Affiliate Marketing Tutorial For Beginners 2024 (Step by Step)
Hey, everyone. Welcome
back to another video. In today's video, I'm
going to be walking you through step-by-step a full
affiliate marketing tutorial. So by the end of this video,
you will know everything you need to know about affiliate marketing to start the business for yourself. Now, this is going to
be one of those videos that moves at a rather quick pace, but it's going to go through
everything in detail. There's going to be a lot
of high-value information in this video, totally
for free here on YouTube. And what's going to make this one unique is that I'm going to take you
through on screen recording on my computer and show you real examples and show you things on my screen so that you can see what
this looks like in practice. Now, before we get into this
video, if you don't know me, just to give you some credibility, my name is Greg Gottfried. I've been making videos here on YouTube for a couple years now,
and I've been doing affiliate marketing for
a couple years as well.
I learned how to do affiliate
marketing kind of the hard way before there was much information on it. So I learned a lot of
things from trial and error. That's what I'm going to
share with you in this video. A lot of the things that
I've learned in the process still are not common knowledge. They're not shared very
commonly on YouTube or anywhere else where you learn how to do affiliate marketing. So I think I have some
very unique things to bring to the table, and I think you're
going to get value from it. Now, with all of that being said, I do wanna spend a little bit
of time in the beginning here to go over affiliate marketing so that, as we get into real examples of this and different strategies
and how you can do it, you have a great
understanding of why these different strategies work and
why some of them don't work because you understand the concept of affiliate marketing very well.
Now, after breaking
down the business model of affiliate marketing,
then I'll break down some of these strategies that you can use to do affiliate marketing. You'll see the pros and cons
to these different avenues of doing affiliate marketing,
and you can see which one you would be the most comfortable doing based on what skills you already have. Now, when it comes to
the different strategies for affiliate marketing, in
this video I'm going to share with you the most basic
affiliate marketing strategies that would be the easiest for a beginner, and I'll work my way all the way up to the most advanced
strategies just so you know what's out there and you
know the different ways that you could do this business. So sit back, relax, this
should be a very helpful video. And if you have any
questions along the way that aren't covered in this video, just let me know down in the comments. So first things first, let's break down what
is affiliate marketing. And I wanna break it down in a
way that's actually relatable and what affiliate marketing really is, not the complicated explanation of it.
So in the simplest terms,
what affiliate marketing means is you partner with a company, they give you a unique referral link, you then share that
link with other people, and when anyone clicks on that link and makes a purchase from that company, you get paid a commission on that sale. Now, you may be wondering, "What is a commission on the
sale, what does that mean?" Well, this will vary
for different companies.
So for instance, you may get
25% of however much money they spent at the company, or you might just get a flat rate. So you might get something like $50 for any time anyone makes
a purchase of a product. So essentially you are a
commission-based salesman for a company, but the
beauty of affiliate marketing is that a ton of big companies out there, almost every big company
has an affiliate program, and they're all free to
join, no strings attached. You don't have to actually be
an employee for that company. It's basically like a
freelancer where anyone can join for free and then they get
their unique referral link, and if they don't generate any
sales, they don't get paid, no harm, no foul.
But if they do generate sales, they'll just get paid
out their commissions. So I'll start with a couple examples here to show you what this looks
like in the real world. So starting with a
company called Best Buy, which is a big electronic store that you can physically walk
into here in the United States, if you go to their homepage
and you scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll see that they have all these different buttons
that go to like Contact Us or different places on their website. Almost every big company
out there has a button that says Affiliate Program. So all you have to do
is click on this button, and you can literally join their
affiliate program for free.
You literally just click Sign Up, fill out a little bit of
information about yourself, and they will give you
your unique referral link that you can start sharing with people and automatically getting commissions on anything that they purchase. So that's one example
that would be Best Buy that's kind of a big box in-person store. But once you get into affiliate marketing, you'll find that there are
even better affiliate programs that you can join. I'll talk on this a little bit
more as we get further along. But an example of this would be Amazon. So if you go to Amazon,
scroll to the bottom, as you can see right here,
they have Become an Affiliate. And then the same concept here, you just hit Sign Up and then
you can create an account and you can be an affiliate for Amazon.
Now, what's cool about this is
when you join these programs, you can get unique referral
links to any product that that company sells. So when you think about Amazon, Amazon sells so many different products. So you could literally be an affiliate for any different hobby
or passion that you have, any different topic, any niche, all through the Amazon affiliate program. Now, one more to show you
before we keep moving on here, this is a more unique one, and
as we get further into this, you'll start to see why I'm showing you some of these obscure companies. So this for instance is a
website called Bluehost. Bluehost is one of the biggest
online software products.
It's basically, if you wanna
create a website online, most of the times you're
going to be using a host, basically someone to
make your website live, and Bluehost is one of the
biggest ones out there. So with that being said, you
scroll to the bottom here and you can see again,
they have Affiliates. So you might see that it
says Affiliate Program, it might say Affiliates, it
might say Referral Program. We're looking for something like that. But you click on here, and same concept, you click the button to join now and you can get your unique referral link. And this is a case where
they're paying a flat rate instead of a commission,
and I'll show you why. This is actually really
cool before we move on.
So you'll see here it says you'll get $65 for each signup or referral. So every time you send them a buyer, you're getting $65 as
a flat rate commission. But what I love about this and what starts to get really
cool in affiliate marketing is that, if you go to one
of their products here, if you were to refer someone
over here on your link and they go ahead and they say, "Okay, I wanna start with this plan, this is the cheapest
hosting that they have." So what's awesome about
this is that the person that you referred here can
literally spend $35.40, they can check out, and
then you are going to get a $65 commission.
It seems kind of weird
when you're just hearing about affiliate marketing,
how this can happen. How can someone spend $35,
and then the company Bluehost is going to pay you a $65 commission? Well, the reason for that is
something like website hosting, traditionally speaking,
when someone signs up to have their website
hosted with a company, they typically keep their
hosting with that company for three to five-plus years. So Bluehost is going to get that $35 over and over and over again, and they only have to pay us the $65 once.
So it's kind of like a win-win. Someone only has to
spend $35 and then you, for sending them there, is
going to get a $65 commission. So I just wanted to show you that, just a couple different
examples of affiliate programs before we start getting
into different strategies and moving on from here. Okay, so before we get
into these strategies, a couple little rapid-fire,
frequently-asked questions that are probably going to
be really helpful for you if you're just getting into this business.
So the first question here is do you need any prior experience if
you're going to start affiliate marketing today? The short answer here is no. There are so many different
routes or avenues, different ways that you
can do affiliate marketing, that even if you're starting
as a complete beginner, you've never had an
online business before, you can start today and
you can have success. Another fun fact about this, while we're talking about getting started, affiliate marketing is 100% free to start. As you can see with
these different programs, you can join the programs
totally for free. And then the different
ways that I'll show you, you can do the marketing
to get people to click on your links for free as well. Okay, the next question,
if you are to start affiliate marketing today, how soon can you start making money? Now, this is going to depend on your pace of how quickly you are
creating marketing content and sharing that online, but I would say that it's safe to say that
you should start making money from this in the same
month that you start.
This is not one of those
business models where you start and you have to wait
and wait and wait a year until you start making any money. This is one of those business models where you can start seeing
results very quickly. So if you are someone who's in a position where you want to start an online business but you don't really know
if it's going to work yet, this would be one that I
would recommend starting. And then within a month,
you're going to see that it's starting to work,
and basically you can then just start working on it
more and more and putting out more content and then you'll
start making more income. Okay, another really common question here is how do you get paid? So how do these companies, when you join their affiliate programs, how do they pay you your commissions? Well, there's a couple different ways.
I would say the two most
common ways are PayPal. So if you have a PayPal account already, you can literally just send the companies your email address to your PayPal account. And then typically every
month at the end of the month, for whatever sales that you sent them and whatever commissions you are due, they will automatically
send to your PayPal account. Now, speaking of the PayPal account, you don't need a business
account for this. You literally just need a
personal PayPal account, totally free to create, and
then you just share your email with them for the PayPal account. You don't have to share
any other information.
Now, the second most
common way I would say that you are paid is by direct deposit. So the same concept, once a month, the companies will automatically
pay your commissions, but this way it just goes
directly into your bank account. Now again, you don't need to have a business bank account for this. This is something something
where you can literally just use your personal bank account. Now with that being said,
whether you're getting paid through PayPal or you're getting paid through direct deposit, you
can do affiliate marketing from anywhere in the world. You don't need to be located
in the United States. You literally be in any country and you can still do affiliate marketing. You'll see what I mean
by this when we talk about the different strategies
of doing affiliate marketing. It doesn't matter where you are based. All right, the next thing
I think you'll find helpful is do you need a business entity? I know we talked about
personal PayPal account and your personal bank
account to get paid, well, do you need a business
entity for affiliate marketing? The answer here is no,
you don't need to set up a business entity for this.
I would say once you start to
make about $50,000 per year in profit, then you might wanna consider starting a business entity for yourself. It's just going to make all
your commission payments coming in a lot more
organized than having it mixed into your personal bank account. Okay, and the last question that I'll put in these rapid-fire
questions is how much time do you need to invest
in this business model? This is one of my favorite
benefits to affiliate marketing. The affiliate marketing
business model is one where you can create content
and you can put time in upfront and you publish that
content onto the internet, and that content lives on the
internet for years to come. So it's literally going to make you passive income commissions
for years in the future where you don't have to
keep updating that content, you don't have to keep
publishing more content. Once you get that out there
and you've put in a lot of work up front, it's
literally going to keep making you money for years. This is something that I can
absolutely say from experience. I've been doing affiliate
marketing for a couple years now.
And without lifting a finger,
there's content that I've made a few years ago that's
still making me hundreds or thousands of dollars every month from a single piece of content. All right, so now that we've gone over what affiliate marketing
is, we've answered a bunch of these common questions,
hopefully we're on the same page about the business model. Now let's move on to the fun part here, which is what are the different strategies for doing affiliate marketing, just so you can see which
one fits best for you and then you can get started doing it. Okay, so there's three main categories that affiliate marketing
strategies fit into. Now, this is where some
of my personal experience is going to come into. What I'm about to share with you in these three different
categories is not commonly shared, especially this way.
So hopefully this is very valuable. So the first overall strategy on how to do affiliate marketing, which happens to be the
most beginner friendly here, is what I call search. So basically when someone goes to Google or they go to YouTube and
they are making a search about a product that
they want to purchase, we want to show up in that
content as the results and make a recommendation
on the best product that we think would fit them
with our affiliate link. So for instance here, if we
type in best dirt bike helmet, you can see in the results
here we're going to get kind of these suggested products that you can make a purchase right away. We have Google suggesting us an article, which is the "5 Best Dirt Bike Helmets For Track and Trail." And then just to show you what else is on this search results page, we have videos that are
coming from YouTube, as you can see right here,
they all say YouTube on them.
And then we have different
links to things like Reddit, which is a forum. We have different articles
or individual articles that we could read, and this
is where we want to show up. So when someone searches for the best item or they're about to make a purchase, they're coming and they're
searching for something, we wanna show up in these results. Now, I'll start with an article result just to show you what that looks like. So any of these, basically,
websites that we're seeing here, you can click on this, and
it'll bring you to their website where essentially they're going to give us their recommendation of what they think is the best product for us, and then they're going to
put their affiliate link. This is common practice
on almost all websites, but you'll see things like this. So number one we recommend is this helmet, and here's the link to that
product, and it's on Amazon.
So if we click on that link, it instantly redirects us to Amazon. So for me as a buyer, this
looks like I'm just on Amazon, nothing's different. But when you look at the actual link that it sent us on right here, you can see that the
tag is dirtbikeplanet. So you can see that this
is actually a referral link from Dirt Bike Planet,
which is this website. So to us as the buyer, when we come in and we're reading this article,
and we click on that link and we go make a purchase,
it makes no difference to us that that's an affiliate link.
The price of the helmet is
the same price on Amazon. But since I clicked on
this affiliate link, anything that I go purchase
on Amazon right now, they are going to get a commission on. So you'll see as you go down here, you'll see kind of the
perks to this helmet, and then they'll go on
to their next helmet, which is number two, again, another link. It's the same concept here. So that would be the first of these kind of search results here. Basically you're writing an
article that's going to show up on Google for when people
are searching for something that they want to purchase.
Now, the second way that you
can take advantage of search is with videos. Now, this is quickly
becoming my favorite way of doing affiliate marketing. And without getting into
too much detail here, the reason why is that these
articles that I just showed you down here that are text-based, well, there's artificial
intelligence tools that are coming out just
in the last year now, and they're getting
more and more powerful, where basically you can
go in and you can say, "Write me a blog post about
the best dirt bike helmet." You hit Enter, and this is a free artificial intelligence
tool that's basically going to write you an entire blog post or an entire text-based article that you can then essentially
copy and you can go paste it on your website and
publish that to Google.
Now, this is going to keep writing here, but just to show you here, this is why I'm not a huge fan of creating the affiliate marketing websites and creating the written articles anymore because anyone can come
in here and they can write a hundred of these
different articles per day, and they can basically just take what are these
recommendations, go to Amazon, find the affiliate link and
just paste it into here, and basically go publish
that all over Google. And with that being totally free to do and so easy for people to do nowadays, it's making it a lot
harder for us to show up on this first page here
with our written article because Google's just
getting so many more people sending in articles. So that's why I like these videos. So basically videos show
up here on Google as well. So for those of you
who don't already know, Google is the number
one most visited website on the internet. If you look at just these crazy numbers, there's about 99,000 searches
every single second on Google. So we just typed in best dirt bike helmet, that's happening 99,000 times
a second on the internet.
So there's a ton of traffic going to all of these search result pages. Now with that said, YouTube
is the second most popular website on the internet. Now, it doesn't say how
many searches are on YouTube per second, but there's more
than three billion searches a month on YouTube. So that's totally separate from Google. Those are in addition to each other. But coming back to this example of the best dirt bike helmet, if instead of creating a
text article and posting that on your website and
showing up here on Google, if you instead create a video, and you don't even have
to be in the video, you can be showing with the camera what that dirt bike helmet
is or what that product is you're talking about without
you physically being on camera. If you create that video and
you publish that to YouTube, you are going to be taking
advantage of all of the traffic that comes to YouTube, the three
billion searches per month.
But also, and this is
kind of the secret here, you're also going to be
able to take advantage of the Google traffic of
99,000 searches per second. Because, what not many people know, is that Google and YouTube, they're owned by the same company. So Google is now showing
these YouTube videos on Google's search results. So you're kind of getting
double the traffic or double the people to
potentially see your content. Now, when you click on
any of these videos, it's going to take you back to YouTube, and then you can see right here, this is the affiliate link right here.
So you click on this, it's going
to take you to the website, and you can make your
purchases right here, and you earn your commission the same way as if you had a text article. So without getting too much
into the nitty gritty here, those are the first two options. They both fall into the search strategy for affiliate marketing. So that brings us into the
second overall strategy on how to do affiliate marketing. This one is called social. So rather than using the search approach where people are searching
for content regularly and we are creating that
content as an answer to their search, this
is using social media to build an audience and then present our affiliate products to people. So to show you an example of this, let's come over to Instagram. This is just a run of
the mill Instagram page that is a perfect example
of affiliate marketing.
So this is called toponlinefinds. They actually have 487,000 followers. So in order to do this strategy, you kind of do have to build an audience or already have an audience on some kind of social media channel. That's why I say that this one's
a little bit more advanced. But if you are someone who has that, this could be a good fit for you. And basically you are just showing photos of different products that
you are an affiliate for. So in this case, it is most likely Amazon, and she can be creating
posts on any product that's on Amazon or even
any product elsewhere 'cause you can join multiple
different affiliate programs.
And then rather than writing
an article about that product or creating a video about that product, you're literally taking
a photo of that product and then writing in the
description what that product is. And then, although a
little bit of a nuance here on Instagram specifically, you can't put clickable links
in each one of these posts. So she's going to say, "Click
the link that's in the bio," which is right here. You click on this link, it's going to say, "Okay, what are you looking for here?" I came in here, I'm looking
for the Amazon storefront.
And then before you know it, you're on Amazon on her affiliate link, and here's all the products that you see on her social media page. So if you come into here,
you click on something that you're looking for,
something you saw on her page, now you can go purchase
one of these products, and she's going to get
her commission that way. So think of this one as kind of the opposite approach from search. The reason that I like
Search for beginners is because you can create
content that's kind of responding to what people are already searching for.
With this social method, you're
kind of building an audience and then you're continually
presenting new products to them. Now, as you continue
to grow your audience, every time you make a post, you're going to get more and
more people seeing that post. And if they like that product
that you posted about, they'll click on your link, they'll go over and make a purchase, and you get your commission. Now, something else that
would be good to note here is that you can join as many
different affiliate programs as you want. You're not limited to
just Amazon, for instance. You can join 10, 20, 30
different affiliate programs all at once. And then you can share
those links simultaneously. It's not something that's exclusive. You don't have to be an
affiliate for just one company.
And also, with that being said, each company has their own
kind of affiliate terms. So we already talked about the commission. You could get paid a
percentage of the sale or the percentage that the person spends on the website after
they've clicked your link, or you could get paid the
flat rate as a commission for anything that they purchase. But something that we
haven't talked about yet is the cookie window or
the attribution window. Basically what that is is a timeframe from when someone clicks your link, how long after they've clicked that link are you still going to
get the commission for? Now on Amazon, specifically, it's a 24-hour attribution window. So when someone clicks on your link, like I just clicked on her
link and now I'm on Amazon, anything that I purchase in
the next 24 hours on Amazon, she's going to get the commission for. This could be something totally unrelated.
So I could close out of
Amazon, I could go make lunch, I could come back and I could
purchase something tonight, something that I just
needed to buy anyways. She's still going to get the commission because it's within the 24-hour window. However, on some of these
other programs out there, the attribution window is 30 days, or even 365 days, a full year. So when someone clicks on your link, if they come back in 25 days, or if they come back on
some of these programs in five, six, seven months from now and they decide that they
wanna make a purchase on their own, they don't
even have to come back and click your link again, you are still going to
get that commission. That's kind of the beauty
of affiliate marketing. What makes it so passive
is that when someone clicks on your link, they have
a timeframe after that where they can come back on
their own and make a purchase and you're still going
to get that commission. So that is the second overall strategy for affiliate marketing.
We've covered search,
we've covered social, and now let's get into the last strategy, which is the most advanced,
and this is what I call spend. So in this strategy, you
are going to be finding affiliate programs and
you're going to be spending your own money on advertising
to get those products in front of the right people when they're ready to make a purchase. Now, this strategy is by far
going to be the most advanced strategy for affiliate marketing. Many people that I know
that do affiliate marketing and have been doing it for years still haven't even
gotten into this strategy of affiliate marketing, just
because it is so technical, it's so hard, there's a lot of risk here.
But I want you to be aware
of what this strategy is so that if you do have this skillset, you can absolutely do it this way. Now, the most common example
for this is found on YouTube or on Facebook. So basically, if you type
in anything on YouTube, basically using the search approach, so if we started with best electric bike, you can see two things here. So first, there's an
advertisement at the top here that says, "Best Electric Bike of 2023." If we click on that,
it's going to bring us right to a company that
sells electric bikes.
Now, this ad is actually
being run by the company, they're selling their own products, but you as an affiliate
could be running that ad. And knowing that, let's
say that you make $100 as your flat rate commission, as long as you can get
people to click on this ad and make a purchase with
you spending less than $100 on that advertising, you are going to have somewhat
of a profit margin there. Now, another way you're going to see this is with an actual video. So if you click on the first
video that shows up here, or any of these real videos
that are here on YouTube, this ad that's going to
show up here and play before this video is being
paid for by someone else. So in most cases, what
you're going to see here is an advertisement about electric bikes. So it's targeting someone who is coming in trying to find the best electric bike, trying to get you to click on their links so that you go make a
purchase from the website.
And then again, the same concept here. The person running that ad is
hoping that they're spending less money than the amount of flat rate or percentage commission
that they're going to make when people do make a purchase. Now, you will see these
video ads on YouTube and you will also see them on Facebook. That is the number one and
number two most common places that you're going to see these ads. When you are on Facebook, the
way you're going to see it there is just as you're
scrolling through your feed, you're going to see an
advertisement, and it's a video. That's where this is coming into play. So with that being said, the
reason that this strategy is so advanced is, when we
look at the other strategies, basically creating
written articles or videos and posting those on Google
or posting them on YouTube, and even the next strategy of
social where you are building an audience and you're
creating posts to them, both of those are entirely free to do. You don't have to pay anything
to create that content and put it out there for people to see.
And then people will find
that content on their own. When you get into this spend category where you're spending
money on advertising, every time you're trying to get
someone to see that content, you have to pay. So when you look at these
other two strategies, there is really no risk to them. Anytime someone comes and they
decide to make a purchase, you get paid a commission. But when you look at
this advanced strategy, right off the bat, you have to spend money and you have to hope that
your ad is good enough and it's targeting the right
people, that one out of every, let's say, 100 or 1,000 people
actually makes a purchase.
So as your costs start to build up, you wanna make sure that
you're getting a sale that has a commission
bigger than the amount that you've spent. Now, just for reference
here, when you are doing this spend approach, the
margins are typically, if you're doing this right, about 20%. Now, I say that just so you are aware of what that looks like, although that is a very advanced way to do affiliate marketing.
You will typically see
the people that are doing that approach are spending
5, 10, 15, $20,000 per day in advertising, and they have everything kind of dialed in here and
they're making a 20% margin. Now, with that being said, something that I've absolutely
learned that I think you should know before you get started with affiliate marketing
is whatever strategy you choose here is really
going to have a big impact on your lifestyle as you're
doing affiliate marketing. So for instance, if you are
doing the search strategy and you are creating content, whether that is a written
article or that is a video, and you're posting that on the internet, that is stress free. You have no risk there, once
you post that on the internet, it'll live on the internet
for years to come, and people are just
organically going to find it. It's basically you are
answering what people are already searching for.
Also, every dollar that
you make in commission is just straight profit because you don't have to be
paying for any advertising. Now, as you move into the social approach for affiliate marketing, there's a little bit more stress here because you have to
consistently be posting and giving your audience a
reason to stay subscribed or stay followed to your social account. Also, you're not going to
be getting that steady flow of organic traffic like
you do on the search. It's more of you're building an audience and then you continually
share posts with them. So the lifestyle starts
to become a little bit more stressful there
because you have to keep up and stay on top of it.
And then once you get
into the spend strategy for affiliate marketing, that comes with a very
stressful lifestyle. You only have a 20% margin there. And in order to make money,
you have to be spending money. So you're always going to
be thinking about your ads. How are they performing? Do
I have to create new ones? Are they starting to perform worse? Do I need to optimize things? There's a lot that comes with
that for just a 20% margin.
Now, you're probably saying,
"Why do people even do that one if it's so high stress?" Well, the reason is, once
you've created a really good ad and a really good video,
you can scale that up. So you can go from $500 a day to 5,000, in some cases, $50,000
of ad spend per day, and you're just going to get 20% of that, as long as everything stays the same. So there you have the three strategies for doing affiliate marketing. You've got the search,
you've got the social, and you've got the spend. If you are just starting
affiliate marketing, I highly recommend starting in the search.
Search is simply going
to be the easiest way for you to get started as a beginner, and it's super low risk. So I know this is already
a really long video, but if you wanna learn more details on how to do the whole search strategy, I'll put a link down in the description. So guys, that's it for this video. If you have any questions or anything that you're still wondering, let me know down in the comments, and I'd be happy to help you out..
