Simple Affiliate Marketing Guide For Beginners On How To Get Started in 2019

Last Updated Dec 20, 2018

This will be a very easy and simple step-by-step guide on how to start an affiliate marketing business for beginners!  You’ll need certain things to get started and I’ll show you how to get this all done and even get started for free.

 

WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?

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To start this Simple Affiliate Marketing Guide, let’s make sure we are all on the same page about what affiliate marketing is.

In short, affiliate marketing is about earning a commission from promoting other people’s products but you don’t earn that commission until someone buys or takes action after clicking on your affiliate links.

Many companies offer affiliate programs which allows people like you and me to join to promote their products and earn a commission for referring traffic to their websites to buy or take some other action like signing up for something, whatever action the affiliate program stipulates in order to earn a commission.

After joining an affiliate program, you’ll have access to affiliate links for the products you want to promote for that program.

Your job is to promote your affiliate links.

There are several ways but the way I am going to show you in this guide is the BEST way to build this online business.

Why? It’s because this is how the successful affiliate marketers do it and it’s a proven path to build a sustainable long term online business using the affiliate marketing model.

For more resources on affiliate marketing, you can check out these other posts:

• What Is Affiliate Marketing Training?
• How To Use Affiliate Marketing Programs to Monetize Your Blog
• How To Sell Affiliate Products Online

I’m sure you’re anxious to get started but before we do, I want to go over a few more things so you full understand this business.

This is a very cumulative business, meaning the more you work on it, the more results you’ll see.  Therefore, the more often you work on it, the faster you’ll see results.

This is no push button system (as those don’t exists and are scams), you will be putting a good amount of work into it, 20 hours a week or more would be great.

You will also need time, time for it to grow and search engines to learn to trust your online business.

This is very important to realize this so you don’t get frustrated and quit after three months because you don’t see any results.

The very reason why people fail at building this business is that they don’t put enough work into and/or let their business have time to grow.

If you can keep in mind you need both hard work and time, then this business is for you!

 

 

HOW TO START AFFILIATE MARKETING FOR BEGINNERS: STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

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Elements you’ll need to create an affiliate marketing business:

 

In this Simple Affiliate Marketing Guide, you’ll be learning the following:

1. Choose an Interest – you’ll learn how to choose a topic that you’ll love.
2. Build a Website – you’ll learn how to build your website very quickly without coding.
3. Get Rankings & Visitors – writing content and build out your website.
4. Earn Revenue – Learn how to monetize your site to make money!

 

 

BEFORE YOU START

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In order for you to follow this guide, you’ll need to create a FREE account here at Wealthy Affiliate so you can follow the training that I’ll be referencing, learn along the way, and create your website at the same time!

Wealthy Affiliate is my #1 recommendation for affiliate marketing training where they offer you two free websites along with hosting, training, and business tools with your free account.

Once you’ve created your account, move on to STEP 1 below!

 

 

 

 

CHOOSE AN INTEREST

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You need to choose a topic for your business that is targeted to a certain group of people called a niche.  It should be a topic you love and will be able to write about for many months and years to come.

The easiest way to choose a topic is go with what you like or interested in.  Usually, it’s something you already have a good knowledge about or, if you don’t know a lot about it, you will enjoy researching about it.

To explain how to look for your niche in more details, here’s a video walk through:

 

If you’re a mom, I have compiled 10 awesome niches for you to think about and maybe even use one of these, you can find them here.  As a mom, you’ll be trusted as other moms-to-be and new moms will look to someone who’s been through their problems and will trust your recommendations.

If you’re anyone else and still stuck, here are some more ways to figure out how to determine your best niche here.

Once you have your niche, we can move onto Step 2!  You should not move on to Step 2 until you’ve completed Step 1.

 

 

 

 

BUILDING YOUR WEBSITE

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Next you will figure out a name and a domain name for your website.  The name of your website does not have to be the same domain name but should be similar.

In this step, you will create your website very quickly as you have two free websites with the free Wealthy Affiliate account you set up before you started this guide.

Your free websites will have a domain URL that looks like this:

http://yourwebsitename.siterubix.com

 

Once you have determined your domain name, you can enter it here and build your free website:

 

If your domain name is taken, just try a different name until you have one that’s available to you.  Once you have your domain URL and clicked on the “Build it Now” button, you will be directed enter your website name that should be similar in topic to your domain URL.

If you want your own custom domain, I have more info on that below.

 

Next, you’ll need to pick a WordPress theme for your website, as this will be the framework you’ll be using to build your website with.

WordPress is used by millions of bloggers and has easy plugins to add-on to your site to make it even better.

The theme of your website can be changed anytime so don’t worry so much about that at this point.  Pick a simple one which always works best nowadays to have a clean, simple looking website.

 

Once you have picked your theme, you’re ready to press that “Click Here to Build This Site!” green button at the bottom of your screen!

Pressing that button will install WordPress and your http://yourwebsitename.siteubix.com site will be live on the internet!

 

CONGRATULATIONS!  You’ve just built your free website!

You can easily see how you can create a free website in less than a minute in a video in this post which will also show you how you can transfer this free website on to your own custom domain in just a few clicks!

 

A Word on CUSTOM Domains

If you’re one that want your own .com URL instead of a sub-domain URL, you can purchase one if you upgrade to a Premium membership.

Upgrading will also offer you the rest of the training for those who really want to earn a full time income with their blog, access to over 2000 themes to choose from, hosting for 50 websites, live weekly video training, Live Chat, and one-on-one coaching!  Take a look at this page to learn more.

If you don’t want to host your website on Wealthy Affiliate, you can do it on your own hosting with the instructions here.

On the flip side, if you already have your own domain and want to host it on Wealthy Affiliate, you can do that do by reading this.

Once your DNS settings are updated, you can choose “On a Domain I Own” instead of “A Free Website” option in the first step of the image above.  You’ll still need to upgrade to a Premium membership to you use this option.

 

 

 

 

GETTING RANKINGS AND VISITORS

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This step will talk about building the foundation, structure, and writing content for your website which in turn will get you rankings on search engines and get visitors onto your blog.

 

FOUNDATION:

In order to build the foundation for your site, you’ll need to activate the following WordPress plugins that was installed on your website when you created it at Wealthy Affiliate:

• All in One SEO
• EWWW Image Optimizer

You’ll need to activate these in your “Plugins” menu of your WordPress admin panel and setup your All in One SEO for maximum success of your site.

You can also delete any default page, post, and comment that came with your site when WordPress was installed.

Lessons 5 & 6 at Wealthy Affiliate can take you through these tasks very easily.

 

STRUCTURE:

Now you can start writing some content!  How do you start writing on your blog?

You can start writing using Pages about your niche.  So if you’ve picked a dog training niche, then start with 3 main themes or pages for your site.

You want these to be the main themes that you can also reference to in the future when you keep writing on different sub-topics of these three themes.

Along with your first 3 theme pages, you’ll want to also create your About page and your Privacy Policy pages which are needed on every website.

You may also want to start to do some keyword research so you can find out what people are searching for in your niche.

This is the way you will bring in visitors to come onto your blog.  If you use the search words they are using and your posts show up on their search engine results, you’ll get traffic!

Just continue with Lessons 7 – 10 and you’ll learn about keywords, how to build your three theme pages, and you’ll also get instructions there to create your About and Privacy Policy pages.

If you continue to Course 2, you’ll learn Wealthy Affiliate’s simple yet very effective technique to do keyword research that can really bring in thousands of free visitors on to your site a month organically.

You cannot beat SEO traffic and finding those right keywords is the secret ingredient to any successful blog.

You will learn how to use and find the right keywords inside Wealthy Affiliate in great detail and they also provide a very advanced keyword research tool called Jaaxy right on their platform for you to use even as a free member.

 

WRITING CONTENT:

After you’ve written your three theme pages above, you’ll continue writing for your website using Posts which will build the content in your blog roll.

If you’d like to know the difference between what a Page and a Post is, visit this page here which I wrote that explains everything about pages and posts.

In your posts, you will write about solving problems for people in your niche.

Back to the dog training example, you can write a post about teaching a dog how to sit on command.  You will offer tips and techniques on how to do this.

You will also address things like what to do when your dog doesn’t listen, or what treats to offer while training.

 

If you can always figure out what your audience’s pain points are, and you’re able to solve these problems they experience, the better it is for your website and the more money you’ll make.

The more value you provide to your audience, the more they will trust your recommendations, and the more you’ll become the “authority voice” in your niche and the more likely your visitors will click on your links and take action!

 

 

 

 

EARNING REVENUE

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Now that you have build out your website a bit and have placed a good foundation and structure for your site, it’s time to monetize it and make money!

The way to make money from affiliate marketing is to recommend products to your audience and if they buy it through your website, you’ll make a commission.  Very simple.

All you have to do is find what affiliate products are available for your niche.  You can start with a place like Amazon, Target, or Walmart which all have affiliate programs.

Or you can go to affiliate networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare, or ShareASale where advertisers and publishers meet and you can find even more products in there.  For more on how to find affiliate products, check out my post here.

Once you find your affiliate products, you will get your affiliate links from the company that’s selling that product and you’ll place the links in your posts.  You do this by either linking it to your text or an image.

The entire Course 3 in Wealthy Affiliate gives you all the details on the “how-to’s” of this whole money making step, it’s such a great course and so easy to follow!

I highly recommend you going through the Online Entrepreneur Certification course at Wealthy Affiliate if you’re serious about building an affiliate marketing business and want to make a full time income with it.

 

 

SUMMARIZING THE FOUR STEPS

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I’m going to walk through the entire process here:

• You pick a niche.

• Build a website and learn how to build a good foundation.

• Build out your website with valuable, great content.

• Monetize that content with affiliate links to products you’ll recommend to your audience to help them solve their problems.

• Your readers click on your affiliate links and buy the products you recommend.

• YOU make MONEY!

 

This list summarizes what my simple guide on how to start affiliate marketing for beginners has taught you!

Use the lessons in Wealthy Affiliate to help you get all the details sorted out as they have way more training videos to learn from than I do and so much more to guide you through the remainder of your journey.

If you are serious about this business, you’ll want the Premium membership because the training will take your website to levels you’ve never thought it can go!

Their techniques gives your site free search traffic and you won’t need to spend a dime on advertising if you don’t want to.

Learn more about Wealthy Affiliate and read success stories here.

 

Ready to sign up for a free Starter or Premium account?  Just click on the “Sign Up Now” button below:

 

I’m a Premium member (“littlemama” is my handle, click the link to see my profile!) in there and I can personally help you along the way!

This training platform has given me so much for my online business, and it can do the same for you.  I’ll see you on the inside!

 

 

Let’s make money online!