Affiliate marketing is one of the favorite monetizing methods bloggers use because it can feel quite passive over time when the blog is set up properly along with the right type of content published to an audience that is interested in what you have to say.

I won’t say that making money with affiliate marketing is 100% passive, because it does require a lot of initial effort, especially if you are a total beginner. Like any other form of passive income ideas, nothing is ever fully “passive.”

Saving money and putting it into an investing account, for example, will take a lot of effort and hard work at first to create your army of minions and see your income rise over time.

Today, 80% if not 90% of the online incomes bloggers make, comes from affiliate marketing!

We will explain, what an affiliate network is, later on this post.

If you are a beginner, no matter how small or new your blog is, anyone can start earning with affiliate marketing.

Of course you will need some traffic for affiliate marketing to work, bu you DON’T need to wait until you have 50,000 monthly page views to start earning your first affiliate income!

Some suggest to start when you will have 18,000 to 20,000 monthly page views, but the truth is – The Earlier The Better.

Because your success in affiliate marketing really depends on the quality of your traffic!

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Here’s a quick glimpse for beginners of what affiliate marketing is.

In a word, affiliate marketing means referring/recommending items and/or services that you love and believe are useful, to your readers and followers.

This is similar, when suggesting to your friends favorite restaurants, places to visit, or hotels to stay in for holiday, just because you loved the services there.

In the online world, your recommendation comes in the form of a special link (referral or affiliate link). To get your affiliate link is when you join affiliate programs, which we will talk about it later.

And that’s when the magic starts happening!

When a reader makes a purchase or signs up to something, you’ll get rewarded with a commission at NO cost to your reader.

Tip for newbies:
Affiliate marketing, in my opinion is very effective when you are completely honest about your recommendations or product reviews. When you spam your blog articles and social media platforms with affiliate links, you won’t be able to convert well or make much money.

This monetizing strategy is the way to go, because you will be able to recommend any product to your readers because it could help and benefit them as well!

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing For Beginners?

To get started with affiliate marketing, always start a blog for people who are new to the world of online marketing.

Many bloggers started making money with affiliate marketing as a beginner using this method.

Not only is starting a blog very inexpensive, but it is a very effective way for beginners to learn how to make money online using affiliate marketing.

By starting a blog, you can promote affiliate offers when you write a review or mention the products you use on your blog.

For example, if you write about your favorite ways to save money, you should often recommend saving-money resources or apps you use, as a helpful tool to your readers.

Readers will only purchase or try something if they are educated more about what that service or product is.

No one clicks randomly on a link to make a purchase if they have no idea what the offer is.

Starting a blog even if you don’t have experience is what I recommend, as you will learn with time how to create content for your readers and apply some affiliate marketing strategies onto your blog posts.

You can start a blog about saving money and making money online, where in your blog posts you can mention products and services that are related to this topic.

For example, you can try promoting budgeting resources to help your readers manage their money better.

When it comes to earning extra income, you can also try promoting online jobs and business tools that will help people make money from home.

Depending on your niche, you can promote pretty anything as long as they are products and services that you use or believe are good, and is related to what you blog about.

You will never see home décor or high-end furniture products from Wayfair promoted on a blog that speaks all about finances, because that’s not what readers want.

How Much Money Can You Make As An Affiliate Marketer?

If you’re wondering, how much money you can make with affiliate marketing, well, here’s your answer – it depends on how well you implement your affiliate marketing strategies.

There are affiliate marketers who make close to $0 (because they are not implementing the right strategies) and there are those who are able to earn $1,000, $5,000, $10,000, or even $50,000 per month!

And don’t get me wrong, but everyone who starts a blog has to learn “how-to” strategically apply affiliate links and promotions in order to earn income.

We keep hearing “affiliate marketing” and every successful affiliate marketer that we see on YouTube shares how much they’ve been earning, which is thousands of dollars a month.

They all made it look so easy, and you started to think yeah, this is as simple as sprinkling affiliate links into your posts, but that’s not the way to go!

So, investing your time to learn and implement strategies especially from bloggers who already have been down the same road and are now making money online from home, is the first move.

But despite the time you will spend testing and tweaking things around, it will be money well spend when you see the income!

None of it will be possible, if you don’t start your own blog and invest time to learn how to use affiliate marketing properly!

As a new blogger who is still trying to figure out how to monetize your blog and earn the first $1,000 you have to know that your earnings using affiliate marketing will be volatile, and it depends on a lot of factors like traffic, season, sales, promotions, authenticity, how you write your blog posts, how helpful and convincing you are to your readers, your relationship with your affiliate manager, etc.

Yet, for a newbie, is better to have a second way of earning your income, despite the affiliate links, and that’s through display advertising.

Let’s See How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

There are couple of ways: Pay Per Lead, Pay Per Sale…..

Pay Per Lead

This type of affiliate marketing is called “pay per lead” because the company or merchant will pay you, the affiliate marketer, based on the conversion of leads that you’re able to persuade the person to sign up for a free trial or product.

Pay Per Sale

The most standard affiliate marketing method is using “pay per sale.”

In this case, the company or merchant will pay you, the affiliate, a percentage of the price of the product or service you sell to the person.

For example, when yo recommend an author’s digital eBook, you would earn a commission based on the sale of their product.

This commission can be anywhere from 15% to as high 50% depending on the affiliate program.

In the simplest terms, you can think of affiliate marketing as a “referral” or “recommendation” that pays you once a transaction has been made.

That transaction could be a purchase, subscription, or sign up.

How Affiliate Links Work?

We discussed the basic understanding of what affiliate marketing is and how it works, so let’s see how affiliate links get tracked.

First you need to join by signing up for free. You as an affiliate should never be asked to pay any membership.

You are ultimately “advertising” for merchants and all of these affiliate programs and networks want you to help them make money by promoting them, so they are all FREE to apply and join.

When you apply for an affiliate program, you’ll be given an affiliate link. When someone clicks on your affiliate link, your affiliate ID is stored in something called a “cookie” and this is how your referrals are tracked when a purchase is made or an action is taken.

This is how to ensure you get compensated for your recommendations.

The Life Of Your Cookie

Depending on the affiliate program, your affiliate ID can have a short or lengthy life in the cookie.
Technically, cookies can be stored forever as long as the user’s browser cookies are not removed.

Longer intervals are preferable because they increase your chances of earning a commission when a customer completes an action.

Most consumers who click on links don’t take action or buy something right away.

They usually ponder about it for a while and then revisit it days, weeks, or months later.

Having said that, the duration of the cookie containing your affiliate ID can affect your affiliate earnings, so keep that in mind. This is something to consider!

How Do I Become An Affiliate Marketer?

In order to become an Affiliate Marketer you need to join first an affiliate programs or networks.

Affiliate program is more commonly used than affiliate network.

Let’s see what they are and how they differ from one another.

What Is An Affiliate Program?

An affiliate program is also known as an “associate program”, where a company or an individual business owner (the “merchant”) pays you (the “affiliate” or “publisher”) a commission, for recommending their products or services through affiliate links on your website, blog, or social media platform.

You get compensated when the reader purchases the product, signs up, fills out a form, or subscribes to the company’s e-mail.

For example, Amazon Associates is an excellent example of an affiliate program.

Applying to an affiliate program can be directly with the company or small business owner, and through an affiliate network.

What Is An Affiliate Network?

An affiliate network serves as a link between a group of companies (or “merchants“) and affiliates (you, the publisher, or blogger).

When joining an affiliate network, you’ll have instant access to thousands of affiliate programs.

The benefit of affiliate networks is that you don’t have to go to the trouble of tracking them down or contacting them separately. You can easily search for affiliate programs or companies that you’d like to engage.

Tip: Some affiliate programs/networks require a minimum amount of page views before applying. Some don’t have any requirements and Amazon Affiliate Program is one of them.

It is important though, to read carefully the guidelines and requirements of every affiliate programs or network before applying because they can reject you the first time if you don’t meet what they ask.

And It may be harder to apply for the second time. To play it safe, make sure your blog looks organized and user-friendly before applying.

The Amazon Associates or so called “Amazon Affiliate” is a program where bloggers, influences, YouTubers, and website owners can advertise almost any products from Amazon. com on their sites by using their Amazon Affiliate links.

The earning process via Amazon Associates depends on your niche, what posts you write about, how well you rank on Google search, how “viral” your blog posts goes on Pinterest or other social media platforms and whether or not those people who clicked on your Amazon Affiliate Links are actually going to purchase things on Amazon!

How Does Amazon Affiliate Program Work?

Here’s a fast and easy example of how this works.

Let’s assume that you’re a food or lifestyle blogger who enjoys using the Instant Pot, that Amazon recommends. You know is good and you decided to suggest it in your blog post that you named “The Instant Pot Review.”

By logging into your Amazon Associates account, you’ll get your own Amazon affiliate link for your blog post. When someone clicks on your Amazon affiliate link through your blog, they will be taken to the Instant Pot product on Amazon’s website.

It will appear to the reader or customer like this:

If the reader clicks on your link via blog and purchases the Pot on Amazon, within 24 hours, you will earn a small commission of the sale.

It’s important to know that Amazon affiliate links have a lifetime of only 24 hours, which means that if the reader, for some reason, isn’t interested in buying the Pot but decides to browse around Amazon and purchases other non-related items, or maybe wants to purchase a pressure cooker of a different brand, you will still earn a commission on all the items they purchased.

Even if they close the browser or turn off their computer, but still come back to Amazon Website within the day, you can still earn a commission from Amazon just because your cookie was stored in their browser.

The majority of Amazon Affiliates actually earn from products that they didn’t promote directly, because many readers or visitors who click on a blogger’s Amazon affiliate link may end up buying other items not even related to the product that was mentioned in the blog post.

Tip: Finding the correct type of blog post to write is crucial to succeeding as an Amazon affiliate.

Gift recommendations and shopping lists do well, especially if you can rank top on Google search or Pinterest.

How To Apply For Amazon Associates?

Applying for Amazon is easy, even if you don’t have ANY traffic at all, but the requirements they will have for you is, when they accept you – you will be put in a “window“ approval period, or a probation period, where you have to generate the first 3 sales within 180 days (that’s 6 months) or you’ll have to reapply again, if you don’t succeed.

So the best way to go with Amazon is, first to drive consistent traffic to your blog before you apply.

Reapplying for the second time can be difficult than the first time.

Some bloggers, recommend up to 10,000 monthly page viewers in order to apply on Amazon and actually generate 3 sales more easily – which means you met their guideline, and you can easily continue promoting more.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?

Some bloggers say it is, because they have tried a tons of ways to make a success, but most of them will say that it wasn’t an easy ride.

It’s important to learn the basic concepts of affiliate marketing and how all this works, and applying those concepts to your audience.

So the best answer we can say is: It is hard, but not impossible. It just takes a lot of effort, time and investing in order to make it, but once you do it, you can have good income.

Learning and testing affiliate marketing strategies is the way to go! It’s okay to make mistakes on the way, because there is not one single solution that’s a one-size-fits-all.

It’s important to have the right mindset about it, and be persistent even if something ain’t going the way you wanted or planned.

Tip: Don’t give up!

Wrapping Up On How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Affiliate marketing is the process of making money by advertising a product or service to your audience. The commission is earned, when the person, whom you are recommending the product to, buys it via your affiliate link.

Once you’ve learned the basics, and how to monetize using affiliate marketing strategies, you can join a variety of affiliate network or programs (like Amazon Affiliate Program).

Make sure you read the guidelines and the requirements of the Affiliate network or program you are applying to. It’s better to grow your traffic first, in order to apply for some of the Affiliate Programs (Like Amazon Associates).

The affiliate links from your blog posts can track readers’ purchases between 24 hours to as high as 365 days, which means expanded earning commission. And remember: Write good posts and recommend good products, because Affiliate Marketing is about promoting what the reader is looking for and is going to help solve their problem.