Affiliate Marketing Made Easy: A Step-by-Step Guide

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Ever had a dream where you could literally do anything – anytime and anywhere?

Of course you have! We all have.

Life isn’t meant to be spent slaving away at some dead-end job hour after hour, day after day just to struggle to even make ends meet.

There has to be more, right? But how?

Passive income.

That’s the dream right? To make huge sums of money, even while you sleep.

This is what affiliate marketing has done for so many others and it can do the same for you.

What is affiliate marketing?

The idea behind affiliate marketing is not a complicated one.

You get paid to promote other people’s products or services and earn a commission when people end up buying.

The amount of money you earn in commission will vary from product to product but in general its based on revenue sharing and you keep a percentage of that revenue.

Often, all of these details are handled through an affiliate network – but not always. It just depends on what niche you’re in.

There are literally affiliate programs out there for nearly everything imaginable.

The best part is you don’t have to spend time and money creating your own products or dealing with customers.

You begin making money as an affiliate as soon as you start recommending products – whether it’s on your website, in a podcast or on social media.

How to make money with affiliate marketing

From affiliate websites to social media and YouTube videos, there are tons of ways to make money with affiliate marketing. Part of the challenge is knowing which way to focus on.

Personally I recommend using affiliate websites. More specifically Niche affiliate websites.

What’s a niche affiliate website you ask?

It’s literally how it sounds, I website you build with content build around a specific niche.

Many new or newer affiliate marketers make the mistake of going broad with their website and cover many unrelated topics and consequently promote many unrelated products or services. This is a huge mistake as doing so will make your job of ranking your website and getting traffic from Google substantially more difficult.

When you are first starting out with affiliate marketing, it is important
When someone clicks on your trackable link to a product or service that you’re an affiliate for, what’s known as a cookie gets added to that person’s web browser. This cookie is a piece of code that ensures you will get credit for any sale that you generate, even if that person doesn’t purchase right away. The length of time that cookie lasts can vary greatly from business to business. It is important to check how long it lasts and anything else related to their cookie policy when signing up as an affiliate.

One of the most popular affiliate programs that many affiliate marketers use is the Amazon Associate Program so we will use them as an example for showing how their cookie policy works which is broken down below:

24 hour cookie policy: Amazon has a 24 hour cookie policy. This means almost any product that people order on the Amazon website within 24 of them clicking on your link, you’ll get credit and a commission for. This can be for any number of products, even if they buy 10 products, you’ll get credit for them all.
90 day cookie policy: Amazon also has a 90 day cookie policy. They will extend their 24 hour cookie for 89 additional days IF a customer places an item in their shopping cart but doesn’t immediately order. It isn’t uncommon for people to do this with higher ticket items that they want to purchase but don’t want to spend the amount needed at that specific time. If they go back before the cookie expires and proceeds to ordering the item, you’ll also get a commission for that item.

These cookie policies will vary from business to business. Breaking down the Amazon cookie policy should make it obvious why it’s important for any affiliate marketer to make sure they understand them.

Also, make sure you’re proactive and research a company before becoming an affiliate for them. Unfortunately there are some companies that handle things pretty unfairly for affiliates and you don’t want to end up working with a company that won’t pay you even if you help sell their products.

How to find products/services to promote

Believe it or not, I don’t recommend that new or newer affiliate marketers start out promoting Amazon products. Recently Amazon decreased how much commission they are paying affiliates for sales making it way more difficult to make money without generating a substantial amount of traffic. This traffic will eventually come from content that you will create on your affiliate website. This content takes time and money to create and getting traffic to that content is going to take time and consistency. Many of the Amazon products only pay you 3% commission now. Why wouldn’t you find a different vendor to promote that pays you 10% for the exact same products/services. In doing so, you’d triple how much money you make for the exact same amount of traffic.

Of course, how much money you make with product that you are considering promoting is only part of what you really should consider. Choosing a niche to build your content around will also dictate which products that you will promote based on that niche. In the next section, we will cover best practices for choosing a niche for your new affiliate website.

Why choosing a niche is important

Many new affiliate marketers make the mistake of trying to go broad with what they are going to build for a website and consequently what products they are going to promote with their new affiliate website. This is a huge mistake. It’s important to niche down. Ranking a website in Google that covers a broad range of topics is way more difficult than ranking a website that has content related to one specific niche. Not only will your content be targeted but your keywords and the products you are promoting will be targeted also. Show how do you figure out which niche to target?