21 Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make money from a website, no matter how new or old it is.

It’s hard, people say. Don’t let this mislead you. You won’t have trouble making money even if you don’t create products. Promoting other people’s products effectively is a creative way to make money with your website.

This 21 Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners guide for beginners will give you 21 tips to help you become an effective affiliate marketer.

Let’s get started.

1. Show That Your Products Are Working

As an affiliate, you have the responsibility of helping your visitors find solutions to their problems.

Showing them the product in action is a great way to get them to buy. Nothing is more satisfying than seeing their problem solved in action.

There are two options available if you want to know how to do it:

• Video – If it’s physical (meaning you have the product in hand), you can use any camera that you own (your Smartphone will also work). You’ll need a screen recording device if it’s digital like a Kindle e-book or other software. Vimeo is my favorite. There are many tools available.
• Screenshots and images – If it’s not digital, your Smartphone camera should work. You’ll need to use a screen capture tool if it’s digital. Although Snagit is the most versatile tool available, there are many other options. Skitch is available from Evernote, and Jing is available from TechSmith.

2. Don’t Promote Junk Products

Affiliate marketing is all about getting the right products out there to make you money.

You’ll have challenges selling products that don’t solve the problems of your customers. Be selective when choosing affiliate sites.

You might make a sale or more. Refunds make it unlikely that you will receive the commission. Most affiliate programs lock or hold your commissions until the refund period expires. This is usually 30 days.

It is easy to identify low-quality products. These products will receive low ratings and negative reviews both from customers and website owners (like bloggers or affiliate marketers).

Find out before you promote a product. You might also consider purchasing it yourself.

3. Create High-Quality Content That Helps

Website content is likely to be your top source of traffic, leads, and sales as an affiliate marketer.

Google Search and social media are the best places to get traffic. You will need to have content to rank in search results and to share on social media.

Landing pages and opt-in forms are necessary to generate leads. They will also contain a lot of high-quality content. You can’t get people to click your affiliate links if you don’t have any content.

Your content must be useful to your readers if it is to succeed. It won’t get traffic if you create content for the sake of creating it. Such a piece won’t lead to any sales. You will not even generate a single penny.

4. Pricing is Not a Game

It doesn’t matter if it’s $40 or $400. You will still make money if your product solves a real problem. You’ll be fine even if the commission rate is good, for instance 30% or more.

A product with a price tag of 50 dollars and a 25% commission rate will earn you $12.50 per sale. That’s $375 per month if you can make one sale per day. It’s possible to sell one product per day. You can make 5, 10, 20, or more sales per day.

Don’t let the price tag dictate what products you sell. You’ll make more sales if your product is problem-solving.

5. Create Product Reviews

Review of products is the most popular type of content for affiliate marketing. Each affiliate website should have at least one of them.

Why? They work. Everyone reads them. A Vendasta statistic post revealed that 92% of consumers read online reviews.

A 2013 survey by ZenDesk and Dimensional Research reveals that 90% of customers believe online reviews influence their purchasing decisions.

It’s amazing to think of the millions of people who use Amazon to search for products. If you don’t have reviews on your website yet, it is a good idea to start.

6. Create Product Roundups

A product roundup is the most straightforward type of content that you can create for your affiliate website. This is essentially a list of products, and a summary with two or three sentences.

These lists can be based on broad topics. You could choose to list the top 100 WordPress plugins or best video games. You can include affiliate links for as many products you wish.

7. Create a Resource Page

A resource page, like the product roundup, is also easy to create. It is basically a list of everything needed to reach their goals. If you are in marketing (specifically WordPress), you may choose to go with this…WordPress Resource: Everything You Need to Build Successful Websites.

Another option is to list all resources you know and call the page “Recommended Resources”.

8. Create Product Comparisons

The product comparisons are similar to roundups but with some differences. It’s also more specific. You can have a specific product in mind, like WordPress SEO plugins.

The A vs. B comparison is a simple way to compare the features and differences. You might also want to include a section in which you share your experiences and maybe your recommendations.

9. Create a Page Called “What’s Your Budget?”

Let’s take, for example, a website about gaming headsets. Let’s assume that you have six price categories.

• $25-50
• $51-75
• $76-100
• $101-150
• $151-200
• $200+

Unless you wish to, you won’t be required to review the products that you feature. You will only need a summary section, which will look like the following:

How do you budget?

It takes only a few minutes to make. You can also copy the template for each product and fill in the gaps.

10. Create a Buyer’s Guide

Affiliate sites and blogs often overlook a buyer’s guide for a variety of reasons. It is an important page that website visitors often visit.

This page is essentially a guide that explains what you should look for in a product. It is a great place to recommend the best affiliate products.

11. Relevancy is Key!

You are correct…relevancy matters.

If your niche is “losing weight after pregnancy”, it’s no use writing a blog post on how to make money using YouTube.

It would be a complete waste of time. Your content should always be helpful to your readers.

12. Make Use of the Expert Roundup Post for Affiliates

Expert roundups are posts in which a blogger asks industry experts a question and then publishes their answers. These posts were extremely popular for a number of years. They are still very popular.

Instead of asking affiliates advice-based questions such as “how do I lose 10 pounds?”, you ask them product-related questions. You can even become an affiliate for the products mentioned.

Here’s an example.

Robbie Richards is in digital marketing. He created a roundup post in which 105 professionals shared their top keyword research tools.

This list includes 105 experts. This is a lot of content. Most people won’t be able to read every word. And all you would need is a leaderboard.

Affiliate Leaderboard

You can place your affiliate links here, as it is what everyone wants to read (instead of reading the entire post).

13. SEO Traffic Is Still Number One

Start typing… There are many SEO strategies that you can implement to make your website more visible.

14. Start Building Your Mailing List from Day One

Email marketing can bring in $44 for every $1 invested. This is a staggering ROI of 4400%. Expert marketers recommend that you start collecting emails as soon possible.

Pat Flynn offers this guide to Smart Passive Income, which includes videos, if you are still not getting started.

You might need to try new strategies if you’re not seeing great results. Backlinko offers 17 strategies that you may not have heard of before.

15. Create Informational Content

For generating sales, product reviews and affiliate content are great.

You should also consider creating other types of content. You should create content that is more advice-based than commercial.

Why?

This content will increase traffic, authority, and high-quality backlinks.

What is non-commercial content, you ask?

It’s basically everything that’s not affiliate product reviews, comparisons, etc. Here are some examples:

• How to Lose Belly Fat in 7 Days: The Definitive Guide!
• 17 Marketing Tactics that Will Get You Blown Away (and Make You Think Twice About the Content Strategy You Implement)

16. SEO is Not Enough

SEO is a complicated game. It may take several months before you see any real changes in the SERPs. Sometimes it can take up to a whole year before you see organic traffic numbers rise into the hundreds of thousands.

This is why I suggest looking into other reliable traffic sources such as social media and paid advertising.

Google AdWords or Facebook Ads can be a great option if you have a good marketing budget. If you don’t have traffic, you’ll need to do it the hard way like most people.

I recommend that you learn about alternative traffic sources if you wish. Neil Patel has a great guide you should follow.

17. Create a Membership Affiliate Site

These fees are often associated with memberships or other services.

Wealthy Affiliate, for example, offers training, community, domains, and state-of-the-art hosting service. The monthly Subscription is $49, and there’s a discounted annual option.

The commission rate for affiliates is approximately 50%. Affiliates get $23.50 per sale. This is recurring, as long as the referred member continues to pay.

Take a moment to think about it.

You’ll have 12 referrals if you can make 1 sale per month for one year. This is $282 per month the moment the referrals are up to 12. This is a good start. It’s possible. However, it is not a great way to make a lot of money.

Imagine if you got 10 referrals per month instead. You’ll have 120 referrals in a year. This would amount to $2820 monthly and $33,840 annually.

This is more than many people make. That’s more than the minimum wage in many places.

You can find passive income in a high-quality product that has a recurring price point. There are membership-based programs for all niches.

If you have one, I recommend that you at least see how it works. Don’t bother if it’s not great.

18. If Feasible, Offer Bonuses

For a higher conversion rate, bonuses or incentives are a great way to get it, particularly if the incentive complements the product that you are promoting.

Let’s take, for example, the promotion of an online tool to help with SEO research. An eBook that teaches people how to use the product would be a great bonus.

A training program for weight loss is another option. You could also offer a document that details the cases of people who have lost significant weight. This is a great bonus. This would be great inspiration.

You have many potential bonuses that you could offer. It’s up to you to choose one. Think. Be creative.

Personally, I have a choice of bonuses a new member can select from. Some may be complete newbies while others may already have gained knowledge in some areas. I have courses and books available to help according the level of knowledge. My bonus page HERE!

19. Use Video in Your Content

YouTube has made video almost an essential part of our lives. Some people won’t click on a link without first checking if it is video. This is pretty insane. People love watching videos.

Affiliates should consider adding a video to their reviews or comparisons.

20. Use an Affiliate Link Plugin

A plugin for affiliate links will allow you to manage your links easily, and also help you to cloak them.

You know how awful affiliate links can be. These links have strange tracking codes at their ends that make no sense. A plugin can help you do it easily.

Using a plugin, you can turn this link: Yourwebsite.com/ref?aff_id39r82km to something like: Yourwebsite.com/buy/product

It’s pretty cool, right? It only requires a few clicks.

There are many plugins available. ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Link are just a few of the good options.

However, I highly recommend Easy Affiliate Links. It’s been a great tool that a lot of affiliate marketers have used.

21. Use Scarcity in Your Marketing

Use phrases like “Only 9 slots remaining”, “Only 21 more hours before we close our early bird offer”, etc.

Scarcity marketing can be a powerful way to get people signed up for your mailing list and to purchase your affiliate product.

You may need a tool to make this work. You will need this if you plan to use a countdown clock. I recommend Thrive Ultimatum for this purpose. It contains everything you could need.

However, you don’t need to use a tool. You can use phrases like “only three left in stock” to get the job done.

Conclusion

Are you looking to become a successful affiliate marketer in 2021 and beyond? Then follow the tips given in this post and keep the ball rolling.