Hey everyone, and welcome back to another video. In today’s video, I’m going to be walking you through how to start affiliate marketing for a beginner. This video is going to be super helpful, and by the end of this video, you will be able to start affiliate marketing today.
I’m going to start off by showing you how to actually join affiliate programs, and then I’ll show you how to get your links from those affiliate programs. Now, after that, I will explain what kind of content to create for affiliate marketing that actually works and will make you money, and then where to post that content. Once we’ve covered all of that, the last couple of things I’ll show you are how to get traffic to your affiliate marketing content. And lastly, how do you get paid by these companies?
Okay, so without further ado, let’s get straight into this, starting with what is affiliate marketing? This is something that I quickly have to explain just so we are on the same page. And the reason I want to take a second to explain this is because so many people online overcomplicate what affiliate marketing is. All you need to know for affiliate marketing is it’s basically like a referral program. You partner with companies, essentially joining their affiliate program or their referral program for free, they then give you your unique referral link. This is called your affiliate link. Then you take your link and you share it with other people, and when they click on your link and make a purchase, the company then pays you a commission. That is all affiliate marketing really is, and when you understand it at that fundamental core level, the rest of this video and the strategies that I will show you will make so much more sense.
Now, something else that’s extremely important to understand before we get into the actual strategy and explaining how to do affiliate marketing is why is affiliate marketing such a good business model? Why would you choose this one compared to all of the other online business models out there nowadays? Well, the short answer here is that so many big companies rely on their affiliate programs or their referral programs to drive new customers to their business, especially as advertising costs are going up year over year, making it more expensive for them to get customers through their traditional routes. This is something that so many people that are consumers like you and me, we don’t realize about their businesses. However, these massive companies in their sales and marketing departments have a division dedicated to their affiliate program. So that is why affiliate marketing has been a proven business model and will continue to be a proven business model for years to come.
Okay, so with all that being said, let’s switch over to the computer, and I wanna start off by showing you some of the big companies that have affiliate programs. This is just to tie all of this together before we start getting into the strategy. So starting with the first one, which is actually the largest affiliate program out there, this is Amazon’s Affiliate Program. So many people don’t know, but Amazon actually has an Affiliate Program themselves. They pay up to 10% commission on anything someone buys on Amazon after clicking your affiliate link. Now, here are a couple of others that you may be surprised by. Best Buy, if you live in the United States, this is an in-person store that you buy electronics, they have an Affiliate Program. Staying on the topic of in-person stores, Target. Most people don’t know, but Target has an Affiliate Program as well, so you can join Target’s Affiliate Program and you can refer people to anything sold in Target. And then beyond in-person stores, there are online businesses like Shopify. So this is a subscription tool to make a website and sell things online. They rely heavily on their Affiliate Program for new customers. Skillshare has an Affiliate Program. Skillshare is a marketplace that sells courses online. They get new customers through their Affiliate Program. Fiverr has an Affiliate Program where you can buy services online. And then speaking of online, Bluehost, which is the largest website hosting service out there, they have an Affiliate Program as well, and this is a massive part of their business. Now, these are just a couple of affiliate programs that I wanted to show you, but there are thousands of affiliate programs out there in all different categories or niches that you can join for free.
So that brings us into the topic of how do you find and join affiliate programs for yourself? Well, the first thing I would recommend for you to do is to come over to Google and I would type in the niche or the industry that you are thinking about creating content in. Now, I get this question all the time, “What if my niche is too competitive? I see people already creating affiliate content in it, can I still go into it?” The very long answer here condensed down to a couple of seconds is, I have been doing affiliate marketing for years now, and I’ve even experimented with trial and error going into extremely saturated niches. What I have found out is no matter how competitive the niche already is, as long as that niche has affiliate programs for products that are regularly purchased online, this is a big one, there are some products out there that people will only feel comfortable purchasing in store, they have to try it on, things like that, make sure that people are okay and regularly purchasing those products online. And then lastly, as long as you are passionate or knowledgeable about the topic. If you have those three things, no matter how competitive the niche is, you can still succeed and make money in that niche. Now, the reason I say this is because when I personally experimented this in a super competitive niche, my content was not getting as many views as the top established people in that niche, however, I was still making thousands of dollars in affiliate commission. To date, I haven’t even worked on that niche and I’m still making money from it. So with that being said, the first step for you here is to pick a niche that you want to start with. You can go into so many different niches down the road, but for this video, you just wanna come up with basically, what are your interests, what are your passions? What are something that can be purchased online? That’s a great place to start. So I’m going to use the example of camping for this tutorial and just go to the Google Search, and go to, “camping affiliate programs.” And then you’re going to get results like this that are going to give you lists of different affiliate programs in whatever niche that you typed in. Now, you can really click on any of these, and we’re just looking for ideas at this point. Now, as you’re scrolling through here, you should see a list of companies that hopefully you recognize within your niche. So I have YETI products, I have GoPro products, I’ve shopped at DICK’S Sporting Goods, I’ve shopped at REI, I have bought a Leatherman, I have been to L.L.Bean, these are all companies that I know things about, or I already own their products. So what you’ve just done is you found out what companies you possibly can be creating content about. Now you can continue to dig into your niche and find even more results, but once you’ve found at least one company that has an affiliate program in the niche you want to go into, ideally if you already own the products that that company sells, you’re going to be able to create your affiliate content without having to buy anything. And all you have to do at this point is go look up their affiliate program and join it for free. Now, many times in these lists, they will link you directly to their affiliate program. What I like doing is just going to Google and typing in their program directly, “Yeti affiliate program.” And this will bring you to YETI’s website or whatever the company’s website is that you’re looking up, and you can join their affiliate program directly with them. Now, this is what’s cool about affiliate programs. Joining an affiliate program for a company is always 100% free. The only stipulation to this that I’ve ever seen is for some of the companies, you have to own the product before you can join their affiliate program. It’s just the company’s way of making sure that whoever’s creating content for them knows about their product properly. But with that being said, you can join as many of these affiliate programs as you want, and you can create content about all of the different products, you don’t have to be exclusive to just one company. So if we were to start with YETI here, which I already own their product, so I could easily create content about them, all we do here is now that we’re on their website, we just go to SIGN UP FOR FREE. And then this is what a typical affiliate program application looks like. So really this is basic information. It’s your Name, your Email Address, Create a Username, and Password, and then you get into Company Information where if you are a new affiliate marketer, you might be a little bit hesitant here, just know that you do not need to have a company registered to do affiliate marketing. What they are saying here is they want to keep track of who they are paying and where you are promoting it. So they’re looking for your website of where you’re going to be promoting their products. Now, you don’t need to have a website, I will touch on this in a second here, once we get a little bit further in this tutorial, but the important thing to clarify here is that you do not need to have a business entity set up to do this, and then just fill in the rest of the information here. Nothing here is too complicated. They’re just going to go over their Terms, basically, them just telling you how much they pay in commissions. And then once you get to the bottom and you have this filled out, you literally just click Sign Up. Now, some of these companies just accept you instantly, and then in the next step, I’ll show you how to get your affiliate links to share. But other companies, they review your application, they look at the website or what I’ll show you to put there in a second, they look at that and they get back to you in a couple of days on whether they approve you or not. I will say, that most people’s biggest hesitation is they think that they need to have a full website with blog posts or a following and all these things to get accepted into affiliate programs. But what you are going to find out as you get into this is you can be 100% brand-new, just have started today, and you can still get accepted to these affiliate programs. So with that said, in order to keep this on track, so it all makes sense, we will come back to this company website right here, but I need to go one step forward before we can come back to it, and I’ll explain how this works. So stick with me for a second here. I’m going to go as if we clicked Sign Up, and now you are approved to the affiliate program. How do you go about getting your affiliate link to then go share that with other people, get them to click on it, and then you get your affiliate commissions? So once you join these affiliate programs, all of these affiliate programs have different dashboards. Some of them use these same services to manage their affiliate programs, so you may see similar dashboards out there, however, they all basically do the same thing. What they’re going to do is allow you to track how many people have clicked on your links, how many people have purchased through your links, and keep track of how much commission they owe you. However, the important thing for you when you’re just getting started in affiliate marketing is actually creating your affiliate links for that company. Now, I’m logged into one of my affiliate dashboards right here, and this will be the same for if I had joined YETI’s Affiliate Program in this example. But basically, what you’re looking for in your dashboard is a section that says, CREATE AND SHARE LINK,” or “Create Your Link,” or, “Get Your Affiliate Link.” And basically, all you have to do here is click Create, it seems super simple, but then this is your unique affiliate link to that company. So basically, you will just copy this link and then you will go paste it anywhere that you are creating content, and you want to send people from that content to the company that you are partnered with. That is seriously how simple this is, but once you go through the application, you get approved, you’ll be then on your dashboard where you can find the area to create your unique referral link.
Okay, so now let’s get into the fun part here, and this is what kind of content should you be creating for affiliate marketing? And where should you be posting it? This is where it’s going to kind of come full circle and we can go back to the application, and I’ll show you what to put in that website box. Okay, so to make this make sense here, most people teach affiliate marketing by building up an audience on social media, and then posting your affiliate marketing content to them. So I want to show you what this looks like on Instagram. So if you go over to Instagram and you type in Search, you type in, “camping,” you’re going to find posts like this, a video of a tent, this is a perfect opportunity to do affiliate marketing. And then you see posts like this where it has products in the post or something like this is a perfect example as well. So this is a photo of camping, but there’s different products within here. So there is a tent, there is a kettle, there are hiking boots, there are coffee mugs, all of these could so easily be an opportunity to do affiliate marketing. Imagine posting this to your followers and saying a caption of, “We love our…” whatever brand this kettle is, and putting a link to that kettle. Well, the problem with doing this on social media to a following, specifically on something like Instagram is one, you have to have the audience built up. Two, when you look at the actual caption over here, there is no way to put a clickable link in the caption. Someone would have to physically click on your profile, go back to your profile, and click the one link that you’re allowed to put in your Instagram profile. This is not conducive to affiliate marketing because you want to be able to put a clickable affiliate link directly on the content that you are posting. And then the other thing that so many people overlook in affiliate marketing is that if you post on social media like Instagram or one of the other big social media platforms, your post is going to become pretty much irrelevant in the matter of hours, weeks, or months, it’s no longer going to be bringing in traffic. These websites focus on that big initial spike of traffic showing this post to all of your followers, but then they don’t have a kind of long tail effect continuing to bring you in traffic. So this is where my current strategy comes in and it works so much better. So coming back to this list of the big social media websites, Facebook gets about 3 billion monthly active users. WhatsApp, 2.78 billion, YouTube, 2.5 billion, Instagram, 2 billion. Now granted, these are all a ton of people coming to their website every month, but what is not shown on this list is that Google actually gets over 250 billion people searching on their platform every single month. This absolutely blows all of these out of the water, and what most people don’t know is that if you’re using the right strategy, it’s actually very easy to get your affiliate marketing content to show up on Google in front of all of those people. So to keep on this example of camping, let me show you how this works on Google. So instead of building up an audience in the camping niche, then posting a photo about a kettle and saying, “Here’s my affiliate link.” The approach that I have learned to use is that there are so many people going to Google every single day, and they’re making very specific searches within every single niche out there. So for example, people are typing in, “Best camping kettle.” Now, these are not only people that are interested in camping and just scrolling through social media and find your post and maybe they make a purchase, these are people that are coming to Google ready to make a purchase of, specifically, a camping kettle. Now, as you scroll through these results here, you can disregard all of these kind of sponsored “Buy it now” things, and come down to these Search Results. Now, there’s two kinds of Search Results that I’ll show you here, the first one is an article. So, “Best Camping Kettles for 2022.” It’s not even 2022 anymore, and Google is still showing this content. That’s what I was trying to say about this content brings you in traffic for years to come on Google, as opposed to social media websites. But in these articles, you’re just going to have this website, which is Outdoor Life, what their best recommended camping kettles are, and this is just their opinion. So this article will go on and say, “Here’s why we think these ones are the best, and then here’s our affiliate link to go purchase that product.” Now, creating these blog articles and posting them on niche-specific affiliate marketing websites is something that I have done for years. And as you guys know, I am super transparent with you guys, my affiliate marketing websites are on a decline at the moment because of artificial intelligence. Now, what has happened in the last year is artificial intelligence tools have come out, the most popular one is ChatGPT, it looks just like this, it’s free to use, and the problem is, people can come in here and say, “Write me a blog article about the best camping kettle.” You just hit Enter, and literally, it’s going to write you an entire article that you can then just fill in your affiliate links to these products, you can copy this, you can paste it onto your affiliate marketing website, and publish it to Google. This has caused a huge problem with Google because Google doesn’t know, did a real person who has a ton of experience with camping and kettles write this article? Or did someone just come in here and within 15 seconds ChatGPT wrote it for them? They filled in their links, and they posted it on their website. So although this has really made creating these website articles extremely hard to rank on Google because there’s so much more competition now, at the same time, it has created a massive opportunity in affiliate marketing. This is something that I’ve been tinkering with for the last couple of years now, and has simply exploded lately, and it’s something that I’m leaning into very heavily. So if you go back to Google, and beyond these blog article website results here, if you keep scrolling down, you’re going to see videos in the Search Results of Google. Now, what most people don’t know is that Google and YouTube are owned by the same company, so if you create content and post it on YouTube, it will actually show up in the Google Search Results as well. Now, this is on top of YouTube’s 2.5 billion people that are going to their website every single month, so you are going to put your content in front of an absolute ton of people when you combine that with Google as well. So with that being said, YouTube and Google are now craving the content that is not created by artificial intelligence, and this is coming in the form of videos because artificial intelligence cannot recreate a real person talking on camera. So
