Affiliate Marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing?

The simplest definition is promoting someone’s else product and getting paid a commission if someone buys the product through your link. Let’s take a company like Amazon. If you join their affiliate program, you will have access to links for the products that are on the Amazon website. If you promote your links to your audience and they click on the link and buy the product or any product on the Amazon website, you will get a commission. That’s basically what affiliate marketing is. 

It’s the best way to make money online when you don’t have money to start. There are very little or no start-up costs. 

Another advantage of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to deal with product queries after the sale. You only have to direct the person to your affiliate link, and once you’ve done that, the person purchases through your link, and you have completed your task. 

How to make money with Affiliate Marketing?

The four best affiliate networks for beginners

Amazon Associates

It’s the best-known affiliate program and one of the easiest to join. All you need is your Amazon email address. Different categories have different commission structures. You can check the commission percentages on Amazon UK here and for Amazon US here. Although Amazon Associates is one of the most straightforward affiliate programs to be accepted, it doesn’t offer the best commissions, and the cookie length is only 24h. In other words, it means that if someone clicks on your link and purchases a product within 24h after clicking on your link, you will still get a commission. 

CJ.com and Impact

Commission Junction (CJ) and Impact are popular affiliate networks. They have thousands of companies you can approach to promote their products. Once you sign up with these networks and decide to promote a product, you need to be approved by the company to promote their product! It’s not like Amazon Associates and Clickbank were, once registered, you can promote anything without approval.

Clickbank

Opening an account with Clickbank is straightforward. Once you’ve created one, you can look for products to promote in the Marketplace. That’s where sellers advertise their products for affiliates to search for them and share them with their audience. You can search by language, category, offer type, gravity (how popular a product is), etc.

Once you’ve found a product to promote, you can create a hoplink or your tracking link to start promoting it. A word of advice is to keep your integrity and advertise products on Clickbank that you would want to use yourself. 

The five best affiliate programs for beginners

Fiverr Affiliates Program

It’s free to join this program, and you don’t need to be afraid of being rejected. You have access to the affiliate tools as soon as you sign up. 

You can promote Fiverr affiliates, Fiverr learn, Fiverr workspace, Fiverr, Fiverr business, and Fiverr logo maker.

Promoting Fiverr and the different product has numerous benefits. First of all, they are well known, and second of all, they offer attractive commission fees. 

Bluehost

The Bluehost Affiliate Program is also easy and free to join. Once signed up, you will receive your unique affiliate tracking link. You will receive USD 65 for every person that signs up through your affiliate link. 

Elementor

The Elementor Affiliate program is open to anybody who has an online presence. Unlike some other affiliate programs, it’s for newbies and experienced affiliate marketers. You can earn as little or as much as you want, depending on the effort you are willing to put in. Elementor has indicated that some affiliate marketers make as much as USD10K! 

Elementor offers a cookie period of 30 days. It signifies that anyone who clicks on your affiliate link and buys within 30 days will earn you a commission. 

They will also pay your affiliate commissions once your account has hit the threshold of USD 200. They pay you made within 30 days through the PartnerStack program.

Adobe

Adobe Affiliate Program is an easy one to join. You can promote several Adobe products such as Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Stock, and Adobe Document Cloud. They offer a cookie duration of 30 days. You also get access to banners and text links to help you in your promotion efforts. They inform you of new product releases.

Krystal

The Krystal Affiliate Programme is the easiest one to join. You get approved instantly and are known to be one of the most generous programmes. They offer 90 days cookie period! Bear in mind most companies give a maximum of 30 days. Your earning potential depends on your efforts. 

You can view your earnings on their dashboard and indicate the bank account where they will deposit your commissions. You get paid every 90 days because they offer a 60-day money-back guarantee to every customer. 

How to get traffic to your links?

Free Traffic

The easiest way to drive traffic to your affiliate links is free traffic. You can start a blog, build a website and rank it on Google. If you don’t know how to create a website, check our article on How to build a website? 

Another great way is to start a YouTube channel. In my opinion, it’s the best way to drive traffic to your affiliate links if you like being in front of a camera. You can also do YouTube videos without being in front of the camera. Check our other articles on How to Make Money on YouTube WITHOUT Recording Videos? Or How to make money on YouTube?

You can also get free traffic through Instagram by creating a niche page, Pinterest or Tiktok. The only disadvantage is that it only works if you have a certain number of followers.  

You can also attract people to your links with a Facebook Group. Especially one that you started yourself. Since your followers know and trust you, they will respond well to anything you recommend. 

Email marketing is another option. If you grow your email list, you can promote your links, and your subscribers will buy through them. The only thing you shouldn’t do is spam your subscribers. 

Paid Traffic

You can use Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or Facebook Ads to drive traffic to your affiliate links. If you are new to paid traffic, you will have to test it and see if it’s working because it’s expensive to use paid traffic. As a beginner, I wouldn’t recommend paid traffic. 

One last tip, you can see if any company has an affiliate programme by scrolling to the very end of their homepage to see if they have an affiliate programme. If not, type the company name in your web browser alongside the set of the words ‘affiliate programme’.