Affiliate marketing is the process of earning money (commissions) every time you promote a company’s products or services and drive a sale. You only get paid every time you drive a sale, just like a commission-only sales representative.

Make money while you sleep.

That’s the dream, right?

For 99% of people, affiliate marketing is how they get started.

The idea behind it is that you promote other people’s products, earning a commission if people actually end up buying thanks to your marketing.

It’s based on revenue sharing. If you have a product and want to sell more, you can offer promoters a financial incentive through an affiliate program. If you have no product and want to make money, then you can promote a product that you feel has value and earn an income from it as an affiliate.

We’ve talked a little about it before. but today we want to dive deeper into what affiliate marketing actually is, what sides there are to it, and how to get started. So, let’s dive into the affiliate marketing guide. Ready?

Here’s the definition of affiliate marketing

affiliate marketing can be seen as the process of spreading product creation and product marketing across different parties, where each party receives a share of the revenue according to their contribution.

It’s not just the promotion or just the product creation that defines who you are as an affiliate marketer.

It’s where the marketing happens. An affiliate promotes one or multiple affiliate products and tries to attract and convince potential customers of the value of the merchant’s product so that they actually end up buying it.

The affiliate will try to market to the consumer on whatever channel they see fit, whether that’s a social network, digital billboards or through a search engine using content marketing on a blog.

Whether the consumer knows that they are part of an affiliate marketing system or not is mostly up to the affiliate.

Some choose to let their consumers know and more and more affiliates tend to be more transparent about their marketing being incentivized financially, but others don’t.

They let the tracking system work in the background, where the customer can follow the purchase process just as usual and the affiliate still ends up being paid a commission.

Anyone can sign up and then generate a custom affiliate link to Storeus products. If someone purchases through your link, you earn a commission.

With the basic terms clarified, let’s get an overview of how you can best get started with building your affiliate marketing business.

you can become an affiliate marketer for one or several products that you’d like to promote and market those to consumers, in order to make money.

While most people start by taking the affiliate route and it definitely is the easier path to take, building enough traffic to make a meaningful income just from affiliate sales isn’t quick or easy.

That’s why I’ll walk you through the 3 basic steps that you can take to get started in the affiliate marketing industry.

Step 1: Review products in your niche

It’s easier to get started as an affiliate. You already use and like plenty of products, so all that you have to do to get started is to publicly talk about them. Any product works.

Really.

Note: A special kind of review, that usually does really well, is the comparison with a direct competitor.

If your reviews aren’t genuinely helpful, people will sense immediately that you’re just trying to make a quick buck.When you write reviews on your blog, you can use an affiliate link to link to the products that you promote.You can recognize them on other blogs by the long “/ref…” tail, at the end of the regular link.

(how you know it’s an affiliate link)

This is usually the first step to start making commissions.

Simply sign up to aff.storeus.com and you can then proceed to get your own affiliate link to any product on Storeus.

Just go to the page and click on “Short link to this page.” You’ll get a link that’ll give you a commission if people purchase through it.

However, if you only rely on people using the affiliate links in your reviews, that means that you need lots of traffic to actually start making serious money.

But, if you find a way to contact your audience directly, you can market to them whenever you like, not just when they come to your website.

This is where step 2 comes in.

Step 2: Build an email list with your prospects on it

Email is still one of the best marketing channels until this day, so don’t miss out on it.

I’ll show you 3 super easy ways to collect email addresses from your website visitors.

If you give your visitors 20 things to do, it’s unlikely that they’ll do anything at all. Just have one call to action in your sidebar. Again, it should offer people something in exchange for their email address.

Since you’re collecting email addresses around a very specific topic, such as finding the best straightening iron, juice maker, mini-oven, etc., you don’t need a lot of them to make the email list worth your time.

Even with less than 500 people on your list, you can create significant sales.

Just make sure that you keep your audience engaged, by sending them regular updates, ideally once a week.

Don’t make it all sales. Just let them know when you have a new review up.

Every now and then, send them a specific call to action to buy a product. Perhaps you just found a new favorite in the latest review and think it’s really great.

You can update your audience on your change of mind, the reasons why and recommend that they switch to that product also.

But, there’s more. Once you have a few contacts on your email list, you can do this.

Step 3: Educate your audience with live webinars

Webinars are awesome.

Imagine that you want to buy a new fridge.

What makes you want to buy a fridge more:

Reading a review on a blog
Seeing a live presentation of a fridge in action

Number 2 of course!

Promote your webinar on social media for a week in advance and get people to sign up. Webinars are great to engage with your audience one on one, show them the product that you’re promoting live and answer any questions that they might have.

You can:

present the product’s features
show different use cases of the product
talk about its benefits and drawbacks
tell people your personal history with the product
help your audience get the most out of it

Imagine how fired up your audience will get when they see all of the cool things that your product will enable them to do.

Pointing to your affiliate link and sharing it at the end of the webinar is a soft sell and comes naturally since you just spent an hour talking about the product.

It won’t feel forced and your consumers can still take all of the time that they want to make up their mind on whether they’ll actually purchase.

Pro tip: Can you get your merchant to give you a special deal for your audience? If you promise to get their product in front of a couple hundred people, they’ll often happily give you a discount or special bundle to further incentivize people to buy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning income every time you promote someone else’s products or services. If you generate a sale for the company, you get paid. If you don’t generate a sale, you do not get paid.

How much money can you make as an affiliate marketer?

Affiliate income is not consistent. You’ll look at income on an annual basis instead of monthly. A decent affiliate can make anywhere from $10,000 a year to $400,000. A super affiliate can make upwards of $1,500,000 a year.

Is affiliate marketing a pyramid scheme?

No, it is not. Think of it as a commission-only sales job. You only get paid every time you drive a sale to a business.

Affiliate Marketing Conclusion

Time to recap. So, there is how to get started with affiliate marketing.

To become an affiliate. There are 3 steps that you can follow:

Starting to review products in your niche
Building an email list
Using live webinars to educate your audience and make sales

Affiliate marketing is a good way to get started with online marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing (and How to Get Started)