How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
What is Affiliate marketing and how much money can you really make from it? This guide will show you how to start affiliate marketing with a step by step simple guide.
Basically, Affiliate marketing is a way to earn a commission on selling other peoples products this can be anything, for instance, Amazon has an affiliate program which allows you to earn a commission on things people buy and it doesn’t even have to be the initial product on the link they clicked on to get to Amazon.
(If this post contains affiliate links please see our full disclosure policy although I have to say I tried really hard to make it interesting and even I struggled to write it so if you really must read it you can find it here)
The great thing about affiliate marketing is its minimal work to maintain – you need to make sure that your links are still active and you can continue earning money from that link.
It’s an affordable way to start monetizing your blog as you don’t have to outlay any money to do it you just need to sign up with affiliate marketing companies to be able to promote their products.
I have started earning money via Awin affiliate marketing company that allows you to add Etsy links to products. If you want to find out more about Awin then click this link its a great starting off point to earn affiliate income from and I am super excited that I have started earning money promoting some of their partner’s products.
Best of all you can work from anywhere as long as you have a computer and internet connection.
You will get paid for each person that CONVERTS when clicking on your affiliate link by doing actions such as entering their email address when they purchase something on a website, filling out a form, or just plan to purchase something.
It’s great for you to be able to review a specific product that you have used and liked for instance in this post I am promoting Carly’s Affiliate marketing for bloggers course. I purchased it 6 months or so ago and I think its a great resource when you are starting out.
I am using the Genus Bloggers Toolkit 2018
as an example.
Because I already bought it and loved it ( check back to see if it’s in the Genius Bloggers Toolkit by clicking the above banner) you then get access to hundreds of other courses- basically, you could say for free for just buying Carly’s Affiliate marketing for bloggers course at $79.
You just can say fair than that its such a bargain!
This is an example of how I have added affiliate links to each for each of these courses:
1- for Carly’s course which is her direct link and
2- for the Genius Bloggers toolkit 2018
Carly’s own Affiliate link adds a cookie ( this is how you then get paid) this cookie will have a lifespan and a 365 day one if fabulous as it stays on the person’s computer till they clear their cookies. If that person clicks on the link above for Carly’s course a cookie will be added and if they then subsequently buy the course I will receive a 35% commission of this sale.
The average click-through rate is only 2% so you can see also that you need a certain percentage of traffic to increase your odds.
If you are struggling with traffic:
My post on how to win at Pinterest will help you out increasing traffic from Pinterest and the good thing is it really isn’t as time intensive as you would expect.
The Exact Pinterest Strategy I used to get 600k monthly views ( in ONE-month case study)
The trick is getting someone to convert to purchasing the product in the first place.
So the point of this post is to explain Affiliate marketing using the example of the Genius Bloggers Toolkit 2018 and hopefully getting you to sign up for it or Carly’s course if it comes up in the Toolkit or separately.
So I will go through what’s great about the Genius Blogger Toolkit and Carlys Affiliate marketing for bloggers course as a review and hopefully, this will inspire you to check it out and eventually consider purchasing either of them.
Ok, the bad news is it’s not that easy to get people to purchase you have to love the products you are promoting did I tell you I love Carly’s course and the review hopefully will highlight this for you.
I guess the key is to tell people why they should spend their hard earned money and how it will add value to them personally – easier said than done!
If you add that together the value of each individual courses are way more expensive than buying the bundle. If you fancy the bundle checkout all the courses you can get here. If you have missed the bundle ( hopefully not they also do a sale later on next year so sign up for notifications via this link as well)
Over $5000 dollars worth of products for just $97! And that’s not including the bonuses they have included this year.
Thinking about buying Carly’s course Guide to Affiliate marketing for bloggers then I highly recommend you wait and purchase it via the bundle if it’s going to be in this especially if you want to find out more about affiliate marketing and how to monetize your site using affiliate links.
The Genius Bloggers Toolkit also comes with FREE RESOURCES as well the first of which you can grab just now completely FREE! Not to mention Case Studies from your favourite bloggers too.
The Genius Bloggers Toolkit comes with a huge bundle of other courses. So click the banners in the post to find out more when it’s coming out soon.
Here is more of a Review of Carly’s affiliate marketing course to help you make up your mind.
Why it’s great pro and cons
What’s in the course check out her chapter list below:
What I really like about this course is it’s mostly text-based with a few video examples to show you HOW she actually does things.
As you can see from the first section Carly goes into Blogging about Blogging and addresses this first. She tells you that to make money you don’t necessarily need to blog about blogging phew that’s great news!
Funnily enough, my first sales have been in my crafty posts NOT my blogging about blogging posts!
And she also outlines in simple terms how to find affiliates to promote and the best links you can use. Its so practically based and simple to understand that I really resonated with the content and felt like as a beginner that I definitely could achieve the same results.
This section is all about using your BLOG posts to add affiliate links to and her hints and tips to making sure you are optimizing these links.
Best of all she shows you this with her examples from her none blogging about blogging posts so you can see exactly why and where she put her links how she will then go back to optimize these links if she feels they aren’t producing income.
I like the fact that she shows you step by step what she has done and why rather than just stating add links.
Yes, but how do you know if they aren’t working and where should you move them – luckily she goes into this for you too.
Carly goes into talking about planning your posts for traffic using Keywords but mentions keywords tools you can use but does not go into any great detail.
For me ranking for keywords in Google and Pinterest is super important to get traffic to your posts and she does say it’s a whole nother course. I would have preferred more on this chapter specifically about finding keywords.
If you want to delve deeper into this and I do feel its super important I have been going through Lena Gott Adventures in SEO course and it’s amazing when it comes to figuring out your best keywords for Google and Pinterest so I highly recommend you look at this course.
At the end of the day you can have a great post with affiliate links but if no one is seeing it then you won’t get the conversions you need.
Don’t forget more and more people are blogging especially about blogging and they will be all promoting the same affiliate links so you need to get great traffic to begin with.
Stuck with Pinterest check out my post on how I managed to skyrocket my Pinterest monthly views by near 500k in one month.
The Exact Pinterest Strategy I used to get 600k monthly views ( in ONE-month case study)
I also use strategies from Carly’s Pinteresting Ebook within my strategies.
Again Carly goes into an example of a post that has high traffic on her site – and what strategies she uses to monetize the post.
Yep, it’s that traffic thing again! You do need it to make sales there is no ifs and buts about it!
I do love how she then goes through how she managed to improve the conversions for a post that has lower traffic just by moving her links. And proves it to you.
The last section goes through her Affiliate marketing strategies:
I found this part fo the Ebook to be super helpful as some of the other courses don’t address this in the same way as Carly does with having a whole section on it as you can see from above.
Even Michelle’s Makingsenseofaffiliatemarketing course doesn’t specifically address email marketing like Carly’s.
Carly goes into your email list and what it should be at the outset giving you practical tips to make sure you are building a thriving list that will respond to your affiliate links with helpful tips about what you should be including in your emails to your subscribers.
Again this is one of the TOP things that I love about her course she gives you an example of an email she sent to her list.
She also talks about the different types of emails to send to your list and again she gives you an example of a launch sequence email she sent out to her list.
To wrap it all up for you one of the BIG reasons I love this course is that Carly gives you tonnes of examples for how to do affiliate marketing properly especially examples not in the blogging about blogging niche.
I also love the fact its lots of text you might not like that so much and prefer video, but for me, the text is great as I don’t have to deal with all that buffering nonsense when I am trying to watch a video with a crappy internet speed. ( yes this still happens).
I love how Carly writes things they seem easier to understand and feel like you could implement them so much easier than other bloggers.
What I would have like would be EVEN more examples ( this isn’t really a criticism just a point out as she does them so well and they really help to make it easier to understand affiliate marketing.)
I would have liked some aspects of the course to have more detail
- Keywords to use in Google and Pinterest how to find them in detail
- Legally what are no follows and why you need to include them ( Prettylinks WordPress plugin automatically adds no follow links into affiliate links for you)
- Requirements and disclosures that you need on your site
- Types of posts to add affiliate links to in detail- this post, for example, is a review post
- Maintaining your Affiliate strategy
- Things to avoid doing
If you want to find out more about then
And Makingsenseofaffiliatemarketing can fill the gaps for you for the things I have just listed above if you want a more in-depth look at affiliate marketing.
Overall I would say that Carly’s Affiliate marketing for bloggers is a beginner guide with great examples of how to implement what she talks about in the course.
I have started implementing what she teaches and hope to increase my own affiliate marketing efforts.
It’s not hard to get started or costly so what are you guys waiting for!
What should you do:
-
- Write an in-depth tutorial like this one about your favorite course, book or anything else you love – a non-blogging example is my post
https://smartpennies.com/crochet-blanket-patterns/
- make sure your content solves peoples problems
- add your links to your content and make sure they stand out to encourage people to click on them and ask them to check out the link for more information if they need it.
