The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Guide for Beginners

Affiliate Marketing is one of the quickest and popular ways to make money online from your own blog. This allows you to add a steady income stream to your blog's monetization strategy. For the beginners, in this Affiliate Marketing Guide, we will explain how affiliate marketing works, and how to get started immediately.

What is affiliate marketing?

By definition, affiliate marketing is a referral system in which an online retailer (commissioner) gives you a commission when users buy their product from your referral link.

Unlike other ad types to be paid based on clicks or ideas, affiliate marketing works on a CPA (cost-per-acquisition), or CPL (cost-per-lead) basis. In other words, when someone takes an action, you only earn commissions (i.e. purchases or signups for a free trial).

Because there is less risk to the advertiser, affiliate programs give much higher commission to publishers than Google Adsense or other types of advertisements.

Affiliate marketing requires a more hand-drawn approach. You have to get a product or service that you believe will be helpful for your users. After that, you have to add it to your blog post and other areas of your site strategically, so that users can buy the product using your referral link.

How does affiliate marketing/tracking work?

First of all, you have to find a company or product that you want to promote. You need to select a product or service that you think will be relevant to the topic of your blog and will be useful to your audience. The product or company you choose will be called 'merchant'.

After this, you have to partner with the company by joining your partner program. This makes you their 'affiliate'. Some companies also use associate partners, partners, etc.

Once you join your partner program (also called the affiliate program), you will get a unique affiliate ID. To promote the product, you will need to use this affiliate ID in all the linked links added to your website.

You can promote the product by adding deep product reviews, recommend it in your articles, display banner ads, send an email newsletter, etc. All traffic sent to the merchant website with your unique ID will be tracked.

Once the user makes a purchase, you earn the commission. Once your income reaches a particular threshold, your payment is usually issued for 45 - 60 days

How to Start with Affiliate Marketing

First of all, you need to make sure that you are using the right blogging platform, and you have permission to run affiliate marketing campaigns on your website.

For example, if you are using WordPress.com, there are some restrictions regarding the products and services you can link to. See our comparison of WordPress.com versus WordPress.org for more information.

On the other hand, if you are on the self-hosted WordPress.org website, you can add the affiliate link you want and manage your affiliate campaigns efficiently.

If you have not already created a website, you can start immediately. Just follow the instructions in our step-by-step guide on how to start the blog, and you will walk and run in less than 30 minutes.

After this, you should know your users how you earn money from your website by adding a disclosure page. See WPBeginner's disclosure page and do not hesitate to use it as a template.

You also need to add the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service page to your blog.

Each of these should be a page for WordPress blogs. They not only save you from legal issues in the future but also help you build trust with your audience.

Finding related products and services to promote

There are several ways to find those products and companies that you can partner with as affiliates. Here are some of the easiest ways to find the products you promote.

1. Become a partner for the products you are already using

First of all, you need to look at the products and services you already use and find useful. It makes it easy for your users to celebrate the product because you already know the pros and cons.

After this, you have to go to the product website and search the terms 'affiliate program', 'partner' or 'affiliate'. Many companies are actively seeking affiliate marketers to promote their products, so they add a link to their affiliate page in the footer of their website.

2. Looking for products are recommended by other blogs

Another way to find products is by looking at other blogs like yours. You will find many similar blogs that are using affiliate marketing to make money.

But how do you know that they are promoting related products?

First of all, look at your website clearly and easily noticeable banner ads. Take your mouse over the banner ad, and you'll see a link in your browser's status bar.

This link will usually have an affiliate ID. Affiliate ID helps traders track which affiliate partners are sending them traffic/sales.

Sometimes these links can look like internal links, but when you click on them, they will take you to a product website with the affiliate marketer ID in the link. You will also find similar affiliate links through their content.

3. Join Large Affiliate Network

Another way to find products to promote is to join the affiliate network. These websites work as an intermediary between affiliate marketers and traders.

You will see that many products and companies you already want to use affiliate network This helps you to find many products faster, which you can start promoting on your website.

4. Reach companies

If you really want to promote a product but are not getting any information about your affiliate program, you can just ask them via email.

Some companies are not actively promoting their affiliate program. If they have an affiliate program, they can invite you to join.

What are the affiliate networks? Why should you join them?

Affiliate networks act as an intermediary between you (intermediate marketer) and merchants (companies who want to sell their products).

For merchants, they provide their platforms as a service to track their products, track related traffic, managing partners and send payment.

For affiliate marketers, they provide an easy platform to search for products, sign up as an affiliate, track their campaign performance and earn money.

The following are some of the most popular affiliate networks you can join.

Shareasale - One of the largest affiliate networks with many high paying affiliate products for almost every class imagination. The popular WordPress hosting company, WPEngine, uses ShareASale to manage its affiliates. WPEngine's affiliate program offers very generous payments to their partners.

CJ Affiliates (formerly, commission junction) - another top affiliate network that can be systematically and conveniently searchable in categories with a large number of merchants and products. Godaddy, Expedia, and many other companies use CJ.

Clickbank - This is a large online market for selling digital products in different categories from different vendors. For new affiliate marketers, it is easy to use and has learning resources.

Amazon Associates - Amazon is the world's largest e-commerce store with millions of products. You can sign up for your affiliate program and start earning by sending them to a website, which they already use for their online shopping.

Which affiliate network should you join?

You must be in the affiliate network whose products you want to promote. You can join several affiliate networks for different products. We all use the above network and some others.

Make sure you always check network program policies. You also need to review the program policies of individual products and merchants. This will give you a clear idea about your earnings, payments, additional incentives, etc.

Affiliate Marketing Tips to Increase Earnings

Now that we have included the basics, then dive into some more tips about how we can actually earn money from affiliate marketing.

1. Select Good Products and Companies for Promotion

As an affiliate marketer, you do not have control over the future of products that you are recommending. This is why you need to make sure that you are recommending the best products of reputable companies.

The best way to do this is by recommending products and services that you actually used. If you want to recommend a product that is useful to you, do not hesitate to contact them to find out more.

If you ask well, most companies happily provide you a free account or copy their product or service to review/test.

2. Provide highly useful and valuable content

You could add affiliate links and banners somewhere on your WordPress site. However, by adding links, your users will not really believe in buying those products.

You need to persuade your users by providing useful and valuable information about the product. Many affiliate marketers do this deeply by writing product comparisons with product reviews, video reviews, pros, and cons.

3. Keep your audience in mind

Keep your website's viewers and their interests in mind when choosing a product. For example, if you run a fashion blog, you want to promote fashion accessories, clothing and similar products that your viewers want to buy.

You also need to ensure that you are not recommending only products because they are offering high commission. If a user buys a product based on your recommendation, and it is not useful, then they will not rely on your recommendations.

Affiliate Marketing Plugins and Tools for WordPress

As soon as your blog grows, you will recommend several different products. This will make it difficult to manage all affiliate links, banners and advertisements spread across all your websites.

Fortunately, there are excellent affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress that you can use to help manage.

1.thirsty affiliates

Adding links to your site becomes really difficult because your site grows. Every time you mention the product and paste it into WordPress, you have to copy the URL with your affiliate ID.

This is where Encephalitis can help. This is an affiliate link management plugin which allows you to easily add affiliate links in WordPress.

This allows you to convert long linked affiliate links into beautiful linked links that are more user-friendly.

Phaseful affiliates have the option of automatically replacing the affiliate link keywords, which can help you significantly boost your affiliate revenue.

2. Aidency

Addendity is the best WordPress ad management plugin and should be for the toolbox of each affiliate marketer. This allows you to create banner ads from your WordPress site and manage them with a dashboard.

AdSanity also makes it easy to put ads in your WordPress post, page, and sidebar widgets. You can also use it to manage your third-party ads such as Google AdSense ads and banners. 

3. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights seems to be the best Google Analytics plugin for as WordPress. This allows you to see where your users are coming from and when they do on your website.

It also helps you track your outbound affiliate link using Google Analytics. This enables you to find out which affiliate links are clicked more often and help you find missed opportunities.

Need more tools? See our complete list of top affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress.

We hope that this ultimate affiliate marketing guide for beginners has helped you learn ways to become an affiliate marketer. You may also want to visit our Ultimate Wordpress SEO Guide to bring more visitors to your website.

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