How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing Faster

Learn how to make money with Affiliate Marketing in 4 easy steps. Follow my guide to explore tactics, tips, and best practices on how to start working with affiliate marketing and how to make money fast with your first campaigns.

If you want to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing faster, you have to know that it doesn’t take much to set up everything you need to start.

In fact, you don’t even need a website!

I know it sounds crazy, but once you begin reading my guide, you will understand why it is so simple to start with affiliate marketing. And you’ll realize that it won’t take too much to see your first revenues, and in the end, turn a profit.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

The Affiliate Marketing world is a huge industry worth over $17 billion and can offer incredibly rewarding possibilities; as a matter of fact, the average affiliate marketer earns $8,038 per month. (Authority Hacker)

Affiliate Marketing is an advertising model where you promote another company’s products or services in return for a commission on the sales or leads you generate.

Simply put, you advertise for someone else, and once a person completes the desired action (e.g., they make a purchase, or they leave some information like their email), you get paid.

Most of the people, who are in affiliate marketing, sign up for so-called affiliate programs, and then they get a link that they can place on their website, YouTube videos, or Instagram for example.

If someone buys or signs up for a service through one of these links, a commission is paid to the person sharing the link.

You simply make money by posting or sharing links. Sounds great, right?

Wrong!

Doing affiliate marketing in this way involves much more work than you can imagine. For a very simple reason. You need traffic to make money, or in other words, you need a good amount of people constantly visiting your website, blog, or youtube channel.

But guess what? Very few people are bloggers or YouTubers, with many people following them. So before you start making money, you’ll need to build a continuous stream of readers/followers.

But as you know, that is not an easy thing to achieve.

My goal is to show you a different approach. A much easier and faster way to make money with affiliate marketing.

The basic concept is exactly the same, you get paid if someone completes an action (a purchase or signing up for a service) by using the links you provide.

The main difference is that you are going to run paid advertising campaigns.

How to Start with Affiliate Marketing in 4 Easy Steps.

1. Choose Your Traffic Source

A traffic source is essentially the platform where you want to advertise.

Generally speaking, the most used traffic sources in affiliate marketing can be divided in 4 categories:

• Social: Everything that comes from social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, Snapchat, etc.
• Search: Campaigns run on search engines like Google, Bing.
• Native: This type of traffic, also called sponsored content, is a type of advertising that matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears. Some of the most used platforms to run these campaigns are Taboola, Mgid, Yahoo Gemini and many more.
• Push: This traffic comes from Push Notification ads. They are personal-like messages traditionally sent to the user’s browsers on both mobile and desktop. Often, platforms that let you run Native campaigns, offer also Push traffic (like Mgid); others instead are solely dedicated to Push, like Richpush or Zeropark.

Among these, the one platform that works best for beginners is definitely Facebook. Zuckerberg’s social network is still the number one source of traffic when it comes to paid advertising.

Compared to other platforms, it’s much easier to set up and run campaigns on Facebook. Additionally, you have more control over your budget so that you can avoid overspending.

The other sources instead require more knowledge of the affiliate marketing world and also more experience.

Read my article on The Best Traffic Sources.

2. Sign Up With Affiliate Networks

At this point, you might be wondering: How do I find these products or services to promote? Do I need to reach out to companies myself and ask them directly?

The truth is, you don’t have to do any of this! Luckily, there’s a much simpler solution.

And this is because there are so-called affiliate networks between you and the company. These networks have direct relationships with many businesses, and they will provide you with all you need to run your campaigns.

Affiliate networks are platforms that connect businesses and people or companies looking to promote their products or services.

They essentially act as a middle man between the publisher (the affiliate) and the advertiser (the merchant). Advertisers establish their affiliate programs on an affiliate network, and publishers can search the network to find programs that they want to promote. The affiliate network acts as a manager for both publishers and advertisers.

Best thing? Getting in contact with these networks is super easy. You sign up on their website, you have a small chat with one of their representatives, and if you get accepted (which happens 99% of the time), you will be set and good to go.

Once accepted, publishers have instant access to a huge range of affiliate programs and promotional material.

It is important though to do thorough research to find out which of the many networks are the best in terms of programs range, as well as many other factors.

If you want to find out more about this, check my article on The Best Affiliate Networks.

3. Choose Your Vertical

As mentioned in the previous step, affiliate networks can offer a great variety of programs.

These programs are commonly divided into categories according to the type of product or service that is being promoted.

In affiliate marketing, categories are called verticals.

A vertical is a market, industry, or sector where you can find products or services that provide for the needs of an audience.

Ecommerce, Insurance, Finance, Gaming are just some of the many verticals that a network can provide. 

And within these verticals you will find the so-called offers. An offer represents a specific product or service related to a vertical.

Think about the Insurance vertical. You usually find offers for Car Insurance, Health Insurance, Life Insurance and so on.

Each of these offers has a unique link provided by the affiliate network, which you are going to use to run your campaigns.

If you are a beginner, the best course of action is to choose a vertical where you have more knowledge or you feel more close to, and then start testing 2-3 different offers.

In affiliate marketing, experts know which are the Top Performing Verticals, but at the end of the day it’s always up to you and your ability to find what works or not for an offer.

I can’t stress this enough, the key in affiliate marketing is TESTING!

4. Track Your Results

In affiliate marketing, tracking results is of the essence. You need to understand and analyze several metrics in order to optimize your campaigns.

In most cases, affiliate marketers use third-party platforms that let you track many metrics, but as you can imagine, these are paid platforms and in many cases they can be expensive.

Although it is advisable to sign up with one of these platforms, this is something that can be done later because you can easily track all the metrics you want in affiliate networks platforms.

This is one of the many good aspects of running campaigns through networks. They need to have these platforms in place to keep track of the performance of all the people working with them. 

Obviously, you will be able to see all the data related to your campaigns.

Make Money with Affiliate Marketing: Summary

As you can see, getting started with affiliate marketing is not so hard and it doesn’t even require lots of money (just a small budget that you would need to launch your campaigns).

The hard part will come later, once you have to optimize your campaigns in order to make them more profitable and improve performance.

Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to cover all aspects related to affiliate marketing here. Rather, I prefer to keep this guide very short and simple just to give you a glimpse of how easy it can be to start.