Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing strategy that content creators and influencers often use to earn money. It involves sharing a special affiliate link to a company’s products or services. Each time someone clicks on the link and makes a purchase, the affiliate marketer earns a commission from the sale.

There are a couple of ways to become an affiliate marketer:

• Affiliate networks: Sign up for an affiliate network such as Shopify Collabs or CJ Affiliate. These networks allow you to market products from a range of different brands.
• Affiliate programs: If you have a particular brand in mind, you can directly apply to join their affiliate program. You’ll have to sign up for multiple programs to market products from different companies.

Once approved, you’ll be given unique links to share with your audience and promote through your digital channels.

In terms of how and when you get paid as an affiliate marketer, it depends on the type of affiliate marketing you’re doing. Generally speaking, you’ll be compensated in exchange for getting people to perform a certain action—whether that be just visiting the brand’s site, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase.

There are different ways to make money with affiliate marketing. You can add affiliate links to the content you create, develop entire websites around affiliate products, and even manage affiliate marketing for others.

Here are some ideas to inspire your next move.

1. Add affiliate links to blog posts

One of the easiest ways to do affiliate marketing is to start a blog and incorporate referral links into your blog content. This is one of the most common ways to make money blogging. If you already have a blog, you can even go back and add links to already written content once you become an approved affiliate.

Your blog could be about anything that interests you. However, the key to successfully integrating affiliate links with blog content is to ensure the product or service is relevant to what you write.

Example: You run a travel blog and you publish an itinerary for a European vacation. You include affiliate links to hotels, airlines, and other businesses within the post.

2. Start a product review website

Another way to integrate affiliate links into your writing is to build a website around other people’s products. A product review website is ideal for affiliate marketing since it won’t be difficult to find natural ways to integrate affiliate links into your content.

Before you build a review website, you need to choose a niche to focus on. This will help you attract a more targeted audience that’s more likely to actually make purchases using your affiliate links.

Example: You start a product review website for new moms. You become an Amazon Associates affiliate, which gives you a choice of thousands of high-quality mom and baby products to write about and link to in your content. You also add a “best deals” aggregator page to boost your affiliate sales without having to publish new posts all the time.

3. Post about affiliate products on social media

Social media is a great place to do affiliate marketing if you’re a popular influencer or business owner. It’s completely free to do, and you don’t need to do much to get started.

Similar to the case with blogging and product reviews, you’ll need to make sure that your affiliate recommendations fit with the overall theme of your social media content. This way, you retain the trust of your followers and earn more money from affiliate commissions.

Example: You’re a tarot card reader, and you create a shoppable post on Instagram for the holidays. Each slide recommends a certain gift based on the person’s Zodiac sign and then links out to the product in the affiliate partner’s shop.

4. Share affiliate links in online communities

Online forums like Reddit or Quora, and even social media groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, can be great places to indirectly market products. By finding questions and discussions relevant to what you do, you’ll find new opportunities to share your wisdom and make expert recommendations that people find helpful.

The catch is that it may be harder to convince random people online to trust your links than an engaged audience on your own website or social media pages. So bear in mind that your affiliate links and recommendations need to be 100% relevant and useful.

Also note that your comments and posts may be automatically flagged as spam. To avoid this issue, you should use a long-standing account and only make sincere recommendations. Additionally, instead of commenting or responding to a post with just your affiliate link, sneak your link into a long, detailed, and helpful response.

Example: You’re an active member of a Reddit forum related to baking. You look out for posts from people looking for recommendations for the best baking equipment and then provide a detailed breakdown of the best products, adding affiliate links where relevant.

5. Create product-related videos on YouTube

If you prefer to create video content, then YouTube is a good platform to use for affiliate marketing. With a video channel dedicated to a certain niche or type of product, you’ll have tons of opportunities to share unique links to all kinds of affiliate products.

To make more money from affiliate marketing with this approach, you can create videos that focus on product comparisons or “best products” lists. This way, you have numerous affiliate links to share at the bottom of the video and thus a higher likelihood of earning a commission.

Example: You create unboxing videos for beauty products. Each video gives you a chance to review at least three or four different products, and you add the product affiliate links to the video’s description.

6. Start a podcast that mentions affiliate products

Affiliate marketing is one of the only ways to make money podcasting. It also happens to be the easiest monetization method, compared to other approaches, like advertising and sponsorships.

Because podcasting is primarily in audio format, you’re best off avoiding products that people need to see with their own eyes, like beauty products or clothing. Instead, you may find that you have greater success with industry-specific tools and services, so long as you take the time to fully describe the benefits of using them on your show.

Example: You host a podcast about music production. During an episode on audio editing, you recommend a particular audio editing software. In another episode, you discuss the best digital audio workstations (DAWs). You have a website and social media profiles dedicated to your podcast, and you include affiliate links in your show notes and in your social media status updates.

7. Start an email newsletter with product updates

Newsletters are a highly effective form of digital marketing. Not only do they tend to be short and to the point, but users are able to read them at their leisure. Your users are less likely to lose track of your newsletters than they would blog posts or YouTube videos, which might get drowned out by newer content.

When choosing which affiliate links to include, be selective. Make sure every gift recommendation is genuine and relevant. You don’t want to start losing subscribers in exchange for (potentially) making a small commission.

Example: You create an affiliate-powered gift guide for the holiday season. In this guide, you include affiliate links for the various gift ideas in your newsletter.

8. Create a membership site with affiliate offers

A membership website is a great way to generate recurring revenue from a devoted community. However, you really have to make the membership worthwhile. In addition to offering high-quality content and a lively community, you should provide additional perks of some sort, like exclusive affiliate offers.

Example: You start a virtual coworking community. In addition to giving members a space to connect, network, and share ideas, you also offer deals on business software, freelancer insurance, and other relevant perks.

9. Become a freelance affiliate marketer

Most affiliate marketing side hustles involve working as an independent affiliate marketer, where you’re working for yourself and using affiliate links to boost your income. By contrast, a freelance affiliate marketer works on behalf of a brand (often numerous brands), making content or posts that contain affiliate links.

All affiliate marketers need to be savvy when it comes to digital marketing, content creation, and search engine optimization. But it’s especially important for freelancers as their contract employment is contingent on how successful they are with affiliate marketing.

Example: You get a job as an affiliate marketer for a sports clothing company. They hire you to organize and launch an affiliate marketing campaign where you create content that contains affiliate links for specific products that the company wants to promote.

10. Become an affiliate program manager

Another way to make money with affiliate marketing is to create affiliate programs for big brands. The manager comes up with the terms of the program, including the commission rates. They publish the program details on the company’s website and then handle the promotion of the affiliate program, recruit affiliates, review applications, and monitor the activity and payouts.

While setting up an affiliate program can take time, the ongoing management of it shouldn’t. So this is something that affiliate marketers can easily do on the side.

Example: You set up a freelancer profile on Upwork to advertise your services as an affiliate program manager. You secure contracts with three different companies and manage each of their affiliate marketing programs.

Making money with affiliate marketing is a pretty straightforward process. First, you become an approved affiliate. Next, you create content that’s relevant to your affiliate partnership. Finally, you add your affiliate link to the content and promote it.

To run a successful affiliate marketing business on the side, though, there are certain steps you should take to increase the chances of people finding and buying something from your links.

Pick a profitable niche

Before you start as an affiliate marketer, decide what niche you want to work in. There are affiliate programs available for a wide variety of industries and business types.

However, the ones you choose should be not only relevant to the type of content you create but also profitable. For instance, software as a service (SaaS) products tend to offer the highest pay rates for affiliate marketers, with compensation in the range of 20%–70% commission.

Create a trusting audience and community

For your affiliate marketing efforts to be effective, you need to have a larger audience that’s engaged with your content. Random website visitors, social media followers, or online users aren’t likely to trust affiliate links from content creators they don’t know or trust. You need to work on building a community that values your recommendations.

Choose the right affiliate products and programs

You can work out affiliate partnerships one by one with brands directly. But a more efficient way to find affiliate programs would be to join a network, such as eBay Partner Network, ShareASale, or Rakuten Advertising. Either way, make sure that your partnerships make sense for your brand, offer fair terms, and pay a worthwhile commission for each sale, click, or lead.

Create high-quality content

People don’t click on links just for the sake of clicking them. They visit affiliate links because they come from someone they trust and they’re curious about what they’ll find.

Even if one of your audience members doesn’t know you well enough (yet), creating helpful and informative content can help you bridge that gap. Ensuring that you’re providing authentic affiliate product recommendations is also a must.

Do search engine optimization

Adding affiliate links to great content is a good start. However, you need people to find that content if you want to profit from it, which is why you need to be doing search engine optimization (SEO).

This involves writing meta titles and descriptions that get you noticed by search traffic. When it comes to social media, this also includes creating hashtags that drive large numbers of people to your content.

Share affiliate links on numerous platforms

We all have preferred methods of content creation. However, publishing a blog post, product review, or YouTube video isn’t enough.

To increase your affiliate commissions, you need to share your content and unique referral links on various platforms. That’s why having an affiliate marketing distribution strategy is important if you want to be successful and profitable.

Affiliate marketing is a popular side hustle for many reasons:

• Minimal startup costs and requirements: You don’t need to create any actual products to make money from affiliate marketing. All you need is a computer or smart phone, content creation skills, and a rock-solid affiliate marketing strategy.
• Work remotely from anywhere: It doesn’t matter whether you’re in your home office or on a beach on the other side of the world. Affiliate marketing is one of the best side hustles to try if you want to work remotely from home or earn while traveling the world.
• Easy work: Aside from establishing affiliate partnerships and adding links to your content, there’s not a ton of work involved. If you’re looking to gain financial freedom, then affiliate marketing is a good way to get started.
• Passive income: Once you’ve set up your affiliate links, there’s nothing more you need to do. You’ll earn money and get paid each time someone uses your link—even if you’re currently working another job or even sleeping.

With that said, while affiliate marketing is a great side hustle for content creators and influencers who are already creating content, it might not be so great for just anyone who’s new to the world of content creation. Starting from scratch takes a lot of time and effort.

In order to make money from affiliate marketing, you need a trusting audience who is eager to click your links and interested in buying what you’re recommending. That won’t happen if you’re a nobody who’s sharing random links online.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that you won’t be earning a lot of money in the beginning. However, your income will likely grow over time as you build your online reputation, produce more content, and establish more profitable affiliate partnerships.

How much money can you make from affiliate marketing?

If you’re curious about real earning potential, here’s what a survey of affiliate marketers revealed about the typical earnings of affiliate marketers:

• 55% make under $10K a year
• 21% make $10K–$50K
• 15% make $50K–$100K
• 94% make $100K–$150K
• 78% make $150K+

What affects your earnings from an affiliate marketing side hustle?

In reality, how much you earn from an affiliate marketing side hustle depends on several factors:

• How often you create content
• The popularity of your content in search engines
• How large and engaged your audience is
• Your niche
• The affiliate programs you join
• Your commission rate
• Low-ticket vs. high-ticket products

What’s more, affiliate marketing side hustles are going to generate less income than full-time affiliate marketing efforts.