How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?
By: Kari Havu
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Work From Home, Howtomakemoneyonlinequick, Passive Income

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

Making money with affiliate marketing, when you read about it online, it almost seems as if you can get rich while sleeping.

Although that sounds too good to be true, when I get up I regularly receive an email saying that I have made money again with affiliate marketing! So you can earn money while sleeping.

I am not very rich yet, but I don’t have to. After all, with more than two thousand euros in passive income per month, you can already live quite well.

So I’m sure: affiliate marketing is the way to build an extra income on the side. That is why in this article I tell you everything about making money online with affiliate marketing and how to set it up yourself. Besides, I will discuss what affiliate marketing is, which affiliate programs make money, and how you can get started with it. On to a passive income!

1. Build a passive income with affiliate marketing

With affiliate marketing you can earn money while you sleep; nothing more beautiful than that of course. Don’t confuse this with making money without doing something for it.

The work to get such a passive income has to be done before you make money with it;). That process can take a long time depending on the skills you currently have. I had my first income from affiliate marketing in the first month that I started, but that was only about 17 euros per month. I am now well over two thousand and that is still increasing monthly because I am working on it.

The great thing is that that income now comes in when I sit still for a moment and so I am not working. I will explain below what affiliate marketing means in practice so that you can understand that concept.

2. What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing means that you are promoting a product or service of a company in exchange for money. This could be because you have a website, blog, Instagram account, or YouTube channel that is viewed a lot. Because you do not have a product or service yourself, you do not earn any money with this. In this case, you can, therefore, use affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing, you become a partner of a company that offers products or services that match your followers or visitors. You then recommend those products or services to your target group. In that case, you use your channel as a place for the company to promote. Then the company will pay you according to your bet.

Are you planning to set up a WordPress blog to make money with affiliate marketing? It is advisable to choose a hosting party that can handle WordPress well, which makes it all a lot easier. I have hosted the website you are on at Wealthy Affiliate, they are very WordPress friendly and also have their own website maker if you like it better;).

With affiliate marketing, you place links of specific products or services in your YouTube video description, between the articles of your website or with the description of your photo on Instagram. You may even have a nice mailing list to whom you send an email containing the affiliate link.

When people then click on your affiliate link because they are interested in the product or service, they are tracked on the company’s website. The company will then see that you have referred them. If that visitor buys something from the company, you will receive a commission from the company. See below the simplified model of affiliate marketing.

3. Make money with affiliate marketing, the way!

By far the most common way of making money with affiliate marketing is based on sales. In marketing, they would say based on the Cost Per Sale (CPS) principle. The company pays you based on a product or service that has already been sold. This way, the company runs no risk of spending a lot of money on an advertisement that doesn’t work. So it is a very fair form of marketing. The better you convince your followers or visitors to purchase the services and products, the more money you earn.

Affiliate marketing is relatively new when we consider other forms of marketing. The reason for this is that this only became possible with the emergence of the internet. Thanks to the internet, we can easily trace where a sale comes from certain pieces of code.

When someone clicks on one of your affiliate links, this is stored in someone’s cookies. We used to take people’s word for it when it came to who recommended the product or service, now the internet is helping us do that.

You should also have had sufficient confidence in the company you work with in the past. After all, they have to tell you when something led to a sale. There are intermediate parties to have this confidence with affiliate marketing. These are affiliate programs that act as a mediator to keep track of which click led to which sales. So you do not have to worry that you are secretly stripped of your income.

For many affiliate programs, everyone can sign up, but before we go to affiliate programs, we first look at what commissions are given so that you know how much you can earn with affiliate marketing.

4. Earnings from affiliate marketing

A lot of money can be made with affiliate marketing. But even more interesting is that this income is often recurring. For example, if you have for example 50000 monthly visitors on your website via Google, it means that you have free natural traffic on your site. Even when I don’t do anything about it, these visitors keep coming. It is, therefore, one of the best ways to make money with a website. That is every month again income from affiliate marketing.

How much money you make with affiliate marketing depends very much on the type of products and services you promote. For example, if you are an affiliate for online training, you have very high commissions of up to 50% of the sales price. While you often only have a commission of up to 8% for tangible products (such as books).

The target audience that you attract to your channel, website or page is essential for how much you can earn with affiliate marketing because it is that target audience that you will need to tailor the products and services that you recommend.

To give an example; someone who comes to a website with information about raising children will not purchase expensive online training. More logical for that visitor are affiliate links to children’s clothing and there is a small margin. So you as a promoter earn less money with it.

If you are still developing a YouTube channel, Instagram, or website, it can be good to dwell on the subject. Is there anything valuable to sell to that target group?

In terms of earnings, I will give you an indication. I earn an average of more than 2000 euros per month passively with affiliate marketing. I do this through my website where I have about 30,000 visitors per month. This number is growing day by day, so there is good hope that this amount will continue to rise, and don’t forget; it is passive. I don’t have to do anything now! And because I live as a digital nomad (I combine work and travel ) I can also build this from anywhere in the world.

What I have learned from my work with affiliate marketing is that it is especially important to look at the average earnings per click. Often the affiliate programs keep track of the number of clicks themselves and you can see this. When you see how many clicks you have and how much total income over the same period, you divide it together. This way you can make choices in which affiliate programs you continue and which you stop.

Many people don’t make much money from affiliate marketing and this revenue per click is one reason for this. They choose too bad affiliate programs.

There are plenty of affiliate networks you can join to make money. Relevance is important here. Products and services that fit your channel are sold much better and are easier to promote.

Just think, if I suddenly start promoting a refrigerator in this article, the chance that you buy it is extremely small. But if you still want to buy a refrigerator, hereby my affiliate link.

The more relevant, the more you earn. Don’t just stare blindly at the committees, mass is cash register too! Rather a low commission with a lot of sales than not selling anything with some super vague product.

6. There are a huge number of affiliate programs with which you can earn money

When you really start looking, you will no longer see the forest through the trees. There are so many affiliate programs to join. My biggest recommendation is, therefore, to work mainly with companies of which you are a customer. Then you know for sure that you recommend something meaningful and you will most likely also be able to sell it better to others, after all, you know how the product or service is. Often large companies do have an affiliate program where you can sign up. So just as good Googling.

I also sometimes choose to approach companies myself if I am satisfied with their product or service and feel that I can also sell this to my target group. Sometimes they have a hidden affiliate program or they think it is a good plan to start this up so that they can market their products or services via more platforms. The big companies almost always have an affiliate program so then it is just a search.

7. Tips for making more money with affiliate marketing

When you have found a suitable program and you have joined it, it is time to place or promote the affiliate links on your website via your Instagram, Youtube, or other channels. Don’t expect to make money just by placing links. Make sure you really recommend and recommend the product or service and be realistic. There is nothing more annoying than someone who just comes across as a spammer. Also, make sure that you actively work with content creation to get more and more visitors or followers to whom you can serve the affiliate links.

It is nice that once you know how many people click on links and how high the conversion is, you can also calculate how much you would earn if you had more visitors or viewers. Based on that, you can then set goals and it is very motivating.

For example, if I look at the statistics of my own website from a random month in 2020, I see that in one month 30,232 visitors clicked 3412 times on affiliate links of my affiliate programs. Of the clicks, 152 people placed an order with a total commission of 3174 dollars. Based on that metric, I then look at the top-performing pages on my website and add links or adjust references if necessary.

Statistics help to grow well and should therefore never be underestimated. And that’s how I actually do it with all the affiliate programs I refer to. So definitely learn to interpret and use statistics.

8. Keep growing in your passive income

By simply starting with affiliate marketing you will learn from time to time how to sell more and earn more. There are many pitfalls that everyone gets into again and again and that is such a waste of time. You see a lot of people referring to products that are not relevant to the target group, simply because they have a high commission. Ultimately, you still earn nothing from it. Refer to products and services that you believe in yourself, then your target audience will also believe in them.

Furthermore, there are plenty of tricks to be used to make affiliate marketing such a success that you can fully live on it. You can take the first big steps, for example, by following a good affiliate marketing training. Definitely recommended if you want to avoid working on something for months, which does not yield anything;).

If you apply affiliate marketing in the right way, everyone can get a full-time income from this. Everyone should be able to do that within a year if you fully devote your time and attention to it. Although you can of course also choose to build it on the side, as I do myself. It all takes a little longer, but then you can start working a little less because of the passive income!

9. Become an affiliate instead of a publisher

Do you have your own product or service? Then see if you could use affiliate marketing the other way around. That you become a supplier of a product that others can promote and sell. For example, I do this myself with my own book. I placed that book on an affiliate platform so that bloggers, vloggers, and influencers can now promote my product with a link. This way I increase my sales channel without running any risks. I only pay the promoter when something has been sold.

Do you want to get started with affiliate marketing, but don’t want to spend too much time making mistakes? Get off to a flying start and take steps towards your own online income with this program!