Best Affiliate Programs To Make Money Online For Beginners

When you hear the term Affiliate marketing, what comes to your mind? Of course, something that can help you make tonnes of money from home and without making many efforts. Well, that is exactly what a simple search on Google can make people believe. However, there is much more to that, a complicated truth that covers many aspects besides merely making money while you sleep.

This post will throw light on how you can earn a decent passive income using affiliate marketing. If you are new to the field, this post will help you get a hang of what affiliate marketing is and how you can use it to your advantage. Even if you are an experienced affiliate marketer, I’m sure you will find something that helps you improve and give you new insights. You can also read here how my top students are making $10,000+ per month from my free guides.

Table of Contents

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

When a retailer provides you with a commission for generating sales or for traffic that comes via your referrals, it is known as Affiliate marketing. It is an easy process that comprises mainly three steps.

You give a recommendation about a service or a product to your friends and followers.
Your followers make their purchase using your affiliate link.
You get a commission for the sales you make with the help of your affiliate link.

Affiliate Marketing – How To Get Started?

Now that you are aware of a definition of affiliate marketing and also have an idea about its working, let’s take a look at how to begin.

The biggest mistake most newbies do is that they blindly sign up for every affiliate marketing program or network available. They don’t tend to plan ahead of time. In the end, they feel loaded and overwhelmed. It is important to take some time and plan. Therefore, check out these seven steps. Only when you have followed the first four steps mentioned here, think about promoting a product.

Choose Your Niche

Carefully choose your niche to make your business focussed and promote relevant content. For most people, this can be a really hard step. However, there are just a few questions that you have to ask yourself.

What Is My Passion?

Usually, our passion is the thing that we have the most knowledge about. Since it sparks our interest, this makes it simple to create interesting content.

Is My Topic Big Enough?

Ask yourself whether what you are writing is huge enough to help you generate at least 100 blog posts. If not, you might face some struggles with SEO and finding relevant keywords. This will also give rise to troubles in developing an authority website.

Does This niche suffer from over-saturation?

Sometimes, a popular niche ca have a lot of competition which a beginner might find overwhelming. If that’s happening to you, consider trying a different niche you are equally passionate about.

Can you make money with this niche?

If you are interested in more than one niche, select the one that has a more income-generating potential. Even though money might not be everything but don’t you think it’s better to generate some extra cash doing what you love?

ClickBank is an affiliate retailer where you can easily check a niche out and analyze whether your time is worth it. Click the ‘affiliate marketplace’ on the official site. It will display the categories on the left-hand side in red color. When you click on a category, it will bring a page that has filters. You can select the product relevant to your niche for sale among a pool of different products.

Tip : Use the Gravity metric for sorting. This displays the products according to a ranking based on how well the sales go.

Products with a higher Gravity score generate a good average income with each sale. If there are a lot of products here that you think you can generate content on, congratulations! You have just landed a profitable niche.

Building A Killer Website

Once you are done finding a niche that can earn you profits, it is time to build your own website. WPBeginner helps newbies select a platform for blogging which is bound to make the process far easier. Your blog is likely to be the main focus of the site.

However, you should consider other pages too. In fact, some of them are must-haves if you are getting into affiliate marketing.

About Us Page – This section is to help the audience know you. Keep it as personable as possible.
Contact Us Page – This section is a means for your audience to contact you. It should have the info you have to share with your target audience including what you have to convey to advertisers, partners, and readers.
Disclaimer Page – If you are monetising the site, this section is where you share how. Use free disclaimer generator here.
Privacy Policy Page – This section lets the users know what information you collect and how you intend to use it. Use free privacy policy generator here.
Terms of Service Page – Terms of Service is meant to protect you legally in case someone misuses the information on your site. It also reveals information related to trademarks and copyrights. Use free Terms of service page generator here.
Custom 404 Page – This page is meant to make the customer experience better.
Advertise Page – If your plan is to sell on-site ads, have a page meant for advertisers. It should have all the necessary information about demographics, views, contact forms, and available spots.

Make sure that you keep all the policies clear so that you are able to build trust.

Ensure Creation of High-Quality Content

Now that you are ready with the creation of the framework for your page, it’s time to start creating content. There are some affiliate networks for which building a site and having decent traffic on content is a prerequisite. So, before you apply for affiliate programs, make sure that you have carefully read their affiliate requirements for eligibility.

However, this doesn’t mean that an aspiring affiliate marketer has to write about 100 blog posts before even thinking of diving into this field. It is advisable to have at least 5 well-thought-out blog posts and some scheduled posts before applying for affiliate marketing.

Work Towards Growing Your E-Mail List

When we talk about marketing, E-mail has been and will be the primary means of communication. For every dollar you spend, you are likely to get $38 in return. Do you realize What this means? We are talking about something that is 3800% effective. This is why growing your email list is totally worth it. One of the best and the simplest ways of growing your e-mail list is including a pop up as soon as a user enters your site.

Select Affiliate Products For Promotion

We have already discussed that choosing a niche requires significant efforts. But when you have done enough work in selecting a niche, choosing affiliate products for the purpose of promotion won’t be a very challenging task. All you need to do is ensure that they fit into the niche you have decided to work in. Another thing to make sure is that the products are related to the content.

Now the big question is where to get ideas for selecting a product or products to promote. It’s simple. You can come across promising ideas anywhere! Let’s take a look.

Promoting Products That You Are Already Using

Think about a product that you have been using for a while and love it. After that, consider that there is bound to be an affiliate program for that. List out different products as well as services you are using and search on Google about related affiliate programs. Write down the reviews of the product and slide an affiliate link into the review. Regardless of what product you love, chances are, there is an affiliate program related to it.

Promoting Products Fulfilling a Need

Interact with people who have an interest in your niche. Are there any problems that they are struggling with? Do the solutions that are currently available have some gaps or shortcomings? Find different products or services that can prove to be of help to users and promote them. Every audience is looking forward to solutions to their problems. If your product serves this purpose, people are more likely to pay for it.

Promoting Products People Wish To Know Some More About

Ask your target audience about their areas of interst and give them a try. Promote a product only if you think it’s good, not just for the sake of money. This will help you earn the trust of the audience.

Promoting Products From Other Affiliates of Your Niche

Pay attention to what other affiliate marketers are up to in your niche. Find out what they are promoting and talking about. Check out there social media handles such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc to have an insight into what they are doing.

Join Top Affiliate Marketing Networks

An affiliate marketing network is an online marketplace where different retailers list out their products. Affiliates can check it out to promote the products they wish to. It’s like the marketing network acting as the middleman. If you are an affiliate, you don’t have to pay to sign up for an affiliate marketing network. Some of the popular networks include, but are not limited to…

If you are thinking of starting an affiliate program of your own, Affiliate Royale is there to make it easy for you. It is a WordPress plugin that enables you to launch an affiliate program. You can do this from the beginning to the end in just a few minutes. It also makes it easy to track clicks, payments, outbound links, and sales with the help of a dashboard. It’s easy-to-use and personalised itself to include only that information that holds relevance to your targets.

Track Your Results

If you are using a WordPress site, you can use MonsterInsights can help you track how your products are performing. All you need to do is install the plugin and activate it. After that, connect your Google Analytics account and WordPress site. After activating the plugin, click on Insights » Settings and select the Tracking tab.

The tab has various selections. Check out the Engagement section. Here, you will see that the default option to Enable MonsterInsights events tracking is yes. This is exactly what we want. There is no need to take any action as far as this section is concerned. Therefore, select Affiliate Links.

In this section, we have to set the path of the affiliate links with the help of a prefix added by the affiliate link plugin. After that, add a label. It will help you identify the affiliate links in the reports. Ensure that you save your changes.

Once you are totally done with the changes, it can take about a day from Google Analytics to start with the reporting.

For viewing the data, check out the Google Analytics dashboard and select Behaviour » Events » Top Events. You can see your affiliate link in the form of an outbound link. The label you assigned will also be visible.

It is important to track your affiliate links since it helps you determine the performance of different products. You can decide later what kind of products you wish to promote in the future based on the behaviour of your audience. This knowledge can help you provide better content to your audience, thus, strengthening their loyalty and trust. They’ll keep coming back to you with time.

To make your affiliate links more memorable and shorter, you can use link tracking plugins. For instance, Pretty Links. It’s simple to use and turns the affiliate links into a readable format. Plus, branding and advertising the affiliate links becomes easier. The performance metrics are all built-in that can help you determine how each of your links is performing.

Conclusion

So, Now you have it! Generating a decent passive income with affiliate marketing has never been easier! Follow all the above steps and have huge success in the field of affiliate marketing.

If there’s anything you think I’ve missed – talk to me in the comments below!

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