Affiliate Marketing. A Crash Course on Making Money Online

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make a lot of money online, especially if you have zero capital and zero skills to start with. And in this crash course on affiliate marketing, I’ll show you how to make money online with affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is simply promoting a product or service and earning money whenever someone buys that product or service or takes action. For example, say you pick a product from Amazon and send the product link to someone else on your website or email list, and when that person buys the product through your link, you get paid. This is simply affiliate marketing. Super simple isn’t it?

Affiliate marketing, in general, comprises of four main steps which are;

1. Picking a Product. I guess it’s obvious, it involves picking a product to promote.

2. Setting up your Affiliate Marketing System. This includes maybe building a webpage or a landing page.

3. Run The Campaign. This is where you start promoting the product.

4. Track and Analyze Your Performances.

What You Must Know

In affiliate marketing, there are mainly two methods or models to earn commissions. In the first model, we promote a product and whenever someone BUYS, you earn a commission. Meanwhile, in the second model, we promote something but, the target or customer doesn’t need to buy the product. Maybe the target just needs to take simple action like submitting their emails or zip code. If it’s successful, you earn money. You’re now earning per sign-up or per action, which is CPA(commission per action).

In the first model, we are earning through commission per sale(CPS). Take note of the two. This will help you identify what you want to promote. Maybe as a beginner, it might be easier to promote something that’ll require sign-ups.

Types Of Products

There are different types of products or things to promote in affiliate marketing. Things like;

1. Digital Product. Like online courses,ebooks, designs and so on.
2. Physical Product. Like promoting Amazon products such as electronics or any physical product you’d like to.
3. Online Services. Like Canva, Semrush, etc.
4. Form Submit. Like submitting an email, filling out a form, submitting a zip code, submitting a phone number, etc. These types of products, are not real products but forms that people will fill and you’ll earn whenever someone completes filling the form.

How TO Pick A product And Where To Find A Product

There are two major strategies to this, Content research-based and Ad spy-based.

Content research

The first one is based on content research, it’s simply to find a product related to your niche. For example, if your website is about digital marketing, you find and promote products related to digital marketing, or if your website is about health and fitness, you find and promote products related to health and fitness.

You can find products to promote on platforms like Shareasale. Shareasale affiliates network is simply an affiliate marketing network. An affiliate marketing network is a place where you can find advertisers and where advertisers find products to promote.

All you need to do is just visit Shareasale, sign up and start promoting products according to your niche. On Shareasale affiliates, there are tons of products that you can promote from all niches.

Other affiliate marketing networks include impact.com, clickbank.com, digistor24.com, etc.

Most of the above-mentioned networks require approvals, if you don’t want such, don’t worry I still got you covered. Go to debounce.com, an email validation tool, it doesn’t require any approvals to get started with. Also, gmass.com, an email marketing system for Gmail that doesn’t require any approval.

Ad Spy

The second strategy which is the Ad Spy Products, is all about spying on ads campaigns other people are running, spying on campaigns people are promoting so you can get an idea of successful products, and maybe copy or clone the campaigns.

There are tons of tools out there to help us spy on ads like Anstrex, a native ad spy tool, that can help you spy on successful ads according to your desired niche.

The Core Of Affiliate Marketing

We’ve now reached the core part of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is all about marketing and promoting the product. The first part which is picking the product is somehow easier. We’ve selected the product, and we have the link to promote it. How do we promote? where to promote? how to get conversions?

We have two main strategies, content-based strategy, and direct marketing.

Content-based Affilatiate Marketing Strategy

Content-based strategy is about creating content about the product you wish to promote on your website or YouTube channel, or even creating content on social media about a product to promote it. You can check out this post to get more detailed information on how to promote affiliate links without a website.

Direct Affiliate Marketing

The second type is direct promotion. This doesn’t need much content as it is about directly promoting a product with its landing page. No videos, blog posts, or any form of content to explain in detail about the product.

These are the main two strategies used to promote affiliate products. You can check out these articles to find out more strategies.

What did we miss?

So far, we’ve picked the product, and we’ve promoted them but, we missed something which is step two, setting up the affiliate marketing system. Now, the reason is skipped this is it depends on the product and how things work.

For example, if your niche is on digital service, it’ll be suitable if you set the system up by writing articles about the products you want to market and get traffic maybe organic traffic, free traffic, or even paid traffic so as to make a sale.

On the other hand, if you pick a product from an ad spy tool, you need to build a landing page to promote the product. Most companies provide you with a landing page.

Tracking Campaigns

We’ve discussed the first three steps, the last step is tracking and optimizing your campaigns. For example, say your website has a banner ad but how do you know who clicked and bought from this banner ad and how can you track it.

Let’s say you’re using CJ affiliate and impact to pick up the product, you can create a link to promote by picking a product, add a sub id to it and you have a trackable link. You will find the report of your links by clicking on the report link in your affiliate network. Note that some affiliate networks do not provide options to track.

You could use services like Clickmagic to track and improve your campaigns. We also have a tool called volume.com, a service used by expert affiliate marketers for tracking campaigns.

Tracking is very important, it can boost your conversions rate astronomically. You can track your campaigns and analyze them for improvements.

These are the four main steps of affiliate marketing. I hope you got the idea and real value from this short course. The next thing to do is START implementing each strategy you’ve discovered today. You can find more tips on affiliate marketing from this post.

Final words

A final tip for today is how to get fast approval from CJ affiliates and impact. The best way is to get a website or a blog, anything like an Instagram profile, YouTube channel, or any presence online. This will help you get quick acceptance. Comment below for your contributions and questions.