So, you’ve heard that affiliate marketing can be a HUGELY lucrative side hustle for anyone with dreams or aspirations of making a life-changing passive income.

You want to get cracking and start making that cheeky money as soon as possible.

You’ve been scouring the net to find the best programmes out there but now you’re finding too much information and don’t know where to begin!

Sound familiar?

Unfortunately this is one of the biggest problems affiliate marketing beginners face when taking their first steps.

Searching online to try and figure it all out can lead you down a rabbit hole where you’re faced with a ‘mind-blowing’ mass of information overload.

The problem is, this can lead to ‘action paralysis’ and you never even get started!

Fortunately, it’s all far more simple than it seems and there’s help out there that can make the whole process completely natural.

If you’ve been struggling to get going, read on because this affiliate marketing for beginners article is going to give you everything you need to finally ‘do it the right way’.

What is affiliate marketing?

The good news is, it’s not rocket science.

Too many people over complicate it.

Bottom line…

• You find a product to promote (… easy)

• Get people to see it (… not quite so easy as they make out but very doable)

• Get paid (… VERY easy)!

Put simply, affiliate marketing is a term used for making money as a middle man!

As an affiliate (… yes the middle man) you promote for companies who pay you a commission if anyone you refer buys their products or services.

You can think of it like a sort of profit share between sellers and promoters but the important thing to know is that there’s no additional cost to the customer because the commission comes out of the price of the product.

You can even start with no money!

Obviously the great thing about making cheeky money as an affiliate is the fact that you never have to worry about creating, shipping or handling of the products, as that’s all taken care of by the suppliers.

But another great advantage is that you can start with zero money!

Basically, because it’s in the interest of the sellers to get more customers via affiliates, the majority of affiliate programs are free to join.

Once you also realise that there are plenty of ways to get free traffic to your ads or promotions, you can see why this is such a popular way for people to start making cheeky money online.

How it works

There are a number of ways to become an affiliate marketer, the most popular being to sign up with an affiliate network.

Here are 4 affiliate networks that you can start with straight away where you can literally find thousands of products to promote.

• Clickbank – Probably the most well known network. Clickbank has paid out more than $4 BILLION in commissions over the last 20 years. They’ve apparently worked with more than 6 million entrepreneurs in over 200 countries around the world so plenty of credibility here!

• CJ Affiliate – Arguably the most highly trusted and established name in affiliate marketing. They’ve also been around for over 20 years and have employees in 15 offices worldwide who are dedicated to ‘delivering innovative solutions and strategies designed to drive BIG results’.

• JV Zoo – Not quite in the league of the big two above but still a large trusted affiliate network with thousands of products to get you going.

• Warrior Plus – Simple to join, excellent for beginners – maybe the ideal place to start!

Now to be frank, if there’s one thing these platforms all have in common is that most, if not all the products you’ll find on them are of low quality and have been developed purely to make money, rather than actually helping their customers.

In fact this is a typical problem in so much of the affiliate marketing world!

So many affiliates, especially those just starting out, tend to focus on how much money they can make rather than what benefit they can bring to the people they’re recommending products to!

This is the wrong way to go about it!

Truly successful affiliates are the ones who actually believe in what they’re promoting.

They’ve either used the products themselves or recommend them based on genuine research knowing that they can be of benefit to the person they’re promoting to!

Get this part right and it’s easy to get people to buy… get it wrong and you’ll never really make any decent cash!

A note about the Amazon affiliate programme!

Because Amazon absolutely dominates the marketplace these days, many people think that the easiest way to make money online just has to be to promote low cost products through the Amazon affiliate programme.

As a standalone, this is a big mistake!

Don’t get me wrong, without doubt there’s very good reason to promote Amazon products if you have a specific reason to so and when this is the case, then yes you absolutely should!

The problem is however, in most cases you get paid a pittance!

Basically, the majority (… not all) of things people buy on Amazon are ‘low ticket items’.

This is fine if your affiliate commission is effectively a little bonus from something you just happen to be talking about but if you’re actively trying to promote something…

… then there’s too little reward for too much effort!

Think about it…

Amazon’s commission rates vary but let’s say they pay a typical 4.5% for a low ticket item such as a book.

Someone you recommend buys the book for a tenner and wait for it…

You get a massive 45p!!!

See the problem here?

There’s just not enough commission to dedicate a load of time in getting people to want to buy it!

The thing is, it’s no harder to sell a high ticket item such as a running machine let’s say, to someone looking for a running machine than it is to sell a book to somebody looking for a book…

… but you can make significantly more money!

Let me give you an example.

A fitness equipment supplier might still only pay 4.5% commission (… after all they’ve got shipping, handling, premises and countless other logistical costs to think about)…

… but if someone is searching online for information on running machines, it’s extremely likely that they’re actually going to buy one at some point.

Now if your promotion helps them make up their mind to go ahead and make the purchase through well thought out and genuinely useful recommendation and they buy one for £1,000…

… your commission is now going to be £45!

Promoting high-ticket affiliate products is something you shouldn’t be frightened of when starting out as it’s simply not that much harder than promoting low-ticket items!

Quality digital products are even better though!

Now here’s the kicker.

Even promoting high ticket physical items has its drawbacks.

Suppliers are always going to have the logistical costs of getting their products to the customers (… premises, shipping, handling, delivery, etc) so they’re never going to pay out a high percentage in commissions to their affiliates!

But high quality digital products are different!

When you promote decent digital programmes the vendors don’t have the usual ‘overheads’ of the supplier of physical goods.

And without the major expenses they can offer higher commissions to their affiliates.

Higher commissions means you don’t have to promote as much!

Going back to Amazon for example.

Even if you promote a high ticket £150 physical product at a commission rate of 4.5%, you need to sell at least ten of them to make the same commission from a £150 digital product that pays out 45%!

In other words, you can make more money even when you sell less!

However, there’s something even more exciting…

Very often, quality digital products with a well run system behind them will allow you to make recurring commissions.

Get paid over and over!

For the same amount of effort, with some companies it’s possible to get paid not just a one off payment, but ongoing payments that can theoretically be indefinite.

1. Get Response

This a great example of a high quality email marketing service with an excellent reputation.

Here’s a snapshot from their current affiliate programme page.

As you can see, you have a choice.

If you successfully recommend someone who actually buys the Get Response service (… which is backed up by quality so is relatively easy to do)…

… you can either be paid a single one off payment of 100$ commission per sale, or an ongoing 33% recurring commission every month as long as the customer keeps using the service.

But here’s the thing.

With this type of program it’s very difficult for those using it to leave because all their email lists, data, information etc will be stored in the system, so going elsewhere is generally too much hassle.

Obviously this is great news for an affiliate who’s on a recurring commission because the user inevitably turns out to be a long term customer.

2. Systeme.io

This is another program that I particularly like because becoming an affiliate is super easy. You simply give over a few details along with your email address and that’s it, your in!

What’s great though is that there’s loads of stuff to promote along with plenty of helpful tools but you can refer people so they get useful free stuff.

But how about this?

If they then go on and purchase anything in the future, not only do you get 40% BUT if these customers then go on and become affiliates themselves, you get 5% of THEIR commssions as a recurring second level commission!

Read my unbiased review of Systeme.io here…

3. Wealthy Affiliate

When I first came across Wealthy Affiliate I thought ‘oh here we go, yet another make money program that makes money out of promoting how to make money’!

However, it turns out I was wrong.

The more I looked into it I soon realised that this is not the case, in fact, if you’re completely new to affiliate marketing then you can’t really go wrong with Wealthy Affiliate.

Basically it’s a platform that has everything you need to build a successful online business all in one place.

Now because it’s owned and operated by affiliates for affiliates, it stands to reason that they have an understanding of the whole business model that you may not find elsewhere but it’s the totally free training that’s so impressive.

You get everything… videos, tutorials, progress reports, a huge community and just so much more…

In fact it’s so good that it makes it very difficult for people you refer to not sign up (… after all they have nothing to lose by joining and accessing the totally free training)!

After that, if those people you refer for the free training go on to upgrade to the premium service (… $49 a month which is amazing value for what you get), then you as the affiliate who referred them gets a recurring commisision.

What could be easier?

Conclusion

No matter what niche you’re into there are countless affiliate programs that you can sign up to promote.

Regardless of whether you’re into cookery, yoga or model aeroplanes, there’s money to be had if you promote the right products.

But to be successful, it’s important that you promote the right products for the right reasons!

Make sure what you promote is of decent quality, that you’ve either used it yourself or at least researched it properly so that you know that it’s going to be of real benefit to the person you’re promoting to.

It’s not rocket science, it’s about just understanding what makes us trust the recommendations that we’re given (… as opposed to whether we think we’re being scammed), and then applying a bit of good old fashioned common sense!