Affiliate Marketing When You’re A Beginner – Crucial First Steps

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways you can make your first dollar online and it’s probably the one that most people attempt first. Why?

1. You don’t have to create any of your own products
2. You don’t have to build a website
3. You don’t have to do any customer support for products sold
4. You don’t have to spend any money on advertisement
5. You don’t have to do any product updates or changes

Now, these are just a few reasons, but they’re important ones because many times people just starting out don’t really know how to do any of those things listed. Affiliate marketing really boils down to getting a link that shows you are the one who referred a sale and taking your percentage of that sale as a commission.  So, let’s look at some of the steps you can take to get your affiliate marketing journey going in the right direction!

First, you’re going to want to select an area of information that you want to target. Many times you hear people say “go with what you’re passionate about” because you already have a good idea for information you can put out.  That’s not always the best advice and instead say “go find out what people are buying.” If you go where the money already is, you stand a better chance and we guarantee that if something is making you money, you’ll get pretty passionate about it real quick.

So how do you know what’s selling? One way is to log into JVZoo and go to the “find products” page.  There you will see the conversion rates and number of sales that each product has from the time it was released.  Now, just a little caveat here. Just because something has a high conversion rate, doesn’t always mean it’s going to be the ideal product to promote. You’ll want to check the refund rate percentage, how long it’s been around, if it’s still a viable product (if it’s been updated and still functions properly) and if you think you can understand what it’s doing well enough to give some information on it.


Once you’ve picked one out, you want to go ahead and request to be able to promote the product. Once the vendor approves you, you’ll have an affiliate link that will credit you with a percentage of each sale for every customer you send through that link who purchases the product.

Now you need to decide how you plan to promote this product in order to start getting some traffic flowing through your link. There’s a variety of ways you can do this without spending a dime of your own money.

1. Video Reviews
Video reviews are fantastic ways of getting your information and link to potential buyers. There are multiple ways to do reviews, but there’s one that usually works the best.  If you actually purchase the product yourself, you can then go through it on video and show some of the things inside of it. Obviously you don’t want to show too much as that wouldn’t be fair to the vendor selling the product, but there is nothing wrong with doing a review of what you purchased and letting them know it.  This instantly inserts more trust in you from the visitor because you’re not just “talking” about something, you actually have it and spend your own money to get it. Be honest in your review, it will help you build a reputation as someone who’s trustworthy and people will begin to come back and watch your other videos because they know you’re giving them the truth.

You don’t have to buy the product. This is just the way that works the best. Almost every product has what is called a “JV” page. You will find information on those pages that relates to the product itself and most times you can create a nice review just from the information you find there. It’s not as powerful as having the actual product in front of you, but it still works nonetheless. If you can’t find a JV page for the product, simply contact the product owner and they will usually be able to point you in the right direction.

2. Review Blog
Don’t like getting on video? No problem (even though you should).  You can create a review blog where you go through and review things in text. While the best way to do this is to get a hosting account and install WordPress, there are also places you can do this for free. Blogger.com is a free option where you can do this.

3. Social Media
Social media these days is all the rage and usually generates the majority of traffic unless you’re paying for ads.  It costs nothing to create a social media account on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others. You can then create your information there and send the potential traffic to either your blog or video. 

4.Build a list
If you are more than a few weeks into your marketing journey, you’ve probably heard “build a list” about 100 times. This one costs money, but if you’re going to survive online, you’re going to have to do it at some point.  The reason this is so important and probably the best method of all is you have direct contact with people who have already shown an interest in doing business with you. So each time you do a new review, you simply send an email saying “Hey, I’ve done a new review on XX product and you can check it out here.”  You drop your link and they go on to the sales page and hopefully purchase which gives you a commission. This method does cost money, but not a lot. You simply pay an autoresponder service like GetResponse a small monthly fee for housing your list. You can get a free trial here.

These are just a handful of ways to get started in affiliate marketing that won’t break the bank and can begin to generate some income for you.  The main thing is to be consistent and not quit! It’s the ones who stick with it that always find success.