Affiliate marketing tutorial for beginners
Welcome to the affiliate marketing tutorial for beginners, as well as an important warning before we get started.
I want you to know that there is no sales pitch coming, there is no webinar to sign up for, as I don’t even have an affiliate marketing course to sell you, but I am here to share my knowledge and also the shady side of our industry.
That’s the disclaimer, as well as the right way to expand on that, so you know how to do affiliate marketing. So, let’s start with that warning.
Okay, there are a lot of shady scam artists in this space and they flock to youtube and youtube ads.
You’Ve probably already encountered them they’re, always pressuring you to get on their webinars, which are fake, pre-recorded webinars, where they’re not actually, there they’re using money guns to show throw money around they’re sitting and flexing on their porsches and their lamborghinis and they’re telling you you can Make a hundred dollars a day doing this and 400 a day doing that, and you can just type names and make 30 an hour and it’s all lies their entire business.
I call these guys the fake gurus and the greedy gurus, and their entire business model is built around selling you scams.
Now there are a few and i mean a very few affiliate marketing courses that you can trust, but the real truth is that you can learn everything that you need if you’re resourceful right here.
Let’s go !
Honestly, I love the business and it’s a great business model because affiliates fill a very good and solid role needed between the consumer and the seller. So let’s talk about what affiliate marketing is and how it works right now for a business.
Affiliate marketing is a customer acquisition channel. It’s an alternative to advertising, and I’ll just give you a quick scenario.
So it can make really clear sense why this is a valuable channel for business owners. Let’s say you sell a product and your product is a hundred dollar product and it costs you it’s a digital product, by the way, so there’s no cost of goods in here. We’ll talk about in a minute, but it costs you 60 in Facebook ads to sell one product.
That means you make forty dollars in profit for every product that you sell right. Well, what if you built a fifty percent, affiliate relationship and affiliates started, bringing you customers and those customers from affiliates only cost you fifty dollars.
This actually lowers your cost per customer acquisition by 10, which means you have 10 percent more profit and the honest truth is, in this scenario: you’re doing both of those things you’re going to get as many customers as you can profitably from your advertising, but you’re also Going to get as many customers as you can profitably from affiliate marketing, so affiliates are essentially commission only sales people and,
what affiliates do is they go out and create content?
They go out and create marketing and they market these products that they represent and only when they create a sale through their specific link. Do they get paid. So in that sense, it’s like building up a 100 commission only sales force, and it’s all digital and virtual. So let’s talk a little tiny bit about the tactics.
Now, i want you to understand how the game works. This point in time. So let’s say you have a big audience of people who are interested in gardening and there’s a certain greenhouse manufacturer that you love their greenhouses and you just want to share their greenhouses.
Well, you simply go to their website and you scroll down in the footer, and you look to see if they have affiliate program in the footer.
If you do, you click on that and you just apply there.
Sometimes you need to go to google and you actually need to type in the business name or the brand name and then type in affiliate to see if they have an affiliate program.
And i will say honestly: many businesses today have active affiliate programs but they’re, not marketing them, because there’s too many scammers and spammers trying to get in and potentially devalue the brand.
So sometimes you actually have to email the company email, their support and say: hey. Do you guys have an affiliate program?
I’Ve got all this audience. I love your stuff. I want to share your stuff once you’ve filled out the application and you’ve gotten approved. What happens? Is you get an affiliate dashboard and you can log in here – and this is where you get your special links now, your special links are embedded with your referral code and to not get too technical.
Cookies
It uses cookies. So when you click through one of my affiliate links, what it does is it plants a cookie on your browser and it starts a clock there’s something called a cookie duration.
So on amazon, this is, as short as one day, it’s 24 hours, which means from the initial click you have 24 hours to generate a sale, or else you don’t get a commission most affiliate programs are a 30-day 60-day, 90-day, cookie duration.
I would say 60 day is the average, and sometimes they go as far as one or two years. Okay, and what this means is the visitor clicks, your link, they go look at the stuff, they’re interested they’re, not interested.
Maybe they come back a week later and purchase, and then you get the commission and it’s all tracked through this little tracking code called a cookie. Now you don’t need to know anything about that. All you do.
Is you get your links and you get your audience? Who knows you likes you and trusts you to click on your links when they’re ready for your recommendation now that little bit i just dropped there?
The no like and trust part is what makes affiliate marketing work because a lot of people when they hear about affiliate marketing, they think wow. I just go get these links over here and i just get to go spam them everywhere, i’ll spam them on reddit and i’ll spam them on facebook. That is not the way to do. Affiliate, marketing, appropriately and really affiliate marketing is like the original influencer marketing.
What it is is we affiliates need to go use content to grow an audience and to build trust with that audience.
So here, you’re witnessing this in action. Right, like this, article is one of the pieces of content, and the goal here is not to sell you something it’s not to promote something. It’s to connect you and i together and for me to demonstrate that i can help you for me to maybe be able to potentially build a little bit of trust in your eyes versus all of the other people in this space.
And then at some point, when you get into the world of keyword research, maybe you’ll find my keyword, research, articles you’ll be like.
He was super helpful, i’ll watch his article about keyword, research. Okay, then you watch the article. I show how i use the paid premium keyword, research tool that i use and love and you’re like wow. That is brilliant.
I want that tool, so you click on my link and you make your purchase, and in that moment i have earned a commission, so it takes lots and lots of content and it takes growing a relatively large audience in order to truly be successful with affiliate marketing.
So how do you build your audience and where do you publish the content?
These are great questions and generally it’s going to be one of three places, the first place and the top level of what i recommend is on a blog. It’S a self-hosted wordpress blog, which is also called wordpress.org.
Blogging
Blogging is what a blog post will show up on google. Okay, so blogging connects to google like articles, connect to youtube, and google has significantly more people searching significantly more often than youtube does.
So what that means is there’s greater potential with a blog there’s, a greater potential for more traffic, and the law of large numbers is important in affiliate marketing business. You need an audience.
You need to be connecting with hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people every single day in order to get the numbers in your favor to build a truly successful affiliate marketing business online.
Youtube
So google having two trillion searches per year, which equates to something like 6 billion searches on every single day. That just means the opportunity for you to deliver answers to go, be helpful to people looking for solutions on google through a blog is actually the number one. Okay, the second place to publish is right here on youtube.
Youtube is the second most used search engine in the world. It’S a little bit more difficult because a lot of youtube users don’t leave youtube very often, but at the same time there’s a little lower level of competition because you got ta get on camera and this moment of being on camera freaks.
Facebook ads
Some people out. It’s not required, it’s totally an option. The third one is using paid ads and i’m going to just go ahead and say: facebook ads is kind of the third option right now today, because mainly the opportunity to get your message out in front of really really targeted audiences. Now, facebook ads and affiliate marketing are not as simple as some people make. It seem uh.
You never want to put an affiliate link directly in a facebook ad. You always want to send them to your own landing page to get your lead magnet and then you use email marketing in order to follow up with them and ultimately through the email is where you present your affiliate links.
So let’s say you help people lose weight. You advertise a seven day, fitness challenge they get on your email list. It follows up with them for seven days and at the end, you recommend daily burn for daily workout articles and if they click through your link and if they purchase daily burn on your recommendation.
Voila, you have just made a commission in that moment. I hope this all makes sense. Now it’s relatively simple to explain, but it’s not exactly easy to put together.
I hope this has been helpful. I appreciate you and look forward to connecting with you on the next article until then be well.
Leave a Reply