The ultimate internet marketing dream – sit by the beach somewhere on a remote island sipping a margarita while wads of cash are credited to your bank account, aka passive income.
It’s a beautiful dream, but I’m sure you’ve finally figured out that passive income isn’t truly passive. That’s why we’re writing this, to help you with one form of “passive” income today – affiliate marketing. Because these days, you can still earn money from affiliate marketing, but the rules have changed.
This post will save you hours, days, and months of frustration; show you the right path, and help you make more money via affiliate marketing in 2024. This is what you need to do to succeed. Let’s start with the basics.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where businesses reward affiliates (individuals or companies) for driving traffic or sales to their products or services through the affiliate’s promotional efforts.
Essentially, it’s a way for content creators, bloggers, influencers, and marketers to earn a commission by promoting someone else’s products. Affiliates use a unique affiliate link to track the sales or leads generated from their marketing efforts. This model allows businesses to reach a wider audience while enabling affiliates to monetize their platforms and expertise.
What is an affiliate link?
An affiliate link is a unique URL provided by a business to its affiliates. This link contains the affiliate’s ID or username, allowing the business to track traffic or sales generated from that specific link. When someone clicks on the affiliate link and makes a purchase, the affiliate earns a commission. These links are often embedded in blog posts, social media content, emails, or websites, making it easy for the affiliate to promote products or services while ensuring they receive credit for any resulting sales.
How do people make money from affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is all about earning commissions by promoting other people’s products or services. Here’s the basic process of how you make money through affiliate marketing:
- Join an affiliate program: You sign up for an affiliate program offered by a company or through an affiliate network, gaining access to a unique affiliate link for their products or services.
- Promote the products: You share your affiliate link through your blog, website, social media, email marketing, or other platforms, recommending the products to your audience.
- Earn commissions: When someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission. The amount you earn is typically a percentage of the sale or a fixed fee per action (like signing up or subscribing).
This process allows you to monetize your online presence by recommending products or services that your audience will find valuable, making affiliate marketing a popular way to generate income online.
Now, before we give you all the insider tricks, you need to go through the most common affiliate marketing myths you need to avoid:
Affiliate marketing myths debunked
1. It’s too competitive
Some people assume that affiliate marketing is just too competitive to make money and that there’s no way to create a profit because you have to be louder than everyone else in a crowded marketplace.
Actually, the opposite is true.
Competition is a sign of user demand, indicating that there’s tons of money to be made in the industry.
According to a report by Emarketer, total online sales in Australia are set to reach $32 billion in 2017 – up 18% from 2014. The proliferation of new technologies will only continue to fuel the increase in consumption, providing publishers and merchants with even more opportunities.
2. It’s only about niche product targeting
It’s important to observe that many publishers rely on more than one product to sustain and grow their affiliate revenue.
Publishers need to be found to be profitable, which can be achieved using earned media (i.e., organic search and paid media channels through content), otherwise, targeting very niche products which aren’t found will set you back from day one.
So this is a big myth, as it’s only after you’ve found and have your own following that you can create a program that advertisers will demand and consider partnering with.
As an advertiser, you should take the time to get to know your publishers. This can help with creating flexible incentives for their audience, which can be mutually beneficial.
3. Affiliate marketing links aren’t good for SEO
One of the primary concerns for affiliate marketers is about link placement on their sites from an SEO perspective, given Google’s link scheme guidelines. The myth goes that websites may be penalized if they have a paid link from another site.
This is not true.
It’s important to understand that all SEO guidelines are proportional to the clout of your business (with both a user and commercial intent in mind). For example, if you had a new low-on-content e-commerce or blog site that was plastered with different advertisement links to external sites and prevented users from either reading a blog post or making a purchase, then sure, that site may be deemed untrustworthy and penalized. However, if you’ve got a well-built up site, it’s hardly overusing ads.
There are also technical parameters that you can incorporate into your affiliate marketing process as standard to prevent paid links from being crawled. These include:
- Using a masked URL or a tracking URL for campaign tracking
- Implementing a 302 redirect for all affiliate links to the site
- Including a disallow line command for the URL path you’re using within the robots.txt file
- Inserting a ‘no follow’ link attribute across all affiliate URLs
Ultimately, an affiliate site needs to be promoted and maintained, just like any other high-quality site.
4. People who use coupons don’t spend as much
We’re not talking about your grandma’s coupons here… these are coupons for the online community.
You can increase your customer’s basket value by providing them with the deal they are looking for and understanding that people who are looking to spend more are always going to go for an attractive offer.
A good tactic is to look at what your average order value is, round it up and then offer a percentage off this amount (for example, 5% off a $50 purchase or 10% off a $100 purchase).
Whatever your customers spend, make sure you’re offering them a discount and make them feel like they’re getting a good deal. It’s a core component of affiliate marketing.
Even if customers are already active on a dedicated coupon site, you can check that you have better deals than your competitors. This can encourage previous buyers to make another purchase and also attract new consumers.
5. Previous buyers can’t be persuaded to make a repeat purchase
As mentioned above, everyone loves a great deal. But if you’ve read stats about decreasing customer loyalty online, you might be convinced that previous buyers won’t return to your site. This is another myth.
When you think about it, someone who has purchased on your site after seeing a good deal is more than likely to purchase on your site again. The game-changer in this is actually how you personalize coupons and create better recurring user experiences.
A great example is offering customers a discount code on a special occasion, like their birthday, that’s exclusive to them and therefore likely to get used.
6. Offering people incentives to sign up to your newsletter won’t work
Emails have a longer content shelf life than paid ads in general and are more trustworthy because they’re a permission-based marketing scheme. According to Get Response, if you’ve got a big mailing list, and your email open and click-through rates are either reaching or exceeding the benchmarks (see the below image). That means you’re probably an excellent candidate for offering incentives through email marketing.
But should you? Maybe… it all comes down to credibility, credibility, credibility. If you can prove that the ads aren’t shaping the content that you’re sending out, that you have clear user guidelines and that you aren’t taking advantage of your authority, then this could be an extremely scalable avenue – especially if you work with affiliate networks.
Leading publisher powerhouses such as BuzzFeed increasingly put product affiliate links into their newsletters and are reaping the benefits of their blended content commerce monetization strategies – for instance, their yearly Christmas gift guides.
7. You need to have managed many affiliate programs to succeed
Charles Ngo, a prolific affiliate marketer, rolls his eyes when newbies ask him questions such as, ‘How do I get started?’ or ‘What tracking tool should I be using?’ It’s always nice to have a coach or mentor, but there’s so much information online, from YouTube videos, blogs and guides to offline events (including meet-ups) that you can take advantage of if you just open your eyes.
Once you have this, it’s all about working to build relationships and improving your affiliate product until it reaches the ‘aha’ moment to generate new and returning customers.
The difference between a good and a great affiliate marketer is not how much you know (although you need to know the basics), it’s how well you can execute your program. There are times when not having the right setup, expectations and conviction can hold you back from succeeding, but this is no reason to be discouraged. You only reap the rewards from what you sow.
8. Affiliate networks can make you rich quickly
Just like all other channels, affiliate networks and affiliate marketing programs – especially new programs – take time and effort. If you were thinking that all you would need to do is set up a site, choose an affiliate program or network and then get on your way, well, I’m sorry… but you’re deeply mistaken.
Affiliate marketing relies on bringing the right partners and fostering the right relationships. Do this by:
- Bringing on new partner programs
- Seeking out better and more effective partnerships
- Devising a content strategy for up-to-date and fresh information
- Effectively promoting these programs
At Commission Factory, we tell our clients that it takes anywhere from three to six months to gather enough data to see the effectiveness of our client campaigns and strategic suggestions on improving the return on ad spend. So think at least a few months ahead.
Insider tips for affiliate marketing
1. Pick the right niche
While picking a niche is a relatively simple task, most people never get past this step. The problem is most people get stuck in the perfection trap and fuss over doing everything just right.
Spoiler alert: it’s never going to be perfect!
Here’s what you should do instead:
Though picking a niche is important it’s not vital to the success of your affiliate site. In fact, you can make money in pretty much ANY niche. The only driving factor is whether you’re actually willing to put in the work.
So, when you’re starting a niche site – first think if you can really write 30k words of content. If you can’t do only this then you can’t write the 100k that’s going to follow.
On another note, we ecommend checking out this Reddit group called ‘Just Start’:
2. Choose the right product(s)
For most affiliate marketers, this is the hardest part, but it’s an important first step. Generally, you can promote physical products, software, services, or courses. And note that those three categories are quite broad.
For example, physical products can be books, clothes, or fitness equipment. You’re only limited by your own imagination. The question is, how can you choose the right product(s)?
To answer this question, you need to find out what your audience’s goals are or what they’re trying to accomplish. That way, you can recommend products that can help them accomplish their goals. The simplest way to decide what your audience wants to achieve is by asking them. You can do this in one or all of the following ways – notice how it’s eerily similar to deciding topics for your content:
- Ask readers who have subscribed to your email list
- Discover their goals by creating a survey
- Read some feedback on current posts through emails or comments
- Visit forums they’re active on
Remember that your final goal isn’t to choose products that offer the most commission, but products that will truly help your audience.
To give you some ideas, consider the following sites in diverse niches doing affiliate marketing. You can visit them later too for inspiration.
Landlordology is a real estate site.
Lucas Hall was inspired by Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income to start his own “resources page” on his website. He promotes legal services for property owners, repairs and cleaning services, and real estate books.
Julie Fagan runs Peanut Butter Fingers, a site about food, fitness, family, and travel.
She is largely an Amazon affiliate and promotes handbags, shoes, supplements, fitness books, fitness equipment, soundtracks, etc in her weekly column “Things I’m Loving Friday.” Sometimes, as a certified personal trainer, she writes about a workout routine and includes affiliate links to what she wore – shoes, headbands, tank tops – at the end of the post.
Remember I mentioned choosing products or services that help your audience achieve their goals. That means what your audience needs may not even be products or services in your niche.
For example, Just a Girl and Her Blog is primarily a home decor site, and she makes money by promoting certain products or services as an affiliate.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that she’s an affiliate for only home improvement services, home security systems, and the likes. Instead, prior to stopping her monthly income reports, her biggest affiliate revenue often came from Bluehost, a web hosting provider.
Just a Girl and Her Blog income report for June 2016
That emphasizes how important it is to give your audience what they want and not what you think they want or products and services that will bring you the highest commissions. And it means your highest revenue-generating affiliate product or service may not be related to your niche. Choose the right product.
3. Create and promote valuable content
If you’ve used Google to do a search for reviews of products or services for a while, I’m sure you encountered reviews that were written solely for the affiliate commission.
Typically, they’re reviews praising the product and listing, with little commentary, the features of the product you can easily find on the product’s official page. Such reviews may have worked ten years ago, but they’re old school now.
To find major success with promoting affiliate offers, you need to write helpful product reviews. Here’s what I mean:
4. Show how you use the product to achieve your goals
Here you’re not just saying “hey, this product is great, purchase it with my link,” but you’re saying “this product is great and here’s how I use it to achieve x, y, and z.”
This bonds and builds trust with your audience. Because they’ll see you truly care about them and their problems and you’re not just after the affiliate commission. Here’s an example of such review by Authority Hacker.
If you read through you’ll see in depth, how they use the tool – Ahrefs – to achieve their goals for their blog(s). Also, they mention what they don’t like about the product upfront, and even though it’s not a lot, it adds credibility to the review since there’s hardly a perfect product. Embedding a video tutorial also makes it easier for others who may prefer to consume audio-visual content.
The review is so successful that it ranks at #1 for “Ahrefs review.”
Aim for that level of content and better.
5. Include a successful case study
If you haven’t used the product you’re recommending, you may opt for this. Social proof is an important component of copywriting, so you’re likely familiar with it.
However, if you’re partnering with an influencer as an affiliate of their product, you may not need to try it before recommending it to your audience. Mine customer testimonials or case studies on the product’s page for one, two, or more stories you can use to promote the product as legit. Plus, when writing a product review showing how you use a product, you can add case studies or testimonials of other successful users of the product who are not you.
Before you can partner with an influencer, build a relationship with them, and grow your email list to a decent number of subscribers, say 5,000 to 10,000 contacts at least.
While sending out emails promoting affiliate offers to your list, it’s good practice to A/B test them. After you’ve chosen what part you want to test – subject line, pre-header, call-to-action – create two separate versions. To be successful, iContact recommends:
“Send one version to 10% of your list, and send the other to another 10%. Then analyze the results. Hit the remaining 80% with the more successful email.”
Split testing will ensure that you’ll discover which content resonates well with your audience for promoting the affiliate offer. Sometimes you may discover that the content (email in this case) without social proof in form of a case study performs better than one with the case study because your audience trusts you not to try to make a quick buck from them by recommending a poor product.
The importance of creating epic content and building an email list rears its ugly head again. There’s no escaping these, even as an affiliate marketer. Don’t skimp on them.
6. Offer additional incentives
Sometimes you may create the perfect content and send out the perfect emails. But adding incentives to your affiliate offers can increase your conversion rate (this is subject to A/B split testing too).
Incentives can include any of the following:
- A discount: You can readily see this with marketers who promote a service like web hosting for example.
- A free trial: This works especially when the product’s creators do not normally give free trials. For example, a 7-day trial with Ahrefs costs $7 but purchasing with Authority Hacker’s affiliate link gives you a free trial.
- Bonus material from you: If you have any products of your own, you may give a discount on them, or it’s possible you can give it out for free for anyone who purchases the product you recommend. Here’s an example I saw in my email some days ago from Bryan Kreuzberger.
He gives a whopping $2,000 applied to any of his courses or training programs as an incentive to sign up for the affiliate offer he’s promoting. Your product doesn’t need to be a $2,000 product, but it sure needs to be irresistible to your audience.
If you want to create courses like Bryan did, you can use popular tools like Udemy or Kajabi to fasten the process. Bonus materials don’t all have to be courses, but they’re the most popular because they’re often high-value materials.
- Offer free help: If it’s a product that needs setup, you may offer to help with the setup for free for people having trouble with it, as long as they purchase through your affiliate link. This is an example I found on WPBeginner.
They offer to help you set up your blog for free if you can’t do it yourself in thirty minutes.
For added effect, I’ve seen incentives limited to the first five, ten, or twenty people. These are just to give you ideas.
7. Offer bonuses to boost your affiliate income
A bonus is an extra product or service offered alongside the primary purchase to encourage customers to buy. Here are some reasons you should add bonuses to your affiliate offerings:
- Bonuses add value. A bonus that can be used alongside the base product or service is a significant selling point.
- Bonuses make you the favorite affiliate. There are likely hundreds or thousands of similar sites that promote the same product or service as you. But if you increase your sales through bonuses, your affiliate partners might give you preferential treatment. Bonuses will also make you the customers’ favored affiliate when they are ready to buy.
- Bonuses build a sense of urgency. Time-limited bonuses tap into customers’ fear of missing out (FOMO). No-one wants to feel like they’ve missed out on a chance to get something extra, making them more likely to click the “Buy Now” button.
Utilizing bonuses to improve conversion rates makes sense. Experienced affiliate marketers realized this a long time ago. In fact, JVZoo, one of the largest affiliate marketing platforms on the net, has built a bonus delivery system into their UI for affiliates.
What this all boils down to is pretty simple; if you give people a reason to buy through your affiliate link you’ll make more sales.
How do you create an effective bonus? As with all types of marketing, affiliate marketers need to understand their audience.
Since you aim to convince the prospective customer to buy, the bonus needs to be something that will push them towards that decision. Therefore, you need to understand your typical customer, pain points, and reasons for buying the product.
A customer persona will help you do this. It is a representation of your ideal buyer. The customer persona usually includes demographic information, skills, interests, and personality:
To create a useful bonus, you must consider your audience’s goals and problems. Consider these questions:
- What problem does the customer have that I could help them solve?
- What would help them get the most out of the base product?
You should also address your customers’ fears. What is keeping them from clicking on the link? A customer’s fear might involve a lack of trust in the product’s ability to achieve the desired result, low belief in their ability to utilize the product or service correctly, etc.
Your bonus should directly address your ideal customer’s problems or fears.
8. Fix broken or expired affiliate links
Affiliate links drive traffic to the websites you are promoting and help you generate revenue via commissions.
So, it’s essential to ensure that your affiliate links are fully functional.
Over time, you may run into problems like broken or expired links. When you do, here is how you can fix this issue:
Step 1: Find problematic links
There are two ways you can find broken or expired affiliate links. The first one is a daunting process that requires you to manually check affiliate links on all of your pages one by one to ensure that they are fully functional.
The process may be thorough, but it is very time-consuming. So, it’s best to consider the second option to find problematic links.
The second option is to leverage web-based website audit tools like Broken Link Checker or Semrush.
The first website audit tool (Broken Link Checker) is for small businesses that have to make do with a limited budget or those that have just started with affiliate programs.
The tool helps you easily find the broken links and take the measures required to fix the issue. All you have to do is add your website’s URL and click the button. Within a few minutes, the tool will crawl your website and find the broken links for you.
Since it’s a free tool, it comes with a few limitations. The tool can process up to 3,000 web pages. So, if your website has more pages, you may have to consider the second option.
The second option is to consider using paid website audit tools like Semrush. To find the broken links using Semrush, log into the tool using your credentials, click ‘Backlinks Analytics’, enter your website, and click ‘Search’.
Now scroll down and find the affiliate links that are tagged as ‘Lost: Broken Page’. These are the links that will cause problems for you and require a fix.
Step 2: Identify the cause
As said earlier, there can be two main causes for your affiliate links to be inoperable. They may represent you or the company that offers the affiliate program.
Your links may not work because the affiliate campaign came to an end or the affiliate program no longer exists. This often leads to a broken or expired link issue.
You may also encounter an issue with your links when there is a problem with your website’s code or you use incorrect URLs when promoting the solutions. So, you must first identify what is causing the issue for you.
Step 3: Reach out to the company
This is an optional step and only applies if the problem with your affiliate links is caused by the company itself.
Usually, companies notify their affiliates when their campaign is coming to an end or they no longer welcome promotions via affiliates.
But if they don’t, feel free to reach out to them and communicate your concern with confidence. However, do this when you have confirmed that everything at your end is working smoothly.
Step 4: Update affiliate links
If the problem lies at the company’s end and the affiliate program is still ongoing, they will provide you with the updated links.
If you are at fault, compare the links you are using with the ones that were provided to you by the company.
In either case, to fix the broken or expired links, you have to replace the inoperable links with the ones that work.
Step 5: Set up redirects
When you replace the old affiliate URLs with the new ones, make sure to set up 301 redirects.
Once you have done this, even when someone clicks the old affiliate link, they will be redirected to the updated page.
Hence, you will be less likely to lose any clicks and keep generating income, even if someone stumbles upon an old URL.
Step 6: Test the updated links
It’s best not to make the same mistake twice. So, before making the changes live on your website, it’s best to test the updated links first.
To do that, all you have to do is click on the new links and make sure that they route you to the intended product pages.
Step 7: Publish the changes
Once you have completed all these steps, all that remains is to publish the changes. And that wraps up the process for you.
How can you use social media for affiliate marketing?
It can be a valuable undertaking if you know what you’re doing – essentially, you earn commission on products by promoting them to followers on social media.
Here are some of our hot tips for making your affiliate marketing journey a success on Instagram:
1. Add an affiliate link to your Instagram bio
When using affiliate marketing as a side hustle, it’s important to utilize Instagram’s link in bio feature. Here, you can provide a link to whatever products you’re promoting so your followers will have easy access to purchase them. And this is good for you because the more followers that purchase the products you’re promoting, the more money you’ll earn via commissions!
Although Instagram only allows each account to provide a single link in its bio, there are tools that allow you to turn one link into multiple. Essentially, when a user clicks on the link in your bio, they’ll be taken to a list of links that you have created. That’s where you can link multiple products or websites at one time.
2. Tag affiliate products as paid partnerships
Using the paid partnership feature on Instagram helps to establish you as an affiliate marketer or influencer.
When other users view your posts, they’ll see that you participate in paid partnerships, which gives you credibility as an influencer as well as promotes transparency between you and your audience.
When other brands view your posts and see that you participate in paid partnerships, they’re likely to be more interested in working with you as an affiliate marketer. And, when your followers see that a post is labeled as a paid partnership, they’ll likely be more inclined to check out what you’re promoting in the post, especially if you have a follower base that adheres closely to what you recommend.
3. Create content on product tutorials
Tutorials are all the rage these days – everyone seems to love watching them, especially with the rise in short-form video content. Use this to your advantage when promoting products!
If you’re looking to promote a particular product to your audience, try filming a tutorial on how to use it. This will get people familiar with the product, raise their curiosity, and overall increase their interest and likelihood of purchasing.
Plus, when your followers see you film a tutorial for a product, they’ll be seeing you use the product. This confirms that you actually use the products you promote, rather than just creating content that entices other people to buy the items.
People love to see “real-life” content, so sometimes a video filmed in your own kitchen resonates better than a photoshoot from an idyllic location.
4. Optimize your hashtags
Hashtags are one of the most valuable tools in your arsenal as a social media content creator! Social-media-based side hustles thrive on proper hashtag use, so make sure you’re using this feature to your advantage.
When promoting a product, make sure that you select hashtags related to that product or related to the audience that you are targeting. This will ensure that your post is promoted among the proper market of users.
It’s important that each of your posts has a unique set of hashtags – recycling the same tags over and over won’t get you anywhere. So, ensure that the hashtags you use on each post and Instagram story are relevant not only to your own account, but also to the specific product you’re promoting.
5. Track affiliate performance
One of the best parts about using Instagram for side hustles is that the app allows you to track the performance of all of your posts. The insights provided by Instagram are thorough and help you to keep an eye on how well each of your posts is received – so make sure to take advantage of this feature!
Using Instagram’s analytics, you can compare and contrast how successful your affiliate marketing posts are. This allows you to experiment with various techniques and determine which ones work best for you.
Guest author: Jyoti Agrawal is a business blogger who encourages young entrepreneurs to take risks and turn their dreams into realities. She writes about global entrepreneurial events for HuffingtonPost, Tech.co, and other publications.