Affiliate Marketing For Beginners – A Complete Guide

Do you want to be successful? Are you waiting for the day you have enough disposable income to take a vacation? Or start building an investment portfolio? You’ve come to the right place.

Long gone are the days where a simple 9 to 5 job would fulfill all your financial needs. If you want to be a success, today, you need to start diversifying your income streams right now. The best way to do this is by making money online?

How can you make money online?

There are numerous ways you can make money online. The primary step for all of them is creating quality, original content, and building a niche audience? What is a niche audience? Well, the internet is a vast place. No matter what you’re into or what you’re looking for, you can be sure the internet will have a thousand pages on the subject.

So, how do you stand out in such a large crowd? What can you do to attract readers? You develop a niche. A niche is a selective audience. By narrowing down the topic you want to talk about to an extremely specific area, you can start developing a reputation as an authority on the subject. 

Once your blog starts gaining online traffic, you can monetize your content. And affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to do this.

What is affiliate marketing?

The basic business model needs four things, a product, a producer, a seller, and a client. In most cases of online businesses, the producer and the seller are the same. But not in affiliate marketing. Here you are the seller, while the producer is an unknown third party.

Why is this good?

With affiliate marketing, you save on a lot of unnecessary hassle. You don’t have to do inventory, handle stock, manage shipping, or deal with any of the details of running a company. All you are doing is leveraging your readership for a fee.

How does affiliate marketing work?

The process is simple. You start by contacting a business you think your viewers will like. So, if your content is related to herbal skincare remedies, a brand that sells aloe-based products would be perfect. Another way you can do this is by signing up with an affiliate marketing website.

Then, you share links to products or mention specific items in your posts. Your readers will see those plugins and follow them to the original site. You receive compensation for sending them forward or the number that purchases the product, depending on your contract. 

What are affiliate marketing websites?

One way to get affiliate contracts is to contract the merchants and businesses directly. But, another method is to work through a more extensive corporate setup. 

Affiliate networks serve as the middle person between the bloggers or marketers and the businesses or product creators. They ensure that everyone gets paid. And using one of these in your affiliate marketing scheme just adds a greater level of security.

So, let’s talk about a few of the biggest affiliate networks in 2020 you should definitely check out before you start affiliate marketing.

Biggest Affiliate Networks 2020

These five affiliate networks are the biggest in the game right now. Pick the right one and start making passive income.

1. ShareASale

Over two decades in the affiliate marketing game have made ShareASale a top-ranked network. If you decide to choose this network, you won’t have to worry about product options or payment security. With around 4000 listed products, you’ll have enough variety to choose items of any category and type. 

Additionally, routine payment schedules mean you’ll receive payments on the 20th of every month, like clockwork. However, you do need to have a minimum balance of 50 dollars. Payment options include Payoneer, checks, wire transfers, and direct deposits.

2. ClickBank

This network has been in the affiliate marketing business longer than any other, with a perfect track record spanning more than twenty years. Their catalog boasts around six million affiliate products. Yes, you read that right. 

With ClickBank, the only problem you’ll have is having to sort through more products than you can handle. But, variety is everything in the affiliate world. And the more your options, the higher the chances you’ll find that one product your readers will love.

Unlike ShareASale, ClickBank allows you to pick your payment cycles. So, you can get your money on a weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly basis. Payment options include Payoneer, checks, wire transfers, and direct deposits.

3. CJ Affiliate

Twenty years in the industry have cemented CJ Affiliate’s place as a reliable, top-rated affiliate network. This agency corresponds to over 3000 merchants. These merchants are the ones who place their products for bidding. Additionally, CJ Affiliate is a member of the Alliance Data Systems, which is a Fortune 500 company. 

So, if you link your business with theirs, you’ll have a solid foundation to work off of. Remember, the entire point of using one of these affiliate networks is to reduce the amount of leg work you’d have to do otherwise. Instead of wasting time searching for products, you can channel your time and energy towards building online traffic. 

When it comes to running an online business, prioritization is vital. You want to make sure you’re spending your energy focusing on the right tasks, i.e., the tasks that will grow your profits. 

With CJ affiliates, you have the option of monitoring your account in real-time. This not only keeps you grounded when it comes to the business end of things, but it also gives you a good idea of where you stand. You’ll know what products are doing well and which aren’t. 

You can then isolate patterns in user activity that are customized to your readership. And take your business from there.

4. Amazon Associates

Everyone knows Amazon. They are a leader and innovator in the field of online shopping, no matter what industry you look at. What a lot of people don’t know, however, is that they also have an affiliate marketing network. 

This network is known as Amazon Associates and is a trustworthy, reliable choice for you if only because it is backed by the conglomerate that is Amazon. Their products rank highly in Google searches, which is always a plus when it comes to online marketing. And they have a wide variety of options to choose from.

That said, you shouldn’t pick this network just because Amazon is the most familiar name on this list. Each of these five networks is solid choices. In fact, what places Amazon lower on this list than previously mentioned options is their poor payment plan. The percentage rates Amazon’s program offers affiliates are significantly lower than other programs.

Moreover, you receive compensation for your sales around two whole months after the products are sold if you choose Amazon Associates as your affiliate partner. This can be a huge drawback for affiliate businesses that are just starting out and looking to meet basic costs. 

Also, Amazon policies ban you from including product links in emails. Email marketing is the popular tactic of creating an opt-in mailing list that sends weekly or bi-weekly emails to dedicated readers. These are people likely to purchase the products you recommend. And this is a highly successful method.

5. eBay Partner Network

The eBay Partner Network is the youngest affiliate marketing organization on this list. Founded in 2008, it is only 12 years old. But, that hasn’t stopped it from becoming one of the biggest names out there and competing with other long time affiliate networks.

Their catalog is extensive and offers 1.1 billion products. So, you could simply pick the eBay Partner Network and not need to look anywhere else for product options to promote. However, the expansive nature of their listings does mean you’ll have to put time and effort into sifting through your options for what you need.

eBay sells to over 175 million customers every year, which totals to an estimate of 23 million dollars. These aren’t numbers to sneeze at and are definitely worth putting in the legwork. 

Another thing that sets the eBay Partner Network apart is its user-friendly payment policy, which allows withdrawals for balances as low as ten dollars. Furthermore, the eBay Partner Network is the only option on this list that offers payment through Paypal. 

Why is affiliate marketing better than other online businesses?

The most significant advantage that affiliate marketing has over other methods of making money online is that it is relatively low risk. You don’t have to invest anything in products, merchandise, or cash. All you need is a blog, which means the maximum payment you need to make is for domain and hosting.

Also, you get complete control over the products you choose to promote. Unlike advertisements and banners, these aren’t randomly generated posts. You pick the products you recommend, the programs you big up, and the services you promote. 

A considerable problem with advertising is that you can sometimes lose readers if people think you’re trying to take advantage of them or sell them something. But, affiliate marketing, if done correctly, can help you increase traffic and gain viewer trust. 

Because once people start purchasing your recommendations and finding them useful, word will spread. Then you can start doing product reviews, comparative analysis, or even video content and hauls. 

Not to mention your articles will remain up permanently. People will continue reading them and buying products long after you post the content. As your blog grows and you start gaining online traffic, this will just mean more views and purchases. Without fulfilling any products, you will get a share of the profits for each purchase. This makes affiliate marketing the best source of passive income generation.

How does affiliate marketing work?

A popular question people have is, how does affiliate marketing work? How do all those clicks, links, views, and purchases translate into money for you? You’ve come to the right place. It’s straightforward. There are three types of contracts, or basis for payment: PPV, PPC, and PPA.

What is PPV Affiliate Marketing?

PPV stands for Pay Per View and is the first method of payment calculation we will be looking at. With this type of plan, the blogger or advertiser simply places the link to the product on their site, and the business or product seller pays them for the number of people who view the ad.

This is the simplest method and also charges the least rates. Other factors that play into the payment calculation are the number of times the link is featured and the number of people who visited the blog page. Readers do not have to click through for the advertiser to receive payment in PPV affiliate marketing 

What is PPC Affiliate Marketing?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is the second method of payment calculation we will be looking at. With this format, the advertiser places the link on their blog post or in an email or underneath a video. And the payment is generated based on the number of readers who click on the link and are redirected to the business’s page.

Rates are decided per click. Your readers do not have to purchase the product. But, they do have to be motivated enough to click through to the product page for this to work. Rates for Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing are higher than the ones for Pay Per View Affiliate Marketing.

What is PPA Affiliate Marketing?

PPA stands for Pay Per Action and is the third method of payment calculation we will be looking at. Of all three ways, Pay Per Action charges the highest rates but also requires the most from the customers or viewers.

Unlike earlier options, for you to receive a percentage of the profits with this format, your readers have to click on the link, are redirected to the business’s page, and then conduct a specific action. This action is usually purchasing a product. So, you get paid based on how many people buy a product using your link.

Conclusion

To conclude, affiliate marketing is a low-risk business model with significant returns. It is one of the best methods for making money online. How much money you can make depends entirely on how traffic to your website grows.