How to Do Affiliate Marketing for Free – Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. In fact, if you’re doing affiliate marketing right, it can be one of the greatest sources of income available to you. But what makes it so great is that it’s also a very easy way for beginners to get started making money online. If you want to learn how to do affiliate marketing for free, then you’re going to need a good guide that will lay everything out in front of you.
So , you have made a decision to start doing affiliate marketing. You want to find the best affiliate marketing programs, but you’re having a hard time doing it. In this article , I will show you how to do affiliate marketing for free.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Choose a Product to Promote as an Affiliate
As ethical content creators, we’re constrained in the products we choose to represent in one of two ways:
- Either we’re limited by our experience to products that we’ve used and liked, that have affiliate programs and that are a good fit for our audience, or
- We’re constrained by the products we can get access to in order to evaluate them, either by buying them outright or getting a free sample or trial.
No matter which approach you take, expect to have to invest time and money into researching the best products for your audience.
Here are your two main options (with your best option listed first).
OPTION #1: PROMOTE PRODUCTS YOU ALREADY KNOW AND LOVE
This is the most common way to get started with affiliate offers.
You become an affiliate for something that you’ve used yourself, had a good experience with, thoroughly tested and feel good recommending. You should be fairly confident that others will get the same results you did (or better), as long as they do the work.
If you’ve found great success from a course, mastermind, or ebook that your readers could also benefit from, it only makes sense for you to spread the word and share your results.
Do an inventory of the products, services, and courses you already have experience with. You might have a list of a dozen or more.
Which of these would you be thrilled to promote? Cross out any that don’t fit the bill.
Now simply check to see if the merchant has an affiliate program (some won’t but you’ll probably be surprised at how many do).
Using a search engine like Google, search for “affiliate program” +
, or simply email the merchant and ask.
Then run your remaining options through this Good Affiliate Product checklist:
- You’ve previewed the product so you know its quality (given, in this case).
- They have a solid refund policy that you trust they’ll honor.
- They provide good customer support (and you’ve tested it).
- You have a good story to share about your experience with the product.
- The offer fits your audience’s needs and won’t abuse the trust you’ve built with them.
The products that tick all the checkboxes are your best opportunities for affiliate revenue. As time goes on, add as many of these products to your mix as you like.
You’ve found your first product! Apply using the merchant’s process and start promoting.
If you’re just dipping your toe in the affiliate marketing industry, this first option may be enough to get you started.
However, most bloggers will want to try the next one, too.
(And you’ll have to explore the second option if you don’t have an existing product you love that is also a great match for your audience and offers an affiliate program.)
Option #2: Find Products Via an Affiliate Network
If you don’t have any direct experience with or knowledge of products in your niche that could help your readers, you can often find good affiliate products on affiliate networks (← our detailed guide).
But be careful — this approach requires that you invest time into research and money into purchasing products to try out, more so than the first option.
That’s because there’s less trust and prior knowledge involved from the outset. You have to do your due diligence to protect your reputation and the credibility you’ve built with your readers.
When you work through a network, you typically won’t know the merchant ahead of time and usually won’t build a relationship with them (your business relationship is with the network).
The list of popular and reliable affiliate networks includes ClickBank, CJ Affiliate, the eBay Partner Network, ShareaSale, CJ Affiliate (aka Commission Junction), and the Amazon Associates program. Some networks will even assign you an affiliate manager to lend a hand and show you the ropes.
Amazon products, in particular, are an easy way to get started. Many newbies begin by becoming an Amazon affiliate and then scaling to other types of more profitable affiliate offers.
Step 2: Get Yourself Set Up as an Affiliate
Whether you work directly with affiliate merchants or through a network, you’ll have to apply, be approved, and provide certain information so that you can be paid.
At a minimum you’ll need to provide:
- Your personal/business contact information for tax and reporting purposes.
- Your bank account where commissions will be sent.
In turn, the merchant must provide you with:
- An affiliate link. Whenever you post about the product, you’ll use this trackable link. It will have a long tag at the end of each link that includes your affiliate ID.
Here’s what some typical affiliate text links look like: EXAMPLE LINK THAT DIRECTS TO THE MERCHANT’S HOME PAGEhttps://merchantsite.com/dap/a/?a=1199 EXAMPLE LINK TO ANOTHER PAGE ON THE MERCHANT’S SITE
You’ll also usually get some tips and useful assets for marketing the product (often found in a welcome guide or on the affiliate website).
These could include:
- An affiliate guide as well as instructions on how to use the platform and a summary of policies such as payouts.
- Online marketing tools like banners and sidebar graphics.
- Sample email/webpage swipe copy.
- Ongoing communications from the merchant about promotions, new products, etc.
If you use an affiliate platform like Amazon, you’ll get your own link for each of the specific products you promote.
Be sure to check your specific network’s help or support pages for more information.Tip: If your audience is global (which many bloggers’ are), you might want to check out geniuslink for tracking overseas sales through Amazon, iTunes, and Microsoft Store.
Step 3: Start Promoting Your Chosen Affiliate Offers
Ultimately, all your hard work finding and evaluating products only pays off if somebody takes your advice and makes the purchase, right?
For that to happen, you need to put your recommendation in front of your audience. Even more importantly, you need to make your recommendation trustworthy.
This is where a lot of affiliate marketers slip up. They think slapping a banner ad up on their blog that links to affiliate products is all they need to do.
But take a look at this:
Does that look trustworthy to you? Nowhere close, right?
Well, here’s a little secret:
The most successful affiliate marketing offers look nothing like that. No PPC or veiled recommendations on social media.
Here’s what to do instead (and what marketing channels to use):
Option #1: Create a Resource Page on Your Blog
Our own resource page is a good example:
It promotes lots of different products, but it also organizes them according to different types of readers and what they might need at the time. It also explains why those products would be helpful to them.
In other words, it’s not just a sales pitch. It’s educational. Because it contains a lot of quality content, plus it’s well optimized for SEO, it also ranks well in Google search results and gets organic traffic. It gets good conversion rates too.
Chances are, you can put together a landing page like this within a few hours. Your readers will also appreciate you putting all of your recommendations in one place for easy reference.
Option #2: Create and Promote Custom Content
This content marketing strategy will be the backbone of your affiliate promotional efforts.
Use as many of the following different techniques as make sense for your blog and audience.Note: All of these strategies assume that you are already sending traffic to the latest content you’re creating by emailing your list on a regular basis (at least two to four times per month) to let them know what’s new.
A) Write Reviews
You can write detailed reviews of products, courses, books, or software products you promote as an affiliate. For example, here’s our review of Siteground:
And here’s our ConvertKit review:
And our Elementor review:
Your reviews can focus on a single product or compare competing products side-by-side.
The second approach arguably builds more trust, but it also distracts people by giving them a lot of different recommendations.
If you would like to review multiple products, one option is to create a review site where all the content is simply reviews and affiliate offers. It becomes a “one-stop-shop” for your niche.
B) Write Definitive Content on a Related Topic
You can write a definitive, comprehensive post on your site to educate your readers and “soft sell” your products and then work to get it ranking in the search engines.
For instance, you could write an ultimate guide to setting up a WordPress blog and include your affiliate links to your favorite hosting providers.
One example here at Smart Blogger is our post on freelance writing jobs. It’s a detailed, definitive guide for freelancers looking to find online jobs, but it also allows us to feature one of our courses for writers.
Whatever the topic, make sure that it’s evergreen content — information that’s likely to be useful and valuable for years to come.
You can create blog posts, videos, infographics or anything similar — but whatever you do, it should not be a sales page. Focus on building trust and authority.
Finally, you should pay a lot of attention to SEO — make sure to optimize for the right keywords, keep WordPress running fast, and build links to your content to get a constant flow of traffic from Google.
C) Create Valuable Bonus Content
Assuming it’s allowed by your affiliate agreement (sometimes it’s not), you can create bonus content, exclusive to your readers, that helps people get even more value from the affiliate product.
People love bonuses! You can create many types of bonuses fairly quickly and easily while still giving your readers excellent value.
By the way, this is a fantastic way to differentiate yourself from other bloggers representing the same products.
Here are some example bonuses you could offer:
- Step-by-step checklists
- Quick-start guides
- Video overviews or demos
- Complimentary or discounted services (e.g., coaching calls)
Step 4: Comply with Legal Requirements (and Best Practices)
In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires that you let people know you’ll earn a commission.
But even if it isn’t required by law where you’re located, we recommend it. It’s just good business.
Don’t be afraid to be transparent. People will appreciate your honesty and want to support you to repay you for making their lives better.
So wherever you share an affiliate link, whether it’s in blog posts, web pages, or emails, let your readers know that you stand to earn a small commission if they buy through you — and if they choose not to use your link, no worries.
Assure them that you wouldn’t recommend any products if you hadn’t used them yourself or were confident they could help them.
It’s also a good idea to create an Affiliate Disclaimer page on your website.
Here’s an example of our own disclaimer page at Smart Blogger:
We’re also clear on how those affiliate links might look within blog posts:
Conclusion
Learning how to do affiliate marketing can be one of the most financially rewarding things you’ll ever do. Sure, it’s not easy and it takes a lot of work and time to see results, but if you follow the right steps and can people skills, you can do affiliate marketing for free in your spare time starting today.