How to Start Affiliate Marketing – 2024 Guide

Affiliate Marketing is a billion-dollar industry that will combine a total of $8.2 Bn business spending by 2024 in the US market. You can jumpstart your career in the field of affiliate marketing by starting today to be in an advantageous position in the future.

To understand how you can start the process of Affiliate Marketing and succeed in the future, you need to first know a few things about affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

The process of promoting a company’s products and services that encourages the sales process and brings positive sales numbers is known as Affiliate Marketing. Here, you are responsible for generating sales, and when anyone makes a purchase using an affiliate link that you give them, you receive a commission from the company. The commission is in the form of reward that the company provides you for boosting their sales.

You can perform this activity on a scale and earn a good income. The best part about this is that you can promote products of multiple companies, and whenever someone buys a good from your link, you get rewards. Unlike a salesperson who only gets to sell products of a particular company, you can promote any product of numerous companies and gather all of their commissions.

How does Affiliate Marketing Works?

The merchant gives each affiliate a unique link to keep track of their sale. Whenever an affiliate clicks the link, a cookie is saved on his computer, which helps to attribute sales to the right person and the payment process.

Let’s look into an example,

A person is reading through your post on the best trekking shoes and thinks of buying one. He clicks on your affiliate link, which directs them to the amazon page of that product. In this process, a cookie is saved in their computer or the device he was using to make the purchase. This cookie is saved for 24hrs as per the cookie duration of amazon. If he decides to buy a trekking boot along with a jacket within 24hrs, you will get compensation for both items, even though you have not promoted the jacket.

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Getting started with Affiliate marketing

Below are the seven steps to get you started with affiliate marketing:

Step 1: Choose a platform:

Affiliate marketing can be done on any platform, even on social media such as Instagram. However, the best platform to get a huge audience base and increase your sales is youtube and blog.

Starting with a youtube channel is free of cost, which makes it an ideal platform. Once you start creating and uploading your videos on youtube and reach a little popularity, you can optimize your youtube videos with SEO and put your affiliate link in the description of the video.

The other best platform is blogging. Starting a blog doesn’t cost a lot, and it is easy too. You can learn to make your blog effective from plenty of tutorials available online for free. For example, check this page to understand more about how you could start to create your own blog. Then, optimize your blogs with SEO to make your blog rank higher. You can add your affiliate link to your content. A blog will cost you a few dollars per month, giving you a vast number of benefits.

Blogs are the best option for affiliate marketing as it gives more click to your affiliate links.

Step 2: Choose your Niche Audience:

Affiliate marketing has multiplied in the past decade. If you are thinking of starting a blog, you will face a lot of competition. According to Statista, the number of bloggers is increasing every day, only in the US, the number of bloggers are more than 31.7 million in 2024.

If you want to stand a chance to be seen and to succeed, you should choose your niche. Choose a specific topic, not the whole industry. For example, clothes are vast, but women’s clothes are specific.

Making your topic-specific and centric to your niche will help you get an interested and focused audience. It will also help you ride the ladder of rank in search engines.

Step 3: Join some affiliate program:

You have to choose from three types of affiliate program:

• High-pay, low-volume programs- These programs sell products which have high payouts for niche products. Here the commission is high, but if you are starting with affiliate marketing, this might be challenging, as there are already many good players in the market.
• Low-pay, high-volume programs- Deals with products have a low payout for affiliate marketing, but the demand is high. For this affiliate program, you would need a lot of traffic. The commission is low, but the good thing is it becomes easier to sell because of the want of people. Moreover, you get a commission, not for one product but all the products bought along with it.
• High-pay, high-volume programs: Products that have demands and have a high pay commission are dealt in this programme.

For example, credit cards, as everyone has a demand for credit cards and many people who join the company for years.

There is a lot of competition as many experts work in this field, making it difficult to compete with their knowledge and expertise.

Which program to choose depends on your level of expertise and your niche.

Step 4: Create High-Quality Content:

Creating great content must be one of the top priorities if you want to succeed in affiliate marketing. Your affiliate link must fit into the content naturally. The link must not make the customer feel you are forcing them to buy, but it should make them feel they want it.

Step 5: Drive in More Traffic:

Creating content is done; the next step will be bringing in traffic to read your contents. This can be done by using different strategies. Three of them are listed below:

• Search Engine Optimization: SEO is done to rank higher in search engines like Google. As long as you use proper keywords and rank high on SEO, you will attract traffic.
• Paid Traffic: Paid traffic is a place where you pay to increase your traffic. The benefit of paid traffic is that the moment you start paying, you start getting traffic.
• Build an email list: Email allows you to connect with your audience at any time. Use email to let your audience know about your new content and keep them engaged with your site more, leading them to click and buy.

Step 6: Get Clicks on Your affiliate Links.

Having quality content is not enough for making people click on your affiliate links. Few things you must consider for getting clicks on your affiliate links are:

Link Placement: Putting your links below the page or putting your link in every other word of your introduction both will not help. As people rarely scroll down the page and putting links on every other word will make your content look spammy.

It would help if you gave a lot of thought while putting links in your content.

Callouts: Utilizing callouts like fastens, tables, and boxes can help stand out for your readers and make the post more skimmable.

Step 7: Increase sale from the link

Now that you have known how to make people click on the links let’s see how you can make people buy the products of the link. In the affiliate marketing, there are two conversions that are required to make money.

First, click on the link and make people get to the product page.

The second is the audience or the visitor of the link buying the product.

Making people buy the product is not in your control; what you can do is look into affiliate programs that generate a regular income and have chances to grow.