How to Do Affiliate Marketing in 2022? - A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

Have you ever heard of affiliate marketing? It is a popular and effective way to boost conversions, drive sales, bring traffics, and ultimately earn a passive income online.

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing enables you to earn a piece of profits by promoting other companies’ products using affiliate links even when you are sleeping. When a customer buys a product or service based on your referral, you earn a certain commission on that purchase.

However, figuring out where and how to get started can be overwhelming since it’s such a dynamic and vast field. Don’t worry. In this post, you will learn 5 simple steps to get started efficiently and effectively as a beginner.

Let’s see how:

What Is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an ideal marketing campaign in which an affiliate earns a revenue for marketing another person’s or company’s products through their blog, video or any other exposure channels. The store owners can use this marketing model to advertise their products through the publisher's advertising sources such as social media channels, websites, blogs, etc.

For brands or merchants, an affiliate program may bring much more sales through a large amount of referring traffic. Meanwhile an affiliate will get commissions revelantly as long as a consumer purchases a product through the unique link or coupon associated with their recommendations. In other words, affiliate marketing is a win-win opportunity for both sides to make profits.

The amount of money the affiliates make depends highly on the commission levels set by the advertiser and how many products they sell. The whole process starts with the advertiser(individual sellers or companies) and ends with the customer. The publisher(affiliate) plays the role of a middleman, selling the sellers’ product or service to the customer.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work

Affiliate marketing always involves three roles, the sellers or product creators, the affiliates or publishers, and consumers.

Like the merchants, you need to find qualified ambassadors or affiliates to help you promote and sell your products, which helps develop your business size fast and stably. You have to pay a commission for them.

Tip: However, recruiting affiliates is hard, getting qualified affiliates is harder. Thus, you'd better spend much time defining your goals, understanding your products and target market before finding suitable and profitable ambassadors to join your system.

And for an affiliate marketer or ambassador, your responsibility is to find the products you want to review, promote them through a blog or video, etc. When the consumer buys a product through your link or content, you will get paid. They are the middlemen between merchants and customers.

For dropshippers, you can also earn money with an affiliate program thus improving your margins. With affiliate networks, such as Admitad, which you can get cashback from with dropshipping tools, like DSers, you can make additional margins through your dropshipping business. When you place the orders from your suppliers, these affiliate projects can help you check whether the products are part of your suppliers’ affiliated program or not. If yes, you can get a piece of the profit from the products you purchase.

Lastly, if you are a consumer, you don’t buy from the store owner exactly. You purchase what you want from a blogger or an influencer in this process. It’s much easier for you to reach the products since sometimes many entrepreneurs don’t advertise their products in the way you are familiar with.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Now you have understood how affiliate marketing works, it’s time to learn how to become an affiliate marketer to earn passive income. There are only 5 steps you need to do. Let's see them one by one.

Step1: Find Your Niche

An affiliate marketer who wants to be successful always has a niche in which they try to make a good impression on their audience. However, the fact is that if they’re too greedy and try to speak to too many niches, they might be stuck in overextending and making your efforts ineffective.

Thus, the first step for your affiliate marketing journey is to find out who you’re going to target. Although it comes first, it’s still vital and difficult. Why? Choosing a profitable niche that you have passion for is one of the most crucial parts of starting your affiliate marketing.

As affiliate marketers are always reliable publishers for a product or brand, it’s essential to make sure you are in the right place. So how could you do to get one? First of all, you can find a niche through your interests. After all, interest is the basis for doing one thing well.

Tip: Although passion is necessary for starting, it’s not the only thing you should focus on, whether it’s profitable is also significant.

Another alternative is to search from the Internet. Engines like Google Trends are great tools, allowing you to know what your potential customers are concerned about. For example, when you put the keyword- dropshipping coffee, the outcomes will show you people’s interests in this niche with a chosen timezone.

Another much easier way is to find one through social media channels. You can reach out to different people since more and more people are sharing their life, family, or work on a social media platform. All these can be inspirations for your niche.

Step2: Choose a Platform

Once you have a niche to go, the next thing is to choose a platform to start. Theoretically, you can be an ambassador on any platforms, like content website, social media channels, affiliate program websites.

However, in this article, we mostly focus on much easier ways to build an audience and increase your sales. For example, you can do it via one of the two channels: a blog or a YouTube channel.

Although blogging now has large competition, it’s cheap and easy to start for beginners. There are plenty of tutorials online teaching you how to get started and it only costs you a few dollars a month. You just need to write articles to get a better chance of ranking through on-page SEO.

YouTube enables you to create and upload content for free and at ease, too. So it’s ideal for many people. Your main task is to optimize your videos for SEO, including affiliate links, and then publish them. Without a lot of techniques, you can do it simply.

Step3: Build an Audience

It’s time to find your potential audience for your niche. For all channels, a large and engaged audience is a highly valuable asset. These people who read, view, and engage with your content might be the main source of your additional income.

A perfect way to build an audience is to find who your target audiences are. There are excellent ways to help you. For example, you can reach out to your target audience by researching competitors, monitoring your site traffic, and conducting first-hand research by talking to subscribers and customers.

Remember, finding them is the first thing. There are still many things you need to do. You need to grow and cultivate your loyal online audience through targeted content and emails with compelling products description from time to time.

Moreover, you have to give your audience a reason to read and engage with your content, like sharing your content with user-friendly images or attractive titles. Then, they’ll find a reason to purchase the products you recommended, too.

Step4: Sign Up for the Right Affiliate Programs

Now, you already have a niche and platform ready to go. The next thing is to look for affiliate programs. Many programs are run directly by a merchant, to advocate their own company’s products. Then it’s easy to contact them to be an affiliate marketer.

When making an option, the first thing is to know what products they are going to promote. Most importantly, you should ensure the products they offer should be well-known in your selected niche. Therefore, you can look for brands advertising their commodities to your target audience, and see if they offer affiliate programs. For example, if your site is about jewelry websites, you could look for web owners or store owners with their own jewelry affiliate programs.

In addition to merchant-driven programs, there are also dedicated affiliate networks, such as Avangate Affiliate Network, Awin, CJ Affiliate, ClickBank, and more. These programs group different merchants and thousands of products. It gives you access to multiple products and merchants without signing up for dozens of programs. Even e-commerce giants like eBay and Amazon have their own successful programs, such as Amazon Associates and eBay Partner Network.

Naturally, finding programs that will pay you well is crucial for beginners. After all, you’re putting a lot of effort into promoting the merchants’ products and getting a commission, so you need to find a fair policy about the share of the profits. Before you sign up, it’s also a smart move to research each program and see what other ambassadors think about the programs.

You might find it useful to seek out an affiliated community, such as Wealthy Affiliate. With the help and advice of those who have been publishing and marketing for a long time, being an affiliate might be a little easier for you. It can be particularly useful when you’re a newcomer.

Step5: Create & Promote Your Remarkable Content to Drive Online Traffic

Lastly, you need to create genuine and remarkable content promoting your selected products to get incredible success with affiliate marketing. You can write a roundup blog post of your favorite and popular products. Then you create comparison charts that discuss the merits of similar products. It’s also crucial to interview other users and fans of the products to showcase their opinions.

Regardless of what kind of content you create, the content should include authentic reviews and recommendations of your affiliate products. Remember to avoid discussing and promoting products you don’t try out yourself.

I would recommend a list of the most popular content formats for affiliate marketing, but it doesn’t mean they are your only one choice, doing research and finding your “Mr. White” is much more vital:

• Reviews: By making insightful reviews of the product, it is very simple to guide consumers to the product
• Tutorials: How-to guides on an offer effectively helps you to incorporate your set affiliate link at the end
• Personal blogs: These blogs focus on stories and experiences that you have about a product
• Product comparisons: Similar to reviews, it helps your customers find the pros of the commodities according to your descriptions
• Product posts: Posting a picture on social media with your product is a simple, but powerful and effective way of getting the ball rolling there
• Resource pages: You can even have a page on your website or platform dedicated to helpful and relevant resources including, products, tools, and services

Remarkable content will make influence only you to promote it. Thus, make sure to apply social media, SEO tactics, and email lists to advocate your content so that you can increase your audience size and boost your sale.

Pro Tips for Dropshipper

For a dropshipper who is willing to grow his business, time and money are some of the main concerns. Dropshippers then are always trying their best to find great dropshipping solutions to help them. DSers, whitelisted by AliExpress, is a simple but powerful dropshipping tool, allowing you to pre-select your favorite shipping methods according to those elements.

If you also have a passion for dropshipping with no money, or how to make an additional revenue through sales you make on different marketplaces, such as AliExpress and Amazon, as I mentioned above, you can apply the best dropshipping tool, DSers to help you save money or use DSers affiliate marketing, to earn a commission.

Except for having an affiliate program with Admitad, DSers also has unique features such as Supplier Optimizer and Bulk Order. With DSers, dropshippers can free themselves from dealing with and managing millions of orders.

Further reading: 8 Best strategies for affiliate marketing you should know

Conclusion

It’s such time-consuming work to find merchants to partner with. Whether you join high commission affiliate programs, or profitable affiliate marketing jobs depends highly on the steps discussed in this article.

Moreover, you have to leverage the best strategies to attract an audience and leave a good impression on them, which helps you to increase brand awareness. However, keep in mind: No matter which approach you choose, the steps in this article will help make your online business journey as an affiliate marketer much easier in the long run.