The Complete Affiliate Marketing Guide
While more and more people have started joining the industry, affiliate marketing has became a mainstream dream chased by many!
Across practically every industry and niche there is, companies and small businesses have started jumping to affiliate marketers for help growing their businesses using this very profitable form of marketing.
Because of how profitable affiliate marketing can be for both the affiliate marketers and affiliate companies – we’ve decided to create the most in depth best affiliate marketing for beginners guide for 2024.
As you reach through this guide, you’ll not only learn how affiliate marketing works, but how to be successful with it.
Here are a few topics that we will discuss:
- The best affiliate marketing tools for beginners
- The best affiliate marketing traffic sources that are affordable
- The best strategies to use in affiliate marketing
- Why affiliate marketing is good for your business
- What affiliate programs that are the best to get started with
Let’s keep this master guide going, as we cover everything affiliate marketing (and we will always add to this too!)
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of referring a business customers in exchange for a percentage of the total profits generated from the sale, which is known as a commission.
You are basically acting as a referral agent for other businesses products and services, and they pay you commissions for the customer referrals you bring them.
This form of marketing has been around for decades and is now a mainstream business practice that is done by the largest companies across the world.
Amazon, Walmart, marketing agencies, restaurants, and many more types of businesses all offer their own rewards and compensation for affiliate marketers to promote their products and services.
It’s a legit business practice that can be extremely profitable when done correctly.
This affiliate marketing for beginners guide will cover EVERYTHING about this business practice.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
The process that runs affiliate marketing is simple. You promote a businesses products or services for them using specialized affiliate tracking links they give you, in exchange for a commission that you make when the sale occurs through your link.
That’s it!
Now, what goes behind the scenes of making that process work, is more complex.
Affiliate marketing, in essence, should be run similar as all online businesses are.
Here’s everything you’ll need to run an affiliate marketing business:
- Product or service to sell from a reputable company (Affiliate program list)
- Traffic source to use for sending people to view your offer
- Method to follow up with leads and customers generated
- Tools to put this all together. (Best CRM’s, autoresponders, etc)
These 4 resources are put together in unison to form a marketing / business campaign, you’re able to reliably and profitably sell any affiliate offer.
Now this may all seem complicated, but do not worry, as their are many done for you marketing solutions that can guide you through this complete process very easily.
Later in this article we will go more in depth about each of these resources, and the best companies to supply your affiliate marketing need properly.
Why Be An Affiliate Marketer?
When this topic comes to mind, what do you think of first?
After we’ve successfully achieved an 8.4X positive ROI from affiliate marketing over the past many years, we think of a lot of things.
Most importantly, you may think of the potential of what affiliate marketing can do for you, and how you can make money with it.
Whether you’re just getting started as an affiliate marketer, or want to attract affiliate marketers to sell your own products, or simply want to understand more about how affiliate marketing works – you’ve come to the right place!
There are too many reasons to count most days! But, we want to give you a thorough affiliate marketing guide that ACTUALLY works for you.
Here at eMoneyPeeps, we’re going to cover the most important aspects of affiliate marketing that can make it an extremely profitable venture.
You should use your own discretion, and it’s all about tuning into your train of thought, as you think about the reasons behind affiliate marketing, and if it is right for you.
Here are the reasons why you should become an affiliate.
- Affiliate marketing can be less expensive to get started than other ways of making money online
- You don’t have to do any product support or customer care
- You don’t have to create the products yourself
- You don’t have to handle any refunds
- Affiliate marketing can be done with high profit margins
- Affiliate marketing is very beginner friendly
- Affiliate marketing campaigns are more simple to run
- You can do affiliate marketing as a side hustle from home, or from anywhere for that matter, because all you need is a device such as a laptop, tablet, or cell phone, and an internet connection
These are the main reasons why so many people are attracted to this business model and method for making money online.
Your job as an affiliate marketer is to bring in sales for other businesses, and the business you refer sales to, does the rest!
Small businesses and major companies online, love affiliate marketers as well, because they are only shelling out money when an actual sale is made.
There is no guesswork involved for their advertising budgets.
Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing
While affiliate marketing has the capability and potential to grow any business, or entrepreneurs profits – there are some bad aspects of affiliate marketing that should be considered as well.
We want to give AM a non-biased review, which is why we’re going to go through in this affiliate marketing for beginners guide – all the pros and cons.
Use your own mind and think about each of these pros and cons when making decisions. It’s easy to jump into a business, without taking in the full perspective about how it works and what puts it all together.
Pros Of Affiliate Marketing
- easier to learn
- very inexpensive to start
- accessible to everyone
- less to manage
- fast setup
- proven success to follow from others
- can be highly profitable
- available to every industry and niche
- simple and cheap advertising costs
- little to no support responsibilities
- can be run from anywhere
Cons Of Affiliate Marketing
- little control over the products and services, there not yours
- learning curve can be long for some people
- little control of upsell and downsell process after purchase
- you lose a portion of the sale that the company collects
- there can be more competition in this industry that directly competes
- No Guarantee of Revenue – meaning you do not get paid tell someone buys something/ the way all business work though
Overall through considering all of the pros and cons of affiliate marketing, it’s still been found to be a reliable industry to do business in.
How To Start Affiliate Marketing As A Beginner?
There are 3 main ways you’ll want to start your affiliate marketing journey if you’re just getting started as a beginner.
Each of these ways has it’s own pros and cons, that you should consider carefully.
Take your time, read through them, and think through what you want your next move to be after finishing this article.
3 ways to get started as an affiliate marketing beginners…
- Learn to become an affiliate marketer from a mentor
- Learn to become an affiliate marketer from a course
- Learn to become an affiliate marketer by yourself – through research, testing, and experimenting.
Each of these methods to learning more about affiliate marketing can be critical to your journey.
We often recommend that you use all 3 ways for learning and mastering the craft.
Because as an affiliate marketer you need to understand these points:
- How affiliate marketing and business works
- How to drive traffic to your offers – Best Affiliate Marketing Traffic Sources
- How to follow up with leads and customers you generate
- How to manage your business profitably and at scale
Understanding these 4 ideas, can be learned from the 3 highlighted ways above.
You can use one of them, or maybe even all of them.
The decision is up to you my friend!
How Much Do Beginner Affiliate Marketers Make?
Just like with any industry or business venture, with affiliate marketing the amount of money you make as a beginner varies.
If you make sure to completely understand how online marketing works, invest in proper marketing automation tools, and learned the steps to get targeted traffic – you can make upwards of $0 to $300 a day.
The top 10% of affiliate marketers earn upwards of $10,000 per month or higher.
Did you know that the top 1% of affiliate marketers earn millions of dollars per year, affiliate marketing can be very profitable!
If you’re a beginner, that doesn’t mean you won’t make as much as others.
Far from it!
We’ve seen some people and their businesses generate hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit in their very first year of doing affiliate marketing.
Disclaimer: This is very rarely happens in our industry.
Your earnings will be dictated by your knowledge, work ethic, and ability to learn and adapt.
Of course, you will need to invest some money to accelerate your journey, as some marketing tools, resources and guides will need to be paid for.
Read also: Best Affiliate Marketing Courses
Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?
Compared to other types of businesses, affiliate marketing is much easier, and cost way less to get started.
This is because as an affiliate marketer, you are not responsible for a variety of different duties and responsibilities that most other businesses must handle.
Although, if you don’t learn from the right marketing mentor, or enroll on the correct course – affiliate marketing can still become a difficult journey to succeed on..
Your success in this field will only be profitable if you apply yourself, and learn from the best in the industry.
You need to take affiliate marketing seriously, and be prepared to have time, some money, and energy ready to be invested.
One of the many reasons we made this affiliate marketing for beginners guide, is because of the ease of access for anyone to get started.
We got started through affiliate marketing as well, and continue to do it every single day.
If you feel you are ready, a great first step is to join our top affiliate marketing program below.
Once you have signed up, keep reading to discover and learn more about the ins and outs of affiliate marketing.
Can You Teach Yourself Affiliate Marketing?
Yes! However, teaching yourself affiliate marketing will take WAY MORE TIME than if you learn from a course or mentor.
We often want to do things ourselves and in our own way.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, you should learn from a reputable affiliate marketing course or mentor.
By learning from one of these two resources, you will cut years of struggle off of your journey.
Many people think they can learn AM by themselves and don’t learn enough. Because of this, some people don’t make anything from affiliate marketing, or they even go into a bit of debt.
Use careful consideration when deciding which way you’ll start following the AM journey.
Trial and error is no fun – trust us on that one!
Why Do People Fail In Affiliate Marketing?
The biggest reason for why people fail at affiliate marketing is the failure to treat affiliate marketing like a real business.
They poke at it with a stick, and think they will make money. Not happening!
As well, people often listen to the wrong influencers who tell you that you can run this business with little to no resources, no ad spend, no mentorship, and with no courses. This is a deception that unfortunately plagues the industry and gives it a bad name.
Lots of people have the wrong mindset all together when they enter the online world, they think because Facebook is free, so should making money online be.
We believe the contrary to this way of thought, and preach the truth.
That it takes time, money, organization, and good marketing practices – in order to run an affiliate marketing business successfully and at scale.
Reasons People Fail at Affiliate Marketing
- Lack of resources. When you do AM, you are running a real business and need to treat it as such.
- Lack of time. People sometimes have the misconception that you can run a business with only a couple hours of commitment a week. This is false, and a make believe dream.
- Lack of dedication. If you’re going to start an affiliate marketing business – you must take it seriously. This a real business you’re working with.
- Lack of knowledge. People spin their wheels for years and waste time, because they refuse to invest in serious marketing knowledge resources and valuable short cuts.
Don’t be like the people that fail, and take affiliate marketing seriously.
Treat it like a real business and it will become a real income for you!!!!
Maybe even a four, five, six or seven figure business if you work at it!
Can Anyone Do Affiliate Marketing?
Yes, anyone of any background can learn how to do affiliate marketing successfully.
As running an affiliate marketing business requires less effort, management, and resources than a traditional business – there is a smaller learning curve to become a profitable affiliate marketer.
If you are willing to learn and invest in yourself – you can do this!
So Yes, anyone can do affiliate marketing and be profitable. All you need is the drive, determination, ability to learn and right mindset, because it does not matter your background, prior experience or education. Affiliate marketing is a skill you will learn one step at a time.
What Kind Of People Do Affiliate Marketing?
A variety of different kinds of people do affiliate marketing, and successfully.
People who are beginners, men, woman, all ages, ethnicity, and more – run profitable affiliate marketing businesses.
This industry is very open to anyone who decides they want to get involved and get started.
As well, even if you own a business already and want affiliate marketers to sell your products or services for you, that’s also an option available for you too.
Affiliate marketing is practiced throughout every country in the world, and is considered a legitimate business practice.
As well, affiliate marketing for beginners guide is a path that people can follow to master the craft more quickly.
Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies For Beginners
What are the best affiliate marketer strategies for beginners if you’re looking to get an advantage over your competitors?
Well, here they are:
- Promote multiple different related affiliate offers at once. (This will allow you to increase your profitability and expand your customer base quickly)
- Learn deep knowledge on how to manage, and scale a business. (This will allow you to understand how to scale out your business and run it more efficiently with less waste)
- Implement automation so your business runs 24/7 even when you are sleeping.
These 3 strategies alone will allow you to scale your affiliate marketing business as a beginner, extremely profitable and with a competitive edge over your affiliate marketer counterparts.
You can learn these strategies from anyone of the courses we listed above.
Best Affiliate Marketing Tools For Beginners
As you move along your beginner affiliate marketing journey, you’re going to need a variety of tools or one “all-in-one” tool, to manage your business successfully.
These tools will allow you to manage your generated leads, customers, and much more.
All successful marketers and businesses use online marketing tools in order to manage and scale their business much more efficiently and with automation in mind as well.
Some affiliate marketers don’t use these tools, and they are forced to manually manage their business.
This is foolish and will cost you much time, money, and energy, than you can afford.
Marketing online is all about reaching masses of people, and engaging with them, the only way one can do this is by using tools that will automate much of the processes for you.
So, here are the best affiliate marketing tools for beginners:
- All-In-One marketing tool and CRM, ActiveCampaign. (This marketing tool will allow you to generate, manage, and communicate with your leads / customers – easily and automatically)
- A high quality affordable autoresponder, GetResponse. (A marketing autoresponder tool that allows you to follow up with and manage leads effectively)
- CRM, Autoresponder, Funnel Builder – ClickFunnels. (one of the most well known and highest quality CRM’s in the industry)
We recommend that you begin by using a single one of these marketing tools for your business.
We advise at the #1 spot, that you sign up for a free trial at ActiveCampaign and give it a test run.
If you don’t like AC, then try signing up for a free trial at ClickFunnels and see how that marketing tools suits you better.
Best Affiliate Marketing Traffic Sources For Beginners
When you’re considering how to run a successful affiliate marketing business, you need to have a quality traffic source that fuels your sales.
However, most affiliate marketers are using low quality paid traffic sources, or they’re only running organic traffic in an insufficient way.
If you want your business to stand out, you’ll need to use quality traffic sources that will actually generate good quality leads and potential customers.
We have gathered together and have used a variety of solo ads for affiliate marketing traffic sources that have created multiple very profitable affiliate marketing businesses for us.
As well, we’ve found that these affiliate traffic sources have converted for decades for thousands of other affiliate marketers.
Take a look, and invest with them if you find they’re quality affiliate traffic sources.
- Udimi Solo Ads – Udimi has some of the best affiliate marketing traffic in the industry. They’ve offered affiliate marketers premium traffic that is filtered and vetted, for over 10 years.
- Traffic Authority – TA has some of the most boutique and high quality affiliate traffic without a doubt. We’ve tested them heavily as well.
- Free Organic Traffic – You should be used blogging, Facebook, YouTube Shorts, other forms of social media, and more to generate free traffic and leads for your business.
Each of these traffic sources over the years we have vetted and tested tens of thousands of dollars with.
We only will recommend quality traffic sources that we’ve both tested and positively created a large margin of profit with.
We suggest you do smaller to medium tests of these traffic sources for your affiliate marketing business, before you decide to spend serious money with them.
You should always, test traffic sources before investing in larger traffic packages from any source.
Learning to use paid traffic correctly, can lead to much faster results and leverage your profits at scale. Generating enough free organic traffic can take much time, unless you are already incredibly skilled at getting engagement through producing high quality content..
What Are The Best Affiliate Marketing Products?
Affiliate marketers are on a rampage to find the best quality products in the marketplace.
Why?
If you can find high quality products, that pay out high percentages of commissions, you’ll be able to generate much more incremental profits, than if you promoted a basic companies products and services.
Over the years we’ve been able to identify and find some of the best affiliate marketing products and services to sell.
What defines the best affiliate marketing products?
- High conversion rates
- High customer retention
- Good quality service
- Good quality product
- Great customer support
- Lead management
- In demand in their respective market places
Where To Find Affiliate Programs & Affiliate Products To Sell?
Through an affiliate marketing network, many businesses use third party platforms to manage their affiliate programs for them.
They act as the affiliate program manger and bring together both affiliate marketers and multiple businesses all to one portal.
This makes it the most convenient method for you to find great quality products and services to sell with no need to go scouring all over the internet for individual affiliate programs to join.
Choose below an affiliate network that you can join TODAY:
1. ClickBank
2. ShareASale
3. Amazon
4. JvZoo
5. WarriorPlus
6. Impact
7. Best High Ticket Affiliate Programs
Should you choose affiliate marketing to be the kind of business you want to run, you’ll be happy to know that affiliate marketing spend is affordable. You can also find pretty much every type of product or service you could ever want to sell. Each affiliate network has a large variety of affiliate offers in their store. (If you join amazon affiliate program, expect to earn very small commissions)
Best Beginner Affiliate Program
Some beginners just want to join a simple affiliate program that is easy to promote and earn from.
If you want an easy affiliate program to promote, you need to sell a product, service, or commodity, that the majority of people in an industry want.
We’ve found, that one of the easiest products to sell, is traffic. Because every business, entrepreneur, affiliate marketer needs traffic (people visiting their offers) in order to sell anything.
So YES, you can even sell traffic.
You can both purchase, and sell traffic as an affiliate through a company like Traffic Authority.
Want to learn more and see other good affiliate programs? This video here will walk you through more.
To narrow down and find affiliate programs that will convert, take your time and due diligence to discover which companies are going to be the best to work with. The affiliate commerce industry is quite large after all.
What Are The Best Affiliate Marketing Companies?
Over the years there have been affiliate companies that have changed the game of business forever.
You see, with a good affiliate program, you can scale any business – even to 9 figures. Take a look at how fast the company ClickFunnels has grown in such a short time period.
ClickFunnels is now almost billion dollar company generating hundreds of millions of dollars in profit every single year. Clickfunnels is now one of the most well-known software companies in the online marketing space.
What made this affiliate marketing company so successful?
What makes any affiliate marketing company successful?
- Quality support
- Affiliate marketing tools
- Affiliate marketing resources
- High commissions percentage payout
- Lucrative affiliate rewards
- Great products or services
Each of these aspects of an affiliate network will allow a company to thrive.
So without further ado, here are a few of the best individual companies that offer affiliate programs.
- GVO/NowLifeStyle has been in the affiliate marketing space now over 20 years. Their products are digital marketing tools, including web hosting, autoresponders, web conferencing, video hosting and more. We have been paid by this company now for well over a decade. They have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to their affiliates like us.
- Fiverr is the largest and oldest freelance services marketplace and has paid out more than a billion dollars to their affiliates. The services industry online is hot, and growing by leaps and bounds. Fiverr has one of the more lucrative affiliate programs.
- ClickFunnels which we already mentioned, has been on the fast track since day 1, thanks to their founder Russell Brunson, who was a very well known successful affiliate marketer before he ever started his company. Not only has their affiliates been paid tens of millions of dollars, numerous affiliates have used ClickFunnels products to make millions of dollars selling their own stuff.
They each have their own advantages they provide to affiliates.
Which Companies Pay Out The Most To Affiliate Marketers?
There are select few companies and platforms that pay out larger percentages of commissions when compared to the average majority of affiliate companies.
However, most companies that only have digital products (meaning the product is used and consumed online) pay out much larger commissions than companies who’s product line are physical in nature.
Companies who have digital products it is not uncommon to see them pay 30% on up to 75% commissions per sale.
Examples: Ebooks, software, digital services, web hosting, and website traffic purchases are all delivered to people online. Less cost involved, equals higher commissions paid.
Certain digital companies even pay out very large upfront one-time commissions in comparison to how much the product cost. Like if you were selling web hosting, you might get paid an upfront commission of $150 even though it only cost the customer $20 monthly.
They are able to do this because they know the life-time value of their customers, so they are rewarding you upfront. Companies who have physical products usually pay somewhere between 5% and 30% per sale at a high end.
Take Amazon as an example: They pretty much have the biggest product selection of any affiliate marketing company or platform, but they pay a very paltry average of 5% per sale.
And this is because with physical products, there is much more cost associated to getting it in the consumers hands.
Where digital products are delivered instantly via online.
So in choosing products to sell, you also need to take into consideration the type of product it is.
What Are The Best Affiliate Marketing Courses?
When you’re looking to become a good affiliate marketer, a great affiliate marketing course can bring your skills even farther ahead and your business will become more profitable.
However, when browsing affiliate marketing courses you often find that the majority of them are low quality courses made by “gurus” who don’t really understand business or how affiliate marketing works.
This is why you need to take time and careful consideration when deciding which affiliate course to invest in.
Here are the best affiliate marketing courses available…
- Marketing Mastery Elite Affiliate Marketing & Total Business Education Course Collection
- Affiliate Millionaire by Andrew Fox
- EMoneyPeeps – Our personal mentorship and affiliate marketing course perfect for beginners.
- Fast Tracks Web Class by Merlin Holmes
- Online Work Shop by John Crestani
Each of these affiliate marketing training courses will walk you through everything AM and guide you through how to start, manage, and grow an affiliate marketing business.
There are very few “Totally Free” affiliate marketing courses online. Marketers can not give away the farm, otherwise they would make no money.
If you’re wanting to learn to master affiliate marketing on a tight budget however, I suggest going through either one of our YouTube channels.
By following our free videos (that we created using video automation software), you’ll learn everything about business and affiliate marketing.
Remember your always going to need to invest in something to make this marketing stuff work, there is no way around it.
Here is Jon Weberg’s YouTube Channel
Here is Richard Weberg’s YouTube Channel
Different Kinds Of Affiliate Marketing
There are a variety of different industries that affiliate marketing is used in.
Each of these industries has turned to affiliate marketing in order to drastically increase their profits and scale their customer bases reliably.
We’ve put together a complete collection of the most profitable and effective industries for becoming an affiliate marketer.
Each of these industries have their own pros and cons you should be considering as well.
Here are the variety of different kinds of affiliate marketing done in different niches.
High Ticket
In the affiliate world, there is low, mid, and high ticket affiliate products and services you can promote. A new and upcoming aspect of affiliate marketing, is the high ticket side.
It is the same thing as affiliate marketing, except the products and services you sell, are priced much higher. HTAM is the most profitable kind of affiliate marketing that you can get into.
With High Ticket AM you are able to accomplish much higher profit margins.
Travel
Yes! You can become an affiliate marketer for travel agencies, travel websites, and many more kinds of travel companies. Becoming an affiliate for travel businesses can be more difficult but if you can refer long term travelers to them – it can be quite profitable.
Real Estate
You really can become an affiliate in the real estate world. This however, is a much more rare form of affiliate marketing. Many times people in the real estate world don’t want to share a portion of their generous commissions they generate.
So, finding an affiliate offer in the real estate industry may be difficult for you.
Gaming
Gaming companies both want and rely upon affiliate marketers to grow their profits and brand.
Often, gaming microphone, headset, and chair companies – will pay handsome commissions to influencers and affiliate marketers who are willing to promote their products.
Teenagers
There are very few “teenager brands” that run affiliate marketing offers. However, you can find younger companies who have young founders, and see if they’ll pay you a percentage of sales for referring them customers to their business.
Bloggers
One of the most lucrative forms of affiliate marketing, is becoming an affiliate marketer blogger. Ourselves included, using blogs to generate affiliate commissions can be quite lucrative.
Why? Blogging if done right, can create for you – decades worth of quality and free traffic that runs on autopilot to your brand and offers.
Our EmoneyPeeps course will show you how to get started today working from home.
Ecommerce
The largest companies that you can become an affiliate marketer for, are in the ecommerce space. Ecommerce covers a wide range of industries and niches, which is why affiliate marketing is so commonly done in this industry.
Who Are The Best Affiliate Marketers?
In the affiliate marketing industry, there are a collection of relatively famous best affiliate marketers that are well known throughout the business world.
Over the years of being successful in the affiliate marketing industry, we’ve became good friends with many of these well known leaders. (We’ve grown our presence rapidly and are considered to be among the top 10% of affiliate marketers throughout the world as well)
Remember however, that these people all once were going through an affiliate marketing guide just like you are right now, including us.
Some day you can join this list with us.
Here is the best affiliate marketers list…
- Joel Therien
- Russell Brunson
- Mike Filsaime
- The Webergs. (Richard Weberg & Jon Weberg)
- Matthew Neer
- Ryan Allaire
- Andrew Fox
- Michael Cheney
- Anthony Morrison
- Adrian Morrison
Each of these affiliate marketers have generated a minimum of $5,000,000 in sales for other companies, and has created extremely profitable affiliate marketing campaigns for a variety of companies in different industries.
As well, they have been in the affiliate marketing industry for a minimum of 10 years. We know most of the people on this list personally, so we’re able to understand how their business works, and the amount of impact on the affiliate marketing industry that they have had.
Final Thoughts On Affiliate Marketing For Beginners 2024
This guide was created to walk you through every aspect of affiliate marketing and how it works. We wish we had an affiliate marketing for beginners guide to follow when we first got started.
We hope this guide was thorough enough, and gave you enough resources to help you get started or scale your current affiliate marketing business. The journey for affiliate marketing for beginners is one that can change your life forever. We hope it’s filled with much success and happiness!
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post them in the comments section below or just say hello.
Sincerely,
Your Friends And Partners
Richard And John Weberg