How to Begin Affiliate Marketing in 2022 – The Complete Guide

The merchant in affiliate marketing is the entity that owns a product or service being sold. The affiliate has no control over decisions made by merchants and there are certain rules they must follow. These rules ensure their compensation does not fall into jeopardy if something goes wrong with a transaction for reasons beyond their control. Merchants can be individuals, companies, trusts, or even other affiliates.

The affiliate marketer is the person or online business that promotes a merchant's product and receives compensation when an order is placed through its promotion. Affiliates will often use banner ads, text links, or simply written reviews to promote affiliate products in which they have no ownership interest. The commission rate can vary from several percent up to 100% of the total sale price depending on many factors.

Affiliates are required to ensure their promotion is unique and not misleading so as not to cause any harm or offense on the part of the consumer. If an affiliate uses another merchant’s trademarked terms in their marketing messages, they must include a statement that indicates they have no affiliation with the owner of these trademarks. The use of such trademarked terms is often referred to as ‘astroturfing’ and if done without following these rules, the affiliate runs a high risk of being banned from further participation in the program.

The consumer is the person who purchases a product or service after clicking on an affiliate’s link. Merchants are required to ensure that affiliates promote products in which they have no ownership interest, thus ensuring there will be no conflict of interest between the advertiser and advertiser's customers.

An affiliate network is a company that acts as an intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate by bringing them together and providing support in areas such as payment processing, tracking technology, reporting, and website tools. 

The advertiser will provide each of their affiliates with a unique referral URL or link to promote their product on various websites or social media platforms. 

Each time a consumer clicks on their affiliate link and purchases the advertised product, the merchant will credit the commission to the affiliate’s account. The network is responsible for keeping track of each account and crediting the correct amount to ensure affiliates are compensated fairly.

While technically it’s possible to promote on any kind of social media platform including podcasts, I would recommend the easiest way to start is to promote via your website or YouTube channel. 

Getting started with your site is fairly straightforward and you can do so with just a few dollars per month. 

Once you have your website established, it’s important to make sure it is optimized for Google search. You could have the best product in the world but if no one can find you how can they purchase from you? 

The other preferred method is via YouTube. This makes it extremely attractive for people on a tight budget because signing up for an account is free! Again it works similarly to your blog. Optimize it as much as you can and then add the affiliate link in the description. 

A word of caution. If you plan on promoting products you must disclose this somewhere on the page. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is very strict on this rule. Don’t get caught out. 

You could have a stand-alone affiliate policy as I do here. 

Seeing as we’re concentrating on blogging as a medium for our affiliate marketing tactics, we need to select an appropriate niche to target. 

Now on the face of it, it may look like there’s a ton of competition in every niche with millions of blog posts already. But here’s the good news, competition is good. 

What? 

Yes! As weird as it may seem, having plenty of competition means that there is actual demand within the niche. 

So how do you compete? The answer lies with niching down within your broad niche. As an example, if your niche was health and fitness, that term is massive with plenty of search volume but if you’re just starting it’s going to be tough. 

To niche down, look for a subcategory. Ultimately it should look something like this. 

Health & Fitness > Fitness for Adults > Fitness for Men under 50

If you go too far into the sub-niches then the demand starts to drop off too much and you find there won’t be enough people searching for the products you want to promote. This is not a good thing.

A lot of marketers new to affiliate marketing think that just because they can join every program under the sun means that they should. I disagree with this. 

To get the most affiliate sales, you need to provide value. To do that, you need to promote relevant products to your audience. Just because you’re in the health and fitness niche doesn’t mean you can try and sell eCommerce software to your audience. 

They just won’t be interested because it’s not relevant to them. In the end, you’ll most likely end up losing readers because you’re pitching things they don’t even want. 

Most companies will have some sort of affiliate program to join. If we stick to our health and fitness niche you can see below that Champs Sports allows people to join their affiliate program, through a link in the footer. 

In simple terms, your content needs to solve a pain point for your readers.

Awesome content is defined as content that forms a well-structured blog post. This will have an introduction, the main body, and a conclusion. You can improve its readability by using special marks to indicate lists or bullets in your text as well as making it short enough so that readers don't get lost during their journey through each section of content you are providing them with.

It is important for every paragraph to contain one main idea but make logical connections between other sentences too if possible because this helps create clarity within any given sentence.

Using images instead of having walls of text, adding in videos, or infographics is a great way to differentiate yourself when creating awesome content. 

There are also two subpoints to consider.

Now that you’ve created the best article out there it’s time to put your affiliate marketing strategy to work so that interested people will, lick the links and you start building your affiliate income. 

Here are some strategies to consider:

Just because you have the best content doesn’t guarantee clicks. However, using a few of these tips can help you make affiliate marketing work.

While the fundamentals of affiliate marketing are very basic, it’s not as simple as just having someone click a link and you get paid. In fact, it’s almost like converting your customer twice before you’ll even see a cent of commission. 

The first part is getting the customer to click the link on your page. This is all you. You have the most control of it and you need to put your best sales tactic forward to entice the reader to click the link that takes them to the next part of the funnel. 

The second part is when the customer lands on the actual company’s landing page. Unfortunately, you have no control over this and it’s now up to the company to lay it all out on the line for the customer to pull out their credit card and make the purchase. 

The best way to get the most clicks is to see which programs are converting the most. 

A great way is to look at income reports from other bloggers within your niche. Some will even put which programs brought in the most amount of money within a particular month.