Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

In this article I'm going to both promote and teach you how to do affiliate marketing using a product that will be useful to many people. Whether you have tried affiliate marketing before or not, I'll start at ground zero and talk about affiliate marketing for beginners. I like online affiliate marketing as one way to create an extra stream of income for your business.

5 Things to Know About Affiliate Marketing

1. It can save you time. If you want to sell services or products online, you’ve got to have something to sell. So you either design your own offers, or you promote other people’s offers. Or, like me, you do a combination of both.
2. The offers need to be a good match for your followers, not something completely out of the blue that they have no interest in as far as you know.
3. The offers you decide to promote need to be good, solid, useful products. 90% of the time I have either bought the product to check it out ahead of time or have been given a review copy before I promote.
4. Since you are earning an affiliate commission on each sale, make sure you are working with someone who pays out their commissions regularly, and without you having to chase them down. Look at their statements in their affiliate area about when and how they pay.
5. You have to be reasonable about the amount of money you expect to make. Depending on the size of your list and on your social following, you’ll make small amounts of money when you promote (most likely) or large amounts if you’ve got a larger following. Don’t sneeze at small amounts – they can add up over time. And if you’ve got a subscriber list that’s small right now, it’s pretty common to make small amounts of money. Nothing wrong with that, it can grow over time.

Promoting a Product Bundle

One type of information product you can easily promote as a beginning in affiliate marketing is called a product bundle. Click To Tweet Product bundles are just what they say, a set of from 10 to 30 (or more) information products on a particular topic that are bundled together and all sold as a bundle for one price. The buyer gets everything in the bundle, and can use each product or select 3 to 5 products they really find useful and ignore the rest. Because product bundles are sold at a deep discount, even if you buy the entire bundle but only use a few products in it, it's still a good deal. 

Why do I suggest that you promote a product bundle?

• Most of the time you will make 40% to 50% of the cost of the bundle as a commission (affiliate payment) back to you. So if a bundle sells for $74 you will typically get about half of that in income back to you. Sometimes, if you have contributed to the bundle yourself, you'll get the entire bundle free or earn a higher commission (like maybe 70%).
• If you refer others to the bundle promoter and they decide to also promote it, you will get 10% or so of their bundle sales. Often this “second tier” commission expires after a year. 
• It's simple to sign up as an affiliate. Here's an example for you to check out and maybe sign up for. You can go to this link and see an affiliate sign up sheet from a company called Ultimate Bundles. Check out the information they ask for from you, and make sure to scroll down and see when and how they pay you for your sales. That's important! You are entering a business relationship here, so pay attention and make sure their payment terms are acceptable to you. (This is my own affiliate link. I promote bundles from Ultimate Bundles myself.) So, if you were to sign up as an affiliate using my link I would also receive a 10% bonus in the first year from your sales. 

With this particular Ultimate Bundles company, you can use your own affiliate link to purchase the bundle you want to promote (you can pick and choose, you don't have to promote all of them.) As an example, I am promoting their Smart Travelers Ultimate Bundle, so I was able to take 40% (the commission rate) off when I bought the bundle ahead of time to check it out. (I almost never promote something I don't personally use or have reviewed.)

How Do You Promote and Sell What You Are Offering?

• Many times, the company you are promoting will host their own webinars for potential buyers. You let your own prospects know about the webinar (using your own unique affiliate link) and if that person later on purchases the product, you earn your commission.
• The company offering the product usually will also have website banners, social media graphics, sample blog posts, sample social media posts, and sample emails that you can modify to your taste and use to promote. This saves you a ton of time!
• You can promote to your own email list, through social media, and on a special page on your website. You can do a Facebook live and talk about it. You can promote it in any way you like, and as often as you like, until the promotion has ended.

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners – Resources

One reason I like the Ultimate Bundles company is that for each bundle they offer, they host a special webinar ahead of time for their affiliates. If you take the time to attend, you'll learn 3 or 4 good marketing tips to help you promote their product. But guess what? These same tips also help you promote your own products, too! It's basic online marketing, and usually I get an idea for marketing that I have not thought about before. (If you cannot attend the affiliate training webinar live, they have a replay.) Ultimate Bundles also has a support Facebook group, so it's easy to ask questions or see what other promoters are doing.

Ultimate Bundles also has a special website for their affiliates with training – overall strategies for marketing affiliate products, interviews with top affiliates, email marketing and blogging strategies, and Facebook advertising training. Most companies you promote for will have resources for you, but this company has more than I've ever seen anywhere. They want you to succeed – they want to make money and they want you to make money, too!

Extra Tips for Affiliate Marketing

To have success as an affiliate marketer over the long term you'll need to always be building your email list. But that's not extra work, we all should be doing that all the time anyway! You can start small. Two sales are better than not even trying it at all. the first time I ever did an affiliate promotion for someone else, I had one sale on a $9.97 product. I made $5.00. But I learned how the process works, and I got better at it. You will, as well. I think the biggest affiliate commission check I've ever gotten was $2000. That was nice!

Sometimes, you can offer your own additional bonus if people purchase through your affiliate link. Ultimate Bundles has their own guidelines for how to set this up, and you can find that in their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) if you decide to become one of their affiliate. 

Almost always there is a set period of time for when the promotion starts and ends. You don't want to promote before time, or afterwards. But you might wonder, what happens once the bundle sale ends? In the case of this company, your affiliate links will switch over (redirect) to a sign up for future bundle notifications, and that gives you an additional 30 days to earn money. If that person buys on of their other bundles within a month, you will earn that commission, too. 

If you are going to be an affiliate marketer who is organized and plans ahead (really the only way to do it) you'll want to set up a simple chart in Excel or Word and keep a calendar of what you plan to promote when. Click To Tweet That way you can keep track of what to set up, how far in advance, when to expect affiliate payments, and ideas for promotions. 

Taking Action 

If you want to try affiliate marketing you can get started in many ways. You can apply to be an affiliate for my own Confident Marketer products by clicking this link. To get started as an affiliate for Ultimate Bundles use my affiliate link and sign up here. If you work a little at a time on affiliate marketing you will soon have a small income stream. Over time it will increase for you. 

Note: The Ultimate Bundle I am promoting currently is the Smart Travel Super Bundle, so if travel is your interest you can click my own affiliate link and get more information about it or buy it. You can see the graphic below, I'm impressed by the quality of images the company creates for their affiliates to use.