For those who don’t know. There’s nothing as sweet as earning in dollars as an affiliate. No much work done yet alert keep on coming. How is this possible? Is it through stealing or dubious act? No. It is through affiliate marketing and selling information products that can provide that comfort for you. Today, we would discuss on the definitive guide to affiliate marketing for beginners. Let’s get started!

You get a commission in exchange for providing your audience with information about products or services they are interested in.

PAY ATTENTION: Here’s how to earn in dollars selling other people’s products as an affiliate

As a blogger, you earn money by building audience that have trust in you and also offer products or services that benefit them.

Through affiliate marketing, one get to offer products and services to your audience without necessarily getting to create your own products.

This can be achieved by looking out for a product or service, promote it to your audience and then get paid in return. This is one of the popular way of making money online from your blog as an affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate marketing? 

In simple terms, affiliate marketing is advertising other companies’ products or services to your audience on your blog. When someone buys through your affiliate links, you get a commission for it. 

The unique thing about this is that as an affiliate marketer, you can promote products or services from many or different companies and earn commissions from them all at the same time.

All that is needed to be done is joining affiliate programs, find reputable and respectable affiliate products to promote and then share those products with your audience. 

For easy attention, things to be promoted are what you know are of dire need to your audience. What you know they can purchase with or without your advice. In this way, you have to be very smart as a beginner.

Read Also: What is Stakecut affiliate marketing?

But how smart you are is to help them make smart decisions. Give more value to the said products or services.

Create a bigger picture of the extra usefulness of the product or service and make them realize the advantages of getting them through your blog.

Here is a quick difference between affiliate marketing and other types of online advertisement

the former works on a CPL (cost per lead) basis, the later deals with pay per clicks or views. This further means that your reward only come as a marketer when someone buys the product or sign up for a free trial. 

As a beginner, this journey of being your guardian angel seems to be an interesting one and so we move till we get to the final destination. Let’s keep on rolling.

How does affiliate marketing work? 

Let’s digest this step by step. 

First, you have to find a company or product that you want to promote. The product or services selected must be one that is relevant to your blog and useful to your audience. The product or company becomes your MERCHANT.

After that, there’s need for you to be a partner to the company by joining their partner program. With this, you have become their ‘affiliate partner’ or ‘associates’ as the case may be. 

Again, upon joining their partner program, a unique ID and a specific URL will be issued to you which will be used in all the affiliate links that you add in your website to promote the product or services.

You can promote the product by giving more in depth analysis, reviews, recommend it in your articles, display banner ads etc. All the traffic you send to your merchant website will be tracked with that unique ID.

When a potential buyer clicks on the link to enter your merchant’s site, a cookie that will identify you as an associate is placed in their device.

This cookie will ensure that you as an affiliate will be credited with the referral sale pending on when the sale is completed. 

Once the buyer completes the sale process, you will be given a commission. Your payment is issued once your earnings reach a stipulated time usually 45-60 days. 

Note: the merchant provides available reports so as to enable the affiliates or associates see their referrals or the number of clicks gotten. This is to avoid any kind of doubt.

How to get started with affiliate marketing

One of the things I love about this type of monetization is that affiliate marketing is very easy to operate or start.

As a beginner, you have no much worries on how to go about it. Little knowledge is enough, then as your site and your marketing skills grows, you can begin to learn more advanced strategies and tactics. 

To get started with the affiliate marketing, the first thing to do is to make sure that you are using the right blogging platform which allows you to run affiliate marketing campaigns on your site.

Example, Wordpress.com gives restrictions to  marketing of some products or services. While Wordpress.org website gives that access to add any affiliate link you want and run your affiliate campaigns efficiently and effectively.

The next is to acquaint your users on how you make money from your website by creating a space for disclosure page. 

The privacy and terms of service page is also important to be added to your blog. Using affiliate disclosure can save you from legal issues in the future and further build more solid trust between you and your audience. 

To further start with affiliate marketing, you must find affiliate products and services to promote. To achieve this, they are many ways out. 

Products to be an affiliate with should be one you know very well. The one you have used and much much about it.

This will enable you to have more convincing power over your audience. Then go the product’s website and search for terms like ‘affiliate program or partners’ to join.

How to choose high in demand products to promote

in this our definitive guide to affiliate marketing for beginners we would share pro tips on how to locate, choose and promote best affiliate products that drive in high conversion.

1. Look for products other blogs are recommending

Make a research on your competitors websites to know the type of products they are promoting. Here is how to know that they are promoting affiliate products:

you look for noticeable banner adds on their website and then using your mouse on the banner, you will see a link in your browser’s status bar. 

 Here is how to find the Affiliate link

As said earlier, the links is attached with affiliate ID which helps the merchant track through which affiliate partner a buyer is coming from.

Some affiliate partners or bloggers promote affiliate products in their blog post. In this case, you need to make a clear statement (affiliate disclosure) in every post you insert affiliate links.

Below we would discuss important affiliate plugins that can help you to perfectly insert affiliate links in your blog posts without hurting your SEO.

2. Bigger affiliate networks should be your option

These websites serves as channels through which the affiliate marketers and their merchant relates. Many of the products you want to be a partner with use an affiliate network and this will help you to find the products to start promoting on your own site. 

Reach out to companies: if you lack the information about the affiliate program of the product you want to promote, you can simply seek for the information through their email.                      

The importance of affiliate network for both side:

Publisher: For you as the affiliate marketer, this platform allows you to search for products, sign up as affiliate, track your campaign performance and earnings.

Merchant: The platform serves as an avenue to list their products, track affiliate traffic, manage affiliates and send them their rewards. 

My 5 recommended affiliate networks

1. Amazon associates: This is referred to as the largest commerce in the world, availed with much products. To start earning from them, just sign up for their affiliate program and refer people to their website. Amazon products are easy way to get started. Newbies start by becoming amazon affiliate. 
2. Shareasale: This is one of the largest affiliate networks which have almost every paying category of products. Example, wordpress hosting company, WPEngine etc.
3. ClickBank: This is a large online market place for selling digital products in various categories. It is easy to use and has tons of learning resources for new affiliate marketers.
   
4. Expertnaire: highly recommended if you consider starting affiliate marketing in Nigeria. Expertnaire is on of the best affiliate network in Nigeria with high in demand courses on digital marketing and e-commerce business. Most of their courses has 40-50% affiliate commissions. There are two ways to join expertnaire affiliate network. You can join directly from their website (expertnaire.com) or you can join through 72IG program.
5. Stakecut: Have you heard about Stakecut before? Well, this is one of the fast-growing affiliate network in Africa that’s giving affiliates an opportunity to earn in dollars selling other people’s products to global market. The opportunity to make money on Stakecut as an affiliate is endless. One of such is free membership registration and ability to receive payment in local and international currency.

Read Also:

1.  Is 72IG program legit or scam (Expert Review)
2. How to promote Stakecut affiliate products using DOINGS strategy

Note; the affiliate networks preferable to join is the one that have the products you want to promote. You can join many affiliate networks for different products.

It is also relevant to always check the affiliate network program policies and to review program policies of the individual products and merchants. This will give you more idea about your earnings, payments, additional incentives etc. 

Tips to increase earnings in affiliate marketing 

1. As an affiliate marketer, you know not what will become of the products you are promoting in the nearest future. Hence the need for you to be an associate to products that are good and reputable enough. Recommend products and services that you have adequate knowledge of. The ones you know are quite useful. Seek more information about the products and services from the appropriate companies. 
2. Offer highly useful and valuable content. Do this by adding affiliate links and banners anywhere on your wordpress site. Although, this will not convince your audience enough to buy the products. So you need to have more power by giving useful and valuable information about the said product. Give more in depth analysis, attached with video reviews etc. 
3. When choosing any product to promote, make sure you put your audience in mind. This is very important. Don’t just promote a product because of it higher commission. Intimate with your audience to know what they want. If you should recommend a certain product for your audience and they end up buying without seeing the usefulness. This may terminate the trust they have in you.

Affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress 

These tools will further help you in managing the affiliate links, banners and ad spreads all over the website. 

1. Adsanity;  This is the best wordpress ad management plugin and it is very necessary for every affiliate marketers to have in their inbox tools. This tools makes it easy to insert ads into your wordpress posts, pages and sidebar widgets. It also gives that room to create banner ads from your wordpress site and manage them from a single dashboard. 
2. Monsterlnights; This one is at it best when it comes to Google analytic plugin for wordpress. With it, you can see the doings of your users on your website. It can be used to track your affiliate links using Google analytics. 
3. Thirsty affiliates; This tools has the option to automatically replace keywords with affiliate links which can significantly help you boost your revenue. It also allows you to easily add affiliate links in wordpress.

Conclusion:

Affiliate marketing has been, so far, one of the best income streams for digital marketers and bloggers. It’s advisable to always recommend products that you have used and making sure that it carries a lot of values and, at the same time, solves a problem that your audience are searching on your blog.