4 Step Process to Start Affiliate Marketing in 2023

Whenever you try to find new side gigs on the internet, one gig seems to pop up again and again, and that is affiliate marketing. People practicing affiliate marketing promote a product through their social influence, organic reach, or by paid traffic. The main job of an affiliate marketer is to help a company guide its customers toward the product they are selling.

Companies pay affiliate marketers by giving them a small commission on every product sold through the link that is tailored to every specific affiliate marketer. These purchases can add up quickly to earn a substantial cash flow through this lucrative business.

This article will guide you on affiliate marketing, how to start an affiliate marketing career, and the possible pros and cons of this side hustle.

Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing

Before you research how to pump your affiliate campaign up, you need to be aware of who it is for. For this reason, we have compiled a list of the possible benefits and drawbacks of Affiliate Marketing over other types of side hustles.

Pros

1. Affiliate marketing is a vast industry that allows individuals to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars annually or even monthly.
2. Affiliate marketing can have a meager start up cost as all you have to do, in the least, is to create a website and promote the product/service.
3. It is a source of income that makes you money passively once set up. You could be making hundreds of dollars worth of profit while you sleep.
4. The affiliate market removes the restrictions one might face in a traditional job, such as an unbearable work environment, fixed hours, and no vertical headroom.
5. The skills you learn on this journey have tremendous carry over to every single other online business you can think of.

Cons

1. Many things you do not control can limit your success as an affiliate marketer, such as the market conditions, the competition, a change in the algorithm, and the quality of the products.
2. Hitting the demographic that is suited to your product can be quite a difficult task unless your advertising is very large scale and you have a big budget
3. There is no guarantee that you will make any money and the likelihood of you making any money in the first few months are very low. This can be discouraging and cause people to quit way too early.

How To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing

In this section, we will address all the steps you have to take to start your affiliate marketing journey.

Step#1: Choose a Niche

For the first step of this journey, you will have to pin down a niche. The niche has to be in a delicate balance of not being broad enough that you have a tremendous amount of competition but not so specific that no one but a handful of people actually take interest. That means, once you’ve found a niche… go deeper. This is called a sub-niche and after you’ve found that, go even deeper. The more specific you are, the better your results will be.  In the beginning, choose something you are passionate about and go deep, because if you are passionate then you will stay motivated and all of the work you do will hopefully seem fun.

Step#2: Choose a Platform

Different products and different niches are better suited to different advertising platforms. For example, it might be better to advertise a VPN or a Browser Extension on YouTube, whereas something like a makeup kit might be more tailored to the Instagram and Tik Tok audience.

It is better to choose a platform suited for your product, but if all else fails, you should look into either a YouTube channel or a blog. After the establishment of your preferred platform, you have to be smart in terms of advertising. You have to choose your keywords correctly and make engaging adverts. Once this is done, you can expect your hard work to slowly but surely start to pay off.

Step#3: Joining an Affiliate Program

After you have decided on a Niche and chosen a platform to market your product at, you have to join a program that lets you sell the product you wish to sell. There are two main types of affiliate programs, high-paying, low-volume (products that give you good commissions but aren’t very popular.) and Low-paying, high-volume affiliate programs (popular products on trusted sites with smaller commissions.). We recommend that you dabble in both types of programs, see what suits you best, and stick to it.

Step#4: Market your product

Now that you’ve done all the setup for your affiliate marketing, the actual marketing part comes. You will have to think of a catchy and convincing marketing campaign; whether it be writing captivating content for your blog or a short video to advertise on Tik Tok, you will have to put in some work. If your budget allows, you can outsource some of this work as well.

After you do this, you will have to spend a bit of cash on advertising (if you have the budget), and if your advertisement is good enough, your products will hopefully fly off of the shelves. If you don’t have the budget then you will have to rely on organic traffic and this is where search engine optimization comes into play. Regardless of how you get traffic, you have to make the advertisement compelling so that it drives traffic toward your website and incentivizes clicking on the link because even clicks on the link can get you a long way in popping up in more search results.

Once you have your potential customers on your page, you have to convince them into buying your product using the image of the product you created in their minds using the marketing material. Do that for enough customers and boom, you are now on your way to becoming a successful affiliate marketer.