Do you want to make money while you’re asleep? Welcome to the world of affiliate marketing.
With affiliate marketing, you can earn a commission by promoting other people’s products or services.
Smart businesses use affiliate marketers to help them spread the word about their product to new audiences, then reward those marketers for their help with a payout.
In this guide to affiliate marketing, we’ll explain everything you need to know, including affiliate marketing meaning, how it works, the types of affiliate marketing, and how to get started with affiliate marketing.
- What Is Affiliate Marketing?
- How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
- Types of Affiliate Marketers
- How Do Affiliate Marketers Make Money?
- How To Become an Affiliate Marketer?
- How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?
But before we dive into our guide on how to make money with affiliate marketing, let’s clarify why you should take our advice in the first place.
We Are (Humbly) One of the World’s Best Affiliate Marketers
Unlike other wannabe experts and marketing gurus, we practice what we preach and have done so for decades.
Our CEO, Syed Balkhi, is one of the top affiliate marketers in the world. We’ve built and managed several high-profile publications that attract millions of monthly visitors. These are sites you’re familiar with, like WPBeginner and IsItWP.
But let me tell you a secret about those sites,
they don’t actually sell anything.
So how do they earn money?
Two words: affiliate marketing.
That’s why, in this post, we’re excited to teach you the exact strategies we use in our publications to increase revenue with affiliate marketing drastically.
Before we get in too deep, though, let’s make sure we’re all clear on what is affiliate marketing and how does it work
If you’re already a seasoned pro, feel free to jump straight to our section on how to make money with affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where an affiliate earns a commission for promoting someone else’s products or services. It involves the affiliate promoting a product or service to their audience, and if a sale is made through their unique referral link, the affiliate earns a commission.
It’s classic advertising in a less intrusive way. Rather than promoting a product on your website with visual advertisements like this:
You embed the product link in your content like this:
In the image above, the affiliate partner is Bluehost, which offers website self-hosting services.
Does that mean you can create a website, toss in a bunch of affiliate links, and watch the affiliate commissions roll in? Not quite, but we’ll get to that.
For now, you need to know the basics of how affiliate marketing works:
- You recommend a product or service to your followers through your website, blog, or email list.
- Your followers purchase the product or service using your affiliate link.
- You get paid a commission for the sales made using your affiliate link.
Let’s break down this process into more detail to make sure you know exactly how to make a successful affiliate marketing strategy.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
To understand how affiliate marketing works, it’s important first to understand the several essential components of the affiliate marketing system.
Merchant: goes by many names but not limited to brand, seller, creator, and vendor. The merchant creates the product and can be an individual or a large corporation.
Affiliate marketer: also known as a publisher, an affiliate marketer promote the merchant’s products and attempt to persuade potential customers to buy them.
Consumer: the party that ultimately purchases the product, and the affiliate receives a commission based on the sale.
Affiliate network: acts as an intermediary between the affiliate and the merchant, offering a database of products for affiliates to promote. For instance, Amazon is the largest affiliate network for promoting consumer products. Their Amazon Associates program lets anyone promote any item sold on their platform by generating a custom affiliate link.
The affiliate network connects a merchant with an affiliate. The merchant provides the affiliate with a unique affiliate link that tracks any sales made from that link. The affiliate then promotes the merchant’s products or services to their audience through their unique link. The affiliate earns a commission if a sale is made through that link.
While affiliate marketing is easier, building enough traffic to generate a significant income takes time and effort.
Types of Affiliate Marketers
Determining whether an affiliate marketer has personally used the product they are promoting can be a grey area, but sometimes it may also not matter to the customer.
However, in specific industries such as tech services or diet products, customers may require proof that the affiliate has tested and approved the product to establish trust.
In 2009, prominent affiliate marketer Pat Flynn categorized affiliate marketing into three types, unattached, related, and involved, to distinguish between affiliate marketers who have a close association with the product and those who do not.
Unattached: Unattached affiliate marketing is where the marketer has no affiliation or knowledge of the product or service they promote. Such affiliates do not possess expertise or authority in the product’s niche and cannot endorse its use.
They typically run PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, relying on affiliate links to encourage customers to make purchases.
This type of affiliate marketing is attractive to those who seek to generate income without committing to the product or establishing customer relationships.
Related: Related affiliate marketing, on the other hand, is a fusion of unattached and involved affiliate marketing. Such affiliates may not use the product or service, but they connect to the niche’s target audience. They have established followings or influence within the niche and can provide some level of authority.
For instance, a lifestyle blogger or YouTube influencer may promote a clothing brand they have not used but have an audience that is interested in fashion.
While related affiliate marketing allows affiliates to leverage their expertise to generate traffic, they risk losing the trust of their audience if they recommend a bad product or service they have not used.
Involved: Involved affiliate marketers connect with the product or service they promote. These affiliates try the product and gain first-hand experience, believe in its quality, and can make claims about its use. Involved affiliates talk about their experience with the product when marketing it, resulting in a reliable and trustworthy source of information.
Although involved affiliate marketing requires more effort and time to build credibility, the returns on investment are likely to be higher.
How Do Affiliate Marketers Make Money?
The income potential in affiliate marketing varies widely, with some earning a few hundred dollars monthly while others hit six figures annually. The size of your audience plays a significant role in how much you can earn as an affiliate marketer.
Different affiliate programs use various payment models, which may be called price models, payout models, or conversion types. The payment model specifies the goals for which you will get paid. For example, if you promote a SaaS product, you may get paid for downloads or app install. If you promote physical products, you may get paid for a purchase.
Most programs use last-click attribution, rewarding 100% credit to the affiliate which gets the last click before the purchase. However, this will change as programs adopt better attribution models and reporting. For instance, you may share equal credit for a sale with other affiliates in a buyer’s conversion funnel.
Affiliates can get paid in various ways, depending on the program. Some common payment structures include:
Pay per sale (PPS): In this model, the affiliate receives a commission for every sale they generate for the merchant. This is the most common payment method used in affiliate marketing.
Pay per click (PPC): The affiliate earns a commission each time a user clicks on their affiliate link, regardless of whether they purchase.
Pay per lead (PPL): The affiliate gets paid when a referred user fills out a form, signs up for a trial, or takes any other action the merchant considers a lead.
Revenue sharing: The affiliate receives a percentage of the revenue generated by the sale rather than a flat fee per sale.
Cost per action (CPA): The affiliate is paid when a specific action is taken by the consumer, such as filling out a form, subscribing to a service, or downloading software.
Tiered commission: Affiliates receive a higher commission rate once they reach a certain level of sales or referrals.
Check out this article for more affiliate marketing tips to earn more income through affiliate marketing.
How To Become an Affiliate Marketer?
There are two things you need to get started with affiliate marketing:
- Create a website or blog in your niche
- Choose affiliate products to promote
Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail:
Create a Website or Blog for Your Niche
To make money with affiliate marketing, you first need a website.
When it comes to building your website, you have tons of options. But we highly recommend using WordPress.
With WordPress, anyone can quickly build a professional-looking website in minutes, even if you don’t know how to code:
WordPress has more tools to help their sites perform at a higher level than other website builders. That means more functionality across your site and a better user experience (UX) for your visitors.
WordPress is your way to go if you’re interested in making money with affiliate marketing. You can check out these tutorials if you need help building your site:
- How to start a WordPress blog
- How to make a website with WordPress (step-by-step-guide)
Once your website is built, you must determine which products you want to promote. That takes us to the second prerequisite for starting out with affiliate marketing.
Choose Affiliate Products To Promote
If you’ve done the work to choose a niche, choosing affiliate products to promote should be easy. Choose products that fit your niche and relate to your content.
One of the best ways to select your affiliate products is by joining an affiliate network.
As discussed earlier, affiliate networks are businesses that connect merchants and affiliate marketers so both can earn more money. Affiliate marketers use affiliate networks to make better product selections to promote on their site.
There are many affiliate networks out there, but here are a few of the most popular:
One of the benefits of affiliate networks is they typically have more data on how well a product sells. You can then use that data to increase your affiliate marketing profits.
For more information, check out our helpful post: Earnings-Per-Click: How to Win Big at Affiliate Marketing.
Anytime you can make data-driven decisions rather than “going with your gut” is an excellent opportunity to optimize your affiliate strategy.
Get Started With OptinMonster Today!
Our conversion experts will design 1 free campaign for you to get maximum results – absolutely FREE! Click here to get started →
Now that you have a website and joined an affiliate network, it’s the right time to start monetizing your site with affiliate marketing.
Let’s get started!
How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?
Step 1: Create Content That Generates Affiliate Revenue
To make money with affiliate marketing, most beginners publish random content and insert affiliate links within the article.
That strategy may or may not work, but if you genuinely want to boost your affiliate revenue, you must ensure your published content reaches your target audience.
Your target audience is someone who wants to buy a product but is wondering whether or not the product is worth it.
Sometimes, the user may need help knowing which product to buy to fulfilling their needs.
As an affiliate marketer, it’s your job to help users discover the right product for their needs with high-quality content, help them make a purchasing decision, and then navigate them to the product website to complete the purchase.
Pro-Tip: Your article should target investigational intent keywords, which your target audience uses on Google to research the product they want right before purchasing.
You can check out our guide on choosing the right keywords for more details.
Step 2: Promote Your Affiliate Products in the Content
Now you know what kind of content you will produce: investigational. You’re looking for topics that revolve around your target audience searching for an answer to the problem they’re facing.
Once you’ve done your keyword research and have your content ideas, it’s time to start inserting affiliate links in your content.
How you insert your affiliate links will depend on the specific article you’re writing. Adding affiliate links to 5 different products won’t make sense if you’re doing a product review.
On the other hand, if you’re showcasing the “Top 10 Tools for Solving X,” you would want to put in multiple affiliate links to increase your chances of making more sales.
The goal is to insert your links as strategically as possible.
Here are a few tips you can use to get the most out of your affiliate links’ placement:
- Only link where appropriate: Don’t add an affiliate link if it doesn’t fit your content. This will negatively impact the user experience (UX) and cost you more lost sales in the long run.
- Add links as early as possible: If you’re showcasing many products in one article, add your affiliate products at the top of the list. Most people won’t take the time to read an entire article. You want to make sure they see your affiliate links early on.
- Get more out of your site’s space: You can use floating bars, inline banners, and sidebar widgets to promote your affiliate products. These enhance the impact of your content and lead to more sales over time.
Here’s an example of affiliate links from a post by IsItWP on the best recipe plugins for WordPress:
The list has many options, but the first few are affiliate links. This allows the user to research all the options while increasing the odds that IsItWP’s affiliate links will be seen.
Again, you want to promote your links as often, appropriately, and powerfully as you can.
Pro-Tip: Invest in an affiliate link plugin before adding hundreds of affiliate links across your site.
Imagine having to sort through and update hundreds of expired affiliate links when you have no idea where you’ve placed them on your website.
You’re looking at hours of headaches and tons of wasted profit from expired links you’d forgotten about.
Fortunately, this is one nightmare that can be avoided with an affiliate management plugin. And one of the best ones on the market is Pretty Links:
Pretty Links is an affiliate marketing management plugin that lets you keep better track of your affiliate links. It’s easy to set up, super user-friendly (even for less tech-savvy marketers) and enables you to put your marketing on auto-pilot.
It also lets you cloak affiliate links to make them look short and neat so that it’s easy to share through emails and social media platforms.
And if the day ever comes when you’re asked to update old affiliate links from your partners, you’ll be able to accomplish it in minutes, not days.
Plus, if you do find trouble, they have an amazing support team to help you at each step.
Now that you’ve created the right content and strategically placed your links (while using an affiliate management plugin), it’s time to kick things up a notch with targeted conversion campaigns.
Step 3: Turn Your Visitors Into Affiliate Customers
One of the biggest mistakes new affiliate marketers make is assuming they need to 10x their traffic to 10x their profit.
It doesn’t work that way, which is excellent news for you.
For example, let’s say you’re promoting a product on your site that pays $50 as an affiliate commission for every sale you make. And imagine that your affiliate conversion rate is 2%, meaning that for every 100 visitors you send to that website, 2 of them buy the product.
That means the CPC (cost per click) you earn is $1 per click.
(CPC = Total affiliate revenue / total traffic you sent)
Could you send 2X more visitors to the affiliate product site? Based on the CPC value, you could also double the affiliate revenue. And the best part, you don’t have to increase traffic to your site. Instead, you could set up a conversion optimization campaign to boost your revenue.
With conversion optimization software like OptinMonster, you can increase your revenue by converting more of your existing traffic into affiliate customers. Without a doubt, this is way easier than drastically growing your traffic.
Here’s how OptinMonster could help you boost your affiliate income:
a) Create a Popup Campaign That Promotes an Affiliate Product
Like it or hate it, you can’t deny that popup works!
Creating a popup campaign is the easiest way to grab your visitors’ attention and convert more of your visitors into affiliate customers.
OptinMonster provides over 50 pre-built templates to help you make the right campaign for your affiliate product. From there, we offer many targeting rules and campaign triggers to ensure you’re showing the right message to the right people at the right time in their customer journey.
This is the exact strategy Top 6 Digital used to increase their affiliate revenue by 30%.
They had a webpage on car seats to help parents choose the right one for their children. When the reader leaves this page, the following campaign would appear on their screen:
This simple campaign was hugely successful. It grabbed the audience’s attention and brought them to the affiliate product page.
b) Display Campaigns When Users are More Likely to Buy
When it comes to popup campaigns, targeting is important. You can show a popup campaign to the right users at the right time with the right targeting. For example, studies show that the best time to show a popup is when a user is about to leave your site.
With OptinMonster’s Exit Intent technology, you can show a popup that promotes an affiliate offer when your users are about to leave.
Our customers use Exit Intent along with Page-Level Targeting and see massive results. Page-level targeting allows you to create affiliate offers for specific pages on your site. So when a visitor is reading one of your articles, you can show them a campaign that highlights the EXACT affiliate product you’re promoting in that article.
Since the offer you promote in that campaign is highly targeted, it’s more likely to convert than a generic campaign.
The WordPress hosting company FlyWheel actually used page-level targeting to increase engagement by 660%.
Or take the fitness company Crossrope, for example. They grew their email list by over 900% by catching abandoning traffic with exit-intent popups.
Step 4: Optimize Your Existing Traffic for More Revenue
This next step comes from a strategy that’s driven by something called “the 80/20 rule.”
The 80/20 rule, in this case, suggests that 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your content. It’s obviously not an exact metric, but the basic principle stands firm:
Identify your highest converting content and make it a priority for affiliate campaigns.
Once you know that a particular post or video is resonating with your audience, you can create a targeted campaign with OptinMonster to increase affiliate sales.
This is a much better plan of action than blindly making campaigns for every page on your site. How do you get started?
Jump into your Google Analytics dashboard, identify the articles that bring in the most content, and then create targeted campaigns for those URLs.
And if you really want to level-up your game, you should consider getting MonsterInsights:
MonsterInsights is the world’s #1 Google Analytics (GA) plugin in the world. Many marketers love the idea of gathering data from Google Analytics, but they get confused, annoyed, or intimidated by GA’s user interface.
Rather than letting all that valuable information go to waste each month, you can get the same data delivered straight to your WordPress dashboard. This includes a review of your site’s top posts:
Once you’ve identified which posts bring the most traffic, you can optimize your content and conversion campaigns to generate more affiliate revenue.
This strategy will ensure that you’re always prioritizing your most profitable content. That means you can save time and increase revenue as efficiently as possible.
Step 5: Grow Affiliate Revenue from Your Email List
No matter how you look at it, email marketing is still the best way to earn passive income. All of the other methods fall short in some way.
SEO is great until Google changes its algorithm and your rankings tank. Paid ads can bring quick results if you have the budget to fail your way upwards. And even then, paid ads require constant care and attention to keep conversion rates high.
But your email list is traffic that’s always yours.
Plus, it’s full of people who are interested in your niche and have already engaged with your content. That means they’ll make an ideal audience for your affiliate marketing campaigns.
The only problem with email marketing is that most business owners struggle to grow their contact list to the point where monetization makes sense.
That’s where OptinMonster comes in:
OptinMonster is hands down the best way to create conversion campaigns.
Similar to how you use conversion campaigns to send traffic to your affiliate links, you can also use them to grow your email list.
You can create targeted popups, floating bars, fullscreen welcome mats, and more to entice your site’s traffic with lead magnets.
In exchange for these lead magnets, your users give you their email addresses. Here’s an example of an optin campaign you can use to grow your list:
Not sure what is a lead magnet or how to make one? Check out this post in 69 lead magnet ideas you can start using today.
Once you’ve built an email list, you can send automated campaigns with your affiliate links embedded in them.
Make sure that you read this post on how to create an affiliate email marketing campaign before getting started.
Whether you’re using your email list to drive more traffic to your high-converting posts or sending users directly to an affiliate link, email marketing is a great way to improve your revenue.
And, again, to grow your list, the best tool for the job is OptinMonster. In fact, check out these success stories from some of our clients:
- How Adam Enfroy Got Over 11k Subscribers
- American Bird Conservancy Grew Their Lead Collection by 1000%
- AutoAnything Increased Daley Email Optins 2.5x
Get Started With OptinMonster Today!
Our conversion experts will design 1 free campaign for you to get maximum results – absolutely FREE! Click here to get started →
These are just a few examples of people who grew their list with OptinMonster. You can have similar results and make even more money with affiliate marketing.
We hope you found this article helpful. If so, you may be interested in reading the following posts:
- Affiliate Marketing Statistics All Marketers Must Know
- Best Tools for Affiliate Marketers
- How to Increase Affiliate Sales by 30% With One Simple Strategy
- Content Marketing Examples
- Sales Promotion Examples
Are you ready to start making more money with affiliate marketing? Sign up for your risk-free OptinMonster account today!
Thanks for reading this article – I hope you found it helpful.
I wanted to let you know about our powerful Exit Intent® technology that converts abandoning website visitors into email subscribers and customers. Typically 70% of the people who visit your website will leave and never return, meaning all those marketing efforts to reach them have gone to waste.
OptinMonster’s Exit Intent® technology detects user behavior and prompts them with a targeted campaign at the precise moment they are about to leave.
You can unlock this powerful technology 100% free when you purchase our OptinMonster Pro plan.
Get started with OptinMonster today and see why 1,000,000+ choose OptinMonster to get more subscribers and customers.
Thomas Griffin
President of OptinMonster
This is really helpful! It’s very encouraging to hear that even with starting out small it’s possible to grow and make lots in the future! Thanks for sharing your journey!!
Awesome content. I checked Optinmonster University, it says enroll for free. When I click on it, it looks like it’s not free. ???!!!
Hello George! I am looking at the OptinMonster University page and see the confusion. It says, “Get OptinMonster University FREE with the purchase of ANY OptinMonster plan.” Feel free to contact the support staff if you have any further questions regarding OptinMonster University or our paid plans.
Nice post guys.
I saw you had the Thirsty Affiliates plugin on your dashboard. I love that plugin. I’ve found it a great way to organize all of my affiliate links, and it’s also really handy for creating your own personal link tracking and performance metrics.
I’m all for making money whilst you sleep, and affiliate marketing is an epic way to do that. So many people don’t really understand just how crazy lucrative it can be., but for those that do, they can totally crush it.
Thanks again for the post.
Peace out.
Rowan Clifford.
Hey Rowan! I’m interested in getting into affiliate marketing any tips or tricks that you have DM me through [email protected].
Chase,
Here are a few more articles about affiliate marketing. I hope these help!
Earnings Per Click: How to Win Big at Affiliate Marketing
How to Use Social Media for Affiliate Marketing
Every one of us needs money for our living and fulfill our everyday expenses. People are searching for business ideas to earn some additional income. It’s really useful for people. Thank you.
I’m new to this. I’m going to take your advice and jump right in. If there is anyone who want to mentor me or hold my hand thru the process. Let me know lol ? #nervousbeginner
You got this, Porsha! If you’re looking for some tools to make things easier, check out our list of the best WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers and these affiliate link tracking plugins.
Thank you for this. I am just starting my research and your article broke things down really well for me.
Great article! I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for around 2 years now. The feeling of seeing commissions earned the moment I wake up is always very exciting.
Thanks very much for being so clear about affiliate marketing I need to have a website so I can start min
I don’t have any website cause I can’t afford it right now but I want to join affiliate marketing program right away. Is it possible?
Hey Becky! There are ways to do affiliate marketing without a website: promoting through social media or online forums/communities, creating an ebook, YouTube, and email marketing, to name a few. However, we do recommend having your own website.
Great post, I think the most relevant advice for me was to stick to only a handful of affiliate offers.
Nice article, what if I got a lot of visitors and there is no conversion at all, what would we advice me to do.
Hey! In that case, we would definitely recommend running a few A/B split tests. You can play around with your campaigns to see what’s working and what isn’t. Then, with the analytical data after your test, you can fine-tune your campaigns to get more conversions.
Check out this article for more information on how to run an A/B split test.
Am interested in affiliate marketing but an a little confused on how I should get started,pls guide me
Hey, and thanks for reading 🙂 As the post suggests, you’ll want to start a blog and grow your audience to start. The only way affiliate marketing will work reliably is if you can get your affiliate links in front of an interested audience. Create a content-driven strategy, grow your email list, and follow the tutorial above to grow!
Hi there, great article I just want to ask… let’s say I set a website up and stark promoting products and solving a problem, then I’m just not sure how I get links to a product and then if they buy that knows the link came from my site? Also if I collect emails, and then what do I send to these guys exactly?
Hey Kitt, Great question! When you sign up for another company’s affiliate program, they’ll provide you with special links specifically for your account with them. Then you write blog posts, eBooks, or other text-based content, you’ll embed those affiliate links. When users click those links and make a purchase (usually within 30 days of the initial click), you’ll get a commission from the sale! With emails, you’ll want to be much more careful and double-check your email provider’s guidelines for sharing affiliate links. If you do it too much (or in a way that comes off as “spammy,” your email provider will likely flag or suspend your account. One good way around this is to send emails to posts and pages with your affiliate links. Hope that answers your question and if you have any others, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
I really thank you all for this beautiful information
You’re very welcome! We’re happy you enjoyed it 🙂
Greetings, thank you very much for this write up. I have read through the content and it’s self explanatory.
Please what I will like to know is how much will it cost me to create the website and the increase my audience.
Thanks
Hello! The cost of your site will depend on the platform you use and the added tools you want. I recommend this resource on how to build a WordPress website. That’s definitely your most affordable option and has lots of plugins to give your site some really cool features.
Thanks for sharing this great information, such as a great article and valuable thoughts about Affiliate marketing.