How to Start Affiliate Marketing Business in 2021

The novel coronavirus is keeping all of us at home. Much of the world is on lockdown, and, even in places that aren't, people are encouraged to stay indoors. Where it's possible, employers are encouraging or requiring people to work from home for an indeterminate amount of time. And since all of our time is at home, there has never been more perfect timing to start an affiliate marketing business right from your bedroom.

I believe if you are following up with us on our Youtube channel or reading our blog posts, then you already know what affiliate marketing is.

But let me explain if briefly what affiliate marketing means in case this is your first time here.

What is Affiliate Marketing

To learn how to start your affiliate marketing business, you need to know what affiliate marketing is in the first place.

The fastest way to make money anywhere, is by earning a commission on sales.

In affiliate marketing, you will be referring someone else's business, product, or any service they provide. Once any customer buys their products through your shared links, you will earn a commission. That simple.

This is the easiest way to make money online. And if you are a beginner and want to learn more about affiliate marketing programs, check out our affiliate marketing ultimate guide.

But in order to start your affiliate program, make sure you always have a blog running and you are always providing good content for your readers.

You can check how to make your own blog here. And if you need help in typing correct English on your blog like this post, check out Grammarly.

Now that we explained some concepts about affiliate marketing, let's dig in.

How and where to start an affiliate marketing business?

To start, you have to go through 3 simple steps.

Step 1: Choosing Product

This depends on your niche. Whatever your niche is, you can always find affiliate products that you can share and earn money for.

Step 2: Create Content about Product

Create valuable content about your product. Whether it is a review, tutorial, or even sharing some advanced features with the readers. Content is the key.

Step 3: Drive Traffic to your content

Try to get traffic to your content. In case you are writing a blog, improve your SEO. You can learn many ways to drive traffic to your content by following this simple tutorial.

Let's now dig into how you can share your affiliate links and start your affiliate marketing business in no time.

Sharing Links in your Content

As mentioned earlier, content is key. And one way to provide your audience with content is by writing articles about the product you want to share, or making videos about them.

Blog Posts

Let me show you a live example.

When you open our blog, you can see this banner. In our case, we are promoting our own website, which is H-supertools, which is a free digital marketing and SEO tools website. But you can add your own banner and share your affiliate links directly through the banners instead of just using ad sense.

Another way of sharing links is by directly sharing them in your articles.

How?

Let's check this article that talks about how to build an SMTP server and send unlimited emails.

Notice that we are providing a free tutorial on how to build your own mailing server. This is what we talked about as valuable content.

If you check in the article, scroll down to creating a VPS server. You can find a link that provides you a 100$ dollars to test Digital Ocean.

This is an affiliate link, you get 100$ to test, and we get a commission for referring you to Digital Ocean. So it is a win-win situation. Always make sure your target is not only getting the money, the ultimate target is to get a big base of readers and followers that can turn into possible customers later on.

What is very important about this way of sharing links is that it is totally passive.
Whenever someone enters to read your blog, they are very likely to press on your links. You just have to drive traffic to your blog using the below methods.

YouTube Videos

Another way of sharing content is by video making. You could film yourself doing a tutorial, giving some motivation, or even reviewing a product. It is the same as typing it in your blog, but instead you are talking about the topic on camera.

People love watching videos instead of just reading so this is a perfect opportunity to to get viewers.

If you go below any of our videos on our Channel, you can find a lot of links in the description of the videos.

Most of these links are affiliate links.

As you can see, these links are shortened. One very important tool to be used when working with affiliate links is link shortening. It is CRUCIAL!

Link shortening is a very important tool to use when starting an affiliate marketing business.

Online Courses

Another way we use to share our affiliate links is by providing online courses.

Anyone can create a free online course and post it online. If you go to one of our free courses, the email marketing mastery course, in precise, you can see we are linking to code canyon affiliate links inside our course.

Free courses get thousands of students, so this would be a perfect opportunity for you to share your affiliate links.

Social Media Links Sharing

Another way to share affiliate links is through social media. Of course, we are not talking about posting your affiliate links directly as a post on your page. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and almost every social media platform has a strict policy about sharing affiliate links.

So, let's see how we can achieve this.

Let's visit our Facebook page. In our page we have around 6K followers.

Remember when I told you that content is the key? Well here is the proof.

Since Facebook does not allow sharing direct affiliate links (and btw it is never advised to share affiliate links directly even if they are allowed), we share our content on social media.
Share your videos, courses, and blog posts on social media. This way you are driving traffic to your content, which will, in turn, drive traffic to your affiliate links.

Start Affiliate Marketing Business with Email Marketing

The last strategy we are going to talk about in this article about how to promote affiliate links is email marketing.

We are surely not talking about spamming, and we hate spammers as much as you do.

We already talked about how to monetize your emails in a different article, make sure to check it here.

One of the strategies we talked about in monetizing email marketing campaigns is by adding affiliate links. No, we are not talking about sending bulk emails to people and probably getting some clicks. This is spamming!

Here we are talking about starting a real affiliate marketing business. How can we send our affiliate marketing links without being a spammer? Simple answer: build your email list.

You can see, this is the opt-in form on our main website. People who are following us and want exclusive tips and tutorials share their emails through this form. This increases our mailing list.

We also showed you a real scenario were we collected 10000 emails in 1 month.

You can also use ads to build your targeted email list.

Let's see how.

In Facebook ads manager, one of the targets of the ad is lead generation.

You can promote a lead magnet that will collect emails from people interested in the topic you promoted. This would be a perfect targeted audience to share your referral links to them.

Make sure to enroll in the email marketing mastery course to learn more about collecting and sending emails to your followers. It is totally free, btw.

Once you build your email marketing list, start sending your weekly newsletter about your blog posts and your videos. Always make sure to provide the subscribers with valuable content to keep them interested and reading and opening your emails.

Conclusion

First lesson to take from this article is that content is key.

Whenever you are trying to share your affiliate links with your followers, do not share them directly.

Provide them with valuable content.

Content can be:

• Blog posts.
• YouTube Videos.
• Free Online courses.

After your content has been published and you have a followers base, you can start promoting your content on social media.

Whether to share your content on social media on your own pages or through paid ads, never share affiliate links directly.

Moreover, you can share your content through email marketing and NOT SPAMMING.

Just make sure to follow these steps and I am sure you will succeed in starting a successful affiliate marketing business in 2021 in no time.

Please, if you have any opinions, thoughts, and other strategies on how to promote affiliate links, make sure to type them in the comments below to help spread all the info needed to start a prosperous affiliate marketing business.

I hope you enjoyed this quick read.

I will be waiting your ideas in the comments section below.