Affiliate marketing is nothing more than the process of promoting a company’s product(s) or services for commissions. It has been around and people have been making money with it for a long time and I believe it will stay with us forever.
There are affiliate marketers out there who make millions of dollars a year from their affiliate marketing efforts and there is absolutely nothing that is preventing you from succeeding like them. As a beginner, you might not make millions in your first year but i am confident you can make enough money with it.
To make money with affiliate marketing you need three things which are;
- A product to promote for commissions
- A place to promote the product (a website)
- Targeted traffic
It can be overwhelming to create an affiliate website to make money with especially if you are a complete beginner who knows little or nothing about the field of affiliate marketing. Chances are that you will fail in your first few attempts but success will eventually come. Like anything else, you need to be patient and don’t expect overnight success.
In this article, I’m not going to give you a step by step guide on making money with affiliate marketing but i will give you some helpful guidelines you can follow for you to succeed.
If I was to create an affiliate site to make money with today, I would do the following.
- Find an affiliate product to promote that pays a commission of $30+ per sale you refer. You will need less traffic and conversions to make a good commission. You will make $900/month if you only manage to sale one product per day and that can easily be achieved if you have a targeted traffic.
- The affiliate product should be targeted at what we can call “a desperate buyer”. Desperate in the sense that they are struggling with a problem that they desperately need to find a solution for. Think of someone who has acne, someone who is overweight etc. These kinds of people will have no problem spending money on a product if it can solve their problems. Products targeting such people are what you need to find if you are serious about making money with affiliate marketing.
- The product should have enough search traffic. Affiliate sites mostly rely on Google for traffic and it is therefore important that the product you are promoting has enough search traffic. If people are not searching for the product on Google, chances of you making money with it are next to none. Just head over to Google keyword planner and check the traffic potential of the keyword of the product you are promoting. Anything more than 1,000 exact match searches per month are enough.
How to create the website
To promote an affiliate product for commissions, you definitely need a website. Here is what you need to do to get started creating the website.
- Get a domain name. It won’t cost you more than $10 to buy a domain name from Namecheap or any other registrar.
- Get web hosting account from Hostgator, Blue Host or hosting company of your choice.
- Install wordpress (a website creation software that easily enables you to post, edit, add images to articles and publish).
When the website is ready, you need to post content that is incredibly useful for the reader. Since you are promoting an affiliate product that you intend to make money with, you will most likely be creating a review of it. You will write as much information about the product as possible and why it is an excellent buy for the person who might need it for one reason or another. You are pitching the product to the reader and you would do everything possible to convince him to buy it in order for you to earn a commission from the sale but that does not mean lying about what the product can do. You need to be honest and don’t lie about the product to convince someone to buy it.
How to get traffic to the website
Without traffic, the website is useless and you won’t make a penny with it. You will need lots of targeted traffic to make money with the website from affiliate commissions but how do you drive traffic to the website? Here are few of the options available to you:
- Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is definitely not the fastest way to get traffic to a website but can work wonders in the long run. SEO involves optimizing a website for Google and other search engines and the goal is to rank the website on the first page of Google for its target keywords and get search traffic to it. This can be achieved with on-page optimization and off-page optimization techniques like link building. SEO traffic is free but it’s the hardest to get.
- Google Ads. Using Google Ads is one of the fastest ways to get traffic to a website but unfortunately not the cheapest by any means. You need to spend money to get traffic from Google ads and that is definitely not an option if you don’t have money to experiment with. If you can convert a large portion of that traffic into sales of your affiliate product, go ahead with it as you will be making more than you are spending on the ads. It makes sense to spend $20 a day on Google ads to make $100 a day in which case your profit is $80 a day.
- Facebook Ads. You can also use Facebook ads to get traffic to your affiliate website. Facebook ads are not free but cost less than Google ads. The goodness with Facebook ads is that you can target people in terms of age, sex, interests etc.
The above are the basic things it takes to create an affiliate website that you can make money with. I hope you have learnt something from it and good luck if you are ready to get started making money online with affiliate marketing.
Had to go back and look for a few useful points on affiliate marketing, then I bumped into this post. Very helpful and informative. Hope to implement a few things I’ve picked from the article. Thank you for the rich content.
Thanks alot Walter for the FREE info you have shared selflessly.
I have followed everything you have LEFT ME HANGING.
I created the website.
I have identified the line of products to promote
I have driven in the traffic to view my content and make a purchase.
Now , how do I get PAID MY COMMISSION?
Do I sign agreements with the products owners or companies?
Hi Musa. I’m glad this post by Ahmed inspired you.
If you’re already promoting products, the company you’re promoting should give you info about how to get the commision e.g. if you were promoting HostGator, then you would get clear information on the HostGator affiliate portal on how to get the commission.
I hope this helps.
thank you so much for the hard work you put to give us all this info on how to make money.
Information comes first before succeeding…am grateful that we have Kenyans in the field too making a killing online where income is not discriminated according to nationality. thanks guys….thanks Walter. Lots of inspiration. My Blogspot blog has some great info that I have been gleaning about making money online….maybe someone would like to check it out and acquire some knowledge. Cheers
Thanks Adam for your comment. I do my best. I wish you well with your blog too. Blessings.
Great piece Walter; i am ab blogger and am promoting several products through affiliate marketing but it is so unfortunate that it seems not to be working in Kenya well.
Does affiliate marketing work in Kenya and how?
Hi Josey
It works perfectly. You need to spot the right products and be able to appeal to its audience. I do that a lot on this blog and it’s been great so far.
Thanks.
Hi Josey,
Affiliate marketing works in Kenya as I have been doing it for over a year. However, there are many things that you need to master for you to be successful. For example, what niche have you chosen to enter and promote products. The competitors in the market, keyword research, how much that product sells among other things. Do you promote local products or international products? You can visit bloggingtogether.com for more information and answers
Thanks Alfred for your comment. Very true.
Nice article, and thanks for the guidelines. i will put them into use.
Thanks Andrew. Much appreciated 🙂
Hey Ahmed.What happened to your blog?
Thanks for the information. Very useful. I am considering promoting educational material. I have found what I think is great affiliate programs. I will be sharing them soon in my blog.
Thanks for your comment Ole Kimiti. I am glad to hear about the great affiliate programs. I hope to read about them soon 🙂
Thanks for the info. I recently started an affiliate program with commission junction (cj.com) and I already earned through ads only even without a website. However, I would like to know if there is anyone in Kenya who is with CJ because I wonder if its possible to withdraw cash from that site when you are in Kenya. We are not among the listed countries..
Great Article man, very Informative.
Thanks, Kelvin.
A great piece of information there! I am a newbie and hope to benefit from this article. I believe I will succeed in this. To my Tutor Walter Akolo, thanks man for the classes. I now have the energy to propel me.
Ahmed,
Thanks alot for sharing this article on affiliate marketing.It has been very eyeopening.I started my business blog recently and am looking to earn though affiliate marketing.May I request to do this using an ebook link that you may have on my blog?Also what would your commission be please?
Regards
Dorothy
That’s a wonderful article Ahmed!! I am encouraged.i would like to do affiliate marketing.meanwhile,please direct me to your website and if you hold classes on the same please let me know because i need to be guided on how i can get started.
Regards.
Thank you for reading, Agnes and i am glad you are encouraged to do affiliate marketing. My website is already indicated here but in case you didn’t see it, it is kenyablogger.com. I don’t hold classes at the moment but we can arrange for one or get my Ebook.
Muktar I do not believe the link for the ebook is working, it returns a 404 error
Informative. I have tried affiliate marketing for some years and that was my very first interest when I learned of online income. I failed miserably and hope to learn from you Ahmed Mukhtar and Walter Akolo. I have always been interested in passive income online solutions that can work for Kenyans
I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you. There is a lot of excellent resources on Walter’s blog that can help you to succeed.
Great article. affiliate marketing is the way to go online. been making a few $$ online with gdi affiliate marketing.
I’m glad it worked for you!
Great stuff,There is no secret to starting an internet business while watching television after supper. (There are the thousands of free e-books that will show you how to do that)
However, quickly throwing up a website and hoping to make some money is one thing. Building a profit pulling business that automatically pumps money into your bank account is an entirely different thing.
I know it may seem overwhelming and even a bit incredible, especially if you are a beginner, but you can really earn a full time living with Affiliate Marketing where basically you get paid to promote the other peoples’ products and services. Get a free trial account @GDI today. ASk me how?
Hi Nixon,
please provide a way I can reach you to learn about affiliate marketing via GDI. Thanks in advance
hey Richad Otolo.The first best way to reach me is to click on my name.
The second best way is to call 0725724555
What a great article. I like it to bits. Thanks Ahmed for the guide.
I’m glad you liked it, Rono.
Good guest post Ahmed.Also your blog has valuable information on affiliate information.Perfect for newbies.
I found this article quite helpful. Actually affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money online. You just start a nice website, promote it accordingly and there you go,,,the money usually comes in after a few months and from then onwards it never stops. You make money even when you’re asleep. Nice article and kudos to the writer for putting it together.
Thank you for the feedback, James. Affiliate marketing pays but like anything else you need to put in effort.