As I mention in my Bio on “my about me page”, I started in affiliate marketing with literally no skill set for working with a computer or how to make a single dollar online. I was fortunate to find a person and a platform that helped me to earn some income while building my affiliate business from the ground up. In this short article I will endeavour to lay out the process I embarked on that ultimately led to my building a lucrative affiliate business.
It’s really hard to distinguish fact from fiction when you are looking at how affiliate marketing really works. There is so much misinformation and platforms pitching totally outdated affiliate marketing training that it may seem like an impossible task to get started making an income online. I am here to say, it’s not as complicated as people make affiliate marketing out to be, it’s actually a very simple process which I will show you. Yes, like anything new, getting started in affiliate marketing has it’s learning curve that you need to navigate through, but if I can do it and many that I have helped over the years have gone on to build lucrative careers online, then I am sure you can too!
If your like me and type with one finger and can’t spell if your life depended on it, don’t freak out. With the simple step by step process that I will describe for you here in this article, anyone can learn how to make a great living online.
Without wasting too much of your valuable time, I am going to show you how I have built my successful affiliate marketing businesses over the years and helped literally 1,000’s of people do the same through the WealthyAffiliate.com platform that I joined back in 2010.
So let’s have a look at the process of affiliate marketing, and how that works…and then I am going to be jumping directly into the process on how you can start an affiliate marketing business literally today if you wanted too.
How Affiliate Marketing Works
There is a boat load of information out there on affiliate marketing, but the problem is with so much information there distinguishing between what is real an effective and what is pure fiction can be a little overwhelming to say the least.
I have been running a successful businesses within the affiliate marketing space for roughly the last 14 years, and during this time a lot has changed on the internet, but to be honest, not a lot has actually changed in how your affiliate business makes money. The same “simple formula” that worked back then for me and many others, continues to work to this day. You have a product, and you have a customer. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to align these two entites. That’s it!
Here is a diagram outling how affiliate marketing works:
I am going to be simplifying how affiliate marketing works a bit for a good reason, I don’t want you to be scared of the word “affiliate marketing”, because you are just as capable of creating a full-time and very successful affiliate marketing business as I have and the many I have helped over the years have. All you need is the right training, the right help (me), and the tools necessary to get you there.
The thing is, affiliate marketing at it’s core is very simple. There are a few terms that you will want to become familar wth.
Affiliate (which is you). You are the affiliate, this means that you can join companies like Etsy, eBay, Walmart, Amazon, home depot, lowes, rain bird, grocery chains, the list is literally endless for companies products and services you can promote for income. When you sign up with companies that offer Affiliate Programs, they will give you a special “affiliate link” that is exclusive to you, and allows you to track all of the sales you generate.
Affiliate Program (companies like Amazon). Most companies have an affiliate program, 99% of all of the brands in the world in fact can be promoted online and you, as an affiliate, can earn a commission. Amazon is one of the biggest and most popular affiliate programs in the world and will allow you to promote 100’s of MILLIONS of products, with a single account. Pretty awesome right? Years ago I made an unexpected commission off of a fridge and stove sold through Amazon because I was promoting a book at the time that was being sold through the Amazon marketplace. What happened was, a customer went to Amazon after clicking on one of my affiliate links to look at a book and once inside Amazon decided to buy a fridge and a stove. This customer enetered Amazon with my link which gave me a commission off of anything they bought in Amazon, making me a healthy commission.
Earning Affiliate Commissions. Affiliate programs will give you a percentage of any sale if you can send people to their website, and they end up buying something through your affiliate link. Say you send someone to Amazon through your affiliate link, and they end up buying a fridge an stove as they did in my case, Amazon will pay you a % of the total sale. Amazon offers around 3-6% commissions, so a transaction like this may yield you $100-300 (depending on the price of the fridge and stove). Depending on the company and affiliate program, they will typically pay between 2% and 75% in commisisons. These commissions are what I call “hands off” commissions. Once a customer clicks on your affiliate link commissions can come in while you sleep. I have woken up to find a full days worth of commission notifications just sitting there in my account.
Unlimited Potential. As an affiliate marketer, your potential has no limits. The more people you can get buying through your affiliate links, the more money you make, it’s that simple! Many affiliate marketers make several millions of dollars per year, and this can be a reality for anyone that is willing to put in the effort to build an affiliate marketing business. But “HOW” do you build an affiliate marketing business? I am going to cover that in the next section.
Starting a Successful Affiliate Marketing Business Is As Easy As 1,2,3,4
So how can YOU create your own successful affiliate marketing start-up? There are actually only 4-steps to creating a successful affiliate marketing business, and if you can follow these and have access to the training, tools and support necessary to run your business (which I will be helping you with), you are going to be off and running! So I am not only going to be giving you the exact steps, but helping you understand how you can accomplish these steps.
Step 1: Choose an Idea.
The first thing you are going to need to do before you can get your business rolling, is come up with an idea for your buisness. This is also called the “niche” stage of your business, where you get to choose the audience and the category of your business. This could be anything, from training a pet, to sports betting, fishing, video games, clothes, travel, cooking etc. There are literally millions of potential niche or business ideas at your fingertips.
I like to recommend to people to choose a passion/interest or just something that you have always wanted to explore or learn about as your niche. This way, you will truly love your business and when you love what you do, you never have to “work” a day in your life. The Internet and the affiliate marketing industry has afforded us all this very opportunity.
How to Choose Your Idea: Choose a niche or a passion. There are close to 5 BILLION people online now, so even the most obscure niches have vast audiences. If you decide to become a member of Wealthy Affiliate, you have direct video classes walking you through the niche selection process along with direct help from the community (and myself) who can give you feedback on your niche. Some of the niches that I have participated in over the years have been, vintage fishing lures, irrigation supplies, urban chicken farming supplies, weight loss, boat detailing supplies, cooking supplies and make money online, just to name a few. Each one of these niches I started out with very little knowledge of the niche but enjoyed learning about each niche and eventually becoming an authority in my chosen niche as time went by.
Step 2: Build a Website.
Your website is the foundation of your business. Think of it like a shop within the online world. If you have no “storefront”, you don’t have the ability to attract and help customers, or the ability to sell anything. Your website is in essence your storefront, where you are able to help your audience, communicate with your audience, and promote products/services to your audience.
If you don’t have a website, you don’t stand a hope of running an online business. It is the first and key neccesity you need to creating a long term business. Don’t stress over creating a website they all utilize simple step by step instructions and Wealthy Affiliate is also there to hold your hand throughout the website building process. Trust me, if an aging meat cutter can build multiple websites so can you!!!
Start Building: You can build high performing and profit-ready websites with ease, at Wealthy Affiliate. You can even get up and running with a website with no cost to you, within the Starter account. Another perk to using the website platform over at Wealthy Affiliate is that their hosting (where your website lives) is high speed and ranks better than other providers. This can give you a competitive advantage and can lead to a lot more opportunity as you build out your website.
Step 3: Build an Online Presence.
In the Internet world, your website is also the place where your “traffic” will arrive. Without people coming to your website, there is no way to make money. So it is important to understand how to attract traffic to your website.
Traffic can come in many forms, but one of the most sustainable and long term traffic methods is through search engine optimization or commonly referred to as SEO. This means, getting ranked in search engines like Google, and as a result getting all sorts of FREE traffic to your website. Once you have traffic, you have opportunity.
So this is the next focus, once you have your website up and running. Building out your website in a way that leads to traffic.
How to Get Potential Customers To Your Offer: You need proper training in traffic generation techniques, along with a website designed to rank well within search engines. These are both things that are provided within Wealthy Affiliate, you have access to elite SEO training, along with classes and access to experts like myself that will personally help you create your traffic campaigns.
Plus, there are many other ways you can get traffic to your website as you build it out. Social media channels, Yotuube and video blogging, podcasts, and paid traffic channels known as PPC. These are all covered in detail within the training at Wealthy Affiliate.
Step 4: Make Money.
Last but no least, the “make money” part of your business. This is where you earn money through affiliate programs. Basically there are over 550 MILLION products/services that you can promote as an affiliate marketer, in exchange for a commission. You will be adding these special links on your website from companies like Amazon, Etsy, Nike, Apple, eBay, etc…and you will then earn a “sales commission” if someone goes from your website to the merchants website and ends up buying something. To simplify what an affiliate marketers job is, you are just directing traffic to a product or service, you don’t hold, sell or ship products, you have zero liability, it’s a pretty sweet deal.
The affiliate marketing industry is growing at the fastest pace ever, and affiliates stand to earn $12 BILLION online this year…with this growing even more next year. You can get your peice of the action by taking action!
How To Find Affiliate Programs: Finding affiliate programs can be a time wasting initiative at best. You typically have to go through a bunch of Google searches, just to find what you are looking for. Within Wealthy Affiliate, you have instant access to an Affiliate Program search where you can search through 10,000+ affiliate programs, across some of the top affiliate networks online.
Not to mention, the training you will be getting on how to properly integrate affiliate promotions into your website to maximize conversions….along with some insight into the customer purchase lifecycle, critical information if you want to become a high performing, and successful affiliate marketers online.
So there you have it, how to effectively start an affiliate marketing business in a nutshell. If you are interested in creating your own affiliate marketing business and have no experience, or you are currently trying to build out or scale an affiliate marketing business and you are not getting the results you want, I CAN PERSONALLY HELP.
Again, I have been at this for many years now and you can immediately connect with me within WealthyAffiliate.com Upon creating your account, you will get access to the training, websites, hosting, research tools, networking, mentorship and direct support from me amd the community.
It’s also free to start with a limited free starter account, at no cost…no credit card required, simply walk away if it’s not what I have descibed. I highly recommend if you are even the slightest bit interested in becoming an elite affilate marketer, you get rolling right now with your account. I will be reaching out to you within 30 minutes or so, of you joining. 😉
===> Click Here to Create Your Test Drive Wealthy Affiliate Account!
And if you have any questions you want to leave here for me, feel free to do so. I will make sure I get back to you as soon as I can (usually within a few hours).