The Ultimate Guide: Affiliate Marketing For Dummies

This is part 5 of the affiliate marketing series.

Part 1: What is Affiliate Marketing, And How Does it Work?
Part 2: 18 Top Affiliate Marketing Programs to Join
Part 3: 10 Crucial Tips to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
Part 4: How to Multiply Your Affiliate Income Using The 80/20 Rule
Part 5: The Ultimate Guide: Step-by-step Affiliate Marketing For Dummies

Affiliate marketing for dummies, anyone?

I’ve seen bits and pieces of advice about affiliate marketing, but rarely do such tutorials cover everything you need to know about affiliate marketing.

This post will be the best post about affiliate marketing that you’ll ever find on the net. 🙂

From finding your niche to multiplying your affiliate income, you’ll both beginner and expert tips to help you make money with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing For Dummies: The ultimate guide for the best affiliate marketing tips and programs to make money from your website. — Pin me, my friend?

Step 1. Affiliate marketing for dummies: What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the process of recommending someone else’s products or services, and earning a commission from the sale.

If you are completely new to what affiliate marketing is, read this post: What is Affiliate Marketing, And How Does It Work?

Step 2. Finding a niche

After you get acquainted with what affiliate marketing is, you’ll need to decide what kind of business you’ll be starting and what niche your business will be in.

A good niche will fulfill these criteria:
1. Passion
2. Profitability
3. Works with your desired business model
4. Scalability
5. Has a reasonable market size

Finding a niche is important as it allows you to establish your website as an authority of a certain topic. Over time, you attract a specific segment of people who are interested in your blog’s content AND interested in the affiliate products you recommend. (aka, cha-ching!)

Check out this tutorial if you need help with finding your niche.

Step 3. Start a website

You need a website… duh.

If you’re just starting out (like, you’re a REALLY new blogger and you don’t have a website yet), check out this 4-part blogging for beginners guide where you will learn how to start a blog in 20 minutes. It’s been shared over 50,000 times and has helped thousands of new bloggers like you start successful blogs.

It’s not that hard. You can do it! Don’t procrastinate anymore – there is never a perfect time. Do it today! A website is essential, it will become your online home.

Step 4. Find good affiliate products to promote

If you want to make money with affiliate marketing, you’ll need someone’s product to promote, right?

You can do this by joining someone else’s affiliate program as an affiliate.

A good way to find high-converting affiliate programs is to sign up for affiliate networks – sites that aggregate these affiliate programs for you.

Some of the better affiliate programs include:

Amazon’s Affiliate Program
Shareasale
CJ Affiliate
Rakuten’s Linkshare
Clickbank
Viglinks
Skimlinks
Avangate
Ebay’s Partner Network
Affiliate Window
Pepper Jam Network

If you need more information, I’ve written an article that gives you a list of the top affiliate marketing programs that you can sign up for. They all contain a ton of great affiliate marketing programs, so sign up for the ones that feel good for your business.

Step 5. Focus on a few affiliate products

To maximize your affiliate income, I would recommend that you focus on a few top-performing affiliate products. I call these your golden eggs.

Golden eggs are products with a high payout and sky-high demand. It must be something that your target audience really desires to buy.

I go through this in detail in this article about maximizing your affiliate income.

Get access to my resource library full of workshops, cheat sheets, checklists, printables, and other amazing FREE resources that will grow your blog + biz here:

Click Here to Access My Free subscribers-only Resource Library full of goodies that will grow your blog + business »

Step 6. Write compelling content and start promoting it

To start a successful blog, you’ll need great content.

Make sure that you create content that is “Google-friendly”.

If you optimize your posts for search traffic, you will also start ranking for more and more keywords over time. This is because in general, most websites become more authoritative with time (aka Google loves you more).

Optimize your blog posts for Google with the following steps:

Have every post target a particular keyword
Optimize title tags
Write interesting and click-worthy meta descriptions
Create longer posts
Alt text for images
Interlink abundantly
Optimize permalinks
Use the Yoast SEO plugin for more assistance
Increase your site speed

If you want to learn more writing blog posts that are optimized for search engines, I go through the above SEO steps in this post: SEO blog tips.

Aside from search engine traffic, you can also get traffic to your blog posts by other methods. Do check out this post for some amazing tips on how to promote your blog posts after publishing them.

Not too sure about how to structure your blog post? Here’s how to write the perfect blog post (with a template just for you!).

The end-goal? To drive people to your website so that they will read your kickass content.

Step 7. Build an email list along the way

Some people may read your posts without buying. You want to capture these leads and build a relationship with them so that when they are ready to buy, you’ll be at the top of their minds.

This article talks about how you can build and grow your list, and this one covers how you can get more subscribers by optimizing your website and converting your existing site traffic.

In my opinion, this is the part of the process where a lot of people get stuck.

If you need guided support with regards to list building, you can check out my flagship course, which will teach you how to get traffic and skyrocket your list to get your first 1,000 subscribers & beyond (plus, how to convert these subscribers into customers too!)

Check out List Building Incubator here.

Or if you’re not ready to invest yet, click here to check out my free list building masterclass, where you will learn the 3 key “ice to fire” blueprints behind how I gained over 40K email subscribers (& 10K customers!)

Need more Traffic & Subscribers? Sign Up For My Free List Building Workshop: The 3 Key “Ice To Fire” List Building Blueprints That Helped Me To Go From 5 To 40,527 Subscribers (& 10,582 Customers!) »

Step 8. Make money with affiliate marketing

Once you’ve eyeballs and you’re ranking for the right keywords, it’s time to monetize.

This tutorial covers some of my best tips on how you can make money with affiliate marketing.

You’ll learn 10 great tips on how you can utilize your blog to make some affiliate income by recommending great products that will help the lives of your readers.

Here’s a summary of the 10 tips you can use to make money with affiliate marketing.