No BS Guide To Start Affiliate Marketing In 2024 (A Quick Guide)

Being a blogger, I am aware of the term affiliate marketing. In 5 years of my blogging career, I have learned the “M” of marketing.

The best thing about Affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to create a product or service, you don’t need to be involved in the sales process, and you don’t even need to deal with customer support, shipping, refunds, etc.

To me, affiliate marketing is one of the best marketing models to promote products and earn big commissions. I love affiliate commissions. I receive them every month. A few of them are below…

These are a few screenshots just to show you what affiliate commissions look like in my inbox. Isn’t it crazy!

It seems very easy, I mean you just need to join a couple of affiliate programs, grab your affiliate links and start promoting them.

Well, it’s not as easy as it seems. There is so much to consider. Here are a few things that you need to be considering in 2024

1. Trust — You can’t even sell $10 worth of product if people don’t believe your opinion. Sometimes if you are lucky you may get 1,2, or even 3 sales, but it won’t make you a fortune. It’s really hard to generate sales daily.
2. Knowledge — You need to have some knowledge and a basic understanding of the product or service before you can recommend it.
3. Confidence — Do not sell something that doesn’t empower you. Why did I say that? because it lowers your confidence. You have to choose an affiliate product wisely. Don’t choose garbage just because it offers a $100 commission.
4. Patience — It takes time to consider Affiliate marketing a full-time business. In fact, it took me 3 years to make my first $149 affiliate commission.

If you work on the above factors, you are well on your way to starting Affiliate marketing. It’s the only qualification you need to have in 2024.

Note: I’m not going to bore you with the basic process of affiliate marketing, I hope you already understand the basic structure of Affiliate marketing. I am here to teach you stuff that actually works and will be working in the future. So bear with me!

Let’s jump into the actual process…

First, let’s understand what makes affiliate marketing successful…

1. Right Product
2. Targeted traffic
3. Right promotional strategy

If you score 100 in all these three areas, you can definitely master affiliate marketing.

Okay… let’s start with the first option…

1. Right product

The right product is a product that solves a specific problem and has a clear goal. For example, Clickfunnels helps entrepreneurs automate their sales processes. With this, they can create funnels, set up an autoresponder, collect leads, and track their performance. So, it is solving a very subjective problem and providing a complete solution to marketers, individuals, and entrepreneurs.

So if anybody who is running an online business would be looking for something like Clickfunnels to take care of all their marketing efforts.

Tips: How to choose the right product that converts

1. Always choose a product that solves the real problem.
2. The right product has nice, affordable, and reasonable pricing. Not too high or not too low.
3. I recommend you look for product reviews on Trustpilot and other public review platforms to make sure that it is good to consider for affiliate marketing.
4. Also, see how hard it is to promote the product. Sometimes it’s hard to promote a product if it is in a competitive niche. And also ensure whether or not you can create content around it. (Do I need to create videos, blog spots, tutorials, etc…)
5. Look at the commission model: Remember if a product is offering a huge commission, it is probably not the best product to promote. Always go with products that offer 20–30% recurring commission. In this way, you are going to make more money for months, not just for a day or a week.

2. Traffic

Okay, now you have the best of the best products. It’s time to drive the right audience to promote the product.

For that, you need to drive targeted traffic to your offer. And here you have 3 legit methods to drive targeted traffic to your offer.

1. Organic Traffic
2. Social Media Traffic
3. Paid Traffic

Organic traffic

It is the best form of traffic when it comes to driving long-term affiliate profit. But it’s the hardest traffic. It involves the right SEO strategies to rank high on search engines like Google, Bing, etc.

This type of traffic is best suited for bloggers who already have a blog and are willing to create valuable content around the product or offer you are about to promote.

For example, let’s suppose, you have a product in the health niche (say Weight loss supplement).

Now to promote this product with a blog, you need to create at least 15–25 high-quality blog posts related to weight loss tips guides, and expert advice before you can expect to make affiliate commissions.

Remember you have to be careful about keyword research. Make sure to target high-converting long-tail keywords with buyer intent. You can do the SERPs analysis to understand the buyer’s intent. You can use keyword research tools like Ahref, Ubersuggest, Kwfinder, SEMrush, etc. to find the best of the best keywords that drive people to take action.

For example, you can create a blog post like this…

“30 Experts Reveals 30 Secrets to Lose 20 Pounds in Less than 6 Months”

Did you see how powerful this post is?

You need to work hard to craft something actionable that makes people click and read your article.

Similarly, you can create a checklist with an action plan to make people go through steps to help them lose weight.

You can even use ChatGPT or other AI tools to generate content ideas, hooks, and call to action for better results.

Once the content is ready, you need to do some off-site SEO link-building to rank higher on Google.

Downsides

1. Time-consuming — you need to wait for months to see results. You can’t solely rely on SEO to drive traffic.
2. Not good for someone who doesn’t have enough time. (I recommend you go with paid traffic. It’s instant, high quality, and targeted. Google ads are the best way to drive traffic. If you have decided to start with Google ads, you can grab a $500 free Google credit here.)
3. You need to build topic authority to rank higher.
4. It’s easy to quit — Most people quit before they can see some results.
5. You have to trade so much time to make money

Social media traffic

The second form of traffic is social media traffic. It is easier to generate social media traffic than to generate SEO/organic traffic.

However, it is less targeted (YouTube is the exception. Highly targeted!) but can work great if you build a one-on-one relationship with your audience.

You have to produce highly engaging short forms of content to make people take action. You can create Instagram stories, reels, and YouTube shorts to boost engagement. You can use tools like Canva Pro to create graphics. And Inshot to edit videos, and Pictory to add captions to your videos.

The only downside is that you need to create content regularly and also be good at building relationships so that you can convince people to take action.

Paid Traffic

It is the best form of traffic to drive targeted people to your offer and make sales in less than 24 hours.

However, you need to create high-converting Ad creatives and invest some money to drive traffic. But no worries, there are many tools like Adcreative.ai that use artificial intelligence to help you create high-converting ad creatives. At the same time, if you decide to sign up with AdCreative.ai, you’ll get $500 free Google ad credit to run your ad with Google.

A few reasons why paid traffic is good…

1. You don’t need to create a lot of content, a few high-converting pieces can do wonders.
2. Traffic on demand — you can drive whenever you want, and you don’t need to wait for the sun to go down.
3. Quick results — You can see results in 1–2 days.
4. You have more control over targeting and the type of traffic you can drive.
5. You don’t need to trade time for money.

Downsides

1. You need upfront investment (However, if you decide to use Google ads, then you can get a $500 free Google ads credit here. )
2. You need to learn how to run paid ads on one of the following platforms Google, Bing, Pinterest, etc. (I recommend Google ads.)
3. It takes time to optimize your ad campaign.

Okay, you have a product to promote, and a traffic source you want to use to generate targeted traffic. Now, it’s time to learn the promotional strategies that will generate results.

So, let’s begin…

3. Promotional Strategies

Driving the targeted traffic to an offer is challenging. You need to offer the right product to the right audience.

For this, first, you have to decide what problem your product solves and then see where you can find people who are actually having the same problem.

# If you have a blog with high-quality content…

For example, if you’re promoting a weight loss product on Facebook, you need to look for groups of people that are actually asking for weight loss tips, and other stuff related to weight loss. You just need to enter into the discussion and add a valuable response, you can even share your blog article to help people find the solution.

In this way, you’re driving highly targeted people to your blog that could be interested in buying the supplement you are promoting. Similarly, you can use LinkedIn and Twitter to promote your product.

# If you’re using social media as a part of your promotion.

If you are using Social media for affiliate marketing, you need to build relationships with individuals who are interested in buying whatever you’re promoting.

For example, you can use Instagram stories to ask people questions related to the problems that your product solves.

# If you’re using paid advertising

NOTE: Use a keyword research tool to find the best of the best KEYWORD ideas that you can use in your ad campaign.

This is the best method to drive instant results. For this, you need to decide what type of traffic source you want to use.

To get started, first, you need to create a landing page. You can use Systeme.io or Clickfunnels to create your landing page/bridge page and set up your autoresponder.

After that, you need to go to Google Ads and sign up for an account. Once done, you can claim a $500 free Google ads credit here.

Now you can set up your ad campaign, create ads, set your bid, add keywords, targeted locations, devices, etc.

Once your ad is approved, it’ll start receiving impressions and clicks.

But it’s not yet profitable, you need to keep an eye on ads to see whether or not it is converting. You need to focus on Headlining, landing page, and ad relevance to optimize your ads. You can also use tracking tools to track performance more efficiently.

Once you start getting positive ROI (Return On Investment), you can add more budget to it and scale it.

PRO TIP: Use a bridge page to capture the leads so that you can retarget your audience. You can later nurture your leads with valuable content, and build strong relationships to promote relevant offers.

That’s it…