If you’re looking for a flexible and potentially lucrative way to make money online in 2023, affiliate marketing is definitely worth considering. With the right approach, you can earn a passive income by promoting other people’s products and earning a commission on each sale.
But where do you begin? In this article, we’ll walk you through seven effective strategies for getting started with affiliate marketing in 2023. From selecting the right niche to optimizing your website for conversions, these tips will help you build a solid foundation for your affiliate marketing business and maximize your chances of success.
Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or an experienced marketer, this guide has something for everyone.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a popular business model that involves a partnership between brands and content creators or publishers. As a publisher or content creator, you promote the brand’s products or services to your audience through your website, social media, or other channels. In exchange for any sales or leads generated from your efforts, you receive a commission from the brand.
The beauty of affiliate marketing lies in its scalability. The more successful your promotions are, the more money you can earn. Commissions can vary widely, from just a few cents per referral to hundreds of dollars per sale. By utilizing this model effectively, you could potentially earn more than your current job or diversify the revenue streams of your existing content business.
What is An Affiliate Link?
Affiliate marketing operates through the use of affiliate links, which are unique URLs assigned to individual affiliates. These links serve as a tracking mechanism that allows advertisers to identify the affiliate responsible for referring a customer and pay them a commission if that customer completes a purchase.
As a beginner, it’s crucial to understand that to earn commissions, customers must come through your unique affiliate link. Two primary models for earning affiliate revenue are cost per action (CPA) and cost per click (CPC). CPA earns you money every time someone from your audience completes a specific action, while CPC pays you for clicks that are deemed to be quality visitors, even if they don’t complete a particular action.
Different affiliate programs offer varying payment models, and some may pay you for both leads and conversions. It’s essential to choose affiliate programs with a high earning potential and to do so, you should be familiar with key affiliate marketing terms like cookies, cookie duration, and affiliate networks.
- Cookies: Cookies are small files that store on a customer’s device when they click on an affiliate link. They help businesses and affiliate networks remember that you referred the customer to them so that they can give you a commission later on.
- Cookie Duration: The cookie duration refers to how long an affiliate link will remain active and varies from 24 hours up to a year or more.
- Affiliate Networks: Affiliate networks are third-party platforms where brands set up their affiliate programs, and popular ones include Impact, Flexoffers, Clickbank, and PartnerStack.
Is It Worth It?
Affiliate marketing has the potential to offer unlimited earning opportunities, and it all depends on your niche and ability to optimize your content and revenue streams. While not every affiliate marketer becomes a millionaire, you can still earn a decent income from it However, top earners who have been in the business for several years and have dedicated teams can earn tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, putting them in the top 1% of earners.
Even if you don’t aim to become a full-time affiliate marketer, you can use it to supplement your current income from day one. And with enough patience and dedication, it’s possible to eventually replace your 9-5 income entirely.
7 Tips To Get Started
Choosing the right niche is crucial to the success of your affiliate marketing business. Your earning potential will heavily depend on the audience you cater to and the products you promote. Therefore, it’s important to carefully evaluate a niche before diving into it.
To help you get started, here are some essential steps to follow:
1. Research Your Niche
Being too hasty in following the latest trends can cause trouble for your affiliate marketing business when these trends disappear faster than they appeared.
Conducting niche research is important to ensure that your affiliate business has high earning potential and can generate revenue for years to come. This process involves analyzing the competitive landscape, researching affiliate programs in your chosen niche, and creating a sustainable affiliate marketing strategy and content plan.
To get started on niche research, there are numerous free tools available, including Google Trends for trending topics and searches.
However, if you have a limited budget, it’s recommended to choose a topic that you are passionate about. This will prevent you from becoming disinterested or hating your niche when you have to produce numerous articles on the topic.
But it’s not enough to just like your topic – it also needs to be profitable. Tools such as Google Trends can help you assess whether a niche has long-term potential or is just a passing trend. It’s best to select an evergreen niche that can generate income consistently throughout the year.
Also, it’s important to understand the competition in your chosen niche to identify your entry point into the market. For beginners, it may be challenging to compete with established players in popular niches like web hosting. Therefore, it’s advisable to target medium-competition niches where you can better serve a smaller audience and differentiate yourself.
For instance, instead of offering “web hosting” for everyone, you could focus on a niche like “gym website builder” and cater to professionals in the fitness industry. This way, you can build a loyal community around your brand and even enhance your search engine ranking.
2. Choosing The Right Platform
Once you have your niche figured out, it’s time to determine where to host your affiliate content and what type of content you want to create.
When starting out, affiliates generally have two options: creating a website or starting a YouTube channel.
YouTube can be an effective platform for building an audience, establishing a brand, and promoting affiliate products to a trusting audience. However, there are drawbacks to using solely a YouTube channel:
- Video content takes longer to produce than written content, limiting the amount of content you can create at the outset.
- Video content is more challenging to outsource, particularly if you are the face of the channel and need to be involved in every video.
- Growing your email list is more difficult on YouTube, which lacks a built-in method for collecting email subscribers, despite email being one of the most profitable channels for affiliate marketing.
- YouTube channels tend to generate less affiliate income, as there is more friction in getting clicks on affiliate links from a video compared to a well-optimized blog post.
Ultimately, having both a website and a YouTube channel can be beneficial. Embedding videos on your affiliate website is a terrific way to increase conversion rates. However, if you are new to affiliate marketing, starting with a blog is likely to be the easier route.
3. Pick Profitable Programs
Many beginners in affiliate marketing make the mistake of registering for too many affiliate programs without considering their profitability, conversion rates, and demand. Instead, it’s important to carefully select a limited number of affiliate programs that meet these criteria.
Here are three important factors to consider when choosing an affiliate program:
Assess Earning Potential
Affiliate programs have varying payment scales, with some offering just a few cents per conversion while others pay out hundreds of dollars for a single lead. Joining and promoting programs with lower payouts is easier, but requires a higher number of sales to generate the same revenue.
There are three main strategies for making your affiliate math “work out”. One is to go for high volume with low commissions, which is typical of Amazon affiliate sites. Another is to choose low volume with high commissions, which is the case for luxury and photography affiliate programs. The third approach is high volume with high commissions, but this comes with high competition and is common in financial and SaaS affiliate programs.
When selecting affiliate programs, it’s important to check the cookie duration. Longer durations give you more time to convert your audience, while shorter durations are still effective if your content targets people later in the buying journey
Assess The Competition
Healthy competition within a niche can be an encouraging sign for your own success. If others are thriving in that field, it’s possible for you to do the same. A quick and easy way to identify competitors is to conduct a Google search using keywords that you’d like your website to rank for.
Once you’ve identified your competitors, analyze which affiliate programs they are promoting most prominently on those pages. Investigate the terms they offer and how to join the program.
This method is a highly efficient way to evaluate potential affiliate programs, especially if your competitors are ahead of you in terms of progress.
Evaluate Brand Alignment
When promoting other businesses’ products and services, it’s important to be mindful that you’re simultaneously building your own brand and image. To avoid damaging your brand in the long run, it’s crucial to be selective in choosing whom you represent. It’s essential to work with businesses that align with your brand’s values.
Furthermore, you must ensure that the brand you’re promoting is likely to convert. You can achieve this by examining their sales pages, checking if their website design is mobile-friendly, and assessing their online reviews. Think like a consumer and consider what would attract you to buy the product.
After conducting thorough research and selecting suitable affiliate programs in your niche, it’s time to create compelling content that will engage your audience.
4. Create Optimized Content
Without high-quality, converting content, all the previous steps in affiliate marketing are futile.
Creating content for affiliate marketing is more than just including links in an existing blog post. It requires a compelling copywriting and engaging design that will help your audience make a purchasing decision directly on your website.
Some examples of high-converting affiliate marketing content are product reviews, product roundups, product comparisons, resource pages, tutorials, and ebooks. Product reviews are particularly effective as almost 97% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase decision. Product roundups based on a specific theme or category can lead readers to relevant products and diversify your revenue streams.
Product comparisons are also helpful in highlighting the pros and cons of similar products side-by-side. Resource pages that focus on solving a problem for your audience can help establish you as an expert and consolidate all your affiliate links in one place. Tutorials provide an opportunity to demonstrate how a product works in a step-by-step process, building trust with customers. Ebooks are useful for in-depth explorations of topics and can be used as lead magnets to build your email list.
It’s important to include an affiliate disclosure, regardless of the term used for affiliate content, to inform your audience that you may earn a commission if they make a purchase from your links.
5. Drive Traffic To Your Affiliate Site
It’s time to start driving traffic to the affiliate offers you’ve carefully selected. This can be achieved through various channels such as social media platforms, SEO-optimized blog posts, and email lists.
The primary objective is to either reach out to potential buyers directly or capture their email addresses, allowing you to educate and inform them before encouraging them to make a purchase.
Here are some of the most effective free traffic sources for affiliate marketing:
Free Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing Social media platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and Reddit are excellent sources of free traffic for affiliate marketing. However, they do require time and effort to build a strong presence.
But the most successful affiliate marketers also focus on growing traffic through SEO. By targeting keywords that reflect buyer intent, you can attract visitors who are ready to make a purchase. This approach makes it much easier to earn commissions by promoting affiliate links compared to trying to sell to people who aren’t ready to buy.
Another free traffic source that we highly recommend for affiliate marketing is email. The direct nature of email allows you to deliver tailored messages straight to your prospects’ inboxes. This helps them learn more about a product and moves them closer to making a purchase decision.
Emails work particularly well for promoting regular product recommendations, sharing time-sensitive deals, and reinforcing your top recommendations to your audience.
6. Build a Funnel
To ensure that visitors progress from being a mere audience to becoming repeat customers, a well-structured process known as the affiliate marketing funnel is crucial. The funnel is especially useful for warming up an audience that isn’t yet ready to make a purchase, such as those from Pinterest or other channels focused on providing inspiration.
7. Track Your Affiliate Revenue
Effective tracking is a crucial component of affiliate marketing success. Without proper tracking, you may find yourself fumbling around in the dark, uncertain of what’s working and what’s not in your affiliate marketing strategy. However, setting up a tracking system at the start of your affiliate website can help you make more money with fewer pieces of content. Here are two key ways to level up your affiliate marketing strategy through tracking:
Firstly, implement basic affiliate tracking
There are two types of affiliate tracking: network tracking (which attributes sales and informs you of which products people bought through your links), and tracking you have to do for yourself (which involves figuring out which pages, affiliate links, text and visual elements are converting).
To handle the second case, you can use SubID tracking. SubIDs are additional data that you attach to your affiliate link, which ultimately gets recorded next to every conversion that results from that link. Typically, a SubID is a query parameter that you can add to existing affiliate links.
Next, run some tests
Once you have tracking in place, choose a blog post to run tests on. Consider high traffic posts, posts with new traffic, or posts with high intent but low RPM. Then, run tests to evaluate its performance and identify areas for improvement.
Some tests you can run include adding comparison tables, switching text on call-to-action buttons, inserting links to alternative affiliate products, removing links that aren’t yielding conversions, and testing different link text.
By using unique SubIDs, you can assess which techniques are converting and how much revenue a piece of content is generating relative to the number of viewers.
By implementing these two tracking strategies, you can gain visibility into what’s working and what’s not in your affiliate marketing strategy, making it easier to make money faster and with less content.
Wrap Up
To wrap up, starting affiliate marketing in 2023 doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By following these seven tips, you can get started on the right foot and set yourself up for success.
Remember to choose a niche, select the right products, create quality content, and promote your offers through various channels. With dedication, patience, and the right strategies, you can become a successful affiliate marketer in 2023 and beyond.
7 Ways To Start Affiliate Marketing In 2023