What is Affiliate Marketing (and How to Get Started)

Want to know how to build a passive income stream with affiliate marketing? Yes? But you aren't sure how and where to get started? Or perhaps read somewhere that affiliate marketing is the easiest way to monetize and make money online?

What is Affiliate Marketing (and How to Get Started)

Want to know how to build a passive income stream with affiliate marketing?

Yes?

But you aren't sure how and where to get started?

Or perhaps read somewhere that affiliate marketing is the easiest way to monetize and make money online?

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Create a website, go online, publish some decent content with the help of Jasper AI, add affiliate links, go to sleep, and wake up to abundant sales early in the morning.

Sounds too good to be true, right?

The truth is you can make money through affiliate marketing, and yes, even while you are sleeping.

But there is more to this business model than just adding a few affiliate links to your content.

In this post, you will learn everything you need to know to build a successful affiliate marketing business.

Let’s dive in!

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the process of making money by promoting other people’s products. It’s a popular way of monetizing online content where affiliates earn small commissions on each referred sale.

The easiest way to identify affiliate marketing websites is to check for a short disclaimer at the beginning of their content.

Like this:

If the whole idea of affiliate marketing sounds new to you, here is how it works.

First, you need to find affiliate programs or networks for products or services in your niche.

Then evaluate the program to ensure you are satisfied with the commission structure, payment methods, and the products or services.

If you find it’s a good program, proceed to sign up and wait for their feedback. In most cases, you will be accepted into the program and will be able to start promoting their product or service immediately.

Next, start creating content that makes it easy to mention the product you are promoting. Ensure the content is SEO-ed to rank on Google’s first page and get as many clicks as possible.

For example, let’s say you signed up for the Burj Khalifa hotel’s affiliate program. Creating content like “best places to visit in Dubai” will allow you to promote your affiliate offer seamlessly.

The way it works is that you need to create content like blog posts, videos, or infographics and add affiliate links to it.

Then you need to promote your content via SEO, social media, forum marketing, Quora marketing, and paid marketing. Once someone clicks on those links and buys the product, you earn a commission.

It’s a win-win situation.

You make money by promoting products you don’t own, while the merchants get free promotion for their products and only have to pay when a successful sale is recorded.

Affiliate links are unique URLs you can generate after joining an affiliate program. They usually carry the affiliate’s ID or username to enable merchants to track sales coming from different affiliates easily.

Here is how it works:

Source- https://smartblogger.com/affiliate-marketing/

  • An affiliate joins a program and gets their affiliate link;
  • they add the links to their content;
  • the buyer clicks on the link and downloads the cookie;
  • the buyer makes the purchase, and the cookie tags the sale with the correct affiliate ID;
  • merchant confirms if an affiliate ID is attached to the sales, including if it’s within the cookie agreement period;
  • the merchant gives affiliate credit for the sale;
  • the affiliate gets paid based on the agreed commission.

The cookie period is the number of days a cookie lasts for a click, and it’s commonly 30 days.

If a buyer clicks on an affiliate link and purchases the product after 30 days, the affiliate won’t get any commission.

The cookie period varies between brands. The most common is 30 days, but some give up to 60 or 90 days of grace.

What are Affiliate Networks and How to Join One?

An affiliate network is the intermediary connecting publishers (affiliates) and merchants. They usually cover several industries and niches, allowing affiliates to find the best offers seamlessly.

You no longer deal with the merchant when you join an affiliate network. Instead, the network sets the terms & conditions and provides the platform. Of course, they also pay out the commissions.

To join an affiliate network, you need to be a content creator, preferably on a blog or YouTube. Most networks need affiliates to have a presence on the web to be eligible for approval. This means having at least some high-quality content before joining their networks; otherwise, they will reject their applications.

Some networks are stricter. They require affiliates to set up crucial pages like “affiliate disclosure” and add a short disclaimer at the top of their content before approving them.

So, how do you join an affiliate network?

First, you need to find the suitable network you want to join based on the kinds of content you cover on your blog.

Joining the Amazon Associates program is ideal if your content is about physical products. In addition, networks like ShareAsale and Impact Radius are good places to promote digital products.

Now, let’s say you wanted to promote Hostinger, one of the most popular hosting providers on the market.

I’m an affiliate for Hostinger, and if you visit this tutorial on getting the best Minecraft server host, you’ll see I promote Hostinger Minecraft solutions there (+ many other Minecraft hosts).

Their affiliate program is hosted on Tune's affiliate platform, and here’s how to join.

First, go to Google and search for “Hostinger affiliate program” Click the number #1 result.

Image source- Nikola Roza

Second, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “become an affiliate” button.

Image source- Nikola Roza

Third, fill up information on the provided fields from top to bottom, and once done,  click the “sign up” button at the bottom of the page.

Image source- Nikola Roza

And that’s how you join an affiliate program. It’s a similar process when joining any other affiliate platform.

How to Become an Affiliate Merchant?

You can become an affiliate merchant and make money by recruiting affiliates to promote your product.

Here are the steps to getting started immediately.

First, you need a worthy product idea. Then, you can brainstorm those ideas yourself or pick inspiration from what’s already trending. I will show you how to do that in a bit.

Second, you need to validate your idea to know if it will work. You don’t want to waste time building something that will flop, right?

Third, building the product. If your idea requires creating a physical product, you can proceed. Otherwise, I will show you ways to develop digital products since they don’t need huge investment and risks; just your time and money.

Also, keep in mind that your product might not break even if you don’t recruit the right affiliates to promote it. This is where affiliate networks become handy.

Step 1: Coming Up with an Affiliate Product Idea

The way to succeed with affiliate marketing as a merchant is to find a worthy product idea that will sell, and it doesn’t have to be something you’re personally attached to.

You should research the market to discover ideas that are already making waves. Then, find ways to improve them to be more efficient and prioritize delivering the best customer experience.

You should also pick the topic you are familiar with or interested in. This means you won’t get bored along the way.

For example, if you’ve previously worked in a firm as part of the HR team and have tons of experience interviewing employees, you can create a tool or program that helps people prepare for their job interviews.

If you look up “interview questions and answers” on an SEO tool like Semrush, you will see that 260,000+ people are searching it every month.

Image source- Nikola Roza

This is looking like a powerful idea for an affiliate product already.

People might be interested in a tool or training that teaches them how to tackle tough interview questions, including tips that will give them an edge over other candidates.

But are they willing to pay for it? A crucial question!

Step 2: Validate Your Idea

It’s one thing to have a hot idea, and it’s another thing to convert it into a lucrative idea.

If you don’t want to end up building an interview prep tool or program that flops spectacularly, you need to know in advance whether people are willing to pay for it.

How?

Simply pitch them your idea and see if they’ll consider buying it.

Where do you find these people?

Social media platforms, forums, and popular communities like Quora and Reddit are a good start.

For example, someone asked this question on Quora, and over 4,500 people were also interested in knowing the answer.

Image source- Nikola Roza

As you can see, one of the answers with less than 700 words has been read over 650,000 times.

image source- Nikola Roza

That’s a ton of free exposure and an excellent way to validate your idea.

To take advantage of this method, simply visit Quora, search for questions related to your product idea, and write an excellent answer while promoting your tool or program at the end.

If you get up to 5% of the readers asking for more details about your product and how to buy it, your idea is valid.

You can do the same on Reddit too. Sticking with the previous example, search for “interview questions,” engage in the discussions, and pitch your product idea.

Image source- Nikola Roza

Since most people will not pay for a product or tool with no credibility, you can create a dummy order page with no information and ask people to visit it to buy your product.

The idea is to track the number of people that visit the page and use it to validate your idea.

Social media is another way to know if a product will convert to sales. You can use the advanced filter to search for people posting topics related to your product, reply to their posts with your idea and see how many people are asking for the website details to make further inquiries.

For example, if you search “interview questions” on Facebook and filter it to Posts, you will find thousands of posts published by different users about the topic.

Image source- Nikola Roza

The next thing you need to do is reply to these posts and promote your product at the end.

The first method of using an active community like Quora or Reddit is more scalable. But the overall goal is to see the percentage of people willing to buy your product.

Once you see an impressive number of people interested in what you pitched them, you can proceed with creating your product.

Step 3: Create Your Product

It’s time to take a leap of faith and create your product.

If you are building a physical product, you can work with a manufacturer to achieve it. Look up eCommerce sites like Aliexpress or Spocket to find qualified manufacturers.

Here are a few resources to guide you in building your physical product:

However, if you want to create digital lessons, an online course platform like Teachable is perfect for hosting your content. If it’s a PDF lesson, you only need to write the content in Microsoft Word and convert it to PDF.

Here are some guides that could help you:

Or let’s say your product idea is a tool or software that people could pay for and use online; you need a web developer to build it for you. Then, you can show them samples of similar software or tell them about an entirely new idea.

Check these guides:

I wouldn’t recommend building a physical product for a start as it requires lots of investment and risks. Creating digital products is more feasible and much more manageable. With just a small investment of time and money, you can build a digital product and launch it to see if your idea is profitable.

Once you have your product ready, it’s time to think about how you’ll attract affiliates to promote it for free in exchange for potential commissions they can earn.

Step 4: Finding Affiliate Program Partners

This part is the easiest.

With platforms like ShareAsale, JVzoo, etc., anyone can register as a merchant, create an affiliate program, and set commissions.

The only problem with such platforms is that they have hundreds or even thousands of products like yours, making it harder to succeed.

Instead, the best approach to follow is to find partners with massive audiences already interested in what you sell.

Let’s stick to the interview questions example.

You first need to find popular sites with lots of organic traffic that promote products related to yours.

Once you find some, you can ask them to promote your product and offer them good commissions, preferably better than what they’re getting with those other merchants.

When you search “interview questions and answers” on Google, you will discover that most top-ranking results promote products around careers and jobs.

For example, this website sells tons of tools related to careers but not one interview prep tool. This makes it an excellent fit for your potential product.

Image source- Nikola Roza

The site also has an interview prep menu at the top, which leads to a page with tons of interview questions. You can easily pitch them to promote your program and enjoy a handsome commission per sale.

The process is simple!

You only need to send them an email introducing yourself and your product, then try to recruit them by asking if they will be willing to become your affiliate partner. If you send tons of emails to different sites, you'll likely get many positive responses.

Also, you should be willing to share up to 50% of the revenue with affiliates, as that’s the industry standard. Digital products are easy to create and have no cost of re-production, so it’s still a win-win situation.

Another way to use Google to find affiliates with a great audience is by searching “Best + products.”

For example, if you are selling a course to learn the Spanish language, you can search “best online Spanish courses” on Google and reach out to the top results to include your program in the list.

Image source- Nikola Roza

As you can see, there are many results. If you could get those sites to promote your program, it would be a fruitful partnership.

You can also find affiliates on YouTube. Let’s go with another example, this time for a physical product.

Assuming you own a company manufacturing mattresses. Then, you can head over to YouTube to find channels that create only mattress-related videos.

This allows you to ride on their success wave and have a massive number of people buying your mattress within a short time. Like Google, you can use “product + review” to find the right Youtube channels.

For example, if you search for “mattress reviews,” you will discover many great options with whom you can partner.

In the beginning, the goal is to find a few affiliates to start with. Then, you can work on adjusting your affiliate website and commission structure as you grow. Don’t waste time getting things 100% right; you will learn along the way. Just start!

And if you don’t have the energy to create your product and find affiliates, you can flip the coin and become an affiliate marketer.

It’s much easier.

4 Steps to Becoming an Online Affiliate Marketer

There are four ways to kick-start your affiliate marketing journey, like becoming a merchant.

First, doing product reviews is an easier route to follow. You can do it with a YouTube channel or a blog.

Second, try converting readers to email subscribers, so they don’t have to visit your site often to know about your latest content.

Third, leverage joint venture webinars to take your business to a new level while maintaining the growth of your list and faithfully following your content calendar.

Finally, once your affiliate marketing business receives solid financial backing, you can skyrocket your growth using pay-per-click advertising.

Here are the four steps in more detail.

Step 1: Review Products in Your Niche

The best part of becoming an affiliate marketer is that you can skip the hurdles of “brainstorming a product idea” or “creating a product” merchants will face.

In this scenario, you only need to find the right products to promote out of the thousands in the market. A good starting point is to gather a list of products or services you use. Then, they will be easier to promote.

It’s easy…most products have an affiliate program.

For example, if you enjoy doing makeup, you can create a YouTube channel for reviewing makeup products.

See this Youtuber who does the same and has over 13 million people willing to see more of her content.

Image source- Nikola Roza

Regardless of your hobby, there are thousands of products you can promote as an affiliate and make good money.

Another kind of product review with great conversions is comparing competing products head to head.

Source

It’s easy to get carried away while doing product reviews, but honesty is the key. Reviews that are too salesy or sugar-coated fall flat with readers.

You can spoil your brand and not make any money if you keep forcing people to buy products rather than honestly reviewing them.

The simple truth is that reviewing products you’ve used is the most profitable because you can write from your experience, and there's no need to paraphrase existing content on the web (which Google can pick up on easily).

Google’s recent product review update clearly states that reviewers need to prove that they have used the products they are writing about. This is important to separate the bad eggs from the good ones.

Come to think of it, how can you accurately review a product you know nothing about? It makes no sense!

The only exception to this is when you review online courses created by reputable and well-respected creators.

For example, Tracy Mathews is a Jewelry maker that has made 0ver $8,000,000 from her business. So when she created the Flourish and Thrive Academy to teach other creatives how to succeed with their jewelry business, it quickly got positive reviews because the founder has proven her expertise over time.

Also, when you write reviews on your blog, remember to use your affiliate link to promote the product. That’s the only way the merchants could track your sale.

If you are starting a blog or Youtube channel to review physical products, signing up for the Amazon Associates program is ideal because you can find thousands of products to review in one place.

But the problem is that you need people to always find your content before making money.

This means content promotion comes before content monetization.

That sucks!

What about having direct access to your audience, so you can promote products to them any time you like? That’s better, right?

That’s what step two is all about.

Step 2: Build an Email List of Your Prospects

If you’ve been in the marketing industry for a while now, you must have heard of email marketing. It’s all about marketing your content through carefully crafted emails.

This should be easy if you already have a blog with decent traffic. You just need to convert your website’s visitors into email subscribers, and there are tons of ways to do that. You can also check out the best affiliate email marketing campaigns to learn how to launch an affiliate program.

First, you can use the Hello Bar.

Have you ever visited a website and seen a call to action at the top like this?

Image source- Nikola Roza

That’s usually created using Hello Bar.

To collect email addresses using this method, you need to add incentives like ebooks, checklists, and case studies at the top of your site to entice visitors to click on them.

Once they click on the Hello Bar, you can redirect them to a page where they need to enter their email addresses (recorded by your chosen email marketing software) before getting the freebies.

Another way to use the Hello bar is to create an exit-intent pop-up. This pop-up appears when visitors are about to leave your site. Once they move their mouse towards the top area of the browser, a pop-up will appear.

Here’s an example from my site, promoting SEMrush to my audience.

Image source- Nikola Roza

Hello Bar is very effective because all your website visitors can see and will likely click on it if you offer them something worthy, like a free ebook, template, or PDF report.

Besides using HelloBar or one of its alternatives to build your email list, you may add an option in your sidebar and a powerful CTA.

Though very ineffective compared to using popups, this method will get more subscribers, especially over time.

Using emails for affiliate marketing is more profitable if your blog is super-specific. Your effort won’t yield any good results if you create content about everything and anything.

For example, if your blog is about finding the right hair product, you don’t need thousands of email subscribers to make significant sales.

With just 500 people on your list, you can get crazy conversions because they are people interested in a particular topic, and every one of them has hair:)

It’s also essential to keep your subscribers active by sending them regular updates every week.

However, they shouldn’t always be promotional emails selling them stuff. Instead, try and build an excellent rapport with your subscribers so they begin to visit you, and next time you publish a product review, send it to them and watch those clicks come in droves.

Here’s how Rob Powell promotes his internal linking guide to his email list.

Image source- Nikola Roza

Also, when you discover a new product you think they might love, tell them about it and let them know why you recommend it.

The idea is to help them make informed decisions while promoting your affiliate products along the way. It isn’t just about being salesy.

Step 3: Educate Your Audience with Webinars

Webinars are workshops, video presentations, or online lectures using webinar software. They are also great for affiliate marketing.

Now imagine you want to buy a new Tesla X. Which of these will trigger you the most?

  1. Reading a review about the car;
  2. Watching a live presentation of the car in action;

Number two, definitely!

After hosting your content on a webinar platform like Webinarjam, you can use a simple landing page builder like Leadpages to create a page where people can sign up for your webinar.

Here’s how Michael Hyatt does it on his site:

Source

If you have a blog with decent traffic, you can promote your webinar to your audience through several means: the HelloBar pop-ups, and more.

You should also promote your upcoming webinars on social media if you have a massive audience or pay influencers to do it for you.

The best part of a webinar is that it allows a one-on-one engagement with your audience, allowing you to show them the product you are promoting and answer any questions they might ask along the way.

You can:

  • Talk about your personal experience with the product
  • Showcase different use cases of the product
  • Explain how your audience can get the most of it
  • Tell them its benefits and drawbacks
  • Discuss its features

If it’s a problem-solving product, your audience will find it interesting and buy it.

You can drop your affiliate link at the end of the content for those willing to buy. This won’t look salesy because you have spent enough time giving an honest product review.

Better still, if you can get the merchant to give you a special discount for your audience, you can easily incentivize them to buy, and you will see great conversions. Most merchants will agree to provide you with a deal once they know you are showcasing their products to a massive audience.

Step 4: Grow Your Business with PPC advertising

Once your affiliate marketing business turns into a reliable passive income stream, and you want to scale it higher, your next option is leveraging paid advertising.

The most common paid advertising methods are Facebook ads and Google ads. However, If you don’t get them right, you could lose your investment. Therefore, it’s better only to try this once you have enough money to test with and know how to get your investment back.

The only metric you need to pay attention to here is the conversion (high return on investment).

PPC advertising can help you:

  • direct people to sign up for your webinars
  • grow your email list
  • make direct affiliate sales

For example, over 500 people search for “free business webinars” on Google every month. If you run a Google ad targeting that keyword, you can effortlessly have these people register for your webinar.

Image source- Nikola Roza

At the end of the webinar, if you have a business course or training you like to recommend to your audience, you just need to tell them about it and drop your affiliate link.

Easy, right?

You can do this for any niche. Just run Google ads targeting “product or industry + webinar.” It’s better to confirm the search volume of any keyword you are targeting from the Google ads keyword tool, so you don’t waste money on unfruitful keywords.

Running Google ads to promote your product reviews is also profitable.

For instance, see this website using Google ads to rank for “best photo editing software.”

People searching for that keyword have already decided to buy and just need guidance on which photo editing software indeed is the best. If you can help them choose your post, they'll reward you with a sale.

Although it’s a good strategy to use paid advertising to scale your affiliate marketing business, it’s not cost-effective. And it’s so easy to waste money bidding on the wrong keywords; it’s virtually a guarantee if you’re a beginner to advertising on Google.

Honestly,  you are better off improving your SEO to enjoy everlasting free organic traffic to your site.

However, If you want to use PPC advertising, the best route to follow is to promote your webinar sign-up page. Also integrate Google Analytics with Salesforce to better understand what allows you to gain more leads and how much revenue they bring.

This means you can:

  • convert the audience into email subscribers and have access to them anytime you wish
  • persuade them to join your live webinars and even buy the product you are promoting
  • put them on an autoresponder email sequence that encourages them to buy.

For example, Michael Hyatt, a business coach, uses this webinar technique on his site.

Once you sign up to watch his webinar, he continues to send you a series of automated emails, inviting you to several training sessions, pitching you his courses, and recommending his best tools.

Source

This has a high conversion rate because if you don’t buy his tools or courses from his webinars, you might buy from one of the automated emails.

Once he calculates the number of people buying his course or recommended tools from his webinars, he knows how to invest more money on ads to get people to sign up for his webinars. It’s a fast way to scale income.

You should remember that using paid advertising for affiliate marketing requires many trials and errors to get your feet in the door, so it is not a beginner strategy.

Also, consider that Google isn’t the only paid ad platform out there, and there may be others that are better suited to your affiliate marketing niche. For instance, Amazon has its own PPC ecosystem which could be a good fit for ecommerce-focused entrepreneurs. PPC software for Amazon are also available, so it’s possible to get great results if you put in the effort.

Affiliate Marketing FAQ- Your Questions Answered!

I want my guide to affiliate marketing on the Wishup blog to be as comprehensive as possible without it becoming overwhelming and unreadable.

That’s why I added this FAQ section to answer any questions you (probably) have.

#1- What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an online business model where affiliate websites promote products on their blogs, for which they get paid a fixed percentage for every sale they make.

The affiliate marketing industry is as old as the concept of buying stuff online, and the industry is rapidly growing.

If you haven’t already, the time to start is now!

#2- What Do Affiliate Marketers Do?

In a nutshell, affiliate marketers place their special links on their blogs, Youtube channels, email newsletters, social media, Quora, and anywhere else to reach as many people as possible and get as many sales as possible.

#3- Can Beginners Do Affiliate Marketing?

Beginners can do affiliate marketing, and in fact, it’s one of the easiest and most sustainable ways to start making money online.

And I firmly believe it’s the right way to start because building an affiliate business is not just promoting affiliate links.

It’s also learning how to create content, promote it, and build relationships with other bloggers in your niche.

With that kind of skill-set, you can thrive online, and if you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, you simply must master those essentials.

#4- Do Affiliates Make Good Money?

Beginners making money online usually try to make their first buck via one of the many money apps. They typically make that first dollar pretty quickly but then realize the real money is to be found elsewhere.

And that elsewhere is partnership marketing.

There’s a ton of money to be made in affiliate marketing.

Successful affiliate marketers can make insane money from their efforts. Just look at Pat Flynn’s income report to see what’s possible.

However, most affiliates won’t get to that point simply because, like in every industry and human endeavor, most people are relatively unsuccessful while few get almost everything (Matthew’s principle).

This is not to discourage you, the good news is that it’s all up to you. If you learn and implement what you learned consistently over a significant period, you will carve out your slice of success for yourself. It’s inevitable.

For example, it took me four years to make my first sale and five years to go become full-time as an affiliate marketer. That’s five years of my life, but it was worth it. Even if it were ten years, it’d still be more than worth it when I think of the success I now have.

And I started from the bottom; I didn’t know what affiliate marketing was and what the SEO acronym stood for.

But I learned, and so can you.

#5- Which Affiliate Program is Best for Affiliate Marketing?

That depends on your niche. So I can’t tell you because I don’t know what niche you’re in.

If you don't know where to go, go where the others have gone before you.

So, promote something everyone else is because there’s a high chance it’s an excellent company to promote.

Of course, picking products to promote is more nuanced than that, but this general rule will serve you well.

As a last resort, you can always join the Amazon Affiliate Program and promote stuff from their inventory since they have a strong presence in any niche.

They're the last resort for affiliates because Amazon affiliate commission rates are so low that you need sales volume to make significant money with them. Plus, recently, with COVID and their constantly overworked staff, their delivery time has suffered dramatically, and there are a lot of product returns that further cut your commissions.

#6- Which Platform is Best For Affiliate Marketing?


You want to go where there's already an engaged audience. For example, YouTube is great for affiliate marketing because billions of people watch countless hours of video every month, and the potential for scaling is near needless.

TikTok is a new player in the social arena and exploding in popularity right now. People are successfully selling via that platform., as unlikely as it sounds at first hearing.

Who knew short videos are so inspiring?

For social media, Pinterest is great because it too has an engaged and enthusiastic audience attached to it and because it is also a discovery engine that helps people decide what exactly they want to buy.

But, to have an effective Pinterest presence, you need to have something to promote, your home base, i.e., your blog.

Blogging and blogs are the most stable and effective ways of affiliate marketing.

If you can master SEO and follow your content calendar by putting out blog posts regularly, you will start to see results from your hard work.

#7- Is Self-Hosted WordPress The Best Platform to Start a Blog?

WordPress.org is the most popular blogging platform in the world. This makes it the best platform for beginners because there are a ton of plugins and themes available, and in case of problems, you can always find help online.

If you currently have a problem, 100 other people have had the same issue as you do now. And they already got their answer, and it’s available free on the web.

If you don’t want or don't like WordPress, suitable alternatives are Wix, Weebly, Pixpa, Strikingly…

These alternative website platforms are limited in what you can do from a design standpoint, but they’re also simpler. There isn’t as much of a learning curve as with self-hosted WordPress.


It is harder to build links to content you monetize with affiliate links than informational content to teach them something new.

But it is still possible,

You can do the following:

  • guest posting;
  • link exchanges;
  • HARO (however, most HARO links will be to your site’s homepage, which is still valuable for affiliate sites);
  • reverse image search link building;
  • niche edits;
  • interview link building;
  • (here's an excellent example of an interview I did a while back);
  • etc.

It isn't easy to build links to affiliate content, but it’s also not that difficult if you're just a bit creative.

Pro tip: image link building is potentially the most scalable.

Because if you build a decent infographic, you will be able to submit to dozens of infographic directories, but you’ll also have a linkable asset that will naturally get you links over time.

And it's a free method because you can use Canva or one of its alternatives to whip up a quick infographic.

#9- How Do I Sell My Affiliate Products?

If you’re a merchant, the best way to sell your products is to connect with successful affiliates in your niche and convince them to promote your products.

Suppose you’re an affiliate marketer and a blogger. In that case, you need to own a decent-looking website that’s hosted with a fast host (or with a mediocre host but with a caching plugin installed), create excellent content, and promote it any way you can, to get people to click on your affiliate links and make sales.

That’s the gist of it.

#10- How Do Affiliate Marketers Get Paid?

Standard payment methods on most affiliate platforms are PayPal, a local bank in the US, wire transfers worldwide, and physical checks.

However, if none of those work for you, affiliate platforms can always find a way to get you paid, as long as you earn commissions and reach out to them with a request to set up an alternative payment method.

#11- What are the Highest Converting Blog Post Types in Affiliate Marketing?

The highest converting  affiliate money pages are product reviews and product review roundups (listicles)

In product reviews, you review a product in your niche. The goal as an affiliate is to sell it to your audience, but the way to sell is not to be salesy (paradoxical, but true).

Instead, you want to objectively talk about the product, list the pros and cons and explain who could benefit the most from said product.

And you pepper the page with affiliate links targeted at the readers most likely to click.

Here’s an excellent example of a product review in action. I found it by searching in Google “Linkody review.”

Next are product roundup reviews, which is a format that converts even better. Again, it’s because these keywords bring people bent on buying but just aren’t sure which product to choose.

And that’s where your article comes in.

Again, you need to be objective and helpful and compare a bunch of products explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Here's an excellent example that I discovered by searching in Google “best social media scheduling tools.”

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is one the most reliable ways to monetize your content and build a passive income stream.

Since the business is evolving day by day, you need to follow the trends to know what’s working at the moment.

For example, blogging and email marketing have been the top ways to promote affiliate products in the past. Still, now, many affiliates have experienced success using social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, and Tiktok.

The game keeps changing, and you need to be on top of it.

Regardless of how you do affiliate marketing, the goal is to promote quality products to the right audience. That’s the path to success.

Over to you, what experience do you have with affiliate marketing?

Or are you just getting started, having finished reading this excellent guide to affiliate marketing?

Author bio

Nikolaroza.com is the place to visit if you want to learn how to get Google traffic using SEO, earn with affiliate marketing, and run your business without your business running you in turn.