How to Start Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

A great way to generate income online

If you landed here, it most likely means you’ve heard about affiliate marketing and you’re interested in starting making money online. It’s a great thing because this is one of the easiest ways to start generating income online. So, without a further ado, I’m going to show you how to start affiliate marketing for beginners.

Disclosure: There are affiliate links in this post, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will be compensated if you click through and take action. This is to help support the blog and does not have any impact on my recommendations. Thanks for supporting Online Elites.

Okay, so we’re going to be doing a few things today…

We’re going to do the following steps:

1) Join an affiliate network

2) Sign up to an affiliate network

3) Search for affiliate products to promote

4) Get your affiliate links

5) Start promoting these money links

The first step, joining an affiliate network is where you find products you can sell or link to, and make money online.

Once you’ve signed up to the network of your choice (more on that soon), you look for specific products that you can recommend online or even offline if you want (on printed materials).

Once you get your own affiliate links, you’re ready to go out there and share them with the world.

Now, if you’re a serious action taker, you can generate quite some income with affiliate marketing.

And actually, you can start earning your first commissions in a few days/weeks, if you just take these simple steps.

So, let’s get it done…

1) Join an affiliate network

If we search for “Affiliate networks” on any search browser, we’ll find a ton of results.

If we just look up the top 20 affiliate networks, we’ll see a lot of good networks to join.

The most popular for digital products are Clickbank, JV Zoo, Warrior Plus. You also have the networks of CJ.com and ShareASale for physical products.

But literally, there are many more networks to join. You choose the ones according to your niche. And if you don’t have a niche yet, start with Clickbank. You’ll find a bunch of interesting niches to get into.

To join an affiliate network, look for the “Sign-up” button. Enter your credentials and you’re good to go.

You’ll soon find out that the commission rates differ from one product to another.

For example, as an affiliate we can earn from 4% to 50% commissions on sales we refer. But wait, that’s not all, some product vendors give up to 75% to their affiliates!

That is quite cool, if you ask me!

This means for example, that you can make $75 on a product you refer that is sold for $100.

When signing up, you’ll most likely need a website URL.

You can check out this resource to get a domain name and hosting for your website. You simply need to install WordPress and you’ve got yourself a website. You’ll need to add a little bit of content and you’re all set.

Also, if you want a professional looking website created very easily with awesome templates that are easy to edit, you can check out these powerful resources: Optimize Press and/or Groove Funnels.

Either one is awesome and very effective!

Take a look at Groove Funnels:

So, once your website is ready, you can follow up with the rest.

But before we go on, here’s a pro tip: You’ll want to look into higher priced products for high ticket commissions.

If you promote low priced items, it’s perfectly fine, but keep in mind that you’ll need a lot more sales to make a full-time income from them.

But no worries, you can start with smaller priced items and growth with affiliate marketing.

2) Sign up to an affiliate network

So, Clickbank is a very popular affiliate network and it’s very easy to join. You can get started really quickly and you don’t even need a website to get your links. You can just sign up, get your affiliate links and promote them with paid ads.

That is fantastic!

Clickbank and Amazon Associates are the two first networks I’ve made my first commissions on.

Many people have made money with Clickbank… And some people made a ton of money. It’s just incredibly powerful.

Now, if you go on their affiliate marketplace, you’ll see all of the products that you can sell/recommend on a commission basis.

3) Search for affiliate products to promote

When you click the search icon on the top right corner you can search for specific products to promote in the Clickbank marketplace.

This gives you a lot of options on what you could potentially sell online.

Now, to find something you resonate with, you kind of want to either look for niches you have knowledge in or look for “high gravity” products, which are products that sell very well.

I personally sell business opportunity products and self-defense related products, but what I recommend you doing is just go with something that sells well.

Here’s a secret, the way you make big money is with high priced products. They are often called high ticket products.

Let’s say I want to start off with advertising an online affiliate masterclass, which is a course on how to make money online. Let’s take Commission Hero for example because it’s a really good course.

We’re going to search this on Clickbank and look it up. So, it sells for around $997.

This means that if I sell this product, I’ll make $468.49 in commissions.

Awesome, right!

We can see the major difference from promoting a high-ticket product rather than promoting products with small commissions and pricing.

So, I’m going to click on the link and get approved by the vendor. And what you’ll see is when you’re accepted in an affiliate network, you see a place to find all your affiliate links.

4) Get your affiliate links

So, what you will do is click the red button “Promote”. And you’ll see it generate your custom link. This is an example of my affiliate link for the Commission Hero program:

https://e692c9nfod0jond8ei7ihck0jj.hop.clickbank.net/

Now, this is the link which I will use to promote this product.

This is the link, which if people click on and buy the product, and I make money.

I hope it makes sense.

So, we can see the type of links automatically generated by Clickbank, but I’m not going to get into too much details of what the link is.

Basically, the link carries information that tells the affiliate network that someone sent a visitor to this page.

It automatically registers the reference into your affiliate account.

It tells Clickbank, that a person clicked on your link versus they searched for it online or whatnot.

And that link contains the tag so that if this product is sold from your link, you make a commission for referring the sale.

To recap, I joined an affiliate network, I selected a product and created my affiliate link.

5) Start promoting these money links

Now, we’re going to move on to posting it online, you know; getting some people to come to our website.

So, now there are a few ways to get people to come to your link.

Some of the best ways is via social media or even better; email.

If you build a website, you can easily create a newsletter that your followers can join.

Once they follow you or join your email list, you can recommend many different quality products and services from different affiliate networks.

You can also create a YouTube channel, just like I did here on self-defense.

You can promote affiliate links on your YouTube channel:

YouTube is a great place to promote affiliate offers.

Facebook and Instagram are also ways you can get your link out to people; all of these methods are options you can use to get your link on the web.

So now, let’s say you’re promoting a software or a membership course, the most recommended place to get going, is to start with email.

For that to be possible, you’ll need an email autoresponder. Using Gmail or Outlook, won’t work for that.

A great way to build a list can be done by building an online presence.

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You can also write articles, such as product recommendations on your blog. You can provide tips and instructions on how to use a product and service and link to an affiliate offer.

I’ve done just that, right here with my Jivo Chat Review.

You could write an article on a related topic, such as a product related to your niche and mention that you really like it, and say: “This product is really helpful for this and that reason and I absolutely love it. Check it out”. And put your link in that article.

So, you write a short personal article or email in the way you normally communicate. Give out useful tips and then, get your link out to people.

So, that would be a good way to start affiliate marketing.

An additional option to start affiliate marketing as beginners

Another way to get started with affiliate marketing is to use paid ads. That is a very effective way to promote affiliate products.

Basically, you run banner ads to an opt-in page, then a bridge page and it goes to the affiliate offer right after. That is a really effective funnel.

Note: You’ll need to read the terms of use carefully of the ad network before you run any affiliate offers to make sure you don’t breach their terms.

A great network to run your ads would be Rev Content for example.

That said, there are also ways of promoting your affiliate offers on Facebook. Again, make sure to read their terms of use.

You can learn all about it in this powerful affiliate course.

So, keep in mind that paid ads are extremely powerful and this is how several SUPER affiliates make their income online.

However, for most beginners, running a blog and using email marketing is a great way to start. Using a video platform such as YouTube is also a very powerful way to get the word out.

Your followers will join your newsletter and will follow you for the quality of tips you provide to them.

So, that’s a way of doing it for free by being useful to others.

Once folks start affiliate marketing as beginners, they want to know advanced tips

That said, if you’re interested in digging deeper into affiliate marketing, learning about paid advertising as well as the ins and outs of creating wealth online, here’s a great resource to start digging deeper into affiliate marketing.

Now, that is how to start affiliate marketing in a nutshell.

I hope this article was helpful. You can check out my newsletter on how to get started with affiliate marketing the right way.

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Have a great and profitable day.

Patrick Viana

Online Elites