How to Start Affiliate Marketing: A Guide to Earn $50 to $125+ a Day

If you’re looking for info to start affiliate marketing and increase your income, then this is exactly where you need to be right now to get started.

I’ll show you the essential elements so you can quickly and easily get started earning anywhere from $50 to $100 extra bucks a day, selling products that YOU don’t have to create, but still getting paid a nice chunk of change.

And then even scale that up to eventually earn a full-time income with your affiliate marketing business.

Why Start Affiliate Marketing?

Making money online has gone pretty mainstream. People understand that it’s possible, and more people want to do it, however, most people are just lost on which direction to go.

Network marketing often comes up, but it’s just not for everyone. Some people don’t want to recruit and grow a downline to create income. And that’s fine.

Others want to sell online, but they don’t want to have to create products, or stock products in their garage, and deal with shipping.

That’s where affiliate marketing fits in perfectly.

When you learn how to start affiliate marketing, you’ll realize that most of the heavy lifting is done for you on the front end.

Other people create products, and even the offer (a sales page) and will gladly pay you a percentage of the sale (your commission) for referring your audience to their offers.

It’s a win/win. The product owner has you working to get the traffic to the offer. You don’t have to do any of the hard work in the front end.

So if the products are already created, your job is to simply get people to see the offers that you’re promoting.  

In many instances, a lot of that work is done for you as well, with sales pages, email templates, etc. So your main job is simply generating traffic to the offers.

But I’ll give you tips in this article, on how to engineer it so that someone is more likely to buy once they get to the offer.

A Simple Definition of Affiliate Marketing?

In a nutshell, it’s simply promoting an existing product (info or physical) and receiving a commission for the sale that you generate. Pretty simple right?

Many people like to overcomplicate it, but when you bring it to its simplest form, it’s no more than that.

A product creator or owner gives you a piece of the action for referring people to his or her product. How cool is that?

The problem that people have, that you might be scratching your head over, is getting the right people to put that product in front of…so that they make the purchase.

That’s where marketing comes into play.

5 Essential Elements to Become Successful with Affiliate Marketing?

#1 An Audience/Market

In order to start affiliate marketing and be successful at it, you need a specific market that wants the offer that you’re promoting. Makes sense right? Otherwise, you’re just shooting arrows in the dark.

The people who are most likely to purchase a product that you’re promoting are the ones who already want it… or something like it.

In other words, they want a problem solved.  Trying to convince people to buy something is much more difficult than simply putting something that people want in front of them. It takes a lot less convincing and persuading.

So there are basically two ways to go about it.

You can either find the audience first (which is the easier route believe it or not), or you can find an offer, and figure out the best audience for that offer.

However, the easier way if you’re just beginning is simply finding your hungry audience, and then finding a product (or products) that match their needs.

Where to start?

An easy way to start is with your own interests and passions. Are you into health and fitness?

Are you into online or network marketing? How about golf, photography, or travel?

Maybe something even more unique like raising chickens, or urban gardening.

You’re going to have to create content for whichever market you choose, so isn’t it better to be passionate about it?

What kinds of problems do you see others needing solutions for? One of your jobs as a marketer is to simply solve problems for people.

What are people already searching Google for? What non-fiction “How to” books are best sellers on Amazon?

Your passion can also stem from wanting to help people in need. (This can also push you through the hard times knowing you’ve got a purpose to fulfill.)

Need an example of a market? Let’s go with the weight loss industry. This is always a big one because health is always a concern.

Making money is another because people almost always either want or NEED more money.

You can also ask yourself, what do people want to get better at? For instance, the golf niche is notoriously one of the most profitable niches in the world. Why? Because golfers are obsessed with golf. They always want to get better, and for various reasons. 😉

Drill Down Into Your Audiences Specific Wants and Needs

Your best bet, especially in the beginning is to drill down and find as specific a market as possible.

Let’s take the health market for instance. If you decided to market in the health niche, you can agree that this is pretty broad.

So what if you narrowed it down to people who want to lose weight. That’s better, but you can also agree with that one that there are various people who want to lose weight, for various reasons.

Men AND women want to lose weight. You’ve probably also noticed that men and women are also very different.

Some people want to lose weight to look better, others want to have more energy, and others need to lose weight to avoid a serious disease like diabetes or heart disease.

A dad might want to lose his “dad bod” to look better in his bathing suit for summer, a woman might want to lose weight because she’s getting married, and wants to look perfect on her special day.

Trying to target and talk to all these people at once will not be as effective as it would be specific about their wants and needs. That’s when the magic happens.

So narrow down your audience as much as possible.

For example Women in their 30s, who just had children, and are looking for a safe and natural way to lose that extra 10 postpartum pounds as quickly as possible.

Do that with the market you choose, and you’ll know exactly WHO you want to talk to, and how to talk to them when you begin to create content. (We’ll get to that in a minute!)

#2 An Offer

The offer is what’s for sale. Maybe it’s an ebook, or a video course, or a membership site (which can lead to residual monthly income.;)   

Your offer must solve the problems of the hungry audience you decide to target.

If you’ve done the work to find your specific audience, then finding a product to promote won’t be as hard. Almost every (wise) product owner will have an affiliate program!

You can find affiliate offers at a number of affiliate networks and marketplaces online.

• • Clickbank
  • ShareASale
  • CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction)
  • Market Health
  • And MLSP! (Best if you’re teaching online marketing or network marketing!)

What If I Already Have a Product I Want to Promote?  

If you’re already an affiliate of a product that you believe in, then you simply have to reverse engineer.

This means you’ve got to dig deep into WHO would want your product, how they’d benefit they’d receive from it, and the problems that your product can solve for them.

So let’s just say you were to become an affiliate for my ‘No Fear Video Marketing Course’. You’ll simply brainstorm, and ask yourself who would want this product?

• • Online biz owners
  • Network marketers
  • Real Estate Agents
  • Personal Trainers
  • Musicians

Then you’d simply narrow it down to one (at least in the beginning) and start figuring out their wants and needs, and how NFVM would benefit them.

#3 Traffic

Okay so you’ve got your target market, and you’ve got an offer for that market.

You must get traffic to that offer.

The internet is FULL of traffic. If you think of it as an actual highway, you can picture all the people online as the cars on the highway.

Of course, you don’t want all the people cruising down the highway. You only want the ones who will be interested in what you’ve got to offer.

On this internet highway, there are some popular exits where many people flow through. These are like large cities or towns where people pull off, and conjure into one place, and spend a lot of time.  

• • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Etc.

And you know the places where they’re hanging out off these exits (like FB groups for instance). You’ve got to get people to leave those places for a bit…  and come to drive over to your place where your offer is.

Therefore you’ve got to attract the people who are interested in what you have to offer so they come over with you.

The easiest and fastest way to do that is to put up “road signs” that tell people that you have something they may want.

Those signs online would be paid ads. Paid ads work faster because it’s a more immediate source of traffic, compared to something like blogging and SEO, where you’d have to wait for your blog posts to rank.

Facebook Ads is a great place to start.

But of course, you may not be ready for that. There are ways that are free. One of those ways is to simply attract the people who are already looking for what you’ve got to offer, with highly valuable content that people are already looking for.

If you know people are already pulling off onto the YouTube exit every day, and they’re searching for videos with certain terms, you can simply create videos that attract those prospects and answer their specific needs, and solve their problems.

This is called FREE CONTENT!

Content can come in many forms such as…

• • Videos
  • Blog posts
  • Facebook Posts
  • Instagram Posts
  • Twitter posts

Creating valuable content earns you credibility and lets your audience get to know, like, and trust you. This means they’re more likely to buy what you’re promoting.

Remember, we don’t want to be doing much convincing. Instead, we simply want to provide value to gain attention, pull prospects into your content, and give them the value that they can use right now.

#4 Leads

The people who like your content, and begin to feel like they know you, like you, and trust you… may just want to get MORE value from you.

When they give you permission to keep giving them content, they then become a lead. In this case, we’re talking about email leads.

Once a lead, they’re MUCH more likely to buy from you. You now can introduce the product(s) that you know will help them, and drip feeds them benefits of that product, building interest and desire.  

There are a couple of tools that you’ll need to make this happen.

A Lead Magnet

In order for someone to give you their email address and become a lead, they’ve got one question on their mind. “What’s in it for me?”

Therefore you’ve got to entice them with a Free Offer.

This can come in the form of a PDF Report, a Video, or you could even just lead them to a highly valuable post on your blog.

Whatever it is, it must be valuable information that will help them get 1 step closer to solving their problems. This will help you build huge credibility and authority within their minds. They’ll see YOU as an expert that they can trust!

A Capture Page

A capture page is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a page to capture your prospect's information.

Here’s an example of a capture page below…

Your capture consists basically of 3 elements…

1. 1. A headline (to grab attention)
   2. The benefits of your FREE OFFER (Usually in the form of bullet points. This is optional)
   3. And a subscription form! (Including the call to action button!)

Email Auto-Responder

When someone becomes a lead, you’re going to want to email them information. Over several days. Of course, you don’t want to do that manually. So that’s when an auto-responder comes into play.

This is simply an application that will store the email addresses that you collect and will allow you to set up email sequences that you can send day after day until they either buy or unsubscribe.

One cool thing is that many of the product owners will give you emails or templates to simply plug into your auto-responder. So you don’t even have to write the emails yourself.

Some good autoresponder tools to use are:

• • Aweber
  • GetResponse
  • MailChimp
  • Etc.

#5 Conversions

The conversions you’re going to want to watch are:  

• • Your lead or capture page conversions (how many people out of 100 visitors become a lead)
  • And your sales conversions (how many people out of 100 who get to the sales page buy)

This is important because a bump in conversions could mean a great deal. For instance, if you’re getting a 2% sales conversion, and you’re generating 50 leads a day, that means you’re making 1 sell a day.

If you were selling a product where you got a $50 commission, that’s about $50 a day. Which is about $1500 a month.

But what if you bumped that sales conversion up to 3%? Now, with the same number of leads, you just gave yourself a raise of about $25 a day, and instead of $1500 a month, you’re now able to earn $2250! Pretty nice raise right? Try getting your job to give you that raise.

As an affiliate marketer, you don’t have control over the sales page of the product.

What you do have control of however is the Pre-Sale! Basically, that means how well you build interest in your product before they get to the sales page. This is the difference between an affiliate marketer and a great affiliate marketer! 

And we’ve already mapped out how to do that above.

It all has to do with…

• • How well you can drill down on your marketplace…
  • The value that you provide in your content…
  • How well you capture attention, and display the benefits of your lead magnet to get people to subscribe to your email list…
  • And how good of a job you do with your follow-up email campaigns to build interest and desire!

The first three elements above will help you increase your lead conversions (how many people become leads on your capture page), and ALL of them will help you increase sales.

You Now Know More Than 99% of People Online About How to Start Affiliate Marketing…

In fact, I know that people are selling courses right now for $100 or more… that go into much less depth than what you’ve just learned for free.

Now you know what to do. Get out there and get started.

Did you get value from this post? Leave me a comment or any questions below.

You rock,

PS: If you don't have a step by step blueprint for success then check this out (Unless you currently have to many leads and sales then you can handle) - Click Here