Affiliate Marketing Tutorial For Beginners 2024 (Step by Step)

so in this video I'm going to share everything that you need to know about starting scaling and operating an affiliate marketing business in 2024 building that up to $10,000 per month as passively as possible so let's go into it in this video this is going to be a full tutorial I've personally made hundreds of thousands of dollars from affiliate marketing and I'm going to show you the exact process that I would use if I was going to start this over from scratch to build this up okay and so let me talk about these different sections that we're going to go into in this video I do recommend taking out a pen taking out a piece of paper jotting down some notes as we go through this this is all free information I don't have a course to sell you so you don't have to worry about this being like one big sales pitch for something like that so first of all we're going to talk about setting expectations setting goals for affiliate marketing why affiliate marketing is one of the best business opportunities this year uh we'll also talk about startup costs by the way it it's going to be probably less than $100 a month at most for affiliate marketing that's why we love affiliate marketing it's pretty much anyone can start it from anywhere in the world regardless of what country you live in then we're talking about you know the basics of what affiliate marketing is how it operates then we're going into choosing a niche what type of category do you want to promote products in how do you build content around that we'll talk about building your affiliate brand so rather than just you posting content everywhere how do you actually build a company from this we'll use some case studies here showing you some different companies that are worth over $ hundred million that are affiliate marketing Brands I'm really excited for that section we'll talk about building out your blog building out your site then we're going to go into how to find affiliate products specifically you know looking at different affiliate programs then we're talking about free versus paid traffic we're going to get into the weeds here okay a lot of other people aren't going to share this type of information that I'm dumping here out in this video for you today I've been doing this for almost a decade now so there's a lot here for me to delve into and then finally we're talking about getting traffic uh using social media using your blog some of the best ways to get people to convert on your affiliate products that you're promoting some of the best practices there whether you're using a website Pinterest Instagram Tik Tok other types of social platforms and then finally towards the end of the video we're talking about optimizing content and increasing revenue and really building a business off of this that can be passive rather than you know having to spend 80 hours a week working on this so that's going to be the video here we're going to get into it here feel free to skip around I will leave some show notes Down Below in the description if you want to check out some of the resources or you want to kind of learn more about you know the exact structure of this video I'll leave all of that down below in the description all right now before we go too deep into this video I want to share the basics of what affiliate marketing is and effectively all you're doing with affiliate marketing is you're marketing products for other businesses and in return they're giving you a commission or a small percentage of the sale that you send in their Direction so for example let's say that you are an affiliate partner with Nike and you make a Blog article or a social media post about the Nike shoes that you know are the best shoes for running a marathon and anytime someone goes through your custom specific affiliate link that Nike gives to you anytime someone clicks on that link and then buy something within a certain time frame you get a commission you get a percentage of that sale you get credited for sending Nike that customer and they're going to give you somewhere between 1 and 10% usually for some type of shoe product from Nike that's just an example there but that is how affiliate marketing works now there's a lot of different niches a lot of different companies have affiliate programs we'll talk about all of that later in this video but the beauty of affiliate marketing is that because you don't have to have a warehouse with products you're also not dealing with the customers when they want to return something or if they have issues with shipping you don't have to deal with any of that cuz all you're doing is you're just sending customers to existing businesses and you're getting a percentage of that Revenue it's kind of like sales in a way and so the beauty of this is that there's really no cost to start up in total cost you're probably looking at maybe at most $100 a month that's after you factor in the cost of setting up and running a website maybe you want to get some different types of software to like cloak your affiliate links or something but overall you're looking at less than $100 per month in total cost so it's very very low cost anyone can start this from anywhere in the world and so that's why we think affiliate marketing is the best business opportunity for someone starting in 2024 going into 2025 now one of the big questions that people have is how much money can you realistically make from affiliate marketing and the reason why this is a great business is because it's really up to you on how far you can take this now I know people who you know make $500 or $1,000 a month from their affiliate marketing business and they're very happy with that they supplement their their rent payments with their affiliate business and they kind of do it on the side now I also know people who have made tens of millions or actually over a hundred million dollar from their affiliate marketing business I would really say that the sky is the limit on this I'll use two examples here three examples actually that I can think of off the top of my head something like the Points Guy which is a credit card affiliate blog they've built this out they made millions of dollars in affiliate revenue from promoting credit cards in their blog articles that guy went off and sold the Points Guy for millions of dollars I think well over $10 million something like the penny hoarder which was an affiliate blog about personal finance sold for $102 million they're doing about $50 million a year in revenue and then someone like Dave Ramsey as another example he makes hundreds of millions of dollars per year and a big chunk of that comes from affiliate Revenue you can look all this up I've gone into detail like I've been doing this for almost a decade now so I've gone into detail on all these different people who have made tens of millions of dollars from affiliate marketing so really the sky is the limit on this um I think a lot of people who attempt this end up failing because they don't stick with making content but you know hopefully if you watch this entire video you'll learn enough to really get started and push forward and start to make some cash from affiliate marketing I think a realistic goal from affiliate marketing is to get to a couple thousand per month within the next 12 months it's not something that you're going to make a million dollars overnight this is going to take time in my first year I don't even know if I made any money I probably made like $10 but after year two three four five it started to really compound I learned from my mistakes I learned how to build out blogs and sites and different networks where we could really start to streamline the process and I will you know explain in more detail on exactly how I would go about doing that if I was going to start over from scratch so now that we've talked about the basics of affiliate marketing setting goals setting expectations for yourself now let's get into understanding the different niches that you could potentially go into and then how to actually build build your brand your affiliate brand building out your site and everything else that you need to do to get off the ground with this new business that you're starting okay so let's talk about choosing a niche we have a lot of different options here and anytime someone asks me Nate what Niche should I choose what category should I promote products in I'm going to tell you the basic answer and then there's a little bit more of an intricate answer okay so the the thing that I think is most important is that you really do need to find something that you either already have a lot of knowledge in or something that love to talk about and learn because if you try to build an affiliate business around something that is just so boring that you don't care about it's going to be actually very difficult to stick with it so if you make an affiliate blog about mattresses I don't care about mattresses so it's difficult for me to actually wake up at 6: a. m. and start to crank out content about mattresses if I genuinely just do not care and so finding a category that you already have a passion on is going to be very crucial for actually succeeding I'm a True Believer in this so write down your five favorite things this could be something so Random this could be literally flying kites you you like flying kites on the weekend that could be a full affiliate brand just around that specifically or you like surfing right that's a whole brand around that you could build you like making Ceramics and pottery that's a whole brand that you could build around that but find specific niches that you are passionate about write down your five or 10 things that you really just could sit down at the dinner table and rant about to your family for 2 hours and never grow tired of that's going to be your list that you want to start start with okay now outside of that I'll tell you some very profitable niches if you are interested okay so the first one that comes to mind is Personal Finance on my personal YouTube channel uh has a little bit over a million subscribers it's been running for six or seven years I've promoted a lot of personal finance products like investing apps brokerages banking products and with all those different products I've gotten anywhere between 30 and $150 for sending customers to these companies like Robin Hood for example which is a very popular investing app I did affiliate marketing for those companies and sent them a lot of customers and in return they paid me pretty well from those videos and just from those videos alone I think uh have made many many many thousands of dollars from affiliate marketing also with our sites so besides personal finance things like supplements and nutrition if you already work out or you take different types of supplements these have really great affiliate rates because they tend to be pretty expensive and so look at something like grons for example I think their product is like $50 or $60 a month and they have an affiliate program where you can get some pretty nice you know returns from that if you are marketing those as you know your uh supplement that you like to take on The Daily and that's just you know another example there supplements any type of nutrition I know festar nutrition pays like 10 or 20% and the order values are you know well over $100 or $200 for supplements in a lot of cases and so you can make some good cash from that other topics things like pets everyone loves their dogs I mean they're doing so many things for their animals these days you can build a whole brand around that and I would say something else would be home and garden so thinking about anything related to your lawn to your garden these are categories that if you actually look at the Amazon Associates which is the affiliate program on Amazon that is one of the highest paying commission rates is Home and Garden Products on Amazon and so let's say that a Rota tiller for example might be $300 or a lawnmower could be $500 someone buys that on Amazon through your specific affiliate link and you're getting close to 10% Commission on that you're making some really great cash from promoting these big ticket lawn and garden and kind of like Farm related items and that's one of my favorite categories we have some agricultural blogs in our portfolio that make some pretty good money in that category another one here would be fashion look this is not something I actually have a lot of experience in because I have the worst fashion ever but if you buy a lot of clothes and you wear a lot of clothes uh and and you're posting them on your social media all the time you can monetize your outfits with affiliate links this is something that everyone should be doing if you're posting a lot on social media and you really like fashion you really like clothing this is kind of a no-brainer to at least make an extra $500 or ,000 per month from something like that okay so those are the best niches you know if you have more questions than those feel free to reach out to me and I can kind of help give you some pointers just you know can shoot me a message on like Twitter or on on Instagram and I'll try to help you out I don't know how many people are going to respond to that so if there's a lot I might get overwhelmed so I can't promise I will try to help you out okay um now in this next section we're talking about building your company and we're talking about building your brand how do you structure this properly and how do you build this up okay so what we need to do if we're trying to build an affiliate brand is we need to come up with an actual like Media Company rather than just like you running around posting your affiliate links everywhere because I've seen people like they'll get custom affiliate links from Nike or from these other companies and they'll just start spamming them in comment sections and forums and all over the place that's not how you build a true affiliate marketing business in a passive manner the way to do this is we need to start with a Blog and then from there we can build out our different social accounts on all these different platforms okay but the goal if you get anything from this video the goal is to have your media company your blog and then have social media coming from all different social platforms into your blog because this is where you're going to make the money okay this is the structure that you need to do in 2024 uh people are still surprised when I tell them that blogs are still cash cows in 2024 can make tons of money okay people think of blogs they think of 2003 or something but the truth is that we have blogs in our portfolio that make really great cash because they rank in Google for very competitive Search terms on Google when someone searches up you know how to invest in farmland and we show up number one or number two in those results and we are promoting affiliate products in those blog articles and makes some really good cash having said that let me show you how to build this out properly the first thing you're going to want to do because if you want to apply to affiliate programs you need to have a media brand you need to have an affiliate uh website already set up and you're going to build this out as a Blog so what you're going to do is you're going to go over to santal media.

com Squarespace and uh when you go through the link below in the description and you use the code sandal 10 you will get 10% off for your Squarespace plan we like building sites on Squarespace it's just very easy to do you can do this in like 20 or 30 minutes and what we're actually doing in this video specifically is we're giving away $500 to five people who build out a site on Squarespace they build out a site write five 10 blog articles send it to us submit it and we're picking five people from these submissions to give $500 to so $500 each to five different people for our favorite and best affiliate blogs that we see built out so I don't know how many people are going to enter I'll leave all those details Down Below in the description I'll leave a special link to it that you can enter to join that contest but it's just a way for us to incentivize people to actually get started on this cuz I know so many people will watch this and then not actually start their affiliate marketing journey and so this hopefully will in iniz some to get started with that okay I'll show you how to build this out super quickly but what I'm going to do is I'm going to pick a brand and for my Niche I'm just making this up on the spot here I'm going to choose chicken like backyard chicken raising there's millions of people in the US who have chickens in their backyard for eggs right and this is actually a great Niche because it's in the home and garden category so these are usually bigger ticket items I know there's not too much competition on this so let me just build out this site here and so they have templates they also have ai Builders with Squarespace so it's super easy to do this so let me just go with this one here and maybe I want this color scheme I can start with this design and then it will make you sign in and we can start to build this out so let's just say that my brand is going to be I'm going to call it Chicken Mania so you can see how easy this is I can just click edit here and I can change the title here I'll call it Chicken Mania and this is going to be all about you know how to raise chickens the best products for your chickens people kind of view them as like pets in a lot of ways and so they want to take care of them there's all trust me I used to obsess over chickens I had like hund something chickens at one time so I know all about this already I'm already passionate about it so it's easy for me to crank out articles you can use AI to help you write articles but be careful like you don't want to overuse AI cuz Google kind of knows this by now and they don't want you creating junk articles just made by chat GPT so I do think you're still better off writing them yourself or at least doing a lot of the heavy lifting yourself when you create these articles and so what I want you to do is go and build out your blog you can spend the rest of today just building out your blog you can keep it very simple build out your homepage I'm not going to bore you with the whole process of me setting up this site specifically and make you sit here for 2 hours all right now when we're building out our site we also need to make sure that we buy a domain name for our website and so what I recommend doing for this let's go back to the main part of Squarespace here okay so right now I just have a free trial but what we want to do is we want to have a custom domain for our website because you're never going to rank on Google with like this random URL here it's just all choppy and weird and it's a Squarespace URL so I'm going to subscribe here to one of squarespace's products and when we do this we're going to get a free custom domain and what I want you to take away from this part here is that you want your domain to be a very clean simple short. com domain for your website so like for example like what was going on with Farmland riches. com it's as short as possible it's to the point and so let's see if we can do one for Chicken Mania for example I'm going to go with the business plan I mean you can do personal as well you're just not going to get as many you know benefits to that the reason why I like the business plan is because you get a professional email from Google and you also get some other really great features there that are going to be helpful so I'm going to go with the business plan here and then what we're going to have is we can pick out our specific domain and so we can search for this I'm going to go with like chicken mania.

com or maybe like some variation of that but as short as possible for that domain to set up so I'll do that after this this video but I just want to kind of walk you through that little process there when you're going through and setting up your site once you get that set up then we can move on to the next section and then what we're going to do is we're going to find five to 10 different blog articles that we can write about chickens okay and so to find these articles all you have to do is go to Google sometimes people try to over complicate this but our goal is to rank number one or number two for competitive Search terms on Google so when we're thinking about what articles we should create you want to create something especially when your site is new you want to create something that's what we call Long longtail keywords so that it's not as competitive like if we just create an article about best chicken breeds this is going to be very competitive right we have a lot of websites that already made these articles and so because of that it's going to be a little bit difficult to rank for a term like that instead we want to Niche down and say maybe best chicken breeds for Pennsylvania and now we can see that if we create an article about this there's a good chance that we'll rank number one or number two for this term best chicken breeds in Pennsylvania and we'll make up a Blog article of top five chicken breeds for Pennsylvania and you know you can tell that this is going to be one that will rank well in Google from our site because the first result is from a forum and anytime you see a forum that's ranking this high on Google it means that you can compete with this also you see things like Reddit when reddit's showing up on the first page of Google it usually means that you can uh out rank these and if you rank number one for this you might get a couple hundred hits per month onto your site and then once people go into your website they're on your blog they're reading your article about the best chicken breeds and then throughout that blog article what you're going to do is you're going to link to various different products that are your affiliate links throughout the article so you embed things I'll show you what we did for one of a Blog that I have some equity in and I'll show you an example here of like let's say that here's three different ways to buy Farmland in 2024 this is an example blog article where inside of the article you are embedding you're embedding affiliate links inside of here right so someone's reading through this right and they're look they're reading about crowdfunded Farmland investing if they then click on you know this link right here that takes us to an affiliate link so now we have the cookie here and anytime someone signs up for this we're getting an affiliate commission from Acer Trader if someone decides to start investing in Farmland so that's an example there of affiliate marketing at its best how it works and you start to rank for these different terms and it can really be effective for your affiliate brand okay so like I said I want people to go build out a site on Squarespace spend you know the next hour two hours on this write a couple of blog articles once you do that you can submit that through our contest to have that potential to win $500 we're giving the way to five different people make sure you read all the terms though Down Below in the description so you can make sure that you're eligible to enter into that contest but it's really just a way for us to find a way to incentivize people to create their affiliate Brands finally okay now once you've built out your site and you don't have to overthink this don't you don't have to go out and spend like a ton of money on like logo designs and stuff you can use canva to create Graphics it's super easy to do that so don't spend too much time initially like trying to make the absolute perfect site it's okay if it's a little bit Scrappy at first okay and so once you have some of these articles written and you're going to start ranking in Google this takes some time okay so if you want to rank on Google we have a full video showing you how to basically do search engine optimization or what we call SEO um on Google for your blog now this does take time this can take a month or two months sometimes to start ranking and show Google that you're actually very serious about you know creating a site that's going to be seen as an authority in the space and so in the meantime while we set up our site and while this starts to rank in Google we're going to go out and start doing some affiliate marketing on various different platforms to send back to our main website okay and so the biggest underrated categories here for this are going to be something like Pinterest which has I think about 500 million monthly active users it's so underserved things like Instagram even Tik Tok but Tik Tok is not my favorite I'd say Instagram and Pinterest are really the best opportunities for social media to funnel back to your website we'll talk about that a little bit more later in the video when we talk about how to get traffic but right now what I want to talk about is how to actually find affiliate products to promote inside of your blog articles and from your brand okay so how do we actually find products to promote there's a couple of ways to do this the first option here is actually very simple and it's to literally just type in any brand that you're thinking of type it in and then just follow it up with affiliate program on Google and You' be surprised like pretty much I would say 80% of brands have some type of affiliate program or referral program already in existence it can be a little bit difficult to find that's why I say do a Google search so like let's say Tractor Supply affiliate program and so with my Chicken Mania blog right it's kind of a funny name Chicken Mania but with the Chicken Mania blog I can just promote products that are sold to Tractor Supply which is a very popular place everyone already knows that if you like chickens you you're Buy products to Tractor Supply and so I can apply to the Tractor Supply affiliate program right here I just did a basic Google search here's a form that I can fill out and join the program and they're going to pay anywhere between I think like 1 and a half to 6 or 7% commission for any product that's getting sold through your special affiliate link and so you know this might not seem like a lot of money if you say you know maybe you're only getting 10% commission from like a lawnmower that you're promoting in like the five best lawnmowers blog article right you might only get 10% Commission on that but if the mower is $500 then you're getting $50 every time someone goes through your link and buys that now let's say that one person per day does that that's $1,500 a month and so it's really just a numbers game here this is how you can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing because it's all about the volume of people that you get to see your content and then it's just a numbers game if you have 10,000 people look at a Blog article and 500 of those 10,000 click on your affiliate link and then a 100 of those 5 00 buy something through your affiliate link and you're getting $50 commission per person that's doing that just off the top of my head I think it's about $5,000 that you make from that one specific piece of content and so it's really just a numbers game of converting those people for your products okay so that's one way now another thing you can consider doing is do affiliate marketing on a brand or on a platform that people are already very much warmed up to so for example Amazon is a great one because any product on Amazon you can join the Amazon Associates program which is the affiliate program on Amazon and you can link to any product on Amazon and get a commission for linking to it and so the reason why Amazon's great is because this is something that everyone already has an Amazon Prime account they trust Amazon and so if you send someone to Amazon their conversion rate is going to be so incredibly High because they already know the platform they probably already have the app downloaded and so it converts so much better you get so many more sales on that platform versus like if you're promoting a product on some website that maybe people have never heard of and so it's a little bit they're more skeptical they have to put in their credit card information whereas with Amazon all their info is already there their shipping address it's all there they can just click with like one button and purchase through that so the conversions are a lot better on Amazon we have a full tutorial actually showing you how to do affiliate marketing with Amazon so I'll leave a link to that down below as well if you would like to see it okay now there's a couple other affiliate networks that I want to show you that you can find brands on so something like impact. com is a great one I recommend setting this up so go build your site First Once you build your site you can apply to something like impact. com so I'll just show you inside of here like the types of Brands you can find I'll sign into one of my accounts and so on impact you can see we have 5,381 potential brands that we can work with and you probably recognize some of these like CH which is a great one for studying so if you build content around that or upwork which is a great place to hire people VPN right we have lots of different ones that you probably already recognize and that are pretty easy to actually promote here's a poker one where you get 50% of the revenue if you're making poker content sign up for this and check this out you're going to see different things that you can sign up for like uh ritual which is like a superfoods which is for nutrition you earn 40% commission for anything someone buys through ritual through your affiliate link which is a really great commission if someone spends $100 you earn $40 and so you can sort through different categories as well so let's say we want to find one for like Home and Garden right or home Pet and Garden and maybe we can find one for our chicken blog as well like you know some different types of like chicken feed companies or something on here I wouldn't be surprised to see that on impact because a lot of brands use this another one that you can use is cj.