You might be wondering what affiliate marketing is... Let me share with you below about how to get started...

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based online marketing strategy that allows you to earn a passive income. By promoting a brand's product or service, you earn a commission when someone purchases that product due to your recommendation. Affiliate marketing can be a rewarding source of income when done well and with a clear strategy. Creating content about brands you are in affiliation with is just not enough. It is one significant part of the process; however, you have to have a plan to promote these products and place your content in front of an audience. 

The Beginners Guide to Affiliate Marketing for New Bloggers

Affiliate marketing can be your primary source of income – or one of many sources of income you earn. It all depends on how successful you promote affiliate products and build your affiliate blog/website!

How does Affiliate Marketing Work?

These are the first few steps you have to take to establish yourself as an affiliate marketer:

• Create a website where you can start talking about your affiliate products and use it as a platform for promoting your affiliate products and services. 
• Select what affiliate products you want to promote. I strongly recommend choosing products that you are familiar with, and in the best-case scenario, you are already using them and loving them. It is so much easier to promote something you believe in. 
• Join the brand's affiliate platform, where you get a tracking code and link so that each time someone clicks on the link through your content, your efforts are recognised and later rewarded. 
• You can use the product's affiliate link in a blog post, email/newsletters, or video.
• The next step is key to a successful affiliate strategy: create and share valuable content. When you teach others how to use a product, share your experience, provide step-by-step tutorials, offers solutions to problems and challenges, you will more likely get the clicks on the links and ultimately the sales as an affiliate marketer. 
• When someone finds your content valuable, clicks through your affiliate link and makes a purchase (this often happens after they visited your website, saw your post about the product), then you earn commission! The person who clicks on your link doesn't pay any extra, and the brand pays the commission you receive.
• Many companies out there offer affiliate solutions, and different brands offer different percentages of commissions. Choose brands relevant to what you do, and you can put those affiliate products into a valuable context. For example, if you are a digital marketer like me, you will likely not start talking about gardening tools in your affiliate strategy (unless you are specifically working with this niche)  

Goal Setting with Affiliate Marketing

Your main goal as an affiliate marketer is to earn commissions by promoting affiliate products. Affiliate marketing is mutually beneficial for you as an affiliate marketer and affiliate brands. I advise you never to focus on the commission alone when choosing brands to work with. Just because they offer high commission, your primary goal should be about connecting with your audience and serving them the best way you can. By providing value, sharing insightful information that can improve their lives in any form is the key to growing your blog's exposure in the long run.

Building meaningful relationships with your readers and gaining their trust by sharing affiliate products that are genuinely valuable to them will help you earn more in affiliate sales. 

How Much Investment Do You Need for Getting Started? 

Affiliate marketing costs you nothing to get started, and there is no fee to join affiliate programs. The only startup cost you will have is purchasing your domain name and website hosting.

You can quickly build websites today without experience in coding and I.T. I use Kajabi, a fantastic platform for building your blog and creating online courses - another source of income that will help you earn money while you sleep. Read more here about Why I Moved from WordPress to Kajabi.

It's important to emphasize here, it doesn't matter what platform you use, but you have to create something visually appealing and easy to navigate. This will help you build trust with your audience and create a structured platform for the brands you promote. 

What are the Best Affiliate Brands to work With? 

There are many! You need to find the right ones for your niche and your expertise. As a new blogger, you need to know what to look for before applying to an affiliate program. There are affiliate programs where you only get paid once when someone subscribes. However, I suggest using affiliate programs that have a recurring commission so that when someone subscribes to the affiliate product, you get paid monthly on that subscription for as long as it lasts. Check out below the affiliate programs I use and really love: 

Canva

Canva is a graphic design platform where you can easily create social media content design, invitations, business cards, graphics, presentations and more using professionally designed templates. The best part is that anyone can use the drag and drop interface of Canva and no design skills are required. 

Commission: 25% of a full year's subscription.

Tailwind

Tailwind is my favourite social media scheduler for Pinterest. You can schedule your pins and Instagram posts that you created in Canva or in any other design platform or use Tailwind to create your own design. Everything works just with just a few clicks.

Commission: 15% per month recurring until canceled at any time.

Kajabi

Kajabi is an all in one platform solution for everything you need from building your website, landing pages, payments, analytics, marketing automations, email, communities, selling products and more. 

Commission: Kajabi account holders can earn a 30% commission for referring new customers. 

How Much Money Will you Make with Affiliate Marketing?

This is a question that is hard to answer quickly. First, as a new blogger and someone new to affiliate marketing, you might not make money at all in the first couple of months. Once the money starts coming in, you will need to spend time regularly understanding where your affiliate links perform the best and how you are converting those links into payouts so that you can replicate those steps in the future. It is essential not to give up and keep improving your website traffic, growing your follower base and email list, and creating quality content related to your affiliate brands. It won't happen overnight, but if you stay consistent, you will reap the fantastic benefits of affiliate marketing.