Affiliate Marketing Tutorial [Beginners Guide for 2022]
– In this video, I'll give
you a step by step process on how to get started as a beginner with affiliate marketing. We're gonna be going over where to find the best
products to promote, as well as the best promotion strategies. My goal is by the end of this video, you'll have enough actionable advice to get started affiliate marketing today. If we haven't met before,
my name is Matt Diggity and I've been an affiliate
marketer since 2009. And over the course of my career, I've been fortunate enough
to make millions of dollars in affiliate commissions which
I'm extremely grateful for. And just so you know I'm not BSing you, here's a screenshot from one
of my affiliate dashboards showing $20,800 commissions
in the last 30 days.
Here's another one clocking in at 13,800. And just to be honest, showing you these
figures is super cringey, I hate talking about money. My point in showing this is
not to brag by any means, there's just a lot of fake gurus that like to talk the talk
about affiliate marketing, but don't actually walk the walk. Trust me, you'll never
see me filming videos in front of a Lambo. Coming from another angle, if you were to run a Google search for learn affiliate marketing depending on which way
the wind is blowing, you'll see me at number one
on Google for this keyword. So at least Google thinks I
know what I'm talking about.
Now, before we start diving in, let's start to talk about
why affiliate marketing is so damn attractive as a business model. First off, unlike starting
an ecommerce business or selling products on Amazon, you're indeed selling products
but affiliate marketing doesn't require you to
invest in inventory yourself. You don't have to worry
about finding suppliers, you don't have to worry
about return policies, you really don't have to do anything except get people interested in products.
Second, which is related
to the first point, you can essentially start for free. Aside from the small cost
of building a website, which can be less than $100
the costs are negligible. And lastly, if you're
an introvert like me, you'll appreciate this. The third benefit is that you don't have
to manage customers, it's 100% possible to go about your day not talking to a single
soul, should you want to. So what actually is affiliate marketing? Now, with affiliate, as you already know, you don't actually own any products. But instead you promote
other company's products and earn a commission fee for doing so. You're essentially a
commission only salesperson, except this mentioned, you don't actually talk to customers and everything is done
online on websites passively. For example, let's say at your day job, you repair air conditioning units. You're freaking gangster ACS
and you know a lot about them. Let's say you make a recommendation on a particular air conditioning unit that could be on your blog or in a social media like YouTube.
When someone clicks your
quote unquote affiliate link, you'll earn a commission. Here's another example, if you were to Google
best web hosting for SEO, you'll see my blog popping
up at the top of Google. Opening up this article, you'll see I recommended a
company called SiteGround. If someone clicks this link
and uses their service, I'll earn some money.
But real quick, if I
could just say something about affiliate marketing, you really only wanna promote products that you'd want to attach your name to. A lot of people will promote products just because they have high
commission rates, Bluehost. I recommend only promoting products that you'd be proud to
share with your audience. For example, I use SiteGround, I have sites hosted with SiteGround, and I know my audience will
have no issues with it. So now that you know what
affiliate marketing actually is, let's start to dig into
how to get started. There's basically four steps
that beginners should take when getting started with affiliate. First, you wanna join
an affiliate network, then you wanna find a product to promote, after that you get a hold of
your special affiliate links, and then you start getting
traffic to those links so you can start earning commissions.
We're gonna go over all these
steps one by one in this video so you can get started today. Now, as you know, affiliate marketing
involves promoting products that you don't own but you believe in, and you believe that your
audience would enjoy. The great thing is that most products and services on the internet
have affiliate programs. All you need to do is look, for example, I'm a big fan
of the work productivity and organization app Asana. If you simply Google
Asana Affiliate Program, right away you'll see that they do indeed have an affiliate program. And if you open this link, you'll eventually get taken
to an application form. It's really as easy as that.
But for beginners I highly recommend joining what's known as
an affiliate network. Affiliate networks are
essentially platforms where you can log in, and browse hundreds of
different affiliate programs in a single place. As a beginner, you're
better off digging around and spending a little time to find the optimal affiliate program and your specific niche. Networks are perfect for browsing. There's tons of great affiliate networks and I'll be demoing three
right now, ShareASale, Amazon Associates and FanFuel. ShareASale's been around since a year 2000 and it's over 4,000
different affiliate offers in different categories. The commission rates range
from 5% all the way up to 50%. I've personally been using
ShareASale since 2015, and I've been earning as
solid 2 to 5k per month from them consistently.
To apply to ShareASale you need to click the signup
button here at the top and then make sure you
select Affiliate Sign Up. Then you just create a username
and password and you're in. Finding products to promote
on ShareASale's super easy. You can find specific merchants by searching for them up here
in the keyword search bar. And you can also browse by niche, by digging into these
categories here in the sidebar or using the logos at the top. Just browsing through
the Automotive category you can see tons of affiliate
programs for auto parts, car covers, radar detectors,
motorcycle helmets, tires. They literally have everything. I'll open up the listing
for Luxe Auto Mats. The software is pretty good. I'll explain what I'm looking at here. So down here in the description they explain that they
sell custom-made car mat. There's a link to their
website over here on the left. And just a quick scan of
their homepage shows that, yes, indeed they do look legit. Up here at the top, it shows that they offer
a 22% commission rate.
So if you sell something
worth $200 you're making $44. EPC stands for Earnings Per Click, this means that if you got
10 clicks to this offer, you can expect to make $960. Another bit of information
is their 90 Day Cookie. The way affiliate links work
is when they're clicked, they store a cookie on the browser of whoever clicked that link. That way the system knows
that you should get credit if they should buy these car mats. A 90 Day Cookie means that
when someone clicks your link, they could literally
go on a 89 day holiday, come back and buy your mats
and you'd still get credit. I'll tell you straight up
that a 90 Day Cookie is good. So let's say you wanted
to promote these car mats, click on join program up here at the top. Now, on this form, you wanna type in where you'll
actually be promoting them. Maybe you've got a car geek Instagram, or maybe you have a blog
talking about car stuff, which is what I'd do.
Now, don't worry, I'll be showing you how to create a blog later. So maybe you're not a car person, maybe you're into dogs or fitness. How do you figure out which
niche is the best to dive into? My first recommendation
is to choose the niche that people are passionate about. When people are passionate
about something, they're talking about it more,
searching for solutions more and more easily open up their wallets to get those solutions. For example, people are super
passionate about their dogs but massage guns, I guess
it depends on who you ask. My second recommendation, is to choose the niche with
products sell for at least $50. Remember, you're getting a
percentage of the sale price of the product. If you're selling $10 yoga mats, you're gonna be making less
than $1 for each one you sell. That's why something
like the fitness niche, where people are taking
expensive supplements is way better than the yoga niche, even though they're very similar. Digital products such as online courses are also great to promote. Since it doesn't actually cost anything to add a new student to a course, Course Makers, Profit Margins are huge.
And because of this, you're typically getting
higher commission rates all the way up to 50%. Software as a service
product such as Online Tools are also great because you
can get recurring commissions. This means you get paid
out every single month that you're referring customer
stays with that service. I'm sure you can see how this
really starts to stack up. Now, there's a lot that
goes into niche selection, so I left a link in the
description to a full video on it. So make sure to check out
after you watch this video. Once you get into your Affiliate Program, you wanna go to the
program's get links page and copy the merchant default link. This is your special affiliate link that ShareASale uses the track and give you credit for all
your referred purchases. If someone clicks this and buys something, you make money, easy breezy. Next up on our list of beginner
friendly affiliate programs, would be Amazon Associates. Amazon Associates has a few benefits that make it stand out for beginners. The big one is that everything
you can find on Amazon is promotable, if Amazon sells it, then you can promote it and
earn a commission on it.
And you already know just
how vast Amazon's catalog is. If you wanna promote dog toys or laptops, you can do both on Amazon. The side benefit is that let's
say your blog about dogs, get someone to click on an
affiliate link to a dog toy. But that person decides hell,
let's buy a laptop today too. You get commissions on everything they buy within that 24 hour cookie. Here's the screenshot of
my 30 day Amazon earnings, which is decent but a lot lower than what you'd find in my
other network dashboards. There's a reason for this, and I'll talk about it more later. To sign up with Amazon Associates, you wanna head over to the
main associate's landing page and click Sign up at the top. Then start filling out your
name and payment information. Step two is important
because you need to fill out where exactly you plan to promote them. At this point, I'll just type in the blog that I'm using to promote their products. But in case you don't have a blog yet, you can always just put
in a YouTube channel or a Facebook page which
can take minutes to create.
When you're done, you wait for
a couple days for approval. Here's an important point. Once you're in the Amazon
Associates Program, you have three months to make three sales in order to remain in their program. That shouldn't be hard and
we'll get to that later as well. To find out your special
affiliate links on Amazon is super simple. When you're logged in,
just go to any product that you wanna promote. And you'll notice a new
Amazon Associates header up here at the top. Click on the Text button
here under Get Link, and it will create your
affiliate link for you. You'll also get an option
for creating an image link, which you can place on
your blog, it's super easy.
Now, as I touched upon earlier, I personally don't make
much money with Amazon and that's because of
their low commission rates. Here's the screenshot of
Amazon's latest fee schedule. As you can see, these commission
rates are quite minimal, especially compared to the
50% rates from ShareASale. For example, if you sold
a vacuum cleaner for $100, you'd only be making $3 with
that measly 3% commission rate. You're not gonna get
rich on Amazon associates unless you're selling a lot of products or a lot of expensive products. Amazon still has its place for beginners because you can promote anything you can find
in their whole catalog. But as you can see, it has its downsides. Let me show you a better way to find niche specific
affiliate partnerships.
Let's say you're really
into weight lifting, going to the gym, you're gym bro. There's networks dedicated to
specific niches like FanFuel. FanFuel is pretty much every
supplement you'd wanna promote in the health of fitness space, fat burners, weight loss
pills, testosterone boosters, nootropics, anti aging
products, they have all of it. And if you scroll down here
to their weight loss products, you'll see commission
rates of 40, 50 and 60%. And that's why my FanFuel
earnings dashboard shows much more revenue than Amazon. Simply because of their
better commission rates and better optimized sales pages where I'm sending my traffic to. Now, the point I wanted to make by showing you multiple networks is that there's a lot of options when it comes to affiliate marketing. And you really wanna shop around before settling on a network. Anyways to sign up to FanFuel, use a link in the description and y'all earn a small commission.
Oh my God, there it was
affiliate marketing in action, it's as easy as that. – Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. – So now that you've selected
a product to promote, let's start to talk about
your different options for promoting that product. How much money you make
is ultimately determined by your conversion rate, multiplied by how much traffic
you get to your offers. Conversion rate has to do with how well, you sell your offers, maybe that's in the form of an
in depth review on your blog, or you made a YouTube video. We'll touch upon that stuff later, but for now let's focus
on your different options for traffic. When people think of affiliate marketing, paid traffic comes to mind, that is paying for ads
on Google or Facebook to generate traffic to webpages that have your affiliate links.
Here's an example of what that looks like. If you Google Cheap Web Hosting, you'll see all these
listings up here at the top with the ad tag next to them. The one at the very top,
Top10.com is an affiliate website. If you open this bad boy up Lo and Behold there's a bunch of affiliate links here. The upside to paid ads is scalability. If every time you paid $10 in ads you can get an affiliate
sale that makes you $15, then you just made yourself a $5 profit. Now, why not keep scaling
this and paid 1000, 10,000, $100,000 per month on ads? Unfortunately, there's some
cons to paid ads as well. First, you have diminishing returns. When you spend too much money, you end up spaming the same
ads in front of the same people over and over again.
Second, I don't feel like paid ads is the right approach for beginners. When you're a beginner,
you don't have cash flow and you want a cheaper
option for experimentation. Now, that's not to say
I don't like paid ads. I run them myself, but that's
because I'm already profitable with the organic traffic route. The next option is free organic traffic, and that's gonna come from
various places like social media or search engines like Google. Here's what I mean by Google traffic, when we Googled Cheap Web Hosting, if you were to scroll down past the ads you start to see the
organic Google results. These guys are getting free
organic traffic from Google. Now, on the social media side of things, I truly believe that the best platform for affiliate marketing is YouTube.
YouTube is crazy, it's the only platform that really helps you grow your audience and pays you at the same time. It's also the second biggest
search engine in the world, second to Google that is. It also converts really well, I can say that from experience. Now, there's some cons to
YouTube of course, if you're shy, you're obviously not gonna
like making videos yourself. Trust me though, I'm an introvert. It's a learned skill and you can definitely
get over your shyness. And at the end of the day,
I can just edit these videos and remove the billion stutters you guys don't see in the final cut. But let's say that you
do actually find someone to make videos instead of you, it's a bit risky to base your business on the employment of a key person.
If that person leaves
what are you left with? Also as you can see, I'm
invested in YouTube as well, I'm making videos and growing my channel. But I'd be lying if I said
I was 100% comfortable putting all this
investment into a platform that I have no control over. Channels get shut down all the time. Another option is Instagram. Once you get 10,000 followers,
you unlock the ability to have your audience
swipe up on your stories. This allows you to bring more eyeballs to your affiliate links. Separately, you can also
add links to your bio. There's TikTok as well, and I personally don't have
any experience with TikTok except trying to pull
off me in dance videos, but I heard it converts well. Now, I touched upon this before
hands down the best place to promote affiliate links is from a blog. Even if you went the social media route, you still want a place to send people that has your affiliate links. For example, I have a page here, with all my recommended
products and services I use. But in my opinion, after trying all the
different ways to get traffic, having a website that
gets traffic from Google is the absolute superior route.
The traffic you get from
Google converts like crazy. If someone searches for
best wireless router, they're super ready to
buy a wireless router. If you come up first, and you're likely to
get massive conversions. You also get to leverage Google, the biggest search engine in the world. Nothing can deliver
traffic like Google does. And lastly, you get to own
the asset, it's your website. It's not like it's a
Twitter or Instagram account that can get banned at any time. Because of this, it's more stable. Going back to dignitymarketing.com, this is a website that I built
based on my personal brand, which focuses on both
affiliate marketing and SEO. And on my site, you'll find
articles like this one, where I review various softwares and of course include affiliate
links for my recommendations but you don't need to
have a personal brand or even use your face whatsoever when you're creating an affiliate website.
You can be completely anonymous, which is a huge advantage that
website affiliate marketing has over social media. Here's an example of a
blog called House & Beyond which focuses on the
home improvement niche. There's basically two
different types of content that you can post on affiliate websites that are most effective. First you have what are
called roundup reviews, these are your top five,
10, whatever lists. Like this top six list of
the best braun shavers. With this kind of review, you're giving your recommendation
on multiple products in the same category and ranking them. These convert really well, and typically have a
high volume of traffic. Then we have single product reviews, like this review of these
nest bedding bamboo sheets. With this approach, you're
just reviewing a single product and recommending it or not. And of course, it's chalk
full of affiliate links. The thing is while these
webpages indeed look nice, they're really not hard to create given the technology that we have today.
There's drag and drop page builders that can craft something
like this up in minutes. And I'll start to dig into that too. Before that though, another way you can do affiliate marketing is through emails. But again, this is a great
option if you have a website that can get people to
sign up to your newsletter to stay up to date on your new content. You can also create quote
unquote lead magnets that encourage people to
exchange their email addresses for something like a PDF
guide of exclusive content. With a email approach, you typically start by sending a bunch of value packed emails, and then once you built
rapport with your subscriber, then you can start to send
links to your favorite products. One of the most famous and
successful email newsletters is the Morning Brew. And if you're into investing, my favorite newsletters from investing.io. So I've talked a lot about websites and how they're my favorite
medium for affiliate marketing. Let me give you a brief tour on how easy it is to
actually create a website. Your first step in creating a website is to get some hosting.
Your website needs a place to live, a place for all its images and texts to be stored and displayed from. And that's what a host does for you. For beginners, my favorite
low-cost host is SiteGround. So start with them, go ahead and head on over
to their hosting page by using the link in the description. That will earn me a small commission which will help to support the channel. Get the startup plan
which has a nice discount and is perfect for a beginner's website. At this point, it's gonna ask you if you
wanna register a new domain, or if you already have a domain. Your domain is the name of your website.
So as a beginner, you probably
don't already have a domain so let's register a new one. For purposes of illustration,
I'll create biohackerly as an example website
for the biohacker niche. Next, you wanna start
filling the stuff out. For the data center, if you're not targeting a specific country in their language, go ahead
and choose the US here. That'll make sure that your
server is close to the US which has the highest search traffic. Other than that, all the defaults are fine so go ahead and pay now. Now, go into the SiteGround
dashboard under the Website tab, and you'll find your site,
select Complete here.
On the next page just click continue, then start a new website. And from here, select WordPress. WordPress is the industry
standard content management system that is gonna allow you to
add new content to your blog on easy mode. Then just type in what
username and password you wanna log into your site. It takes about two minutes and you'll be taken to the screen. This is a step by step
WordPress starter walkthrough, another benefit of using SiteGround. Go ahead and click start now. Here's where you select your blog's theme. It's the basic layout
and design of your blog. I like this minimum one here, so let's just go with that one. You can select some extra
features on the screen before an affiliate blog, you really only need a contact form. Now, your blog is being
built from the ground up. Bam, we're done click on view site to see what it looks like. [Narrator] Will blow! (static music) – All right, not bad, but you definitely need to customize it. To do that, you just go right up here, to the Edit Page button. And right here, you can just
start editing the text CC straight away for example, the first thing you wanna
do is change the title.
Eventually, you're gonna wanna
start creating review posts to review your affiliate products. To do that, from your WordPress dashboard, simply click on new post. Here you'll find a simple editor that will let you add in new
content as well as images and of course, affiliate links so you can monetize your review. Now, that you started your blog, at this point, you need to
start thinking about traffic.
How are you gonna get people
from Google over to your blog? This is what SEO, Search Engine
Optimization is all about. Now, the complete strategy for SEO is beyond the scope of this video. But I can say that there is indeed a repeatable process to it. To get started, I have
two options for you. First, check out my SEO
beginner guide playlist for some free videos on some
of the core essentials to SEO I'd love to link in the description. And if you want a deeper dive, check out my course the Affiliate Lab which lays out my exact Blueprint for the SEO and affiliate
marketing career path.
