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Affiliate Marketing remains one of the best methods to make money online today, and for many bloggers, webmasters, students, and online entrepreneurs, Affiliate marketing has become their major source of making money online and even replaced the regular 9-5 jobs for a lot of people.

There is this misconception about what affiliate marketing truly is, so in the article today we will explain everything about affiliate marketing for beginners and also discuss how to get started with affiliate marketing

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing has several definitions, but for the benefit of beginners to affiliate marketing, we will try to make our explanation simple. 

So Affiliate marketing is simply the process of receiving or earning commissions (money) each time you promote someone else's or a company's products or services and make a sale. It is a great way to earn more money and start a home-based business because it doesn’t require much money to start up, and you don’t need to produce anything, stock or ship product inventory, or even deliver a service.

Simply put, in affiliate marketing you get paid for referring new clients and customers to other businesses online.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

If you are interested in becoming an affiliate marketer, you need to first understand how affiliate marketing works, this would give you a clear idea of how to get started with affiliate marketing.

To get started, you need to join an affiliate program or affiliate platform and choose any products that you would like to promote from the categories available. After you picked a product of your choice to promote, the seller will provide you with a unique affiliate link that you can use to refer traffic (prospective buyers) back to the target site or sales page of the product vendor. Most affiliate platforms or programs have pre-made text links, banners, and other types of creatives that you can use. All you need do is copy the code and place it on your website/blog or email your subscribers to start driving traffic.

Basically, the affiliate will try to use whatever channel or medium they find fit to drive or refer traffic back to the product sales page. It could be via email marketing, social media, paid advertising, blog, or Youtube. Whenever interested visitors click on the affiliate link, they will be redirected back to the product sales page, and if they make a purchase of the product or subscribe to a service offered by the vendor, the affiliate who referred that person receives a commission.

How To Start Making Money With Affiliate Marketing

So, we've discussed what affiliate marketing is and also talked about how to start affiliate marketing as a beginner. Now it's time to learn how to start making money with affiliate marketing. 

First thing first, making money with affiliate marketing is a gradual process and you need to 

• Create Content That Generates Affiliate Revenue

Most newbie affiliate marketers make the mistake of publishing some random content and hurriedly insert affiliate links inside the article. Now, this strategy might or might not work, because if you truly desire to make money from affiliate marketing and earn commissions you need to ensure the contents you publish is targeted toward a specific audience.

Your target audience can be people who are interested in the product that you are promoting, and most times they might not know the exact product to purchase that will fulfill their needs. This is where you come in as an affiliate marketer, and it is your responsibility to help them discover the right product for their needs with the right content to help guide them to make a purchase.

What it implies is that your article needs to be keyword specific, you should target keywords that prospective buyers of the product that you're promoting use to research about the product they want to buy on Google and other search engines. To help you discover the right keywords, check out this Free Keyword Research Tool.

• Promote Your Affiliate Products in the Content

The next step to start making money with affiliate marketing is to promote your affiliate products in your published content. So, now that you have a clear idea of what type of content to create, it's time to find topics related to the solution to the problems faced by your target audience.

And this is why you need to do proper keyword research first with a keyword suggestion tool that will help you generate ideas for your content. In the course of preparing your content, you should also start inserting your affiliate links. However, the way and manner that you should insert your affiliate links depend on the article that you are working on. For example, if you are writing a product review, it's logical that you insert only the link to that product and not links to other different products.

While if you're writing about "Top 5 Gaming PC's" or "Top 10 Tools For X" you can insert multiple affiliate links, as this would increase your chances of making more sales eventually. The aim is to insert your affiliate links in strategic places to improve conversions.

To help you get the best results with affiliate links placement, check out these tips below:

Affiliate Links Placement Tips

1. Always resist the urge to add affiliate links that don't fit in with your content. If you don't, it will negatively impact the user experience (UX) and cost you more lost sales in the long run.

2. If you’ re reviewing  many products in one article, ensure to add your affiliate products at the top of the list. This is simply because most people don't have the patience to read an entire article. It's ideal that they see your affiliate links early on.

3. Make use of sidebar widgets, floating bars, and inline banners, to showcase and promote your affiliate products. They increase conversions and also enhance the impact of your content to your viewers.