Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing? Here’s What You Need To Do
Do you have a blog, or an active and engaged following on social media? You can make money whenever you talk about or share a product or website you're passionate about through affiliate marketing, generating passive income through increasing your reach and influence.
Do you have a blog, or an active and engaged following on social media? You can make money whenever you talk about or share a product or website you're passionate about through affiliate marketing, generating passive income through increasing your reach and influence. The concept of affiliate marketing is simple: you "advertise" for a company by talking about their product, and when somebody makes a sale based on your recommendation, you receive a percentage of that sale. Everybody wins.
Even if you don’t have a following or have never attempted to build one, you can still get started today and begin generating income through consistently showing up to your target audience, educating them on the benefits of the product, and growing your following to increase your chances of making affiliate sales. While many influencers participate in affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing is not the same thing as influencer marketing. You don’t have to try and market yourself—you’re marketing products and services. This isn’t like multi-level marketing, where you’re trying to find people to sign up underneath you, but you can also earn money by referring others to affiliate programs you’re a part of—very meta, but can become lucrative down the line. For example, Impact is a site I use to apply for brand partnerships, and if you click that link and sign up for your own Impact account, I would get a percentage of the money you eventually make through your brand deals.
The best part about affiliate programs, in my opinion, is that you aren’t taking additional money from the customer, and you’re not scraping off the earnings of anyone who’s signed up for an affiliate program through you. The money that is paid out to affiliates usually comes from a company’s marketing budget, and there’s literally millions of dollars waiting to be tapped into.
With an active online presence, affiliate marketing can really add up to a lot of passive income from all of the sales being generated from your links. You can try to make a bunch of small affiliate sales through sharing discounts or deals, such as through Amazon or Target, and you can also make a handful of big-ticket affiliate sales (Hubspot and Shopify pay out huge commissions) by acting strategically and choosing to speak about companies that pay out more to their affiliates.
Here are some steps you should take right now if you are thinking about beginning your affiliate marketing journey:
Sign up for a website to begin building your email list, and create a sign-up form that you can easily link on other pages. This is the single most important step in any online business, IMO. Email marketing is extremely effective when compared to other forms of marketing (like social media or print advertising), and a great way to build trust with your following, which is vital for marketing products and services to them. Websites I recommend for this step are ClickFunnels and Aweber if you’re into simple, text-based emails with high levels of automation, or Flodesk if you’re into making emails that are a bit more aesthetically focused. Flodesk also offers gorgeous checkout pages, which I am a fan of if you also sell digital products or webinars, but it can also be a bit pricey for the full package ($29-59 a month). This link will get you 50% off Flodesk, if you are interested in a discount.
Once you have created your mailing list, the next vital step will be building email sequences, which are sometimes referred to as funnels or workflows.
This is the key that will allow your affiliate marketing business to eventually run on auto-pilot and generate you commissions without you having to do any extra work. This can also seem like the most tedious part of your entire business, and you may be right, but passive income creation functions like that in the beginning. A person should be able to find you on the internet, and within a matter of minutes, be able to identify what you’re all about, what you’re marketing, and how they can get more content from you (ie, joining your mailing list or subscribing to your channel). If they can be led to making a sale, even better.
Once they are on your mailing list, they should be initiated immediately into a series of spaced-out emails that communicate even more about your story, your brand, the product(s) you’re marketing, and how that product will benefit your reader. This isn’t about writing spammy sales emails; this is about storytelling. Earning your readers’ trust is paramount as an affiliate marketer, and it’s also easier for people to trust you when they know at least a little bit about the human behind the screen. You don’t have to tell you entire life story, but include something in your introductory emails that opens up your reader to who you are and why you do what you do.
Email marketing is powerful because you can segment your audience based on their interests or how they found you, and market to them in an even more personalized manner. Try setting up a few different sequences that each talk to a specific audience about a specific product—even if you have to make up a fake product to practice with. This is called copywriting, and while it may not be a skill that comes to you naturally, that doesn’t have to mean you are doomed to fail at affiliate marketing or email marketing.
If you are stumped on how to begin copywriting or introducing yourself to your readers, don’t be afraid to use AI as a resource. ChatGPT is fabulous for taking your ideas and giving them more form, structure, or a clarified tone. Just remember to always use AI as a starting point, and customize the ideas it provides you to make it authentic to your voice and mission. At some point when you can afford to hire a copywriter, it’s well worth the investment, but when you are just beginning and you need to get scrappy with it, it’s alright to rely on technology to fill in the gaps.
You may be wondering how you can allow people to find you online in the first place—and do you have to pay for advertising to do it? The short answer: no. This is where some decisions must be made—one, which market or “niche” you’re going to be marketing to, and two, which platforms and media content you are going to use to reach new people.
The word “niche” has been beaten into the ground in terms of digital marketing in the last decade, so I don’t want you to read this and think you have to dedicate your life or your business to one thing and one thing only. However, it is absolutely more strategic in affiliate marketing to not market to an audience that’s too broad. If you’re really into, say, travel, then you can talk about travel all day, but how can you get a little more specific with it? Maybe you want to reach people who are Millennials, without children, who have an interest in making their travel as environmentally responsible as possible. Maybe you want to talk to young queer people who are traveling on a budget and recommend them affordable, queer-friendly vacation spots around the world. Maybe you want to talk to parents of young children who want to travel to resorts that offer both free childcare and open bars. The possibilities are limitless, and though it may seem counter-intuitive, it is true that the more specific you are, the more likely you are to reach an audience that is engaged and trusts your recommendations. This is a goldmine for affiliate marketing and will have the added effect of making you more desirable to companies that you may want to begin marketing for.
Once you know who you’re going to be speaking to in your content, what you are going to talk about, and which types of products or services you’d like to market, then you have to decide which form of media you want to market with. There’s a huge emphasis on short-form video content right now, such as TikTok or Instagram reels, and that can feel overwhelming or uncomfortable if you aren’t interested in putting your face or voice at the forefront of your business (which is TOTALLY okay, by the way, and plenty of people make bank doing it that way). You can still create video content that utilizes stock footage or faceless videos of you using the product(s) you are marketing, accompanied by text and/or captions describing the benefits of the product. If you aren’t interested in making videos, don’t worry—you can still generate organic traffic (meaning you didn’t pay for any advertising) through text-based content, such as blogging. Pinterest is a wonderful platform for generating traffic to your website or blog, seeing as it is a search engine, and you can link basic graphics with some summarizing text on them straight to your blog or website, from your Pinterest profile. The key when you are just beginning to create content for affiliate marketing is to not overthink it and resist the urge to overproduce your work. Just get the word out, be honest and transparent with your audience, and be genuinely enthusiastic about whatever it is that you’re advertising. Focus on growing your reach and influence, because those are two of the most important metrics that companies will look at when they are considering you as an affiliate.
Speaking of companies, a huge part of beginning your affiliate marketing journey, before you ever post your first piece of content on Youtube or Instagram or TikTok or Pinterest, is actually applying for affiliate programs and getting accepted to them.
Go ahead and sign up for Impact right now, because it is an affiliate network that many brands will require you to have an account with in order to join their affiliate program. Impact is also great for searching through brands that have affiliate programs you may never have heard of before. It’s a great way to discover new products and services within your niche so you can decide if you want to try them out and begin advertising for them—but be wary of programs that accept everyone automatically, and never advertise something you aren’t confident about. PartnerStack is another affiliate network platform that allows you to become an affiliate for companies that are a bit more SaaS (software as a service) focused.
A general rule for affiliate marketing is that you should apply for a brand’s affiliate program before you ever start advertising for them, so you have plenty of time to let the application be processed (typically takes 2-5 days) and have your affiliate link ready to go when you begin posting and driving sales to that company. Don’t be afraid to Google search “[company name] affiliate program” any time you are even considering talking about a company on your platform; you’d be surprised just how many companies offer an affiliate program.
It can often feel disappointing and discouraging when you are first building your audience and you are rejected by brands you apply to. Don’t take it personally; this is a business contract after all, and companies want to make sure they will benefit from a partnership with you. You can always re-apply when your web traffic, conversions, and/or readership numbers have improved. The phrase “no free advertising” gets thrown around a lot, but sometimes you have to do a bit of free advertising to establish trust with your readership and with companies you wish to advertise for.
If you don’t have the ability to build and host an entire website right away, don’t fret. Plenty of people run hugely successful affiliate marketing careers without ever having their own website. While it can be useful to have your own website if you are marketing through methods like blogging, it’s not immediately necessary to build a successful business. What is important is that you have a convenient place where people can find out everything they need to know about your business.
LinkTree is a hugely popular platform for digital marketers and creators to keep their most pertinent links in one place. I would not recommend simply posting affiliate links in your LinkTree—unless you are running a promotion and directing your audience there—but rather, linking to an opt-in form for your mailing list or taking them to your other social media platforms. Treat it like a hub for all the ways to connect with you, not necessarily a place for selling things.
LinkTree is free, but if you are willing & able to invest a bit of money into something that’s not quite a website and not just a collection of links, then Stan is a platform I highly recommend. Not only can you share your links on Stan, but if you’re doing affiliate marketing in addition to digital products & offerings, you can also sell your products, webinars, run a membership, and even book 1:1 sessions directly on your Stan page, and it processes payments directly through your Stripe account. You get a free trial with Stan, so it’s really easy to use that time to generate the $29 a month you’ll need to maintain your subscription. That’s just one sale of a $30 e-book or one $30 commission every month, and your costs are covered—this is the magic of combining affiliate marketing with other income creation methods, but that’s a talk for another day.
Choose your definition of consistency, stick with it, and don’t lose hope. This may seem like really cheesy advice, but the process of creating a business or generating passive income is always the hardest at the beginning. The compound effect works in mysterious ways, but it’s like a vehicle that requires you to put gasoline in it (in the form of creating content for your audience) in order for it to take you wherever you want to go. If sharing a TikTok about your niche every single day sounds impossible at first, aim for once a week. If you aren’t always inspired to sit down and create content for your blog, bank some posts while you are feeling inspired and schedule them to be posted periodically. Strategy will come in handy with affiliate marketing, but more than that, you need to have hope that it can work for you. You don’t need everybody in the world to care about what you’re doing or to give you their money in order to achieve the lifestyle you want. You simply need to reach enough of the right people, and the more dedicated you are to refining that message and providing value to your audience with your recommendations, the better off you will be.
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This post contains affiliate links.