Many people today are searching for ways to create passive income online. This is especially true due to the Covid-19 outbreak that created mass layoffs across the globe and on the other hand the rise of e-commerce shopping.

There are a many ways you can make money online, if it’s starting your own online course, drop-shipping, online consulting, local lead generation or affiliate marketing.

If you a beginner and asking yourself how do I start affiliate marketing when you don’t know anything? This article is for you.

First, I believe affiliate marketing is a great way to make extra money online that you can start today but to be honest, like every business, it required time, effort and most importantly, dedication.

But it is possible for anyone who wish to generate more income while still working on your day job.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

In simple terms, affiliate marketing is the act of promoting other products for a commission. The good thing about affiliate marketing, is that you can start without having a blog.

So for example, let’s say you really lie a specific product, you can start promoting in using your social media accounts with a unique link, so when someone clicks on that link and buy the product, you make a profit. It can be shoes, kids toys or air purifying products.

Basically, it can be any product you connect with.

How Do I Start Affiliate Marketing?

1. Choose an affiliate marketing platform
2. Pick a niche or utilize your existing website
3. Choose an affiliate marketing network
4. Select the products you want to promote
5. Create quality content
6. Get traffic

1. Choose an Affiliate Marketing Platform

The first thing to ask yourself when you are thinking how to start affiliate marketing is which method are you going to pick to promote affiliate marketing products. A blog, YouTube channel or another social media platform?

Not sure which type of blog to start, checkout my guide for the best types of blogs that can make you money.

But you can also use the many social media platform, like Instagram or Pinterest to promote affiliate marketing products. If you consider any of these options there are numerous tutorials for doing just that.

My personal advice is to have a blog anyway as this is like in real estate. Meaning, you won a blog and no one can take it from you.

Social Media platform are not yours. However, you can utilize them to increase your affiliate income. Check out how to make money on Pinterest with Affiliate Marketing.

You have no control over them and cannot predict their behavior. Build your own blog and use social media in parallel.

2. Pick a niche or utilize your existing website

Now that you have decided which platform to suits you, you can start thinking about what do you want your business to be about so you can start creating passive income online.

The trend today is to pick a niche that is not too big like “Fashion” but to picking a small niche within that frame. It can be for example: “Bamboo Clothing”.

You want to target an audience that has a specific interest and need. So, in other words, you want to solve a problem for your audience. If you are not solving a problem, you will have a greater challenge in producing revenue.

You should note that not every niche is good for affiliate marketing. Or better said, you can pick any niche but you need to make sure that the following criteria are met:

1. Low competition
2. There is an interest for what you are trying to sell
3. The product you are selling is a profitable one

3. Select the products you want to promote

The most important part here is your audience, you are serving your audience with your blog and therefore, need to see what your target audience is interested in.

The product can be a physical product, an online course or a service.

At this point, you may already have an idea on which products, that relate to your niche, you’d like to promote.

But before you invest time and resources on the wrong product, make sure people actually wants to buy them.

One of the easy and FREE ways to check that is by looking into Google Trends.

For example, if you decided to write to an audience that cares about improving the quality of the air that they breathe at home, so home air quality is your niche, then you can promote “Air Purifiers” as a product:

And also add “Air Purifying plants” as an additional product:

Google trends provides a good indication on what people are looking for.

4. Choose an affiliate marketing network

Now that you have find the products you wish to promote, it is time to find affiliate programs that offer them.

So how do you find an affiliate marketing program?

1. Search Google for your product and the word “Affiliate Marketing“. So for example: Bamboo Clothing Affiliate Marketing. They you can see which companies, provide affiliate programs.
2. Search for products with Affiliate Marketing Networks which is a third party company that connects you with different merchants where you have access to multiple products that you can choose from and more opportunities to increase your income. Some known Affiliate Marketing networks are:
   • ClickBank
   • ShareASale
   • Rekuten
   • CJ Affiliates
   • Amazon Affiliates
   • MaxBountry
   • eBay Partner Network

Here is an in-dept article on the best affiliate programs for beginners. Where you can find specific details on each program.

5. Create quality content

Content is king.

Starting with affiliate marketing is not just about links and making money. You want to provide your audience quality content about their problem and their solution.

Blogging and writing content, is the one sure way to build trust with your audience and build your credibility as a niche expert. That is of course if you write great and high quality content and that means you need to upgrade your writing skills and learn how to write a blog post.

You can write different type of blog posts about your niche.

It can be:

• “How-To” article
• List-Based article
• Infographic Post
• News article

When you write, always have at the back of your head the following questions:

• What do they want to know about?
• What kind of information are they already searching for?

Today, the trend is to write content that is around 1900 words per post – the more in depth content you provide, the better.

One great way to know what to write about is look at your competition and see what they write about and do it better. Stand out from the crowd.

6. Get traffic

If you truly care about creating passive income online, you need to learn how to generate traffic because without people looking at what you are promoting, even if you’ve built a beautiful blog and write AMAZING content you will not make money.

Set some time every week to learn how to properly and consistently get traffic:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you are a beginner, then I suggest you start with SEO strategy and that means, growing though organic traffic.

Why SEO? Because this is a sure way to grow even tough it takes more time to see results.

The reason is, once you rank high for a few keywords, traffic will come without you needing to do something further.

If you want to learn SEO, I truly recommend looking at Brian Dean’s blog. He has really great guides on different topics and one of them is SEO. I have learned a lot from reading his guides.

2. Social Media

You your social media account, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and more to get traffic into your blog and to your offers.

Build Social Media accounts for your blog in the different social media platform. And don’t start with all of them at once. You can start with Pinterest and then move onto Facebook and so on…

I suggest Pinterest as it is probably the easiest social media to start with especially, and it is the preferred social media for buyers. Just make sure you use Pinterest SEO.

Conclusion

So if you are still asking yourself how do I start affiliate marketing from scratch. I hope this article provided you with a good insight.

You should know that the road to creating passive income online is long, you need to invest time to succeed but this is true to anything else.

However, with affiliate marketing the rewards can be very worth your time and efforts.