I’ve been in the affiliate marketing business for over 16 years and in this post will be providing a guide on how it all works for you and not just in the operating department, but also how to get started and succeed in this business, while avoiding the many pitfalls many beginners fall prey to (including myself when I was just getting started).
To start here are some of my stats:
Getting to that point took time, a lot of failures and lessons learned, so what I’m going to be showing you here is based of the wisdom I gathered over the many years I’ve done this. Let’s begin:
How affiliate marketing works:
Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting other people’s products and earning commissions from it. Here’s the most simplified way I can explain it:
- You sign up for an affiliate program and choose what to promote
- You get personalized links (affiliate links) to promote the product/s
- You share these products across multiple areas (blogs, YouTube, social media, etc…)
- Each time someone clicks your affiliate links and buys from it, you earn a commisson
For example:
Ways to succeed in affiliate marketing:
Let’s take the above mountain bike example. Obviously making $500 commissions for every sale sounds great, but how do you actually go about doing it? Well there’s multiple avenues available with affiliate marketing and here’s a few to consider:
- Promote mountain bikes via a blog (review different ones and send people through your affiliate link)
- Promote mountains bikes via YouTube video (provide the affiliate link in the description of the video)
- Promote mountain bikes on TiKToK videos (provide the affiliate link in the video description)
- Promote mountain bikes via paid ads (make an ad on Google, send visitors to your review of the mountain bike, provide affiliate links to buy it).
These are just some, oversimplified examples of how to do it. In reality there is a bit more practice/time required to do this, but that’s basically how it all works. My personal go to approach for promoting affiliate products is via a blog, paid ads and making YouTube videos reviewing products.
What’s the most beginner friendly way to get started with affiliate marketing?
In my experience there’s a few things I’d recommend:
- Choosing to promote products you actually love (makes it more fun and easier)
- Using an affiliate training program that teaches this step by step (guidance, tools and expert help provided). This is actually even more important because you need fundamentals to start, grow and succeed in affiliate marketing (it’s often not as simple as just signing up, promoting products and making money).
In my experience the best program for learning this business is the Wealthy Affiliate program which is the program that trained me to become a successful affiliate marketer. Their main specialty is helping people create a profitable affiliate websites on any passions you have in life.
For example: If you love mountain biking for example, they’ll show you how to create a profitable website on mountain bikes (promoting them as an affiliate and other methods). Any passion you have in life can be turned into a thriving online business and this is exactly what they show you how to do. They teach this through the following 4 steps:
This is in my experience/opinion the single best program for learning affiliate marketing and there are tons of success stories to prove it. Here are some:
Other reasons I recommend Wealthy Affiliate:
- It’s free to join (no CC required)
- Beginner friendly
- It teaches multiple ways to create an online business (on top of affiliate marketing)
- They have many success stories
- Very high Trustpilot rating (4.9 out of 5 stars)
- Excellent support/expert coaching
- And tmuch more
Bottom line: You don’t have to invest crazy money with Wealthy Affiliate or in general to succeed online. It’s free to try and only $49/month (or for the best membership, $99/month) if you decide to stick around. The upgraded memberships provide you with more tools, resources and expert guidance on further expanding/building your online business.
Here’s how to get started with Wealthy Affiliate:
The value of the Wealthy Affiliate (WA) speaks for itself and if you have any doubts (which is totally normal), test drive them risk free.
Here’s what you get when you try the program today (all included):
- Access to the Starter Membership of Wealthy Affiliate.
- 5 lesson getting started course.
- Access to the WA community (help/support).
- 7 days coaching from me, Vitaliy (one of WA’s top experts).
- And much more (join WA today and see it all for yourself).
The program does have an optional upgrade called Premium after the Starter Membership that I do highly recommend, but more than that, I recommend you first:
- Try it for free.
- Immerse yourself in the program so you get the most out of it.
- Use my 7 day coaching! You can contact me directly inside WA.
Wealthy Affiliate works, but it is also not a get rich quick scheme. It will teach you how to build a REAL online 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).