How to Start Affiliate Marketing With No Experience or Money (4 Free Tools!)

Are you feeling overwhelmed by affiliate marketing and swamped by all the options and directions you could take? In this video, I'll walk you through four essential free tools to kickstart a much simpler affiliate journey and share some of the biggest mistakes to avoid. We're going to learn everything from how to find an affiliate program to how to start earning actual dollars as an affiliate partner. We also have a free set of templates to make it easy for you to track sales, revenue and profit from your affiliate campaigns. You can go ahead and check that out in the description below. Now let's dive in. Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn passive income online, with publishers earning around $56,000 a year through partner programs. But generating commissions requires more than just getting your referral link and access to your dashboard. You'll need content, whether that's your website, podcasts, social media or email newsletter, a source of traffic which is your engaged audience for that content, affiliate products or products or services you promote within a potential niche market that earns commissions from sales credibility and trust, which establish a strong reputation between you, your affiliate partners and your audience. And though this will require some technical know how and back end access to your website, if that's your chosen platform, don't be spooked. I'll walk through everything so it's worth your time and effort. Now this video is primarily concerned with the affiliate side of affiliate marketing. We're going to do a video about the brand side setting up your own affiliate marketing program very soon, so if you want to learn about that, be sure to subscribe. The first step in selecting a product is to identify your passion and interests. What excites you? Let's say you're a music producer and love hearing your music played back at its fullest. Potential products could be studio equipment like speakers, headphones or signal processors. Next, look for a niche where customers are actively seeking products and solutions. What can your content deliver that solves a problem with those products? Sweetwater's affiliate program, for example, delivers solutions to those looking to build a whole studio from scratch with its latest and greatest music and audio equipment. So professional and hobbyist musicians as content creators could be a great fit for their partner program. Once you've decided on a product that aligns with your niche and interests, the next step is choosing which affiliate network to join. While hundreds are available to choose from, some are much better than others. Amazon Associates is by far the most popular affiliate program. It's not even close. It's one of the world's most trusted brands, known for its ease of use, and it's free to sign up. Plus, it sells pretty much anything. You'll get access to over 900,000 merchants across a variety of niche markets to help create profitable partnerships that align with your brand. Let's say your blog is a knowledge hub for audiophiles with a niche focus on headphones for music production, but you also review other audio equipment. You want to search for new partnerships, but you don't want the challenge of managing multiple affiliate links. Amazon Associates hosts a range of tools to help you find and promote products within your niche, including customizable product links and banners and deep linking options that link directly to the Amazon Shopping app. Go to the website to sign up if you have an Amazon account, use your username and password to sign in and it'll take you through the account creation process. Here, you'll enter your website landing page or social media URLs and the type of content you create. Select the terms and conditions and click Finish. Your account will be temporarily approved while Amazon reviews your application. In the meantime, you'll get full access to its Affiliate Tools and Performance Dashboard. To search for products, go to the Amazon website and type in a specific product name or keywords to find the most relevant results for your platform, select your product. Then come up here to the Site Stripe header, which lets you build affiliate links and banners directly from any Amazon product page. I'll choose Text link. It'll generate a link with your store ID and tracking code embedded that you can copy paste into your content, which places a cookie into your customer's browser when clicked. Amazon Associates also handles payouts so you don't have to set up accounts with different merchants. You can use their advanced reporting and analytics tools to track your earnings and commissions and monitor clicks by and conversions. And the more you understand campaign performance, the better you can optimize the content and improve lead generation. This requires planning, testing and scaling of your traffic sources. Nice. A website analysis tool like Google Analytics is a treasure trove of information about your website traffic, and it's free to use. With this data in hand, you can measure progress of your affiliates, evaluate performance, and try different strategies to see what works best. For example, you've got two blog posts promoting the same affiliate product, product review and a comparison. You want to double down on the content that's driving the most traffic to your site and generating conversions. The traffic acquisition report is going to be your best friend when it comes to identifying this behavior and conversion info. Now, before you start using Google Analytics, you'll need a registered Gmail account. HubSpot has a guide at the link below to get you up and running. Let's navigate to Life Cycle Acquisition, Traffic acquisition and review. Here you'll see how many users came from organic search, email, social media, and more. Scroll down and to the right to Conversions to view the number of times users triggered a conversion event. The best way to measure a conversion is to create an event that measures outbound clicks on affiliate links. Go to Admin Create Property data streams, stream details, and enhanced measurement. Click on the gear icon and turn on Outbound clicks along with other metrics you'd like to capture. Let's try this out. Click Click on Admin and scroll down to Debug View. Here you'll see real time behavior on your site, which is enabled by installing the GA Debugger Chrome extension. To isolate affiliate link clicks only, go to admin Events Create Event Give it a custom name like Affiliate Partner Click. This filters out other outbound link clicks on your site. Then under matching conditions, choose Event name needs to equal click and link URL contains. Enter affiliate URL here. That way we only fire this event when these conditions are true. Check copy parameters and create. Reload your post and click on the link. Now go back to analytics and into the Debug view where you'll see the affiliate partner. Click Event to track this as a conversion. Navigate to conversions New Conversion Event Enter the event name and save. Now you'll see a flag icon by your event name, which is a conversion. Go to Conversions and click the event itself, which takes you to the report to show you how many Affiliate Partner clicks you have. But traffic alone is not enough. You want qualified traffic, meaning visitors are targeted with a strong match between your offer and their intention. And the most obvious source of traffic is search engines, which is why you'll need a keyword research tool. Let's say your headphone review post is getting lots of traffic, but no clicks, conversions or revenue. Semrush offers a robust set of tools in its free plan that allow you to see traffic and competition scores for different keyword phrases, how you rank based on intent, and find those high intent keywords to naturally plug product recommendations within your content. So someone searching Best Studio headphones for mixing is likely in the market for a product, but wants to read an in depth review before pulling the trigger. As a result, they're quite likely to click and buy linked affiliate products in your post. Let's type in some ideas to see how many searches we're getting and how competitive these keywords are. Though monthly searches for this keyword are high, you'll see how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results. Now let's refine our keywords for intent. Even though search volume for this keyword is much lower, it's now possible to rank with informative quality content focused on purchase intent and ranking for relevant keywords with purchase intent is how most content based affiliate marketers earn their commissions. You can also run an affiliate marketing business entirely through an email newsletter if you want. Though, you'll need an email marketing service to collect emails and many, like HubSpot, include a landing page builder, customer journey mapping and list segmentation all in its free plan. Let's start with building a landing page with an offer to capture email addresses. This free offer attracts your core audience and really hones in on the value they're going to get. With that, opt in. Go to Marketing in the menu and click Landing Pages. Give it a name, select a template and add your content. We'll choose this one in your layout, customize or add content blocks as needed. Keep in mind that the more forms you add to your landing page, the less likely someone may be to opt in. So keep it simple and include a clear call to action that makes it easy for customers to download your offer. As you capture the info you need to build your list, click Preview to see what your page will look like and if it all checks out, click Save and Close. Your email list is the most important element of a successful marketing strategy. With that list you can share your story, promote your business, and showcase your products, all while turning subscribers into paying customers. Once you've set up an account, click Contacts Lists, then Create List, then click Contact Based and give it a name. Here you can click Add Filter. Filters are the criteria which will decide who gets onto the list and who doesn't. It's basically the Naughty or Nice list, if you will. We'll choose Form Submissions, then choose the form from the landing page we just built. The one that had the free offer set. The status to contact has filled out form. Once that's done, you'll want to set up an email automation so customers immediately receive an email with your offer when they submit that form. Go to Marketing Email, Create Email, then Automation. This will let us set up an email that can be used in the next step. Be sure to choose Automation here. It's super important. We'll choose the welcome template to customize, but it really doesn't matter. Make your email and be sure to include the offer itself. Finally, save and publish. So with this email and our list from earlier that we prepared, we can create the workflow that will actually send this email to the folks in our list. Trust me, this is the easiest part. Head over to Automation then Workflows Hit Create Workflow from scratch. We'll choose Contact Based Blank Workflow. Then we'll click on Contact Enrollment Trigger. We'll choose when Filter criteria is met, choose List Membership, then the name of the list we created earlier. Then hit Save. Next press the plus icon to add another step to the workflow. We'll choose Communications, then send email. Select the automated email we made earlier and then press save and that's it. Make sure to test everything first so links and downloads are working properly before sending traffic to your landing page. Now you're ready to promote from a variety of places like your podcasts, social media posts, Instagram bio or your YouTube channel. Now one of the biggest mistakes newbies make when starting out is creating content for too many traffic channels at once. I see accounts on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, all while managing a newsletter and a blog. Way too much. Instead, start with one to two main traffic sources like an email newsletter and Google that can bring recurring organic traffic. Then get really good at them and make sure those are rock solid. Keep the bulk of your content creation intention on one channel, then bring others in to support those main channels as you scale. Another common mistake is neglecting thorough market research. The products or services you promote have to resonate with your audience's needs and interests so that they're targeted and effective. Use Google Trends and competitor analysis tools along with your keyword research to identify niches with high demand and relatively low competition. Look for niches where customers are actively seeking solutions or products because the lesson affiliate marketing program feels like a sales pitch, the better it'll perform. And if you don't build an audience for your content, then you can forget about it. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business. When you build an audience through trust and credibility, you leverage that knowledge to promote solutions and value and therefore earn more income. Great content that is relevant to your niche and promote it on your traffic channels. Build your email list and use it to communicate directly with your audience and build authentic relationships. It's important that you know your audience so well that you understand why they follow you in the first place. So affiliate marketing is a long term game and it's not for everyone. But if you're willing to learn, it can drive consistent quality traffic to your affiliate offers. Remember, the key is to provide real value in whatever approach you choose. If you're ready to start making some real bank with affiliate marketing, remember to download our free templates to help manage all those partnerships that bring in the most profit. And remember to like, subscribe and leave a comment if you liked what you learned and what you want to hear more of. Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go affiliate myself with the market of that new bakery that opened up down the street. I'm feeling a little hungry. I can smell the pan dulce from here. Until then, I'll see you next time. I can find this client info.

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