In this article, I will cover how to make money with affiliate marketing in 2024.
This article will give you an overview of what you must do to create profitable affiliate marketing.
It is written to help you start making money with affiliate marketing fast.
If you want to build a sustainable income online, you have two choices:
- Sign up to my free newsletter and get my eBook that will give you a checklist of what you need to do to create your affiliate marketing business.
- Jumpstart your success by investing in your education and purchase my step-by-step course for just $7. The best thing is if you choose to do both while the worst thing is to leave now without taking any action.
To get all the details, click here.
Making money online has never been easier and never harder as well since competition these days is fierce.
Step 1: Find a Niche and an Offer to Promote
The first and most important part is that you find a niche.
A niche can be described as a specific market with specific problems and specific pain points.
There are endless possibilities for you to get started with affiliate marketing in a specific niche.
However, some niches are more profitable than others.
A. Finding the Niche
I recommend choosing one that you are very passionate about and that you know is profitable through research.
Maybe the thing you are passionate about isn’t a profitable niche.
If you don’t have anything that you are passionate about, I recommend that you go with a niche that is profitable in the affiliate marketing space.
Below, I will share some examples of each of the most profitable niches.
The five most profitable niches are:
- Make Money Online (e.g. affiliate marketing, cryptocurrency, eCommerce)
- Health (e.g. weight loss, keto diet, healthy eating)
- Relationships (e.g. dating tips for men, dating tips for women, marriage counselling)
- Spirituality (e.g. law of attraction, yoga, numerology )
- Self Help (e.g. self-esteem, self-improvement, stress management)
B. Research Your Niche
A great resource to begin researching your niche is Clickbank.com.
It is one of the largest affiliate marketing networks on the planet!
They have been around since 1997, and their headquarter is located in Boise, USA.
Creating an account at Clickbank is free.
Other affiliate networks you can join include JvZoo, CJ, ShareASale, and of course, Amazon.
Clickbank and JVZoo are mostly selling digital products, while the other three are mostly selling physical products.
Choose an offer that resonates the best with you and that you’re most passionate about.
C. Should I Promote Digital or Physical Products?
Digital products are sold through an online platform.
Most of them are only available digitally, i.e., eBooks and software.
For this reason, you can earn up to 100% of the product’s price once a customer purchases them.
This is, in my opinion, the best way to make money online as a beginner.
Why?
Because you don’t have to deal with customer service, returns, chargebacks, and so on, which you would have to deal with if you sold your own products in your own store.
Since all products are stored digitally, there is no need for physical storage.
Physical products offer a lower cut, and there is a reason for it.
The site that sells them needs to pay for warehouses to store the product, shipping and handling to the end-customer, customer service, chargebacks, and returns.
This makes their cost significantly higher.
I prefer to promote digital products myself since it offers higher margins, and the customer gets instant access to the products they have purchased, which will also decrease refunds since they get instant gratification.
D. Do Research of Your Product
No matter which product you have chosen to promote, you need to do some research about it.
To research your product, I recommend that you start by going to the affiliate page for a digital product.
If it is a physical product, I would recommend that you go to Amazon to read reviews and try to figure out the benefits of the product.
If you are promoting a digital product, reviews might be helpful too.
However, most of them will be written by other marketers, which you need to be aware of.
This will be a great way to see what your competitors are doing and get some pros and cons about the product you will be promoting.
The best way to do your own research is by either purchasing the product yourself or ask for a review copy from the product owner.
This only works if the product is digital. Otherwise, I recommend that you purchase the product yourself.
If you purchase the product yourself, you can experience the pros and cons of it.
Another benefit of buying the product is that you will be able to pinpoint the pros and cons.
You will also make your review more human and real as well as unique.
This will help you gain trust, one of the most important yet overlooked parts of affiliate marketing.
I would suggest that you only recommend products you believe in and are using yourself.
Customers are really savvy these days.
They will know if you are just trying to make a quick buck or are genuine and helping them solve their problems by using the products you recommend.
This, too, will make your review more real and trustworthy.
Step 2: Create Your Landing Page
Creating your landing page is the next step.
Landing pages are also referred to as opt in-pages or squeeze pages.
No matter what you call them, this is the first interaction your customer will have with you. After seeing your offer and clicking on it, your customer lands on this page.
There are different philosophies about how these pages should look.
The only thing that everybody agrees on is the purpose of these pages, which is to collect people’s email addresses.
When you have someone’s email address, you can send information and promotions to them.
You mustn’t just do either one but both of them.
I will explain why it is important so you don’t make this common mistake when I first began my journey.
If you only send information to your customers, they will never expect you to send them promotions and will unsubscribe from your list when you finally do.
However, if you only send promotions, people will get tired and unsubscribe.
For this reason, I recommend a mix, which I will cover in more detail in step 3 below.
A. Your Landing Page Builder
You can use either a free landing page builder or a paid one.
Free landing page builders, such as Wix, Blogger, or WordPress, may sound great to you, especially if you have a small budget.
However, if you want to use a paid landing page builder instead, they have more benefits.
Paid landing page builders are things like a self-hosted WordPress blog with a plugin to help you build landing pages with ease.
I recommend you choose GetResponse, BuilderAll, or ClickFunnels if you decide to pay for one.
However, the truth is that even if free might have a nice ring to it, there will be limitations.
The most important is that you do not own your content if you choose a free landing page builder.
Another limitation is that you can not easily install the tracking software needed or any tracking device on the free platforms.
You need a tracking device installed to track particular aspects of your business.
B. Add Tracking Software to Your Landing Pages
So why would you need tracking software to your landing pages anyway?
First, you need to know where visitors are coming from.
You will track gender, age, and country, which is essential when selling things.
This will help you understand what kind of demographic you are selling to.
For this reason, I recommend setting up your Google Analytics account before you get any eyeballs to your landing page.
I suggest installing a Facebook pixel on your website as quickly as possible.
Both Facebook-pixel and Google Analytics are free tracking software.
By having both in place, you will use the pixel to see who is visiting your site and reveal a bonus beIt would be best if you.
You need to take some time and set both of them up right now.
Watch me set up Facebook tracking on my Clickfunnels-account here.
Even if I recommend setting up your tracking with a paid tool, you can wait to set it up for now.
This can wait until step 4 and step 5.
Step 3: Create Your Email Follow Up Sequence
The next step is to create your email follow-up sequence.
These emails will help you promote one offer in your follow-up sequence.
What you first need to do is welcome people and congratulate them for joining your email list and delivering the gift you offered them.
You will need an autoresponder for this, a piece of software that sends emails to your customers.
There are a couple of free ones like Mailchimp that is okay.
However, as you probably noticed, free is a relative term, and every “free” tool comes with a “price” to it.
The delivery rate is how many people will actually be significantly lower if you choose a free version.
It will make it a lot harder to make money from your email list for you compared to if you choose my recommended autoresponder.
DO NOT try to do this with an email such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or even Hotmail.
Not even your Internet provider’s email will do since it may lead to an immediate shut down of your account.
A. Your Email Sequence
Your email sequence will be the same, no matter what niche you’re in.
As I wrote above in step 2, you should mix promotions and information in your email sequence.
The most overlooked email is the first one.
This email is probably the most important since you will start to build a relationship with everybody who signs up to your email list.
Your first email is your welcome email.
You might have encountered the phrase “the money is in the list” on other blogs or on YouTube videos that you have been watching.
However, I would argue that, in fact, “the money is not in the list” but “in the relationship, you build with your list.”
Trust me. This comes from experience.
If you sign up for my newsletter below, you can immediately experience how I start to build that relationship between us.
You will notice how I set the tone immediately in my first email.
In fact, I will send you a free checklist of what you need to start your affiliate marketing business when you sign up for my newsletter.
<put an in-content form here>
Once it is set up, you need to connect it to your landing page.
If you are using my recommended landing page software and my recommended autoresponder, you need to create this connection to work properly.
If you are using GetResponse, you can choose to go with the free builder included in your plan.
However, I will show you below if you have chosen to use ClickFunnels and GetResponse but don’t know how to connect them.
Click here to read about which email software I recommend for affiliate marketing.
Step 4: Get Your Free Gift
Before you get traffic to your landing page, you need to get your gift.
As with everything else that I have discussed, there are two ways to get it. By creating it yourself or paying someone to create it for you.
Your gift can be:
- An eBook
- A piece of software
- A video
- A course
- A cheat-sheet
- A physical product (All you need to pay for is handling & shipping)
However, it should solve a problem for your customer in your niche.
You should know this before you create or choose your gift.
The bigger problem it will solve for your customers, the better.
Since I know that this article is pretty long, I am offering you what is essentially a cheat sheet if you sign up for my newsletter early on.
However, I know that it is also pretty detailed and walks you through every step you need.
So, I am solving a problem right away by offering you a shortcut and getting you on my email list.
As I stated above, you should either create your own gift or pay someone to do it for you, which I will cover in much more detail right now.
A. Create Your Free Gift Yourself
If you have the skills and the time to do it, you could very well create your gift yourself.
However, besides taking time, every gift presents its own unique challenges:
- An eBook needs to have a good cover design, well-written and informative information, and be appealing graphically. Then you need to upload it and be able to link to it.
- A piece of software needs to be programmed and developed, packed and given a good cover design as well as uploaded to a server. Servers come with a monthly fee.
- A video needs to be filmed, have great sound, and be edited before it can be uploaded.
- A course is a compilation of audio, video, eBooks, and other materials which needs to be produced, edited and stored on a server.
- A cheat-sheet is a short overview of something that you know your customer will appreciate.
- A physical product needs to be purchased by you, repacked, shipped to your customer, and then delivered to your customer.
As you see from my little list above, creating your gift is great, but it has a price tag on it.
The price is literally the same for every free thing you do. You “pay” with your time instead of your money.
B. Pay Someone Else to Create Your Free Gift
I know it might sound ridiculous to you to pay someone else to create your gift, but it really speeds things up.
There are two ways to do this too.
You can pay someone else on a freelancing website which is the first way to do it. You can also choose to pay for something that is already done for you.
Paying someone might seem a bit risky, but most freelancing websites offer reviews from previous customers to help you pick the best people for the job.
If you choose this alternative, it is best to start with someone who has many good reviews.
You also need to have a clear idea of what you want them to create for you to give them proper directions on what to create.
It will make the freelancer’s job much easier.
You will also become more satisfied in the end as well since you will get what you want.
It will also help you get more freelancers to apply for your job whenever you need to hire another freelancer.
Even if it is on a different task, the freelancer will also leave a review about you.
If you are a complete beginner, I would highly recommend that you choose the second option and pay for something already done.
One site that has always given me high-quality products for an affordable price is IDPLR.com.
They offered a wide variety of everything that I mentioned above, and they also offer you three different packages.
You can join them for free, and then, if you like it, you might want to upgrade to a paid subscription.
I have personally never been disappointed with anything from them myself, and that is why I recommend them to you.
C. Upload Your Free Gift
If you choose the B-version and pay someone to create your gift, you must first download your gift.
You then need to upload your gift to a server. If you have a WordPress blog, you can use that blog to store it.
Otherwise, you can upload it to a cloud service.
Then include the link in your first email.
We have now come to the last step of the way.
I know many people are struggling with this one, so that I will discuss this more thoroughly: Traffic.
Step 5: Get Traffic
The last step is to drive traffic.
You can use both free as well as paid traffic to get human eyeballs to your offer.
How do you get traffic to your new online real estate and your affiliate links?
Without real human eyeballs seeing your offer, you will never start to make money online, which is the hard truth.
If you are a beginner, I recommend that you begin with organic traffic.
Free organic traffic is something everybody should do.
First, if you have some money to spend, I recommend you do something called solo ads.
If you want to get into paid traffic, I recommend that you start with solo ads.
Solo ads are basically that you pay another marketer in a specific niche to send your email to their email list on your behalf.
It is like renting another person’s email list so that you can start collecting emails and send people to the first offer you are promoting.
This will help you to generate sales by getting people to sign up to your email list.
I recommend that you use Udimi to get results quickly.
Click here to sign up for a free Udimi-account now.
If you use my link above, you will get a $5 discount on your first order on Udimi, as well as my own personal recommended sellers list.
However, there are other ways too, which I will cover in greater detail below.
A. Organic Traffic to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
Everyone should do two types of organic traffic, and that even complete beginners can do, even if you do not have any money to spend on marketing right now.
The first one is Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.
Create information around a certain topic and get help from Google, Bing, Ubersuggest, and AnswerThePublic to find it.
You can do all of this completely free.
The second kind of organic traffic that I recommend you to do is social media.
You can even use free automation tools to increase your efficiency and share your links and content on the Internet, which helps you get more traction from the search engines I mentioned above.
After all, if nobody sees your offer, they can’t buy it, and you can’t make money with affiliate marketing if nobody, right?
With both of them, you spend time rather than money.
There are other ways to do organic traffic, which I will cover in the last section.
If you make any money, I recommend investing it in paid traffic, which I will cover below.
B. Paid Traffic to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
If you have some money to spend and want to get results fast, I recommend starting with paid traffic and then reinvest any money you make from it into buying more ads.
By doing this, you will create a snowball effect that will help make you more money.
All you need to do to make money with affiliate marketing is to keep spending money on your ad campaigns, and you will continue to make money with affiliate marketing.
Here are some popular paid traffic sources:
- Google Ads
- Bing Ads
- Twitter Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Pinterest Ads
- Native Ads
Some are cheaper than others, and most of them are either pay-per-click or social media marketing strategies.
I discuss this in much more detail in my article How to Make Money with Paid Traffic.
In that article, I divide the different paid traffic sources into three distinct categories and share some tips on what kind of traffic might be the best one for you to use, depending on which offer you are promoting.
If you are new to affiliate marketing, you need to know that not all paid traffic sources work for every market.
However, if you want to learn more about the details, I recommend signing up for this free webinar that will teach you more about it.
C. Other Traffic Methods to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
There are other traffic methods, both organic and paid, which I didn’t cover above.
The other traffic methods include things like:
- Forum posting (Organic)
- Blog commenting (Organic)
- Guest blogging (Organic)
- Answering people´s questions on sites like Quora (Organic)
- Influencer marketing (Paid)
- Creating a YouTube-channel (Organic)
- YouTube-commenting (Organic)
- Commenting on Facebook-groups within your niche (Organic)
Posting links on forums and blogs in your niche might seem old-fashioned, but they still work like a charm since most people are unwilling to put links and provide value to their readers.
That is really the trick to make money with affiliate marketing in the 2020s.
As long as you do what other people are NOT willing to do, you will be able to make money with affiliate marketing, thereby creating a life filled with freedom, happiness, and success.
I want to share another secret to make money with affiliate marketing too.
You will need to provide value and not just spam your link on forums, blogs, and comments.
That is the recipe for failure, and you will not make money with affiliate marketing for long.
If you spam these free resources, your link will be deleted by the administrator, you may be blocked from posting again, and all your efforts will be in vain.
So, I do want to emphasize the importance of providing value here.
Give value first and build up things slowly organically.
If you want instant results, paid marketing like influencer marketing is a better option for you.
Reach out to influencers in your market and negotiate the price but be aware that most influencers will turn you down if you do not have a huge following or provide value.
Do you see the common pattern here?
For this reason, I always recommend that you begin with organic methods first, so you learn how things are done properly.
When you have made some money, you can invest in paid advertising.
Here is my in-depth article on how to make money online with organic traffic.
In that article, I will cover some of the fastest and easiest ways to make money online with affiliate marketing.
Share this:
