New to the world of affiliate marketing? Do you know it’s something you want to do, but you need some guidance on how to get started?

You’re in the right place.

This ultimate guide on How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing for Beginners will give you the steps you need to get started.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways for a beginner to make money online. You might already know this.

Either way, here are a few reasons why beginners and veterans alike LOVE affiliate marketing.

• It’s mainly a passive income business.
• You don’t have to worry about inventory or customer service.
• You get to help others by sharing products & services that you genuinely enjoy.
• Whenever you make an affiliate sale, it’s a win for you and the customer!

I remember Googling How to start affiliate marketing, Is affiliate marketing dead? and How to make money with affiliate marketing and feeling OVERWHELMED. I was lost, and I didn’t know where to start… or… if I’d ever figure it.

I didn’t know which niche was best for me, which affiliate programs were good, nor which traffic source I would use to bring people to my affiliate content.

After enough analysis paralysis, I knew I had to get started with affiliate marketing industry. I started with YouTube content, made a lot of mistakes.

Long story short, I’m now a successful affiliate marketer and earn a commission from products/services I promote in different niches.

This ultimate guide is the accumulation of my experiences and lessons I’ve learned in affiliate marketing over the last four years.

This article will help you:

• Get started step-by-step
• Avoid newbie pitfalls
• And give you tips on how to accelerate your learning curve!

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the business model of selling other people’s products or services and getting a commission. And it’s essentially revenue sharing from a company’s point of view.

You might have already done some affiliate marketing (everyone can do this)!

Have you ever shared a discount code or offer with a friend or family member to get rewarded with a benefit?

If so, you might have already got a taste of affiliate/referral marketing!

For example, I’ve shared my Instacart (an online grocery delivery service) link with my friend so they can sign up and get $10 added to their account (and I do too).

This works great until you start running out of friends and family to share your link with!

This is where affiliate marketing skills come in.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Many affiliate programs (aka. partner or referral programs) can be found in the company’s website’s footer section.

Affiliate marketing is similar to being a salesperson. Your content is your sales pitch, and your co-workers are your affiliate partners.

A traditional salesperson, say in the cell phone industry, makes a commission for each Android or iPhone they sell.

He or she uses persuasion and sales techniques to identify a problem (i.e., upgrading a customer’s phone) and present a correct solution (i.e., a better phone).

This, in essence, is what affiliate marketing is, except our “sales floor” is the internet.

We partner with companies, marketplaces, and private vendors to get commissions for selling their products through our online content creation efforts.

For example, let’s say you recently purchased a new smart thermostat for your home. You can go to that company’s site to see if they have an affiliate program.

If they have one, you can sign up to get access to your affiliate links.

Once you have your links, you can promote the link within an article on your blog or record a video and put your affiliate link(s) in the description of your YouTube video (there are other methods too).

Whichever way you choose to promote your affiliate links, you’ll get a commission when anyone buys through your link because all affiliate programs can track which affiliate referred a lead to their product or service.

That’s not all, though. There’s this thing called affiliate cookies that makes an affiliate business one of my favorite business models on earth!

Affiliate Marketing Cookies 101

All affiliate programs have affiliate marketing cookies involved.

An affiliate cookie is just a piece of code that your affiliate link puts on your potential affiliate customer’s browser (this is only when your link is clicked, and so the affiliate program can track if a sale came from you or not).

Here’s the best part. Typically an affiliate marketing cookie stays on people’s browsers for 30 days.

Meaning if that person doesn’t buy the first time and comes back 15 days later to buy, you still get a commission!

There are affiliate programs where cookies last 60 days, 180 days, and even one year!

Are you starting to get how affiliate marketing works?

Are you beginning to understand why your favorite influencers, YouTube channels, podcasts, and bloggers, have sponsored products (aka affiliate products) in their content?

Two words: Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate marketing provides value to the customer and rewards you with a sales commission.

When you start to get good, you can create content and make it last, so you get paid passively any time someone clicks on your links.

Can YOU Profit From It?

Of course! Anybody can be a successful affiliate, but making money takes time and effort.

Can you write an article or create a YouTube video that solves your audience’s problems?

YouTube is a great choice for getting your affiliate marketing journey started. It’s how most affiliates get their start.

Sean, from Think Media, got started promoting Amazon products by solving an audience’s problem. Watch his story from VidSummit about how he began promoting affiliate offers with YouTube.

Think you can handle making a simple YouTube video and improving over time? If so, you have the opportunity to become an affiliate marketer.

If you can do that, your next question might be, how fast can I make money with affiliate marketing?

The answer to that question depends on two things:

1. The supply and demand for content in your niche
2. How good your content is at solving your audience’s problem

For instance, if you have a Best X for Y YouTube video (i.e., Best Cold Press Juicers for 2024) and it’s getting multiple views per day, then you can start to make money within a few days.

The more quality content a content creator continues to make, the more money they’ll make from their affiliate links. The same can be said for blog posts.

If you don’t have content on the internet, don’t worry. It’s uncommon for a beginner affiliate marketer to have existing content. This is something you’ll work on soon enough, I hope.

How Much Money Can You Make?

Honestly, the sky is the limit here. There is no cap.

I started out making YouTube videos in my first niche, which got me close to four-figures a month.

As I progressed, I added a website (mainly blog posts) to supplement my channel and eventually surpassed my goal and started to make a mid-five-figures a month.

Disclaimer: These results aren’t typical – I was very “hungry” and committed to being a successful affiliate marketer.

Creating YouTube videos and blogging is what online marketers call free traffic (aka. earned traffic).

Affiliates just starting can make their first dollar or hundreds of dollars a month, with free traffic alone. Some can even reach the mid-four to five-figure per month range using either of these two marketing channels.

On the other end of the affiliate marketing, income spectrum are super-affiliates. These are affiliate marketers who have honed their craft and can make anywhere from $1,000/day to $10,000/day and more.

Usually, these affiliates do paid traffic affiliate campaigns, free traffic, or a combination of both.

Some even build an email list to run email marketing campaigns (an advanced affiliate marketing strategy).

Learn more: about the best email autoresponders for affiliate marketing of 2024 here.

You see, there’s no one answer to the question at hand because it depends on you ultimately.

It depends on your ability to learn, do, and improve over time. The higher your affiliate income goal is, the harder you’re going to have to work.

Hopefully, you can tell by now that affiliate marketing isn’t just adding your affiliate links to your content.

It’s about providing helpful, high-quality content to solve people’s problems & address their pain points and present a paid solution.

Your affiliate commissions are just a byproduct of helping people get what they don’t have or get closer to their goals.

Below is your step-by-step affiliate marketing for beginners guide.

Once you follow the strategies below and get the ball rolling, and after some practice, your journey will become effortless!

A Step-By-Step Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing

Let’s start with consumer search intent.

Consumer search intent is understanding why your reader (or viewer) clicked on your piece of content.

Are they there to understand something complex?

Are they there to make a buying decision?

Are they there to be entertained?

One of your primary objectives in affiliate marketing is to attract readers/viewers in your niche that have a problem with your content.

You can solve a problem or pain point with your content and, eventually, your affiliate link. This is how the game is played.

It sounds easy enough, right?

Well, it gets easy over time. However, fair warning, this isn’t for the faint at heart.

You’ll have to go against some resistance at first because, for most people, it’ll be the first time transitioning from being a consumer to being a producer.

If you accept that, then let’s get you started with the affiliate marketing guide below.

Step 1: Pick Your Niche

Now that we have the affiliate marketing basics covered, your first step is to pick a niche you’re interested in. It’ll be better if you have a passion for it, but it’s not necessary right now.

If you already have a niche in mind, you can skip to the next step.

Niche selection is one of the most important steps in launching an affiliate marketing business. Beginners are usually concerned about the following:

• Are there affiliate products I can sell in my desired niche?
• Are there online buyers in this niche?
• Can I compete with the competition in this niche?

Let’s tackle these one at a time, shall we?

Are there products I can promote in my desired niche?

More than likely. I’m sure you’ve been on Amazon.com before. And perhaps you’ve noticed that they have products for every category (niche) imaginable!

So, don’t let this question get in the way of choosing your niche.

Amazon is one of the biggest affiliate programs in the world, is beginner-friendly, and you’ll be able to promote products in their inventory.

We’ll discuss Amazon’s affiliate marketing program in step 2, along with other affiliate programs and marketplaces.

Are there online buyers in this niche?

If you’re at all interested in your niche, you’ll be able to understand your target audiences’ wants and needs.

This includes thinking about how your audience thinks.

Thinking of what your potential buyer would type into Google (& other search engines) and/or YouTube (what searchers type in search engines are known as search queries or keywords) is a critical skill great affiliate marketers have.

A free tool for digging deeper into keywords is Ubersuggest. With this tool, you can get a good idea about how many people are searching for products and content in your niche.

Here’s an example in the home brewing niche:

The volume (“VOL”) column is how many people search per month for the keyword. Make sure to analyze your market’s demands.

We’ll cover traffic sources again in step four.

Can I compete with the competition in this niche?

Competition isn’t a bad thing. It’d be concerning if there wasn’t competition, actually.

However, this isn’t to say that competition isn’t getting more intense. As digital marketing tools and guides (like this one) get better and simpler to use, more competition starts to intensify.

To counteract this, as a beginner, especially, I recommend YouTube because it’s easier to stand out from the competition.

There’s far less friction when compared to starting an affiliate website and learning the traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) game.

However, if you are interested in creating niche sites, I recommend reading our Best Affiliate Marketing Courses & Online Training guide.

Managing an affiliate site involves a domain name, web hosting, theme installation, creating blog posts (product reviews, guides, comparisons, etc.), improving domain authority and page authority, keeping website visitors on the page, and much more.

Anyhoo, back to YouTube…

With YouTube, videos not only rank for keywords when people search for content, but you also have the opportunity to rank in “recommended” videos (usually on the right-hand side of a YouTube video page).

To counteract competition further, it’d be a good idea to get two traffic sources going eventually. Two is enough to handle as a beginner. The two choices I recommend are Google and/or YouTube traffic.

You used to get away with one free traffic source for a business a few years ago, but not in 2024 and on.

It’s okay if you haven’t decided on a niche just yet, but make sure to have three in mind as we go through the rest of the steps.

Step 2: Become An Affiliate

The next step is to become an affiliate marketer by signing up for an affiliate program or an affiliate marketplace.

What Is An Affiliate Program?

An affiliate program is another way for a company to make money.

When a company offers an affiliate program (sometimes called a referral program), they’re creating another revenue stream by signing up individuals (affiliates) who market and sell their products/services for a commission.

All affiliate programs have rules and agreements that usually tell you:

• How much % commission will be paid out and how often
• How long their affiliate cookies last (recall this is how long after someone initially clicks on your link you can still get paid for if the end-user ends up buying)
• How and how not to promote their products or services (for example, some affiliate programs won’t let you advertise on Google Ads for their branded keywords)
• What countries you can & can’t promote their products or services in

Once you sign up for an affiliate program (usually, you’ll have to create an account), you’ll be able to access your affiliate link(s).

Most of the time, affiliate programs will give you promotional material to promote their products!

Affiliate links, if you’ve never seen one before, have a tracking code in their link URL. At least one of these codes will be a unique tracker for the affiliate marketer. This is so the company can track the traffic and sales you’re producing.

For example, this is my link to promote ClickMagick, which is a click tracking tool (handy for affiliates): https://clickmagick.com/go/clik4543

When someone clicks on that link, ClickMagick will register it on their side of things and track if there’s a referral sale made, and give credit for the sale accordingly.

That’s how affiliate marketing programs work!

The Types Of Programs

As you progress through your affiliate marketing journey, you’ll come across other blogs, Facebook groups, forums and notice some unique lingo for different types of affiliate programs.

Let’s cover these briefly.

• One-Tier Programs: This is your standard individual affiliate program. You get a commission per sale transaction when a sale is made from your affiliate link.
• Two-Tier Programs: With this type, you get commissions when you refer other affiliates to the main affiliate program and when they start making money as an affiliate. This is a bit more of a multi-level marketing approach. Typically these types are found in the make money online niche.
• Recurring Programs: Have you ever signed up for a service that charges you every month? Well, there are affiliate programs that payout monthly recurring commissions too! These are services such as email autoresponders. And supplements are an example in the health market.
• Site-Wide Commissions: Some affiliate links will give you credit for any affiliate product a potential customer buys on the company’s site. Amazon Associates is an excellent example of this.
• Pay-Per-Lead: In this type of program, you’re generating leads for the company and getting paid a commission (usually lower than the other types). This can be as simple as getting a potential lead to fill out an opt-in page with your link.
• Pay-Per-Call: This is getting someone to call and remain on the phone for X amount of minutes. If the criteria are met, you get paid for providing a lead.

Affiliate Programs vs Marketplaces

So far, we’ve discussed individual affiliate programs.

Here’s what ClickMagick’s affiliate program, an individual affiliate program, looks like:

But, there are also affiliate marketplaces (aka. affiliate networks). These are your Clickbank, ShareASale, Commission Junction, and Market Health (to name a few).

Marketplaces have hundreds of merchants, usually in various industries, and you get to choose which merchant you want to promote.

Because they’re in a marketplace and you have options, merchants will show off some stats (commission, EPC aka. earnings per click, conversion rates, etc.) to be competitive in acquiring affiliates (you) to promote their products and services.

Which Program or Marketplace Should You Join?

To help you choose your ideal affiliate program or marketplace, here are a few criteria to consider.

1. Does the company have an excellent reputation in the industry?
2. Does it have a reasonable commission payout? High commissions are great if they’re reputable.
3. Do they have product(s) or service(s) proven to convert highly?
4. Do they offer a long cookie duration?
5. Do they have low refund rates?
6. Bonus: If it’s a recurring program and meets the criteria above, then you found a hot program!

Every affiliate dreams of a reputable product with super high commissions, but is it always the best scenario?

This honestly depends on your niche. Your niche will usually dictate the types of programs at your disposal.

For example, if you’re in a health and wellness niche, your products are usually going to be on the lower commissions side of things, so you’ll be relying on the volume of traffic to generate affiliate sales.

The same can sometimes be said for the love and relationship market. They typically rely on search volume for sales. Don’t be fooled – volume in mass quantities can add up significantly and produce tons of sales.

On the other hand, if you’re in a wealth niche, your commissions will usually range from medium to high ticket commissions. Therefore, you won’t need to rely on volume sales as much.

In either scenario, affiliates have been successful (i.e., live more than comfortably from their living room).

The Best Programs for Newbies

In this quick section, I will discuss the best programs for beginners based on The 3 Markets.

The Wealth Market

In your wealth sub-niche, you’ll eventually discover the tools of the trade. These tools are perfect for your audience if you:

• (a) use them for your business
• (b) can demonstrate that life would be easier if other people used it.

For example, in the online marketing niche, everyone needs two things:

1. An email autoresponder
2. A landing page software or website

Both charge tools above are monthly charges. So you can expect recurring affiliate commissions.

If you’re in this niche, it’d be ideal to sign up for an autoresponder and landing page software’s affiliate program so you can promote them. I use GetResponse and Clickfunnels consistently, so these would be my first two programs.

The Health Market

In the health market, the obvious choice is being an Amazon affiliate. They’re great at converting people. And you get affiliate credit on ANY purchase a customer makes for the next 24-hours after they click on your link (site-wide).

The downside is they offer lower commissions (up to 10% – and that’s on the high side). Unless you’re selling gym equipment or the like, commissions will be nothing to write home about – at least not at the start.

Yet, this is where volume comes in again. In a health niche, commissions will usually be lower for products and services, so you’ll have to make up for that in your content (coming up in step 3).

Alternative, but not equal, options to Amazon (that pay more) are:

• Clickbank
• ShareASale
• Market Health
• Supplement affiliate programs

These (except ShareASale these days) are the most beginner-friendly marketplaces.

Let’s say you’re in a health detox niche (or diet niche). Clickbank has quite a few products for you to choose from:

The Clickbank affiliate network doesn’t have too many supplements. A popular one is Organifi.

However, if you have a supplement involved in your niche that you take every day, there’s a good chance that the company has an affiliate program or is hosted in a marketplace!

The Relationships Market

I’m going to be fully transparent here; I’ve never entered this market as an affiliate. However, I know there are affiliates having success in this niche.

Clickbank is a decent marketplace here. I’ve seen dating products and spirituality products be top performers for affiliates on Clickbank.

If there’s nothing you like on Clickbank, then I’d think about what programs or services you’ve personally taken in this market and see if they have an affiliate program you can sign up for.