Today I started an affiliate marketing business, in hopes that I can supplement my income so I can continue to stay at home with my one-year-old son. And you can too!
What is an Affiliate Marketing Business?
Affiliate marketing may sound confusing or scary, but it is very very simple.
The technical explanation: A brand offers affiliate partners a percentage of every sale or lead the partners generate via their online promotional activity.
The real world example: A product I really love and have used for many years in my skincare routine is the hyaluronic acid moisturizer from The Ordinary. I seriously love this product. So I decided to tell my friends about it in my group chat and they asked where they could buy it. I sent the link and two of them decided they were going to purchase… now if I had sent them a regular link they would’ve purchased the product and all would be fine and dandy… BUT I sent them an affiliate link (yes it’s a special link) and not only did they purchase the product and love it, but I also received a commission off of the price of their purchases! I literally made money from recommending one of my favorite skincare products. How cool!
This is affiliate marketing ^. Sure it can be a little more complicated, and yes you need to scale it to create a full-blown business that brings in a full-time income, and that, of course, would require more knowledge and information but right now I’m really just trying to get you to understand the basics.
You love a product, you share it, someone makes a purchase, and you earn some money.
How to Become an Affiliate Marketer
You can become an affiliate marketer with a few clicks of a button. Literally.
Step 1:
Choose a niche!
What’s a niche? A niche is your lane, your category, your area of expertise. Ideally, you want to build an audience that will eventually translate into buyers. Therefore you want to pick a niche and build an audience around that common ground. So say, for example, you really love cleaning. You can start creating content about cleaning, (how to clean, best cleaning products, best bathroom cleaning hacks, etc.) people interacting with that content are going to be people who are interested in cleaning. So you would want to begin recommending cleaning products, and more than likely those people will make purchases. If you post content about cleaning and then start talking about your favorite pair of shoes, those people are not going to convert into buyers because they don’t come to your page or your website, or open your emails for your opinion on shoes. They want to hear about cleaning!
My recommendation… choose a niche related to something you enjoy and or are passionate about, has a product base, and isn’t overly saturated.
Step 2:
Decide where you are going to post your content and open those accounts. If you enjoy writing maybe a blog is for you, if you like creating photo content consider Instagram or Pinterest. And if you can get down with video content (HIGHLY RECOMENDED) Tik Tok or YouTube could be for you.
What would I personally do? I obviously blog, you’re literally on my website as you’re reading this. BUT honestly, if your goal is solely to jump into affiliate marketing I would opt for creating content on Tik Tok or Pinterest off the jump. You can certainly work your way up to a blog later on, which I would recommend once you’ve leveraged other platforms. But starting a blog requires a little more knowledge and money than simply utilizing a free social media platform.
Step 3:
Choose an affiliate program or network.
An affiliate program is usually a program run through a brand or business that allows you to earn commissions off of their products. If there is a specific company or product that you are looking to promote you will want to go to their website and find out if they offer an affiliate program. If they do, a link to their affiliate page can often be found at the very bottom of the website in the footer. Or you can google “business name affiliate program” and if they have a page on their site their program it’ll come up. There are larger affiliate programs, the most popular affiliate program to date is Amazon’s. Becoming an Amazon affiliate or an amazon influencer allows you to promote anything that is listed on Amazon.
You can also sign up for an affiliate network like ShareASale or Awin. These networks are home to thousands of affiliate programs for different businesses or companies. In order to access their programs, you must become a member of the network.
Many times there are some criteria you may need to meet in order to be accepted into the network or program. In my personal experience, it is very easy to get into Amazon’s influencer program and that is why I highly recommend it for anyone starting from scratch. I would also highly recommend signing up for LiketoKnowit if you are eligible.
Make sure you are choosing to work with businesse/ products that organically fit within your niche AND you honestly love. This is KEY to creating an audience that trusts you, and that will convert. If you pick random products just because you think they are going to make you money it will come off as inauthentic no matter how hard you try, and your audience will not trust you.
Step 4:
Decide how you are going to set up your links.
There are many ways you can go about this…
We’ve all seen those link in bios from milkshake, linktree, beacon.ai, etc. all of these sites allow you to link to multiple sites/ pages/ profiles and more from one streamlined page. This is a great tool to allow you to link to multiple products across multiple sites. Most of these sites are free (I really like beacon.ai because it has lots of design options and an option to opt into a paid subscription to access more features and your own domain name when the time comes to level up) and work in generally the same manner.
If you choose solely to work with Amazon as an affiliate (which many people do) you can actually create your very own Amazon Influence Storefront. On your storefront you can create categorized lists so it’s easier to navigate and find products. You an also post your own photos and other content directly on your storefront. If this is the route you take all you need to do is insert the link to your Amazon storefront on your profiles.
If you decided to work strictly with LiketoKnowit, similarly with Amazon you can create your own page to display all of the products you’re promoting so you will only need to insert your storefront link into your bio.
You could funnel all of your traffic to Pinterest! Pinterest allows you to directly link content to wherever you’d like to send your traffic. If for example you’d like to utilize Instagram or TikTok to generate traffic via your content you could pin all of the products you’re promoting on Pinterest utilizing your affiliate links. This way, the only link you need to provide on your social medias is to your Pinterest.
You could build your own website and set up a landing page for all of your links. As I mentioned before, starting a website or blog takes a few additional steps and comes with some expenses but if you’re up for the challenge this is a route you can consider.
I personally chose to use beacon.ai to set up a landing page full of affiliate links for the new affiliate Tik Tok page I recently started as a growth experiment.
Step 5:
Start creating content!
Keys to creating great content include making entertaining, informational, and quality content. Are you providing some sort of education or knowledge? Are you solving a problem? Are you providing entertainment? Keep these questions in mind when you are creating.
Below you will find great examples of affiliate profiles found on Tik Tok, Instgram, and Pinterest.
Miscellaneous:
To really make your new affiliate marketing business look legit consider a few of these miscellaneous tasks.
Create a brand around your business! Give your affiliate business a name, just as you would name any other business or company.
Create a logo. You can use free programs like Canva (my fav) to create simple, beautiful logos in minutes. You can also use canva to create your content, with custom brand colors, fonts, etc.
Create branding for your storefronts.
You Can Become an Affiliate Marketer Today
The beauty of affiliate marketing is you can literally start doing this TODAY! To prove a point I literally started a new affiliate marketing page right before I sat down to write this blog post. And as an added bonus i cost me $0 to start!
I picked a niche, I picked a name, I am going to use Amazon, I started a beacon.ai page, I opened a TikTok account, and I opened a Pinterest account. I completed all of these tasks in about an hour. In one hour I created a new business. Let that sink in.
How Much Can You Make as an Affiliate Marketer?
Though you can start this business in a day, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will suddenly make money over night. I want to motivate you to start a business, but what I don’t want to do is give you a false hope that you’re suddenly going to make a full time income over night.
Affiliate marketing can make you $15 a month, or it can make you $25,000 a month. It is one million percent possible to turn affiliate marketing into a full time income. But you have to put the time and the effort into it. Over time, with hard work and consistency you will build your income month by month.
According to Statista, affiliate marketing spending in the U.S. alone is expected to reach $8.2 billion by 2022.
Some Things to Think About When Becoming an Affiliate Marketer
I assume you’re reading this blog post because you want to become an affiliate marketer in order to make money and reach some sort of version of financial freedom.
I’ve dabbled with making money online numerous ways including with affiliate marketing for years. I finally decided to start taking it seriously because I now have a son who I wish to be home with. I now more than ever desire financial freedom. I desire being at home with my family everyday, I desire having the freedom to do what I want with my time, I desire my husband being home with us, I desire to live a life of travel, I desire to live a life of abundance.
If you are looking to create a life like this it IS POSSIBLE. Consistency is KEY. I really don’t think I can make that point enough. And I will tell you from personal experience consistency has always been my downfall and I still until this day kick my past self for it. STAY CONSISTENT.
Set reasonable goals for yourself. Take a look at what kind of products you’re promoting, their price points and the commission you will be earning. If you are promoting the best fashion sweaters on Amazon and the average price point is $40 and you’re making a 4% commission rate (the current rate for the fashion category on Amazon) you’re making on average $1.60 per purchase if they only buy one item. That means you need roughly 63 people to purchase one sweater for you to earn $100 a day. Unless you have a pretty large and established following 63 sales is a lot. If you are dead set on selling sweaters you need to adjust your expectations. Until you hit a growth point at which 63 sales are reasonable. If you are dead set on earning $100 a day then maybe you need to consider targeting products at a higher pricepoint, with a higher commission rate. For example luxury beauty items on Amazon earn a commission rate of 10%. Say you choose a handful of luxury beauty products that average $100. 10% of $100 is $10. Therefore you’d only need 10 people a day to make an average luxury beauty purchase of $100. This is much more reasonable, and will still allow you to hit that $100 a day goal.
It’s easy enough to apply for affiliate programs, create new social media profiles, and so on. However in order to create optimal systems that earn money via affiliate marketing you need to understand how marketing and social media works. If you are hoping to make a full time income from this, you need learn at least the basics of social media marketing and SEO. I’m not saying you need to go get a certification in social media management or take a course on SEO, but what I am saying is, take the time to learn. YouTube should become your best friend. Learning the basics of these things concepts will put you light years ahead of any affiliate marketer who has not taken the time to learn.
Final Thoughts
I love the quote “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. What I have discussed above are in my opinion the fundamentals. Just get started. Focus on making your first affiliate sale. As your platforms grow, set new goals, and continue to learn and experiment more. This is how you can build an affiliate business that will someday earn you a fulltime income, and someday after that a life changing income.