Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting a merchant’s products or services in exchange for a commission when a buyer buys a product through your link. It is also a perfect side hustle for people like me who enjoy making web pages and sharing information to an audience.

Affiliates are marketers or salespersons for the merchant. The merchant rewards your effort by paying you a certain percentage of the product price every time a customer buys the product via your link.

Affiliate marketing, unlike other forms of marketing, can be done at scale. An ordinary salesperson doesn’t multitask; instead, she sells products from one merchant. Affiliates are free to promote products from multiple companies and earn a commission from each of the products.

However, if you’re a beginner, there are several affiliate marketing tips you need to learn so that you can advance your prospects of flourishing in this niche. Affiliate marketing is a source of livelihood for millions of bloggers worldwide. The amount you earn as an affiliate depends on several factors, such as the type of products you’re promoting, the number of followers, commission rates, etc.

With that in mind, here is a step by step guide on how to become an affiliate

Pick a Niche

The first step to becoming an affiliate marketer is to pick which affiliate products to sell. Before you settle on a particular product, it’s important to understand what it entails. This will help you know the value the product adds to the consumers and why they should buy it.

All affiliate marketers have a niche in which they strive to persuade their audience. As a beginner, start by concentrating on one niche to make your effort more effective.

Therefore, making your mind on who your target audience will be is the first crucial step. Though it comes first, it doesn’t make it easy whatsoever.

To find your perfect niche, kick-start the process with a short-self assessment. Since affiliate marketers are intended to be champions for a brand or product, you can’t afford to be in the wrong headspace.

Some of the questions you should start by asking yourself include:

• What subjects do I find interesting?
• Are there good keyword opportunities?
• How often do people search for my core niche?
• Will there be consistency for demand in my niche?
• How does the competition fair for my niche?
• How many affiliate programs work within my chosen niche?

These questions will help you determine whether the products you’re evaluating is something you can promote often. Irrespective of the type of affiliate marketing strategies you eventually choose, these are made or break questions.

It’s worth noting that passion shouldn’t be the only driving factor to becoming an affiliate marketer. Effecting an idea or project without a passion doesn’t make it less profitable.

Therefore, it’s important to note that finding the ideal products to sell is not all about fun but for profit.

Once you find answers to all these questions, you’ll be ready to go.

Research Programs

Once you’ve chosen a niche, the next step is to search for programs that can aid you to promote products in your niche. This is a great step in your quest to become a successful affiliate marketer.

Affiliate marketing programs are platforms that serve as a link between companies and affiliates. Because it can be arduous for affiliates and companies to link, these platforms serve as a gateway for the relationship to commence.

Even as you undertake research, there are several fundamental questions that you need to figure out how to become an affiliate. These questions are:

• Who are the merchants using the affiliate program you’re targeting?
• What’s the estimate of the commission you’re likely to make from your program?
• Are you eager to be linked with the program and the brands selling via it?

Does the program render you any support?

Beware that this is another crucial step that can make or break your affiliate marketing career. In simple terms, your program is the link that helps you find lucrative deals. Therefore, don’t overlook this step.

Build Your Platform

Creating a platform is the third step that helps you thrive as you get an insight on how to become an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate marketers work by creating blogs/marketplaces and running paid ads.

Though these aren’t the only options, most affiliate marketers can use a couple of platforms. Therefore, here is a breakdown of how to set up each.

• Build a Website

Though there is an ongoing discussion about whether affiliates need a website or not, there are a handful of benefits to owning a website even as you try to learn how to become a successful affiliate marketer.

Irrespective of whether you’ve partnered with low or substantial commission affiliate programs, websites can help make a stride in your affiliate marketing career.

Furthermore, owning a website can help to hunt for affiliate marketing opportunities in the future; therefore, owning an affiliate site is an ideal resume builder.

Choosing a host is the first step to building a website. Some of the host service providers include Wix, WordPress.com, etc. So, the best choice is up to you, but WordPress.com is the perfect option for growth.

Create and Publish High-Quality Content

Content is a crucial aspect of marketing and one of the concluding steps of becoming an affiliate marketer. Content should also top the list of your affiliate marketing efforts. Whether you’re blogging or publishing ads, when you start creating top-notch content, then you’re in line to become an affiliate marketer.

Creating content isn’t difficult but adding value is up to you. There are plenty of options when it comes to figuring out the type of content to create. It’s thus your onus to create content based on the topics you’re familiar with.

Reading product reviews can help you to choose the best products to market as an affiliate marketer. This is because reviews provide an in-depth overview of a product or service.

Setup Your Ad Account

Building a website is one of the steps when pondering how to become an affiliate marketer. Ads are an ideal marketing strategy that can help you be successful, especially for sizeable commission affiliate programs.

A website is of no importance if you’re looking to use paid ads to allure customers to your merchant partner’s website.

Instead, all you need is to create an ads account to incorporate ads. The type of ads you use will depend mainly on your audience. Some of the ads you can use include Google, Facebook, Bing, etc.

What is the click-through rate?

CRT, an abbreviation of click-through rate, is a metric that determines the number of people that click through an email concerning the number of emails conveyed. Basically, the click rate is a fraction that informs the number of emails that successfully attained one click from a subscriber. This click lets you know whether your campaign was intriguing to entice your audience and prompt your audience to take action. The primary objective for tracking the click-through rate is to weigh engagement. Here are some of the areas you can gauge performance via click-through rates

• Email content
• Media type
• Inclusive brand interest
• Link replacement

CRT can be determined by dividing the number of clicks your email received against the number of times your email was successfully conveyed.

How much you can expect to make for a blog with 10,000 views per month

With the research I’ve done, I’ve found that most blogs with this traffic can make around 250$ to 1000$ per month with 10,000 views a month using a basic affiliate program such as Amazon Affiliates. I have not yet grown a blog to this high of a traffic to tell you but hopefully by personally following the tips I provided in this article I will be able to get to that milestone in the next few years and update these numbers from personal experience.

There are other affiliate programs out there that have been rumored to pay back 50% of purchases to the affiliate site. If a blogger has an opportunity to be an affiliate for one of these products and it is a product they BELIEVE IN and find value in then they should be able to make much more then with big retail affiliate links. As I find some of these myself and have experience I will write a follow up for that process as well!

Also if you have an email list with loyal subscribers and have your own product on your blog it is possible to make $1-$5 in revenue for every email subscriber. Therefore, if you have an email list of 10,000 views, you can expect to earn between $10,000-$50,000 per month.