by finding people with a problem, need or desired result, and offering them a solution that fulfills their need or solves their problem.

When you do that properly and people buy the solution you offered them, you get a commission from whoever sells that solution.

That’s how affiliate marketing works in a nutshell, and that’s why it is a beginner-friendly model for making money online.

However, in order to find opportunities to make money online with affiliate marketing, you need to do specific steps in a certain order as in the following section.

Affiliate Marketing in Action, Step-by-Step?

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1 – Choose a Group of People to be your Audience “Niche”

It is important to choose a niche for your affiliate marketing business as you will be doing some steps that require you to understand your audience and know how to make money with it.

That’s how any successful business works, they focus on a group of people with a common interest, problem or desired result.

And that takes time and effort, and if you try to be the guy known for everything, then you will be the guy known for nothing.

And choosing a niche is not difficult, you need to select a group of people that you would help accomplish something.

This could be related to a hobby or sport you practice (drawing, tennis, …etc.), a passion you have (Yoga, green products, …etc.), a problem you suffered from (addiction, overweight, hair loss, …etc.), your profession (engineer, fitness trainer, …etc.), skills that you have (video editing, singing, writing, graphic design), and so on.

 

Some examples are:

• You want to help women to lose weight after pregnancy and delivery, that’s a niche.
• You want to help men after 40 to prevent hair loss, that’s a niche.
• People trying to learn Yoga, that’s a niche.
• You want to help retirees make a side income online, that’s a niche.
• You want to help gamers find the best gear and decide which one to purchase, that’s a niche.
• You want to help basketball players to improve their skills, jump higher, buy the best shoes, …etc., that’s a niche.
• You want to help engineers learn how to do some tests and what tools and devices to use, that’s a niche.
• You want to help people create a WordPress website, that’s a niche.

And so on.

If you think about a niche as “a group of people who need help in doing something”, then you will be able to literally unlock millions of ideas for niches to choose from.

 

2 – See What Your Audience Need Help with & Find Solutions

This is the cool part of affiliate marketing and any business in general.

If you want to make money in any field, then you need to find a problem, question or need and offer a solution for it in order to make money.

And in affiliate marketing you don’t need to create a product or solution, but you need to find someone who already created it and recommend it to your niche and get a commission if they buy it.

You need to help these people by offering them solutions to the problems or needs they have, by explaining to them what they have to do and recommending useful products or tools that would help them achieve the desired results.

For example:

• People looking to lose weight from home, offer them an online membership coaching program and gear that they would buy online.
• People looking to learn how to jump higher for basketball or how to shoot 3-pointers, offer them to buy basketball drills course online and recommend the right shoes for them.
• People want to learn how to create a website, show them the step-by-step process and offer them the best hosting package to purchase.
• People looking for kitchen knives under $100, find the best knives on Amazon and create a list of them to recommend them to people.

And so on.

And when you recommend a solution for them to buy (physical product, online course or ebook, membership program, software, …etc.), you will send them to that product or solution through a unique link that is called (affiliate link), which would help track these people’s purchases and credit you for any sale that comes through your promotion.

In order to get that affiliate link, you need to find affiliate programs for companies that allow you to promote their products as an affiliate.

But one example is Amazon’s affiliate program that allows you to promote any of the products in its marketplace as an affiliate.

 

3 – Choose a Medium to Reach Your Niche

You can do this in different ways such as Facebook pages and groups, YouTube channels, answering people’s questions on forums and Q&A platforms like Quora, and you can offer them the solutions to buy.

But these methods have lots of limitations and don’t build a sustainable business on the long-run that allows you to enjoy the passive income lifestyle.

And worse, you build your business on platforms that you don’t own, which means risking everything overnight if Facebook or YouTube decided to close your accounts because of what they consider as a violation of their terms and conditions.

Then what is the right medium to build an affiliate marketing business?

I’m glad that you asked.

If you want to do this the right way and build a sustainable income, then you need an asset that no one can take away from you.

And that can only be fulfilled if you have your own place on the web, which happens through a website or a blog where you create and publish the content that helps people and makes you money.

I know what you might say now.

But I don’t know anything about websites or coding!

And you will never need to.

What I’m talking about here is a WordPress website that you can create in few minutes without any coding or experience.

Actually, at the website builder at Wealthy Affiliate, you can start an affiliate website in 30 seconds! (Yes, seconds and not minutes! Check out this article if you don’t believe me).

Your website is something that no one can take away from you, unlike the different ways of doing affiliate marketing without a website.

It is an asset that you can grow and keep making money from as long as you want, and you can even sell for a high price in the future.

And after you create your website where you promote stuff to people, you can drive visitors to your blog in many different ways.

But the best way so far is by getting organic visitors from Google and other search engines, and it is the most evergreen method, which you will learn at Wealthy Affiliate.

 

4 – Rinse & Repeat in order to Grow Your Affiliate Business

If you want to become a successful affiliate marketer and build a sustainable business, then you need to work consistently on building your affiliate business until your reach a point where it can generate you a passive income and you can take long breaks from working on it without really affecting the generated income.

And to do so, you need to hold your self accountable and stay consistent for not a short period of time until you achieve this point and start making commissions like these.

It is always easier to fall back and choose the lazy route of not doing anything to improve your financial situation, but the cost of that route is higher on the long run.

 

When you are building an affiliate marketing business, you are building a business, and you need to take care of it at the beginning so that it takes care of you later, just like planting a tree.

 

Ready to Start Your Affiliate Business In 5 Minutes from Now? (And for FREE)

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As I mentioned earlier, affiliate marketing is the best way of making passive income online, but it requires work in advance, like any other method of making money online or offline.

But Affiliate marketing is my favorite because it is the most beginner-friendly and comes with the lowest possible risk.

The secret to succeeding with it is that you start your affiliate business with the right way from the beginning and stay consistent until you start seeing results, and for that to happen, you need three main things that I will provide you with:

1. You need to learn affiliate marketing, step-by-step. (Solved!)
2. You need to use the best tools in order to stay ahead of others and the best web hosting so that you don’t care about technical stuff. (Solved!)
3. Because entrepreneurship is lonely, you need to be part of a community of like-minded people that will support you and will keep you on track so that you don’t deviate from building your income-generating online business. (Solved!)

And I have the solution for all of these things in one place!

This place is every affiliate marketer’s dream, which is called Wealthy Affiliate.

This is the place that helped me build many affiliate websites in different niches, and this is why I will always be a member of this great community and will always recommend them.

And while they have a paid plan, but the FREE Starter plan offers a great training that would help you learn affiliate marketing from scratch and start building your first website without coding or technical knowledge.

It is up to you to decide if you want to stick to the free plan or upgrade to the paid plan later.

 

You can read my complete review of Wealthy Affiliate and see what they offer in details, and from their, you can join for the free membership.

Or you can click here or on the following image in order to join them NOW and create your free account and start learning and building your affiliate business TODAY.

P.S. You will receive an internal message from me once you create your account guiding you on how to start the FREE training.

 

I hope you enjoyed this article and you understood what affiliate marketing is and how it works.

If you have any question or concern, please, tell me about it in the comments’ section below and I will be happy to answer you asap 🙂

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