Affiliate Marketing in 2021 : Secret Beginner Guide to be Successful : A Step-by-Step Updated Process!

Today we are again discussing SUCCESS, The most important word of our life. Why I am saying this again because we have already posted an article on success where we have discussed 10 Entrepreneurial Skills of Elon Musk To Be Succeed in Entrepreneurship. 

BUT If you ask someone "What is the meaning of Success or who is considered as a successful person?" Then max no of people will say that the person is earning a good amount of money actively as well as passively, without working much can be considered a successful person. So, Today we are going to discuss one method which can automatically increase your income level without effecting your current source of income. 

Also, this process of earning money is so good that you can consider this passive income as your active income if you are able to learn & do the process in a good way.

So, Enough introduction. Come to the main topic. Yes, I am talking about Affiliate Marketing & Earning through affiliate marketing is not rocket science. But to be successful in affiliate marketing you have to learn & implement the affiliate marketing process in a good way so that it can generate a good amount of passive income for you.

So, If you are not aware of the term Passive Income, Then before proceeding to learn about affiliate marketing tactics & different affiliate software, you have to learn about passive income. 

"What is Passive Income?"

I will not gonna write a lengthy article on passive income. I will just write a line that explains passive income best.

So, Passive income is the Income you make while you are sleeping. 

Don't be too much surprised. Yes, Earning while you are sleeping is possible. But do you want to know what you have to do to earn while you are sleeping or continue your earnings while you are on vacation with your near & dear one?

You have to make a platform that will work for you when you are on vacation & that platform is Affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

The main idea behind affiliate marketing is that you don't have to create or own any product. You just have to make an online platform where you will promote other manufacturer's products & by selling other's products through your promotion, you will make money through commission.

How affiliate marketing works infographic – Source: AvoidOnlineMarketingScams

The whole idea based on the revenue sharing business model. This type of business model explains that if you have any product & want to sell more then you can share a percentage of revenue with the promoters so that they will promote your product more aggressively for commission earning & at the end of the day you will sell more products. So, It's a win-win situation for the Product Owner & Product Promoter. It's also a win-win situation for product buyers also because they will get a better product without giving any extra cost to the product owner or promoter. Because to sell the product, promoter writes a detailed review of the product & compare with similar kinds of product in their digital platform. This type of review helps buyers to take decisions easily to buy or not buy. Also, the promoter gets his commission from the direct product owner. The buyer doesn't have to pay any extra cost for this.

So, Today's motive is to help you guys to start affiliate marketing from scratch that will generate a good amount of money at the end of the day. So, Be Ready for that!

Before going forward take a look at the recent infographics we have created which can explain in 8 easy steps how affiliate marketing works.

You Can always use this infographic for your website without any hesitation. We don't encourage you to just download & upload this image for your blog post. Use this code to add this 8 Easy Steps How Affiliate Marketing works Infographic to your website.

Actually, there is a total of 3 parties involved in the whole process of the Affiliate Marketing Program.

1. Merchant / Product Owner
2. The Affiliate / Product Promoter
3. The Buyer

So, Who is Marchant / Product Owner?

A product owner or merchant can be anyone. Solo Entrepreneur to New Startups to Any well-known Brand to any one of fortune 500 companies to any digital platform who are actually selling other sellers products (Like Amazon, Flipkart). They just need anything to sell which promoters can promote.

Who is an Affiliate?

These parties are sometimes called product promoters. They are the actual persons who are promoting merchants' products to be sold online. The affiliate can be an individual person or a whole company. It's better to know that a good affiliate can make starting from a few hundreds of dollars to a few millions of dollars of commissions. Actually, this is the place where actual marketing happens. A promoter tries to promote one or many products digitally to the potential customers as a way that actually sales happen at the end. The promoter can use any type of medium to promote any product which has a good affiliate program. Like Facebook, Google Linkedin Ads, Writing reviews online or making an entire review website that contains tons of cool products to buy.

The Buyer:

One of the most important members of the whole affiliate marketing process. The buyer is the one who actually decides to buy a product from an affiliate product promoter through their affiliate links & the promoter ends up getting a percentage of commission from the product owner. Why I am saying that buyer is one of the most important members of the whole process because without a buyer there is actually no meaning of Product Owner & Product promoter. If the buyer does not buy a product then the promoter will not get their commission & the owner also not able to sell their product. Then the whole ecosystem of affiliate marketing will fail.

In addition to that, The buyer or product consumer will be able to or not able to know that they are part of affiliate marketing is on the affiliate. Some choose to share the information with the consumer that they are part of an affiliate to do more transparent business but others don't.

The person or company does not let consumers know that they are a part of an affiliate network, just let the tracking system work in the background & the consumer buys the product as usual & the affiliate ends up getting a commission. But this is not something to worry, because the consumer does not need to pay any extra cost for this whole process, The commission price already included in the retail price of the product & if the sale happens promoter gets a commission from the product owner, not the buyer.

So, We have discussed the main three parties of an affiliate marketing program but there is another party who is also sometimes part of an affiliate program. 

THE NETWORK - Affiliate Network.

Where I am writing a comprehensive guide on affiliate marketing then I thought to write about the Affiliate Network.

Who is an Affiliate Network & what is the role of an affiliate network?

In some cases, the affiliate networks play the role of intermediary between a product owner & an affiliate marketer. While technically you can join & promote any product which is coming under affiliate marketing but in some cases, the affiliate networks like Clickbank or Commission Junctions plays a role in handling the payment or Product delivery. So, In some cases, an affiliate has to go through the affiliate networks to be able to promote products that are coming under affiliate marketing.

The affiliate networks is a huge database of tons of products & out of tons of product, an affiliate has to choose a product as per their own interest & can start promoting.

As per my experience & many affiliate marketer experience, if anyone is interested to promote consumer-based products then Amazon Affiliate Program is best suited for anyone. An affiliate can promote any product which is listed on the Amazon website. As per bigcommerce.com, Amazon is the largest online marketplace & has a nearly endless variety of products to choose from. Amazon sells more than 12 million products online & has built an unbelievable catalog of more than 12 million products, books, media, wine, and services.

If you expand this to Amazon Marketplace sellers, as well, the number is closer to more than 350 million products. So, you can easily understand what is the potential of Amazon Affiliate Marketing & how many options you will get to choose products from amazon for promotion.

Anyone can signup for an amazon affiliate & generate a custom affiliate link for the product they want to promote & start their promotion. So, it's a very easy process of being an amazon affiliate.

So, Till now it's been proved that Affiliate Marketing through Amazon is a very good practice to earn money online.

Personally speaking, you can also count me IN for Amazon's affiliate marketing program & the reason why I promote Amazon’s products is that they convert incredibly well. Amazon has done well to establish itself as the best e-retailer over the years and the trust it has with its customers is the reason that makes customers buy products from them over and over again.

In addition to that, being an Amazon affiliate, you only get about 4-8% commission on most of their products, depending on the number of sales you make each month.

Apart from buying only one thing from my promotion link customers had bought several other products, which also gives me a decent commission of about $10 or more. Though the commission itself wasn’t that much, it gave me the motivation to push harder and made me realize that I could make a good amount of money by being an Amazon affiliate in the future.

So, till now you have understood What is affiliate marketing, How it works & can make a decent amount for you. But being a good affiliate marketer is not as easy as it seems.

You may have listened somewhere or if not then I am saying to you that "Selling is an Art & You have to be an Artist to sell anything". Selling may happen Online or offline but without learning the art of selling you will end up not getting any sales through your affiliate promotion.

So, I will tell you 4 basic but an updated process which will actually work for you & help you generate a decent passive income from affiliate marketing.

First, you need to start reviewing products in your niche. Please keep in mind that do not just take any product & start promoting. Choose relevant products as per your niche. Promotion or reviewing products can be done on a YouTube channel, on a blog, or even just using live streams Facebook or youtube, or any other video streaming platform where peoples can directly interact with you. 

As an example of Niche relevant product, I mean to say that if you are a blogger & writing about How to Blogging then you can choose the essential products which are required for blogging from the amazon affiliate program. Like Laptop, Desktop, Keyboards, Mouse. Or you can join any other affiliate program where you can choose & promote blogging or keyword research tools, blogger or WordPress premium themes, etc. Hope you have made a clear understanding of the niche.

Secondly, Be sure to collect emails from your audience, so that whenever you require, you can connect with your audience at any time you want and don’t have to hope for them to see your content. It will increase your buying rate & build up trust between you & your audience. Because TRUST is very important to succeed in any type of business.

For every $1 spend, $38 is the average return on email marketing investment. Study says that approx 66% of customers have made a purchase online as a result of email marketing emails.

There are plenty of tools are available which is good enough for collect & store email ids for you & you can just write a comprehensive email & just click on send & all your email will be sent to all the email ids with just one click.

So, I am listing down some very famous tools that will help you with your email marketing campaign.

So, the most famous method of collecting emails from your website visitors is Pop-Ups. That's the other thing that you are a lover of Popups or a hater of popups but as per the case- study pop-ups works great to collect emails.

Here are 10 popups that will help you collect emails.

1. PopUp Domination
2. OptinMonster
3. Thrive Leads
4. BounceX
5. Popup Maker
6. Ninja Popups
7. UpViral
8. Sumo
9. PopUp Pro
10. Hustle

Also, you can read 67 Tools That Will Help You Grow Your Email List by Neil Patel

Third, One more thing I can suggest to you, which is also trending nowadays that you can use joint venture webinars & start making a lot of sales in a short period of time, while simultaneously growing your email list and creating new content can be a mind-blowing process to be successful in any affiliate marketing program.

Imagine you want to buy an air conditioner for your home. So, what will be great for you to select a good air conditioner which absolutely suits you as per your requirements & budget?

Reading a review article of an air conditioner or a live webinar or pre-shooted & published video, Demonstrating all the benefits, pricing details & working principle of an Air conditioner.

Live Webinar or Published video of course!!

There are plenty of Free as well as paid tools are available by which you can create good landing pages for your webinar where anyone can sign up for your webinar. 

You can use Leadpages for creating your landing page for your webinar where people can sign up for your webinar. Just create a landing page for your webinar before 1 week or 15 days or even 1 month before your webinar date & promote it through all your social media. Let peoples sign up for your webinar.

After that, you can start your online webinar with all the participants in any online video conferencing platform like Google Hangout or Zoom Meeting, or Webex.

You can do below mentioned things to scale up your affiliate business through video conferencing or online webinar:

• You can easily present the product’s features, you are promoting.
• You will be able to show different use cases of the product which will be helpful for the buyers.
• You can always talk about its benefits and drawbacks which will help buyers to select the appropriate products as per their needs & budget.
• You can tell them about your personal history with the product. Share experience with the product. That will create a trust factor.
• You can answer your audience's question about the product & help them to get the most out of it.
• And much more you can do to promote your product & grow your affiliate marketing business.

Secret Pro Tip: 

Just talk to your merchant before arranging these types of online sessions to promote any product to increase the commission on the sale of the product. If you tell them that you are arranging this type of session to promote any particular product in front of 1000 peoples, then there is a huge chance that they will offer you a good amount of commission on selling the product. This will help you to boost your motivation to do more & more this type of promotion & to be successful in affiliate marketing.

And The Fourth & Final Step, Once your promotion starts converting & affiliate marketing business starts making money, you can scale your growth with pay per click advertising in Google Ads or Facebook ads or by joining any other ads program. 

Promoting directly through PPC advertising is not means that you have to promote the product directly. That can be done by merchants also. You will promote your webinar details, so many potential buyers can sign up in your webinar or you can promote your review blog post which will increase your affiliate sales as well as help you to grow your potential customer email list. 

Most Common Question about Affiliate Marketing

How Much A Affiliate Marketer can Earn?:

Actually, there is no limit. You can check your earnings on a monthly basis or yearly basis. But a standard affiliate marketer can make $10,000 on a yearly basis & go up to a limit that there is no end. You can read Harsh Agrawal's Earning report from ShouMeloud, He is one of the leading affiliate marketers from India. By seeing his earning reports you will get an estimated idea of how much you can earn through any type of affiliate marketing.

How to get more clicks on Affiliate Links?:

Ok, You have posted a great review article on any product & included your affiliate links but your sales are not up to the mark. WHY? posting great content does not always guarantee you getting sales from your affiliate links. If all your affiliate links are at the bottom of the article you have posted on your website, then clicks will be few & sales will be less. Also, On the other hand, make every other word a link at the starting of the article, content will look spammy.

You just need to understand the balancing method of link placement in your content.

How to Choose the Best Affiliate Product for Promotion?

When you have decided to go with Affiliate Marketing & become an affiliate marketer then choosing the right product which you are going to promote through your review website or any type of online social media advertising is a vital step. Always searching for products offering high commission maybe not suit you. You should always choose products as per your niche similar products & choose products on which you have some idea & can write a good comprehensive review article on the product. Otherwise, you will not be able to sell those products through your affiliate links. Also selecting low competitive products is always easy to sell & promote.

How Do Affiliate Marketers Get Paid?

Affiliate Marketing does not mean that the consumer always needs to buy the product from an affiliate link to get a commission. Depending on the various types of an affiliate program, the affiliate’s contribution to the seller’s sales will be measured differently.

The affiliate may get paid in various ways:

Pay per sale:

By its name "Pay Per Sale" we can identify how we will get paid. If anyone buys any product from using our affiliate links then we will get the pre-decided commision.

Pay per lead.

By its term "Pay per Lead" we can understand that if any potential customer shares their contact details, email ids to know more about the product & interested in buying the product then the affiliate marketer will get paid for the successful lead generation.

Pay per click.

If you are promoting anything with your customized affiliate links that if anyone clicks on the links then you will get paid for this. This type of method is called Pay per click method.

Final Thoughts:

Don't be just too much motivated by affiliate marketing & do not think that this can change your life within a day. Yes, of course, it can change your life & can be a good option for passive income if you can implement affiliate marketing in a proper way but it will take time. I advise you to start focusing on making the first affiliate sale. As your website grows, you will be able to set new goals and can continue experimenting.

As a new blogger, everyone worries about the approval of Adsense & similar kind of ads network to show ads in their blogs & earn money but As per the personal experience of Kulwant Nagi from Blogging Cage, Earnings through Affiliate Marketing can be 3x to 4x compared to the ads networks earnings.