I’ll make this real easy if you don’t know what affiliate marketing is. If I recommend a product or service and you buy it, then I get a commission.

The concept is very easy but it can be a little tricky to  be successful at it. There is most defiantly a right way and a wrong way to do this. I’m going to fill you in on how to do it right so you can easily make passive income for a long time.  Especially if you are doing this on a blogging or information based sharing platform like YouTube….

Affiliate marketing guidelines

You need to operate with honesty and integrity to the people your drawing in if you want to be successful at affiliate marketing. The goal here is to help people and being transparent will always get you further on your road to success. So, I have a list of guidelines that I always follow and recommend you do as well.

1.) Do not advocate products that you have never used or don’t believe in.

Being honest with people is numero uno! Do not recommend anything you have never used. If you promote something you’ve never used and someone buys it just to find out that it didn’t work, then kiss your credibility and audience goodby. Also, creating a mock webstore full of click images is one shade away from scam artist zone and won’t work.

2.) Be honest about you experience with the product or service and explain how it has personally helped you.

Being candide with people is the greatest way to inspire more curiosity about what your talking about. Go into detail about what the item did for you and why people will Ben if it from. The priority should never just be you getting paid from an easy sell.

3.) Your content to the audience should always be the first priority.

Then, product marketing can be placed within the content ONLY if it applies…to the content. You should not create content for the sole purpose of dropping affiliate links into them. This will come off as very  disingenuous to the audience and could tarnish your credibility.

4.) Build trust and make a great first impression to your visitors.

For example, I don’t have ridiculous advertisements posted all over the place because it’s off-putting to just about everyone and it makes websites look trashy. If I visit a site with a shitload of banners and random pop-ups all over the place, I probably won’t go back.

Your audience needs to know that you are an authority on a subject matter and intend to help them. This is how you build trust. Give them a great experience and they’ll be likely to come back. So make it simple for them to use your site!

5.) Don’t be afraid to tell your audience that you are affiliate marketing.

Like I said, honesty is king and it never hurts to be transparent. Some people will be more likely to go through your link if they know it benefits someone who helped them out with solid content.

The awesome part about affiliate marketing

Little work for alot of potential passive income

The most  seductive part for most people interested in affiliate marketing is that you can create content with an affiliate link and it will continue to make money for years to come without your active participation.

Say you have a website all about gardening  and you have signed up and been excepted into an Amazon affiliate program. You write an article about the five best books about how to garden. Within the articles content you place affiliate links within the content  you’ve written.  Anyone who reads your article and clicks on those links  well then be sent to the Amazon webstore where they can purchase the book.  After they buy it, you receive a commission for directing them to the website.

So every article that you write acts as an employee  that makes money for you 24/7.

Once you are excepted into an affiliate program, you can also use those links in other ways other than just website content!   Basically once you get that affiliate link you can use it in any capacity that you need to.  Another great example of this would be YouTube.A lot of people on Youtubers will talk about a product and at the end of the video tell you to “click on the link below to see the best product for such and such”.

You don’t have to create your own product or be a marketing genius

The cost of creating your own product can cost thousands of dollars and most people won’t have the money to get a product launched because it cost thousands and thousands of dollars.

After you’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars creating your own product, you have to figure out how to market it to convince people to buy it. And marketing is arguably the hardest part of getting a product to sell to consumers.

With affiliate marketing, you can just talk about other people’s products or services.  Inform people how they’ve helped you, and potentially get paid for it. You just have to have something to say and be creative!

It cost very little money to get started profit margins can be insane!

Most affiliate marketing programs are free to join if you get accepted.  You just have to have a website or YouTube channel in order to promote your affiliate links.

My website only cost me $60 for the entire year through Bluehost. And within the first two months my website had paid for itself and reached 100% profit from my initial investment.

The not-so-great truths about affiliate marketing

 It takes time to generate substantial income

Affiliate marketing is not something that can just generate a ton of money overnight when you first get started.  You will have to build a website with good content that people want to read. Content that engages your audience.

It’s not as simple as ‘If you build it, they will come’ in this situation.  You will have to understand SEO and get your site to rank on search engines in  order for people to find your material.  The way that most people find websites is through search engine optimization or SEO.  When you get on Google, you are using a search engine. The goal is to get your website to rank on the first three or four pages of Google in order for people to go to your site.

I use the Bluehost for all my webhosting  because they have an extremely affordable platform and make it easy to get a website up and running . They also partner with a really great plug-in company called Yoast.  The Yoast plug-in analyzes your content and tells you what to change to rank higher on search engines. This plug-in is free, but you can also purchase upgrade packages.

 You’re not guaranteed to get accepted into an affiliate program.

I am only a member of two affiliate programs and that is CommissionJunction and  Amazon affiliates.  Commission Junction has thousands of different advertisers which are companies that sell the products  and provide links.  Once you apply to be an affiliate with those companies, theres  a waiting process where they analyze your website and decide if they want you to be in their program.

If the advertiser doesn’t feel that you have a professional looking website or your content isn’t consistent with their products, your application might be declined.

There is usually a waiting period to receive payment

Commission Junction ask as the middleman between the advertisers and you. Ensuring that you get paid your commission correctly.  However, there is usually a 30 to 90 day waiting period on payment to ensure that all transactions were non-fraudulent.  Well this isn’t really a setback, most people just don’t understand this going into it.

 Should you become an affiliate marketer?

Absolutely!  But only if you have substantial content to provide people with.  You should not get into affiliate marketing only for moneymaking purposes.  If you really have something that you want to say to the world then start a website and let that be the voice to reach the masses.   In return for your good content, the affiliate links that people click on can make you a lot of cash.

Google will not direct traffic to your site if it’s just pasted with tons of affiliate links as a mock web store.  Google uses an algorithm when it crawls websites that directs traffic to sites that have useful content for its users.  If google sees that a schemy website is nothing but affiliate links then it will not rank it.

Think of it like this….. You have to provide the world with useful information and knowledge.  If you give people something they really benefit from, you get paid!