Earn While You Sleep: A Complete Guide on How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

Forget about having to wake up to go hustle. There’re ways you can make money while ensconced in the warmth of your bed. You can make lots of cash, with minimal effort from your end.

Interesting, right? Read on below for excellent tips on how to make money with affiliate marketing.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing

You may have come across the term affiliate marketing, but you have never quite taken the time to find out what it means. Well, you know how you always refer your friends to a particular retailer and get nothing out of it? With affiliate marketing, you can turn your referrals into cold hard cash.

Every time you make a referral, the retailer will pay you a commission if they make a sale.

Here’s how it works

  • As an affiliate marketer, you get a unique ID from the online merchant, which will track any referrals and complete sales
  • When you sign up to be a marketer, you’ll get an affiliate link that contains the tracking code
  • When your referral clicks on your link, the merchant site will pick it up through the use of the tracking cookie
  • The cookie with your unique ID allows the final sale to be attributed to you, as it gets picked up on the merchant’s website
  • To ensure that you get credit for the sale, you need to set up cookie duration. Setting up a long duration will increase the chances of you making a sale and commission

Who’s involved in the process?

There’re three parties in affiliate marketing

  1. The seller or merchant whose goal is to sell as many products as possible
  2. The final consumer who is looking for a product to satisfy a specific need
  3. The affiliate marketer who provides the connection between the final consumer and the Merchant

How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

The possibility of making money with affiliate marketing sounds easy, doesn’t it? As easy and exciting as it sounds, you need to take certain steps to ensure that it becomes a reality for you. Take into consideration some of the things we’ll highlight below.

1. What Is Your Niche

You’ll need to convince those you are referring to buy the products so that you make some money. It becomes easier if you find a niche that will allow you to focus on one particular area.

You can then align your communication campaigns appropriately. Tips for finding a niche include:

  • Looking for an area that is of interest to you. When you have an interest in something, you’ll go out of your way to build your knowledge base. It’ll then become easy for you to create relevant material to help in marketing.
  • Can you become an authority – marketing requires that you are constantly pushing out relevant material to your target audience. Imagine pushing the same content over and over again to your social media friends, not only will you bore them to death, but you’ll lose followers.
  • How much competition do you face – if there’re too many people in that particular area, maybe it is time to learn something new? It is especially tough for a newbie to compete with the more experienced affiliate marketers.
  • Can you make money – finding a niche that does not have competition is all good, but will you be able to translate it into business? Remember, this is a business and not a hobby, at the end of the day; you need to see some money coming in.

2. You’ll Need a Website

You have started the process of making passive income with affiliate marketing by finding a niche. The next step is to set up a website. Don’t fret that you need to spend your hard-earned money on an expert to do it for you. There’re many online resources you can use to set up a website without coding knowledge.

You’ll need the site to share content with the target audience. The blog page is very important in affiliate marketing, and you will need it for SEO. You can also monetize your website by selling ad spots on it. Include all the relevant information and make sure that it is easy to use.

2. Content Matters

Depending on the affiliate network you are working with, some may require that you have certain things already running including:

  • Content on your blog
  • Adequate traffic to your website
  • A certain number of views every month

Most of the networks will not sign you on until you can provide evidence that your website is active. You can only make money for them and yourself if the search engines find you easily.

3. Look for Products to Promote

You know what you love and should, therefore, use the search engines to find affiliate programs that offer them. You’ll then need to plug-in to the affiliate links as well as write the necessary reviews. The information you give should fill a need that you have already identified.

Give the audience solutions that you generate through proper research on the products. Once you become an authority, you’ll realize that it gets easier to recommend products because they trust you. Don’t forget to get the audience feedback. They’re the ones who’ll tell you what they want, and in return, you must do your best to find the solution.

Take note of what other people in your niche are doing. You can get a lot of information and tips from them which you can then use to get more business. Social media platforms will give you a lot of information.

4. Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing Networks

Think of the affiliate marketing networks as a marketplace. Retailers will post their products there, and affiliate marketers will then go in and choose the products they want to sell. Don’t pay any money to join a network; you’ll find many of them on the online platform; just do your research.

5. Check How You Are Performing

Yes, we did say that this is passive income that you can make while asleep, you will, however, you need to monitor your progress. It’s a business, after all. There are many tools you can use online for monitoring. You’ll then know which products are doing well for you, and which ones you need to ditch.

The insight you get from the monitoring will also allow you to churn out better content. Remember your success will depend on how much your customers trust you. Only then can you hope for their loyalty and repeated business.

What to Watch out for with Affiliate Marketing

It’s clear that there are ways you can make money with affiliate marketing. However, just like any other business, there are certain things you need to be wary of including:

a) Get-Rich-Quick Schemes

As cliché as it may sound when the deal is too good think twice. Do not fall for anyone who promises to make you a millionaire overnight. It just doesn’t happen; unless you win the lottery.

b) Fake Training Opportunities

You’re new to the affiliate marketing world, and everyone is offering you training on how to make money with affiliate marketing. You’ll find many people selling eBooks, offering webinar training, among others.

We are in no way saying it is wrong to educate yourself, but, before you sign in, use what is available online. Our article is a great place for you to begin the lessons.

c) Not Understanding What You’re Selling

When you join an affiliate network, your main goal should be to sell a product. Forget about those who operate like pyramid schemes. Also, avoid those which will require you to part with money before you make any. With so many credible networks, all you need to do is a little research before you sign onto any of the platforms.

d) Paying to Join an Affiliate Network

We have already touched on this above, but for the sake of driving it in, we’ll address it again. Don’t part with money to join an affiliate network. The credible ones will not ask you to pay anything.

Understand which platform you’re signing up on to avoid future disappointments. See how long the network has been around. Does it have a good track record of payment, how long has the domain name been around, among others.

Also, make sure you get contact information, in case you need help with anything.

Time to Make Some Money

Our guide above will show you how to make money with affiliate marketing. It does require some effort on your part, but once you are up and running, you can make quite a bit of money without too much effort. Make sure you understand the nitty-gritty of affiliate marketing.

It’ll require that you do your research well; be curious about everything. Platforms like LinkedIn will allow you to join groups with affiliate marketers. You can learn a lot from them so that you avoid costly mistakes.