How to make money with affiliate marketing

1. What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a possibility to start earning money for promoting a product or service of some brand using an affiliate link (a link to a specific site that contains a unique user ID).

It’s simple: you find a product that you think has a great perspective, promote it to potential buyers and get your reward (commission, a part of the profits from each sale you have managed to make).

Affiliate marketing is a rapidly-growing market. According to Hosting tribunal, affiliate marketing along with email marketing accounts for over 16% of all e-commerce orders in the USA and Canada. That’s why it is one of the best sources of income you can get online.

Selling products or different kinds of services with the help of the affiliate programs provides an opportunity not only to get momentary profits in the form of a bonus for a new customer but also constant payments. Therefore, affiliate sales today have become a constant source of income for many webmasters, online entrepreneurs, bloggers, etc.

This article will help you to clearly understand, how to make money with affiliate marketing. Here you will find:

• earning opportunities in affiliate marketing;
• pros and cons of such activity;
• most high-paying affiliate programs examples with a good passive income;
• tips on how to succeed in this area;
• how much money you can make with affiliate marketing!

2. Is affiliate marketing a passive income?

In fact, affiliate marketing allows you to get a good passive income. Just imagine: you do not need to create new products and produce them, or go to work every day – you sit at home, selling products and earning money with various affiliate programs.

3. 4 important steps to making big money in affiliate marketing

3.1. Select a profitable niche and find a good product for your affiliate sales

The benefit of participating in affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to search for ideas to create a best-selling product. You simply choose an existing product on the market than you are confident in: if it was created, then there is a demand. That is, you can find an audience!

Check out a few examples:

• Selling toys creating video reviews is an excellent way to monetize any content for kids. Many partnership programs can be integrated into such types of projects, and the sale of physical goods is one of the most win-win options.
• Selling mobile devices using a blog – this is the same review, only in text format. You are wrong if you think that people do not read articles today. This content is no less popular than videos.
• Sale of any products through thematic sites.

Check out any successful website, that is a partner of the Aliexpress platform. The sites’ owners make large selections of a variety of trending products, providing affiliate links. They also provide a lot of useful info on how to order products on Aliexpress, how to avoid fraud, how to communicate with sellers and so on.

Thus, visitors trust these websites and use the recommendations from various articles.

3.2. Build the subscription base for sale

Email marketing is, maybe, one of the greatest marketing channels. Having a large subscription base with the audience, that is interested in related themes, you can always sell affiliate products from the selected niche.

To collect email addresses you will need a lead magnet. This is a free informational product that you provide to users for contact information.

You can build your subscription base in many ways:

• create a landing page as the lead magnet, which briefly describes your free product and encourages the visitor to leave their contact information. The page should consist of 3-4 blocks;
• create contact capture blocks on the site with catchy titles and contact forms. Place it in the most visible part of the webpage;
• the pop-up window that appears on the screen when a person visits the site (or is about to leave it).

3.3. Host webinars and live broadcasts to increase audience loyalty

Often, people host webinars to give the audience more valuable free content and significantly increase customer confidence in the brand.

Live broadcasts are a separate issue. Broadcasts are held on all popular social networks, including Facebook and Instagram. Using live broadcasts, you get an audience in these social networks and draw attention to your brand. Social networks themselves promote live broadcasts.

Therefore, your subscribers will always be the first people to see your broadcasts. Think about the useful things that you can share with your subscribers to boost sales in the nearest future.

3.4. Deliver the offer, start promoting it with PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising

And again, the landing page is the perfect choice for that!

Although you can sell products directly with the help of videos, articles, posts on social networks and so on. But you will still need to end up with the selling site someday.

Create a one-page website, write a strong selling text, add calls to action and so on. Then, start promoting your web page with ads that you will pay for every click. This can be contextual advertising on Google at your search queries or targeted ads on social networks.

4. Best affiliate programs examples

Try the Fiverr Program: the dynamic CPA model allows you to earn up to $150 for every single first-time customer.

ClickFunnels will pay as much as 40% recurring commissions on all successful deals you make.

Wealthy Program is the most attractive form the available ones: you get a stable income by referring others to the Wealthy’s community. The standard commission is $100 per the premium signup.

Constant Contact offers quite a simple, yet interesting program: you get your $5 for every referral that opts for their free trial. Plus, you get a $105 reward if your referral chooses a full account.

Join Media.net ambassador program and get your guaranteed 10% commission on all referral income for the first year. Earn an additional 10% for the first 3 months.

In affiliate marketing, you’re getting the greater income by inviting the greater number of people who have met all the requirements of a contractor.

Today, millions of entrepreneurs from all around the world are creating websites for business using website builders, which means that this niche can be quite profitable if you start working with the right affiliate marketing program!

Check out Weblium’s affiliate program – an advanced 5th generation website builder offers to earn money with the help of two platforms – First Promoter and ShareASale:

1. At First Promoter, you will get 50% of the first sale and 20% of all subsequent and recurrent ones.
2. At ShareASale, you will get 40% from the first sale of any package + special bonuses:

• 45% commission if you manage to make more than 30 sales per month;
• you get a 50% commission if you make more than 70 sales per month.

Choosing the Weblium affiliate program, you will also get the additional tools for success:

• tracking your referrals and earnings stats online in your personal account;
• ready to use promotional materials (you can order creating unique promos from Weblium team experts if needed);
• 150 days Cookie window – you guaranteed to get your reward even if you will decide to stop working with the program;
• coupons and interesting offers for webmasters;
• a designated manager that helps you with the onboarding and payouts.

Weblium affiliate program is a vivid example of brand loyalty to its partners. So, if you look for the best way to monetize your content, and you can figure out where the potential customers hang out online, then start earning with Weblium affiliate program today!

5. Benefits and drawbacks of affiliate marketing

5.1. Benefits:

• Low start-up cost. Most referral programs are free, so the expenses are typically related to the referral/marketing methods you will choose.
• You don’t have to create a new product or service.
• You can work whenever you want and from any location you want, you just need to have a stable internet connection.
• The great potential of getting passive income, the size of which depends only on how you are selling the products.
• You can easily combine this business activity with the one you currently have, increasing your profits.
• It is an ideal business for trainers, bloggers, information entrepreneurs, еtс.

5.2. Drawbacks:

• Generating the required amount of traffic may take some time.
• Bad affiliate referrals can destroy your credibility. You can avoid this by choosing honest partners for cooperation.
• You have no control over the product or service and you have no idea of how the partner makes his business. Your very first and the most crucial step is finding the right, reliable affiliate program. You can study the reputation of various partners for weeks, read multiple reviews and compare the payments, or you can simply use the proven software solutions like Post affiliate pro software and start getting profits today.
• High competition. When you finally find an option that suits you the most, you may realize that many other people are already using it.
• The buyer belongs to the seller. You never know who made the purchase, and this makes your further sales difficult.

6. Tips on how to succeed in affiliate marketing

Yes, affiliate marketing is a perfect way to get income online. But this does not mean that you will be earning money doing nothing!

Having completed your market research, carefully studied the details of the affiliate program, you will have to invest your time and patience to develop a strategy for success for selling products in affiliate marketing.

Check out these proven tips on how to succeed in affiliate marketing:

• Pick up only reliable affiliate product or service (from time to time, you should even try them and see everything for yourself).
• Carefully study the affiliate program — for instance, find out in detail how and when you are going to get paid.
• Start a blog – this will provide many opportunities for promoting referral products.
• Choose affiliate products that perfectly match your niche, your website’s or blog’s content.
• Combine different types of affiliate ads so as not to overload visitors. Publishers typically have better click-through rates on referral links with images.
• Be honest. Always open in your partnerships – this guarantees confidence in your offers.
• Before investing in large volumes, test on small volumes. The goal is to understand how this audience reacts to different advertisements.
• If you are counting only on SEO or social media in rider to attract people to your website or blog, as well as affiliate referrals, then you are wrong. You have to clearly understand who your target audience is, where these people hang out online and how you can make them visit your website.
• Start an email newsletter – sometimes it is the best way to increase your affiliate profit.
• Think about using a lead page and funnel system. Attract subscribers with an absolutely free offer, then, later, make them visit your affiliate products page.
• Keep track of the effectiveness of your activity, especially if you are participating in several affiliate programs or you use other types of advertising, such as Google AdSense for earning money online. Remember that if you use too many ads on your page, this may distract your visitors, resulting in poor performance.

7. How much money can I make with affiliate marketing?

With various affiliate programs, you can get from $0 to several thousand a day with a thought-out system of earning money (for example, a website with good traffic can easily earn you $1000 a month).

There are few groups of affiliate marketers based on their income:

• Apprentice – almost no profit/$О profit.
• Low Level –$0/day – $300/day.
• Intermediate – $300/day – $3,000/day.
• High Level – above $3,000/day.
• The «Bag of Dicks» – more than $10,000/day.

While the greater part of affiliates makes up to $20,000 a year, there still are a lot of guys that will never earn this money this way. As 99firms claim, out of the 35% of affiliates who earn more than $20,000 per year, 12% make over $75,000 in affiliate income. Not bad at all!

8. Summary

Affiliate marketing is about getting a stable income of up to $10,000 per day. Moreover, your earnings directly depend on how efficiently you convert potential customers into buyers.

This type of earnings is worth the costs that it requires at the initial stage, plus, you can do it from anywhere in the world!

On the one hand, there is a high level of competition in this area and it is rather complicated than you think. On the other hand, any ambitious person who has his own website (or does not have one) can achieve success in this business.

Day by day, you will learn to understand the main needs of customers, develop your promotion skills and learn to effectively analyze your work.

Here are a few more tips for you to succeed in affiliate marketing:

• Be patient – it can take up to a year from website development to the start of affiliate sales.
• Your audience is more important than a percentage of sales – those customers who you attract to buy affiliate products can potentially become your customers.
• Choose the market segment wisely – it should be interesting to you and your target audience.
• Choose the product or service you will be selling correctly: everything is important here – you should test some products yourself, check whether the product matches your content, understand whether the seller’s page makes people want to buy the product, etc.
• Understand how to properly search for affiliate programs. Affiliate networks are the best solution: here, you can find hundreds of sellers who are looking for partners.
• Find better places for affiliate links and banners on your page: according to Google, they should be in harmony with the text and be an integral part of your content.
• Use only useful content: each article you write carefully provides an opportunity to make a profit.
• Attract only targeted traffic: write guest articles for the third-party sites, share your content on social networks, work with subscribers via email, etc.
• Use only paid hosting to get quality services and work without any troubles.