Learn Affiliate Marketing for Beginners – In Four Simple Steps

The intent of this article is to give you an understanding of how to learn affiliate marketing for beginners. If you landed on this post, it is because may be questioning whether you should get into affiliate marketing and if the benefits are worth the effort, even as a beginner. You may also be wondering what affiliate marketing actually is, how it works, why it is important for the future and how you get started as a beginner.

One of the things that 2020 and 2021 has shown us is that people are buying products and services online like never before. People who have never used email before are opening up email accounts because, well, they have to in order to make a food order or any other type of purchase on the internet. It wasn’t that long ago, that a majority of people felt uncomfortable using their credit card online. Now it is very common place and if retailers are not offering online opportunities for people to make purchases, they will not last amongst the competition.

In addition to this, affiliate marketing is very effective at driving sales online. It actually accounts for about 20% of total online sales (this is huge!). More and more large retailers and other businesses are looking to affiliate marketing as a way to sell more products and services to keep up with the ever growing competition.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

As you may know, there are many ways that you can generate an income online and, of course, just as many ways that you can build and scale an entire ire business. But, the most lucrative way to earn money online is through Affiliate Marketing. This is when you can earn an income selling other company’s products and services.

So, what is affiliate marketing exactly. According to Wikipedia, Affiliate Marketing “is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts”. As you know, many retailers have been going out of business of late and one of the reasons is that they did not embrace a good online presence or offer an affiliate program that allows them to generate more sales online.

Big retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Target, all have affiliate programs and are doing quite well. In fact, the Walmart Affiliate Program is starting to gain as much attention from affiliate marketers as Amazon. It allows them to reach a larger portion of the market share, plus it gives us affiliate marketing an opportunity to capitalize on their huge product line.

In the paragraphs below, we will show you what this process looks like and exactly how affiliate marketing actually works.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketing is not a complicated process and can really be broken down into four main parts. The entire process starts with a potential customer doing a search on one of the search engines or on one of the social media channels (the first part) and then they land on a website (the second part) and then end up on a sellers’ website, such as Walmart, Target, Amazon, eBay or one the many other companies that have affiliate programs (the third part). The potential customer makes a purchase on one of these companies’s website and you, as the affiliate, earns a commission (the fourth part).

 

Just like there are four parts to the affiliate marketing process, there is also a proven fours step formula for the affiliate marketer to earn money through this affiliate marketing process described above. Those four steps include

• Choose an Interest,
• Build a Website,
• Attract Visitors,
• Earn Revenue.

It really is as simple as that. So, let’s break these steps down into bit sized pieces.

Choose an Interest

Since there are so many products and services available online these days, it is really easy to find a category of products that you might want to sell online. You simply choose a category of products or an audience for a category of products that is of interest to YOU.

We all have our hobbies or something that excites us and/or we are passionate about. There are millions and millions of different ideas that you could potentially tap into if you use your imagination and, of course, we are going to help you come up with your own topic in our training program mentioned below. For example, if I was interested in basketball shoes, I could create a website centered around basketball or, specifically basketball shoes. Just to let you know, many people buy basketball shoes online and there are many affiliate programs available that offer affiliate commissions in this niche.

The really cool thing about this is that very few people just buy one pair of basketball shoes. Or, can you imagine if you had an interest in women dress shoes. How man women do you know that own just one pair of dress shoes?

Keep in mind, there are over 2 billion people online and regardless of the area you choose, you can be very successful online as an affiliate marketer. The goal is to find an area that you enjoy and don’t mind spending time on. Plus, when you choose something you are passionate about, success is much more likely to follow.

Build A Website

I know what you are thinking. I have to build a website, oh my gosh, I can barely copy and paste!

Don’t worry, building your own website is extremely easy these days. In fact, the process can take less than 30 seconds to build an awesome looking, traffic generating, revenue ready website. The advantage of having your own website, besides the fact that many affiliate programs require you to have one, is that it is the foundation of your business and it also builds trust from your potential customers.

In a matter of seconds, you will have your own website up and running and you can choose a design that you like. This is the place you can build your business upon and write about your interest, review and discuss and recommend products and services to others who are searching the internet for information you have to offer.

Attract Visitors

Your primary goal for your website is to attract visitors to that website. Without visitors or eyeballs on your site, it will be very difficult to sell anything. So, this is a critical component of the process. Within our training platform, you will learn about all the current strategies and techniques to generate an ongoing flow of traffic to your website so that you can recommend products and services to your visitors. You will learn how to generate traffic from the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. This very targeted traffic, because it is from people who are searching for the information you provide. This is a very easy process within Wealthy Affiliate.

Earn Revenue

This is my favorite step of the process. This is where you generate revenue. Once you have the traffic to your website, you promote products and services through “affiliate programs”. These are typically free to join. We mentioned company’s like Walmart and Target, but there are many other affiliate programs available to choose from. From these programs you can promote just about anything you can think of. You do not have to have your own inventory of products or worry about drop shipping or customer service or anything like that. Those functions are all done by the affiliate program.

Your job is to drive traffic to the company website, then they pay you a commission of up to 75% in many cases if your visitors purchase something. There are literally millions of products and services that you can promote as an affiliate marketing. One type of business I find fascinating is the cosmetic industry. There are many cosmetic affiliate programs available and this is a very lucrative marketing or niche to get involved with. This of course, is just one example of a group of affiliate programs. There are many others. Check out my website for more information about affiliate programs. I have dedicated a whole category for just affiliate programs.

Why affiliate marketing is the future?

It has become obvious to businesses in today s environment to find other ways to complete in the market place. The pandemic and the struggling economy have hit retailers and other business pretty hard and many are looking to affiliate marketing and online sales as their way of increasing their revenue. It is simply a fact that retailers that are succeeding in this current environment are utilizing affiliate marketing and embracing online marketing strategies just to stay alive. Many of the retailers who did not embrace this type of marketing have either closed their doors or are in bankruptcy. Unfortunately this is the cold hard facts.

So, Affiliate marketing is here to stay and is opportunities for affiliate marketers have never been better and will continue to grow as an income producing activity.

How Do I Start Affiliate Marketing as a Beginner?

As a beginner it is very important to learn the basics and to understand the foundational approach to making money online. This is the theme of my affiliate website. To help people understand that there is no “push button” approach to earning revenue online. One needs to build their business based on foundational affiliate marketing principles that can be taught by professionals who have many years of experience in the affiliate marketing space. As a beginner I recommend a website known as Wealthy Affiliate. They offer a free affiliate marketing training program designed for the beginner and will teach step by step how to learn affiliate marketing for beginners.