How to Start Affiliate Marketing With No Experience or Money (4 Free Tools!)
– Are you feeling overwhelmed
by affiliate marketing and swamped by all the options and directions you could take? In this video, I'll walk you through four essential free tools to kickstart a much
simpler affiliate journey and share some of the
biggest mistakes to avoid. We're gonna learn everything from how to find an affiliate program, to how to start earning actual dollars as an affiliate partner. We also have a free set of
templates to make it easy for you to track sales, revenue, and profit from your affiliate campaigns.
You can go ahead and check that out in the description below. Now let's dive in. Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn passive income online with publishers earning
a round $56,000 a year through partner programs. But generating commissions
requires more than just getting your referral link and
access to your dashboard. You'll need content, whether
that's your website, podcast, social media, or email newsletter. A source of traffic, which is your engaged
audience for that content. Affiliate products or products
or services you promote within a potential niche market that earns commissions from sales. Credibility and trust, which establish a strong reputation between you, your affiliate
partners, and your audience. And though this will require
some technical know-how and back-end access to your website, if that's your chosen platform. Don't be spooked. I'll walk through everything so it's worth your time and effort.
Now, this video is primarily concerned with the affiliate side
of affiliate marketing. We're gonna do a video
about the brand side, setting up your own affiliate
marketing program, very soon. So if you wanna learn about
that, be sure to subscribe. The first step in selecting a product is to identify your passion and interests. What excites you? Let's say you're a music producer and love hearing your music played back at its fullest potential. Products could be studio
equipment like speakers, headphones, or signal processors. Next, look for a niche where customers are actively
seeking products and solutions. What can your content deliver that solves a problem with those products? Sweetwater's Affiliate
Program, for example, delivers solutions to those looking to build a whole studio
from scratch with its latest and greatest music and audio equipment. So professional and hobbyist musicians, as content creators, could be a great fit for their partner program.
Once you've decided on
a product that aligns with your niche and interests, the next step is choosing which
affiliate network to join. Well, hundreds are
available to choose from. Some are much better than others. Amazon Associates is by far the most popular affiliate program. It's not even close. It's one of the world's
most trusted brands known for its ease of use
and it's free to sign up, plus it sells pretty much anything. You'll get access to
over 900,000 merchants across a variety of niche markets to help create profitable partnerships that align with your brand. Let's say your blog is a
knowledge hub for audio files with a niche focus on
headphones for music production, but you also review other audio equipment. You want to search for new partnerships, but you don't want the challenge of managing multiple affiliate links.
Amazon Associates hosts a
range of tools to help you find and promote products within your niche, including customizable
product links and banners and deep linking options
that link directly to the Amazon shopping app. Go to the website to sign up. If you have an Amazon account, use your username and password to sign in and it'll take you through
the account creation process. Here you'll enter your
website, landing page, or social media URLs and the
type of content you create. Select the terms and
conditions and click finish. Your account will be temporarily approved while Amazon reviews your application. In the meantime, you'll get full access to its affiliate tools
and performance dashboard. To search for products,
go to the Amazon website and type in a specific product name or keywords to find the
most relevant results for your platform. Select your product, then come up here to the site stripe header, which lets you build
affiliate links and banners directly from any Amazon product page. I'll choose text link. It'll generate a link with your store ID and tracking code embedded that you can copy paste into your content, which places a cookie into your customer's browser when clicked.
Amazon Associates also handles
payouts so you don't have to set up accounts with
different merchants. You can use their advanced
reporting and analytics tools to track your earnings and commissions and monitor clicks and conversions. And the more you understand
campaign performance, the better you can optimize the content and improve lead generation. This requires planning, testing, and scaling of your traffic sources, nice. A website analysis tool
like Google Analytics is a treasure trove information
about your website traffic and it's free to use.
With this data in hand,
you can measure progress of your affiliates, evaluate performance, and try different strategies
to see what works best. For example, you've got
two blog posts promoting the same affiliate
product, product review, and a comparison. You wanna double down on the content that's driving the most
traffic to your site and generating conversions. The Traffic Acquisition report is going to be your best friend when it comes to identifying this behavior
and conversion info.
Now, before you start
using Google Analytics, you'll need a registered Gmail account. Postbot has a guide at the link below to get you up and running. Let's navigate to Life Cycle, Acquisition, Traffic Acquisition and Review. Here you'll see how many users
came from organic search, email, social media, and more. Scroll down into the right to
Conversions to view the number of times users triggered
a conversion event. The best way to measure a
conversion is to create an event that measures outbound
clicks on affiliate links. Go to Admin, create Property,
Data Streams, Stream Details, and Enhanced Measurement.
Click on the gear icon and turn on outbound clicks along with other metrics you'd like to capture. Let's try this out. Click on Admin and scroll
down to Debug View. Here you'll see real-time
behavior on your site, which is enabled by installing the GA Debugger Chrome extension. To isolate affiliate link clicks only, go to Admin, Events, Create Event. Give it a custom name like
Affiliate Partner Click. This filters out other outbound
link clicks on your site. Then under matching conditions,
choose event name needs to equal click and link URL contains
enter affiliate URL here. That way we only fire this event when these conditions are true. Check copy parameters and create. Reload your post and click on the link. Now go back to Analytics and into the debug view where you'll see the
affiliate partner click event. To track this as a conversion, navigate to Conversions,
New Conversion Event. Enter the event name and save. Now you'll see a flag
icon by your event name, which is a conversion.
Go to conversions and click the event itself,
which takes you to the report to show you how many affiliate
partner clicks you have. But traffic alone is not enough. You want qualified traffic,
meaning visitors are targeted with a strong match between
your offer and their intention. And the most obvious source
of traffic is search engines, which is why you'll need
a keyword research tool. Let's say your headphone
review post is getting lots of traffic but no clicks,
conversions, or revenue. SEMRUSH offers a robust set
of tools in its free plan that allow you to see traffic and competition scores for
different keyword phrases, how you rank based on intent, and find those high intent keywords to naturally plug product recommendations within your content. So someone searching best
studio headphones for mixing is likely in the market for a product, but wants to read an in-depth review before pulling the trigger.
As a result, they're quite likely to click and buy linked affiliate
products in your post. Let's type in some ideas to see how many searches we're getting and how competitive these keywords are. Though monthly searches
for this keyword are high, you'll see how hard it is to rank in the top 10
organic search results. Now let's refine our keywords for intent. Even though search volume for
this keyword is much lower, it's now possible to rank with informative quality content
focused on purchase intent. And ranking for relevant
keywords with purchase intent is how most content-based
affiliate marketers earn their commissions. You can also run an affiliate
marketing business entirely through an email newsletter if you want. Though, you'll need an
email marketing service to collect emails. And many like HubSpot include
a landing page builder, customer journey mapping,
and lists segmentation, all in its free plan. Let's start with building a
landing page with an offer to capture email addresses. This free offer attracts
your core audience and really hones in on the
value they're going to get with that opt-in.
Go to marketing in the menu
and click landing pages. Give it a name, select a
template, and add your content. We'll choose this one. In your layout, customize or
add content blocks as needed. Keep in mind that the more forms you add to your landing page, the
less likely someone may be to opt in. So keep it simple and include
a clear call to action that makes it easy for
customers to download your offer as you capture the info you
need to build your list. Click preview to see what
your page will look like, and if it all checks out,
click, save and close. Your email list is the
most important element of a successful marketing strategy. With that list, you can share your story, promote your business, and
showcase your products all while turning subscribers into paying customers.
Once you've set up an account,
click Contacts, Lists, then create list. Then click Contact-Based
and give it a name. Here you can click Add Filter. Filters are the criteria which will decide who gets onto the list and who doesn't. It's basically a naughty
or nice list, if you will. We'll choose Form Submissions. Then choose the form from the landing page we just built, the one
that had the free offer. Set the status to contact
has filled out form. Once that's done, you'll wanna
set up an email automation so customers immediately
receive an email with your offer when they submit that form. Go to marketing, email,
create email, then automation. This will let us set up an email that can be used in the next step.
Be sure to choose automation here. It's super important. We'll choose the welcome
template to customize, but it really doesn't matter. Make your email and be sure
to include the offer itself. Finally, save and publish. So with this email and our list from earlier
that we've prepared, we can create the workflow that will actually send this
email to the folks in our list.
Trust me, this is the easiest part. Head over to Automation, then Workflows. Hit Create Workflow from Scratch. We'll choose Contact-Based Blank Workflow. Then we'll click on
Contact Enrollment Trigger. We'll choose when filter criteria is met. Choose list membership. Then the name of the
list we created earlier. Then hit save. Next, press the plus icon at
another step to the workflow. We'll choose Communications,
then Send Email. Select the automated
email we made earlier, and then press Save. And that's it. Make sure to test everything first, so links and downloads
are working properly before sending traffic
to your landing page. Now you're ready to promote
from a variety of places like your podcasts, social media posts, Instagram bio, or your YouTube channel. Now, one of the biggest mistakes
newbies make when starting out is creating content for too many traffic channels at once.
I see accounts on YouTube,
TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, all managing
a newsletter and a blog. Way too much. Instead, start with one to
two main traffic sources, like an email newsletter and Google that can bring recurring organic traffic. Then get really good at them and make sure those are rock solid. Keep the bulk of your content creation and attention on one channel. Then bring others in to support those main
channels as you scale.
Another common mistake is neglecting thorough market research. The products or services
you promote have to resonate with your audience's needs and interests so that they're targeted and effective. Use Google Trends and
competitor analysis tools along with your keyword research
to identify niches with high demand and
relatively low competition. Look for niches where
customers are actively seeking solutions or products. 'Cause the less an affiliate
marketing program feels like a sales pitch, the better it'll perform. And if you don't build an
audience for your content, then you can forget about it. Affiliate marketing is a
performance-based business. When you build an audience
through trust and credibility, you leverage that knowledge
to promote solutions and value and therefore earn more income. Create content that is
relevant to your niche and promote it on your traffic channels. Build your email list and use
it to communicate directly with your audience and build
authentic relationships. It's important that you
know your audience so well, that you understand why they
follow you in the first place. So affiliate marketing
is a long-term game, and it's not for everyone.
But if you're willing to learn, it can drive consistent quality traffic to your affiliate offers. Remember, the key is to provide real value in whatever approach you choose. If you're ready to start
making some real bank with affiliate marketing, remember to download our free templates to help manage all those partnerships that bring in the most profit. And remember to like,
subscribe and leave a comment if you've liked what you've learned and what you want to hear more of. Now, if you'll excuse me,
I gotta go affiliate myself with the market of that new bakery that opened up down the street. I'm feeling a little hungry. I can smell the pan dulce from here.
Until then, I'll see you next time. (upbeat music) – I can find this client info. – Have you heard of HubSpot? – [Narrator] HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data
across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets
or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better..
