7 Basic steps of affiliate marketing for beginners

Table of Contents

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is simply promoting and selling other’s products and services and getting a commission for the same. In this article, we will discuss 7 basic steps of affiliate marketing for beginners.

First, you have to choose a good product or service from the internet marketplace from your niche. So the best thing in affiliate marketing is you don’t need a product or service to sell. Just selecting an affiliate product, promoting it, making sales, and getting an affiliate commission. Affiliate marketing can give you passive income every month.

How is it possible? We will go into a deeper discussion in this article and will explain how you can generate passive income by affiliate marketing. To make your first sale on affiliate marketing and also to generate passive income you need to work hard. Affiliate marketing is not a one-day game, you need to keep patience to get results. So hard work and patience is the first step in affiliate marketing for beginners.

The affiliate tracking procedure is done by cookies. What is a cookie? Very simple explanation, a cookie is a small file generated and stored in a buyer’s computer, from which the merchant can track that the buy is done through your affiliate link or it is referred by you.

Sometimes this cookie plays a huge role in affiliate marketing. Few companies provide some cookie time frame, the time period may be 3 days or 3 months or more, it completely depends on the merchant.

The concept is if someone clicks your affiliate link and the person doesn’t buy the product on the first attempt. As the person clicks on your affiliate link the cookie will be set on the computer for the given time frame of the merchant. The person may not buy the product on the first attempt.

But if the person comes back again to the particular website even through a google search and buys the product, the purchase will be referred through your affiliate link. This will only happen when the buyer buys the product within the cookie time frame. So the recommendation is that choose a product that gives you more cookie time period.

Affiliate commission

There are two types of commissions that exist in affiliate marketing. One-time commission and recurring commission.

When you sell some product or service through your affiliate link the merchant sometimes gives you a one-time commission. That may be a fixed commission or a certain percentage of the product. Sometimes merchants offer a recurring commission every month when the buyer renews the product in the next month and so on.

So here also a recommendation is to choose a recurring commission product instead of a one-time commission. But my personal experience is to work with both kinds of products. Some good products and services are there that provide a one-time affiliate commission, but they are very good products for affiliate marketing.

We have split the total affiliate marketing procedure into seven different steps where you can learn the entire procedure of affiliate marketing from scratch.

Major steps in affiliate marketing for beginners:

Step 1: Finding your niche:

This is the most crucial and important step in affiliate marketing for beginners. Some basic questions and answers you have to keep in mind before you choose your hot niche. The first question is, do you really have interest and knowledge in that topic? This will be very good if you are really passionate and have some knowledge of that particular subject.

The second thing you have to keep in mind is that monetization is possible on the topic? If you choose a niche that you are really interested in but money is not involved, then choosing the niche will be a wrong decision.

Some niches are there you may not have very much knowledge about, but you can earn money from there, so definitely choose that niche. Any time you can learn and gather knowledge on any particular subject.

The third point is, that you must choose a niche where you can easily write 75 to 100 articles, which is very important to grow on google. You should never run out of topics in your niche. So you have to create a lot of content on your subject. If you don’t find enough content on your topic, you must not choose the niche.

Avoid high competitive niches. Some niches are there which are very much popular (Ex-weight loss), but there is so much competition in it. There are a lot of affiliate marketers that are already ranked on google.

If you suddenly jumped on that particular topic without any market research you may not compete with other affiliates. So, there must be enough room for the niche you choose.

Demand is also required before choosing a niche. If there is enough demand then only people will come and read your article and buy the product from your affiliate link.

The last main factor needed to consider is whether affiliate programs are available in your niche or not. There must be enough affiliate programs to join your niche.

Here I want to mention some hot niches to start with: Digital marketing or internet marketing, Health, pet care, love and relationship, fashion and beauty, music, etc. But please don’t blindly choose any one of these niches, do your market research first.

Step 2: Doing market research:

Some market research on affiliate programs is required before choosing your niche. Choosing the perfect affiliate program and an affiliate network is a must because after all these programs and networks will pay you money.

Now, the question is what is an affiliate program and affiliate network? An affiliate network is a marketing network where a group of companies is listed for their affiliate programs. Some companies don’t enter into any network, they provide their own affiliate panel. My recommendation is to join some good affiliate networks because it is easy to manage the affiliate programs.

So, you start your research on the basis of commission. How many commissions they are providing. Is the commission one-time or recurring? But sometimes few companies are providing good commission but their market reputation is not very good, don’t choose this kind of products.

For beginners, I will recommend joining a CPA network to start with. CPA network is the cost-per-action network. Instead of selling any product, they will provide a commission on some action on their product.

For example, if someone does a free sign-up from your affiliate link you will get paid. This is quite easy instead of selling some product. This is really good for newbies.

Step 3: Create your own website:

Creating your own website is a major step in affiliate marketing for beginners. Without a website, you can start affiliate marketing, but if you really want to grow and want to generate passive income, a website is a must for your affiliate marketing business. First, determine your domain name and purchase it. But always buy a high authority domain. Ex: .com, .in, .co, .net etc.

The next step is to purchase good hosting. Good hosting plays a huge role to rank your website on google. There are so many market-leading hosting providers there, those are site ground, Bluehost, Hostgator, etc.

For beginners, I will recommend Hostinger, Bluehost, or Hostgator to start. Because you need a hosting provider that is fast and cost-effective. Do your market research and choose your best-hosting provider.

I will recommend WordPress to build your website. Because you can customize your website by using so many free plugins in WordPress. Also, there are so many free themes in WordPress, that you can install a suitable one.

If you want you can buy good themes also. ThemeForest is a very good website from where you can buy various good themes related to your niche. But I will recommend choosing a simple theme to start. So, after purchasing the domain and hosting, install WordPress to quickstart your website or blog.

Step 4: Start creating content:

Now you are all set to start your blog content. Content creation is the main part of affiliate marketing for beginners. This is really time-consuming work. But if you really jump into the affiliate marketing business, you have to create new content. Keep in your mind that you should never copy any content form to any other blogs.

If you copy and paste content to your website Google will never rank your website. If a copyright issue comes, Google will penalize your website. So, be honest and start writing your own fresh and new content. But you can definitely take references from similar posts. Read other blog posts and rewrite the content on your website.

For creating content you can choose a product and can do an in-depth review of that particular product. You can also compare two similar kinds of products to create your content. You can also write informational articles on a process that is related to your niche. You can choose some evergreen content also.

Step 5: Need to start building your own audience:

Audience building is a very crucial part of affiliate marketing. The experts say that if you are not building your audience then you are not building your business. And I feel this is 100% true. You have to build your audience to do serious business in affiliate marketing. Now the question is how to build an audience?

one of the best procedures for audience building is email marketing. Building an audience is to collect email lists of the visitors. You can use a lead magnet to collect the email list of visitors.

A lead magnet is nothing but collecting email addresses in exchange for a giveaway. The giveaway could be a free ebook, some free lists, free webinars, email sequences, etc. After building your email list you can send emails and provide knowledge to them. Also, you can send some emails with your affiliate offer.

You can promote the blog through different social media to build your audience. Choose Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

To drive traffic to your website this is very important to do SEO (search engine optimization). On-page and off-page SEO both are very important to growing your website. Do proper keyword research for on-page SEO. For off-page SEO you have to build quality backlinks and need to do guest posting on a regular basis. Try to build do-follow backlinks from high-authority websites.

For growing your audience you can also do paid promotions on Facebook, Google, etc.

Step 6: Start sharing your affiliate links:

Now you are all set to promote your affiliate offer. In your blog, valuable content shares your affiliate offer. Choose proper anchor text to promote your affiliate link. For example, if you write a proper review on some product, use the product name as an anchor text.

There are some other ways also there to promote affiliate products. You can use some popular platforms like Quora, medium, etc. Quora is a question-and-answer platform, where you can answer various questions related to your niche and can share your affiliate link.

Instead of sharing a direct affiliate link in Quora, create a presale page to promote. The presale page redirects visitors to the affiliate page. Do not spam on Quora, it may suspend your account. Medium.com is also a great platform to write articles and promote your affiliate product. On medium.com your quality article will rank on google very fast. Leveraging Quora and Medium.com is a great way to affiliate marketing for beginners.

Step 7: Create sales funnel:

This is the final step in affiliate marketing for beginners. Creating a sales funnel is also a procedure to do affiliate marketing. A sales funnel or a conversion funnel is a process or stage of the journey from entering into the funnel and ending with a purchase. In the first stage of the sales funnel you have to collect the email address of the visitors by using a lead magnet.

After collecting leads redirects people to a presale page or a bridge page, where you provide some knowledge about your affiliate product. From the bridge page redirect visitors to your affiliate page.

On the first attempt, most people will not buy the product. You can send a sequence of emails to the collected lead, later on, to promote your product again and again. There are various funnel-building tools are available to create your high-converting sales funnel. Ex:- Click funnels, GrooveFunnels, etc.

Conclusion:

Now you are all set to kickstart your affiliate marketing business. Just keep in mind that the above 7 steps you have to follow again and again to grow your affiliate marketing business. After all, you have to keep patience during this process. I hope the topic “affiliate marketing for beginners” will be helpful for you in your affiliate marketing journey.

Initially, you may not get any sales. Motivate yourself and keep on doing your work on a regular basis. I am sure that this self-motivational theory will make you successful. Please don’t forget to make a comment below if you found the article helpful for your affiliate marketing business.