Affiliate Marketing – How To Make Your First 1k Online?

If you are a content creator, such as a blogger, YouTuber or Instagrammer, today’s profit hack could help you convert your traffic figures into passive income. It requires a little thought, but very little additional work on your part. Most importantly, it comes with zero cost and, if done properly, zero risk.

In fact, you could go as far as to say that Affiliate Marketing under-pins and complements many of the passive income ideas we have shared so far. Affiliate Marketing can deliver you real passive income in it’s own right, but also add additional passive income streams to your other passive income activities.

Affiliate marketing has the potential to generate a substantial income over time. Those who have been doing it for years report incomes in the millions of dollars. If that sounds interesting and our guide doesn’t answer all of your questions, just hit reply to this or any email from us and let us know..  

TL;DR

• Free – there are no set-up or running costs
• Passive Income – it takes virtually no effort to implement and can generate big profits
• Simple – it requires no specialist knowledge
• Requires content – it is most effective as a way of monetising content – whether that is written, imagery or videos

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a way to monetise some form of media, converting your hard-earned traffic into income. This media could be a website, blog, YouTube channel or social media account with a lot of followers. You earn an income by ‘affiliating’ your channel (in whatever form it takes) to a company, promoting their product and directing your audience towards them.

This can be achieved in a number of ways, each with its own advantages and disadvantages:

– Pay-per-click: You get paid for every time someone clicks on a link or advert on your site that takes them to the advertiser’s site. The most common version of this is Google Adsense, which doesn’t even require you to affiliate yourself to a specific company. However, it’s also the least effective since, without encouragement, the chances of your readers clicking the link are quite low.

– Pay-per-post: This is the most blunt approach to affiliate marketing and is the modern equivalent of an advertorial. As the name suggests, you get paid for creating content (usually a blog post but it could also be a YouTube video or Instagram post) promoting the advertiser. This guarantees a fixed level of income since it doesn’t depend on how many people click the link. However, it’s also the approach that is most likely to result you getting criticism from your audience, especially if the product isn’t as good as you claim, so it’s important to choose your clients with care.

– Pay-per-lead: This is quite a good middle ground, providing good returns for both the advertiser and the affiliate. It only requires that people sign up to the advertiser’s email list or make a free account, having come through a link posted on your site. Not only does it put potential customers into the sales funnel for the advertiser but convincing someone to sign up to something for free is a lot easier than getting them to buy something.

– Pay-per-action: A fairly recent addition to the list, this approach to affiliate marketing is a little more forgiving than most. The action could be merely hovering over a link (rather than necessarily clicking on it) or calling a specific phone number.

– Pay-per-sale: This is self-explanatory – you get paid a percentage of each sale you generate, making you effectively a salesperson for the company. This is sometimes achieved by offering a special discount code that not only tracks the source of the sale but also gives the customer a bit of value by reducing the cost of the product.

The advantage of affiliate marketing as a source of income is that it theoretically requires little to no additional work on your part and comes with no cost or risk. You can sign up to an affiliate programme for free, add a link to your channel’s typical content and you could be earning money immediately. If you’re going to use Google Adsense and similar programmes, you will need to include appropriate spaces on your website for adverts to fill, but that is all.

However, as is often the case with side hustles and sources of passive income, any approach that’s low on effort and risk is generally also low on earning potential. The click-through rate on pay-per-click display ads is somewhere in the region of 2% and the income per click is so low that you will need an audience of millions to generate even a moderate income.

Some of the approaches further down the above list – those that take more effort on your part – can offer greater returns. Indeed, one survey found that nearly 20% of well-established affiliates make more than $1 million per year (though, with only 117 respondents, this statistic isn’t especially reliable). Importantly, it was mostly “established affiliates” that responded, meaning those who have been in the game for years.  

How To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing

The most important thing you will need in order to make any money out of affiliate marketing is a channel to do so through. Ideally, you should also have a sizeable audience on that channel. Marketing in any form is primarily a numbers game and your income will be higher if your blog has more readers or your YouTube channel has more viewers. However, if we’re being precise about it, the audience is not strictly required.

Next, you need to sign up to an affiliate programme. There are plenty to choose from, with different programmes and providers specialising in different approaches and different products. You should choose a programme or product that best suits your channel and, therefore, your audience. If you’re trying to promote travel insurance to gamers or women’s fashion to a mostly male audience, you could have traffic figures in the billions and still not make a single sale. However, if you advertise a product that aligns with your audience’s interests, you could make a good income from traffic measured only in hundreds.

With pay-per-post more than the other approaches, it’s also important that the product you choose to promote be something that you have personal familiarity with and faith in. If you are not confident in the product, promoting it will cause your channel more harm than good as viewers/readers will begin to doubt your honesty and authenticity.

For most of the affiliate options, you will be given a link to an appropriate page. The link will include a tracking cookie so that the advertiser can monitor exactly how many customers your link generates. Put that link into your content where appropriate and you’re basically done.  

– Introducing Wealthy Affiliate

When I started preparing this article, I was trying to think of the best way to help you {{ subscriber.first_name }}, so that you could start earning money through affiliate marketing as quickly as possible. While doing so, I had a memory flash back of an excellent training program that I went through back in 2007 – yes 2007! – which was the first course I took that actually delivered and I still credit a lot of my success since then to this program.

So I jumped on to Google and searched for Wealthy Affiliate and would you believe it, it is still going strong – in fact, it has just hit it’s 15th anniversary. Quite incredible really and I’ve just signed up again to take a look around and it is even better than when I first used it.

When something in the digital world is still going strong some 15 years later, you know it is of the highest quality and value.

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Things to Consider before starting Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a form of passive income to the extent that you don’t need to do too much extra work to earn money. However, it is also not an approach that you can really start exclusively for the purpose of adding to your annual earnings. Rather, it is a way of monetising a hobby or passion. It is very difficult to create a successful blog or YouTube channel about something you do not have a significant personal interest in and you will need to continually make content on the subject in order to maintain a significant audience.

As mentioned above, the exact amount of income you make will vary depending on the size of your audience and your approach to marketing. However, as a general rule, larger audiences will generate greater income. That being the case, you may need to run your channel for years before you see a good and consistent income, consistently creating high-quality content throughout that time.

At the end of the day, affiliate marketing is still a form of marketing, so some degree of skill in marketing will help. It might be worth investing in courses to improve your skills if they are presently lacking.  

How Much Does It Cost To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing?

There is no cost to setting up or running affiliate marketing. Some marketers spend money on sponsored posts, search engine marketing and other forms of paid promotions to increase their sales, but this is not required if you have a good amount of organic traffic already.  

Learn more about becoming a successful Affiliate Marketer

If you are interested in learning more about Affiliate Marketing and how it can create you a passive income, check out these links:

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