How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing For Beginners (Tips From a 17 Year Pro):

Hi there! My name’s Vitaliy, aka the work at home guy:

Over the past 17 years, I’ve earned a passive income online doing affiliate marketing and in addition to that, I’m also actively involved in helping regular people do the same. I’m talking about people from all walks of life:

Retirees.
Students.
People seeking to pay off debts.
People seeking to make a side income.
Single parents.
People who have tried this before but either failed, got scammed or ripped off by the fake gurus out there

For me I was a college student when I started and today it’s what I do for as a full time “job”. I didn’t start out successful and went through a bunch of failures and bad experiences to know what works and how to avoid the pitfalls out there and see real success.

What I’ll be showing you in this article is how I’ve been able to do this for many years and it’s not some get rich quick scheme.

It takes work and time to succeed, but if you have the ambition, combined with what I’ll show you in this post, you can also become a success at this business and I’m going to show you how to do just that. So let’s get started!

First, let’s dissect what affiliate marketing actually is:

It’s a method of making money online where you promote other companies products and earn commissions for every sale made. You are provided with what are known as “affiliate links” to promote these products which track if the sale comes from you. Here’s a simple example of how it works:

In this example we have someone who wants to promote a mountain bike that costs $5,000.
If they make 10 sales for it ($500 commission per sale), they will have earned $5,000 from it.

One of the steps required for you to start an affiliate marketing business is to sign up with what are known as affiliate networks. There are MANY legitimate companies online that will allow you to promote their products (you can sign up for free), give you unique affiliate links and pay you for every sale you make for them (checks get sent out twice a week in most cases). Here are some of these companies:

Amazon Associates (you can promote millions of products straight from Amazon itself).
Clickbank (highly popular digital affiliate network).
Commission Junction (very similar to Amazon).
Avantlink (great affiliate network for promoting outdoor products).
And more.

I’ve personally made 1,000’s of commissions across these networks here’s several awesome benefits to this:

You can make a part-full time income from promoting 1 product.
You can sign up for free with the above networks
You can also become an affiliate for multiple networks and promote multiple products.
You don’t have to buy the product to promote it either
This is a very legitimate way to make money online

This leads me to the next point:

How much can you actually make as an affiliate marketer? Here are real success stories:

The answer is that there is no limit and while I’ve shown you some of my results above, here are other people who are also making a part-full time income with affiliate marketing:

You may have noticed the term Wealthy Affiliate. That’s actually the program that the above success stories and myself learned this business from. They are free to join and have the most success stories out of any training program I have ever reviewed/tried, but I’ll talk about them more later.

The 4 step formula to succeed at affiliate marketing explained:

There’s many ways to become a success at affiliate markerting, but the 4 step formula I’m going to be sharing in just a moment is in my opinion the best for success because its simple to understand and is beginner friendly:

Here’s how it works:

Choose a niche
Make a website
Get visitors to the website (traffic)
Earn money via promoting affiliate products on the website

Let me explain each step so you fully understand how it’s all tied together:

1) Choose a niche (that you love):

A niche is simply a specific topic/hobby you like. When you build an online business on something you have a lot of passion, interest and knowledge in, you will be able to more easily promote affiliate products on that very site. There are countless niches out there to choose from and I’ve personally made affiliate sales in the following niche topics:

Outdoor gear
Drones
Make money online programs
Diet and fitness programs
And more

2) Build a website:

Once you have a niche, you’ll want to make a website for it. Think of your website (blog) as your online store. This is where visitors will be coming to in order to read your affiliate reviews and buy stuff based on your advice from your site.

Setting up a website is actually easy (and the Wealthy Affiliate program I mentioned earlier not only gives you 1 free website, but it helps make the initial set up effortless, more on that below).

3) Get visitors (traffic) to your website:

Setting up a website isn’t enough to start making sales. You will need visitors (aka traffic) to actually find your site and this is one of the most pivotal parts to success in affiliate marketing. You also want relevant traffic to visit your site.

For example if you chose a topic like “trail running”, you’ll want people who are actually interested in trail running to come to your site. Why? Because the more relevant the traffic is, the easier it is to convince them to buy products that are relevant to their interests.

Here’s how to get relevant traffic to your website: Blog about your topic. If it’s trail running, here are some examples of what I can blog about:

The top trail running shoes in 2024.
Product reviews for specific trail running shoes
I can review backpacks for trail running
I can blog about how to avoid injury on trails
I can blog about how to run 20 miles on the trail without getting tired
Ect…

The more you love your niche topic:

The more you can blog about it and…
The more visitors you can get to your site…
And that ultimately helps you earn more affiliate commissions…

But what if…

You run out of ideas on what to write about?
What if you’re not a good writer?

Well the great news is that programs like Wealthy Affiliate provide AI powered tools to help with that, from content idea generators to even AI article creation tools, to basically give you limitless content ideas to get limitless traffic to your site.

Just imagine for a moment if we use that example of 10,000 visitors coming to your site that makes 100 sales ($1,000 a month). What if it got 100,000 visitors a month an earned 1,000 sales? That would be $10,000 every month, a literal full time income.

4) Promote affiliate products and earn money on the site:

When your website starts getting visitors, it is then time to promote relevant products to them. Let’s use the same niche we’ve been using so far: Trail running. What can I possibly promote in this niche? Tons of things actually:

Trail running shoes ($5-$10 commission)
Backpacks for trail running ($5-$10 commissions)
Waterproof socks ($3-$10 commissions)
Expensive trail running gear ($20+ commissions)
And much more (there’s affiliate opportunities where you can earn $100s and even $1,000s per sale, like with the mountain bike example above).

Putting it all together (earning a passive income online with affiliate marketing):

By following these 4 steps, I’ve consistently been able to make an affiliate income online for years and continue to do so. In addition to that, this is also a business model that is scalable which means:

As your blog grows, so does it’s traffic and do it’s sales (your affiliate income).
This online business is built of something you love (so you enjoy working on it, making it much easier).
You can make a secondary niche site on a different topic and increase your profits.
There’s no limit to how much your business can make doing this.
You can then go into other realms and scale it that way (YouTube, Pinterest, paid ads), or just stick to your original blog and continue to grow that.

Ethical vs unethical affiliate marketing (important):

I want to take a moment to talk about ethics in affiliate marketing because it’s not taught enough. Unethical affiliate marketing can involve doing the following things:

Promoting high ticket programs that are overpriced, outdated and just flat out scams.
Promoting scams, dead end opportunities and products that just don’t work.

I am completely against this type of affiliate marketing and highly recommend you avoid doing the same.

What an example of good, ethical affiliate marketing? Here’s some examples:

Promoting affordable products that help people solve problems. For instance, promoting hair regrowing supplements for women with hair thinning issues. Unethical would be promoting $1,000 products to them when a $50 product could solve that problem.
Giving away awesome information and solving people’s problems without baiting them to buy something. You’d be surprised to know just how often good information leads to sales folks. Trust me, they’ll trust you more when you help them solve their problem and they’ll buy your recommended products based off that trust.

How to begin building a successful affiliate business (coming back to Wealthy Affiliate):

If affiliate marketing is what you want to do, there is no better program in my honest experience that’ll show you how it’s done than Wealthy Affiliate.

What exactly is Wealthy Affiliate?

It’s an all in one program that teaches people how to build affiliate businesses in any passion they have. Additionally:

They are free to try (join here)
They are beginner friendly
WA provides excellent training, tools and guidance to help you succeed at affiliate marketing
Have more success stories than any other program
They teach more than just affiliate marketing
High Trustpilot rating (4.9 out of 5 stars, 500+ reviews)

How to get started with Wealthy Affiliate:

Join here (its free)
Complete the Hubs set up process (5 steps) which has you create your first passion based website.
Start your training (8 lesson course)

The value of the Wealthy Affiliate (WA) speaks for itself and if you have any doubt (which is totally normal), test drive them risk free by trying out the Starter Membership first (no credit card required).

The program does have 2 optional upgrades later called Premium and Premium Plus after the Starter Membership that I do highly recommend. I am an affiliate for this program but I don’t want you to upgrade unless you really like this program and want to go further which is why above all else I recommend that you first:

Try the Starter Membership (it’s risk free).
Immerse yourself in the program so you get the most out of it.
Use my coaching! You can contact me directly inside WA.
If you enjoy the program and want to go further, then you can upgrade if you want 🙂

Wealthy Affiliate works, but it is also not a get rich quick scheme.

It will teach you how to build a REAL affiliate business of your dreams and if you apply the training they have and work hard, you will become one of it’s MANY success stories.

And frankly speaking, I want to see you do just that. As your coach, one of my goals is to see just that and I’ll help you along your journey there too). Thanks for checking out this page and if you have ANY questions, fire away below!