Affiliate Marketing for Beginners – What you need to know

If you are new to making money online, this article on affiliate marketing for beginners is perfect for you. This article will show you how to set up an online affiliate marketing business with a minimal startup cost. Additionally, unlike a brick-and-mortar business, this one can be run by a single person and remains open 24/7. This fact means that your affiliate marketing business can make money even while you sleep.

There is no recruiting or networking, no products to deal with, and you do not need to approach anyone when you are running an affiliate marketing business.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate Marketing explained in a diagram

Affiliate Marketing is a business structure where we make money by advertising other people’s products. The idea is to have an asset that you own. Ideally, this is a YouTube channel or a website. You, the site owner, will use the site or channel to post informative, quality content to appeal to a section of the market.

Now, when you ask what affiliate marketing is, many focus their answer on the money you make from advertising. However, while this is important, anyone who focuses on this is quite likely to fail at it. The most important part of your affiliate marketing business is your content. Your content generates traffic or site visitors. Your site visitors are your asset. The more visitors you have, the greater your chance of making money with your site. Your content must be good so that your visitors will use your site time and again and recommend it to others.

Note Well: This post may contain affiliate links. Could you read my full disclosure policy here?

Affiliate marketing products

Once you have good quality content and a growing number of visitors, you can then move on to advertising-related Affiliate marketing products on your website. Now you could advertise products that have no relation to your content, but these advertisements aim to appeal to site visitors. As such, if someone comes to your site to learn about the best site to use to teach online, chances are they may be on the market for site membership to a teaching site. As such, they are a potential customer for related products. Therefore, it is better to sell or advertise affiliate marketing products related to your website content.

You are free to recommend as many or as few products as you wish. However, I provide also guidelines in on the best products to promote for affiliate marketing.

How to start affiliate marketing with no money?

Grammarly Writing Support

If by asking how to start affiliate marketing with no money you mean how to get started on a shoe string budget , you have come to the right place. Every business needs some monetary investment, and affiliate marketing is no exception. However, if you are strapped for cash and want to start a business on a shoestring budget, affiliate marketing is perfect for you.

The startup cost for an affiliate marketing business is your domain name plus hosting. Depending on the hosting site, this amounts to less than $50 for the first year. Most hosts will have a much lower price for the first year than for the years after that. However, the yearly cost is still pretty low but varies from host to host.

So in answering the question of how to start an affiliate marketing business with no money, I will tell you that you cannot. You can, however, do so on a shoestring budget. So if you are a student or single parent struggling to make money and looking for a side hustle, affiliate marketing may be just what you need.

How to start an affiliate marketing business

Starting an affiliate marketing business is relatively easy and costs less than you think. There are some who claim to do affiliate marketing without a website or YouTube channel. However, most affiliate marketing networks require a website to advertise your products.

As such, in answer to how to start an affiliate marketing business: I advise that you ensure you begin by creating a blog or website with a minimum of 30 pages of unique, quality content.

If you want to know about how to buy a domain, how to plan your website, what type of content to use, and how to systematically build out your content, look for my article on affiliate marketing tips for beginners.

How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

All of us go into business with one purpose, to make money. As such, if you are going to start an affiliate marketing business, you need to understand how to make money with affiliate marketing.

I would have indicated above that you should first establish your website and build out your traffic. After this, there are several ways to make money with affiliate marketing. The quickest and easiest ways to make money with Affiliate marketing is:

  • advertising other people’s products or
  • selling your own affiliate products via your website.

The last is the most difficult and generally require some professional experience with your chosen field.

Before you go: You may access my free beginners’ affiliate marketing course here.

Do you have questions or comments about affiliate marketing? Be sure to leave them in the comment section below. I promise I will respond to your comment promptly. All comments are welcome.

Candy Benn

Leave a Comment