What Is Affiliate Marketing and How To Start One

Affiliate Marketing is a popular way to make money online. Learn What is Affiliate Marketing and How To Start One so you can start your own online business.

Finding an extra source of income nowadays is important because prices are on the rise and job security is getting worse.

Unfortunately, finding an extra source of income is also tricky because of time restraint. Chances are you are either already working long hours on your job, taking on double jobs, or you have kids to take care of aside from your full-time jobs.

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Of course, there is always a solution to every problem. In this case, the solution is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is your best option if you are looking to create an extra source of income but don’t have the luxury to apply for another job or do extra hours on your present job because creating and managing one is very time-flexible.

You can do affiliate marketing by just investing 2 to 4 hours a day! It doesn’t matter how much time you put. What matters the most is consistency.

It is also a great option for stay at home moms or dads because aside from it is time flexible, all you need to run this business is your laptop/desktop and internet.


In this article, I will teach you the following:
  1. What is affiliate marketing?
  2. Why not a lot of people do affiliate marketing?
  3. Does affiliate marketing work?
  4. How to start affiliate marketing?

What is affiliate marketing?

In summary, Affiliate Marketing works this way.

  1. You create content (either blog or vlog) with the intent of selling a product/services.
  2. You make a clear “Call to Action” for your viewers or readers to click on your “affiliate link” if they are interested in buying the product/service that you used in your content
  3. You market your content
  4. Collect your commission

If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, simply watch the video below:

how affiliate marketing works by wealthy affiliate

Here is another example if it still doesn’t make sense to you.

Observe how your favorite YouTuber (subtly or directly) advertise their product and how they direct you to click the link (affiliate link) to get the product/service for yourself the next time you go on YouTube. That is affiliate marketing!

Or if you don’t use YouTube, you can also go and search your favorite blog and read one of their articles!

Chances are, they wrote either a product review or product list the tells you where to buy it. When you click the link, you will be redirected to Amazon or other online retail stores.

Some articles try to solve a problem for you then refer you to a service/product that helped me solve the same problem. Again, they will ask you to click the link if you want to avail of the product or service.  This is also affiliate marketing!

That’s it! That is all there is to affiliate marketing!

Pretty straightforward right!

You are probably thinking,

“This can’t be right. I will make thousands of dollars per month with affiliate marketing and all I need to do is to create a content, make a call to action, market my content, collect my commission then rinse and repeat?”

I am tempted to say,

That’s really there is to affiliate marketing.

Now TAKE action TODAY by subscribing to Wealthy Affiliate. Wealthy Affiliate HELPED me with my affiliate marketing career.

It taught me how to set up my blog, trained me on how to write a blog, and show me how to market my posts.

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What is Wealthy Affiliate and What is Included In It?

But I want you to succeed so I’m gonna say Yes and No to your question.

Yes, affiliate marketing only has four-step and it is pretty straightforward.

No. It’s really not that straightforward. What makes it tricky is the marketing aspect of the business (which I will answer why in a bit)!


If Affiliate Marketing isn’t Hard Then Why Not Many People Do It??

As stated above, affiliate marketing only has four steps and that’s it! All that is left if for you to repeat the process over and over again until you start making an income. Once you are consistently making an income, then all you need to do is to scale it up.

The reason why many people do not do affiliate marketing is that there is fierce competition when it comes to content marketing!

Many failed or quit because they are expecting an instant result.

You have to understand it is not only you who thought about making money online with affiliate marketing.

There are thousands of people who have the same goal (including me lol). Unfortunately, there are only a few places (search engine and social media) to sell/market your content.

The Truth About Affiliate Marketing

The goal of any affiliate marketer (or any online business for that matter) is to be on top of a search result page because search engine users will not read the results found beyond the first and/or second page.

What that means is if your article is not on the first page, then you will not get traffic. If you don’t get traffic then you will not have readers. Sadly, no readers mean no buyers, therefore, no profit. ☹

To make it harder, search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo don’t just put you on the first page. These search engines rank you according to the keywords used in your blog, your domain authority, the relevance of your blog to the topic searched, time, etc. In other words, you need to prove to search engines that your blog produces quality content and this takes a while since there are others who came before you.

BUT don’t lose hope. There are standard operating procedures or blueprints per se that when followed can make your blog look legit to the eyes of search engine algorithms! This will be your ticket to land on the first page of any search engine.

P.S. There is another way to do affiliate marketing. What I have shared above is called search engine marketing and it is mostly preferred because you get free traffic. However, if you do not have time and patient for SEM, you can also do social media marketing (SMM). The downside of SMM is more work (you need to create social media post) and more costly (social media charges you for targeted advertising)


Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

For sure! There are countless work-at-home moms, online entrepreneurs and even small to medium enterprises that built their fortune based on this business model.

The only reason why many fail is that only a few people have the courage to step out of their comfort zone, strong desire to win, attitude to learning new things, perseverance to stand up after each failure and discipline to do what is necessary.

Many don’t succeed in affiliate marketing because they don’t treat it like a real business, rather, they make themselves believe that it is a genie that will make them rich overnight!

You see, a business doesn’t become successful overnight.

A business owner must consistently put lots of energy and resources into their business before it becomes successful.  This is true with affiliate marketing.  You will have to write lots of articles and market your blog many times before you see the fruit of your labor.

Hopefully, you will not give up half-way through your journey or get impatient if you are not making money the way you envisioned it.

I can promise you that just keep up the work and persevere and everything will fall into place at the right time.

Affiliate marketing is tricky (not hard) but not impossible.


Want to Learn More About Affiliate Marketing?

Wow. I am impressed! You are still reading. You must be really serious about affiliate marketing!

Okay, I’ll show you another example of Affiliate Marketing in action

I was in your shoes about a year ago. I desperately need to find different ways to make money and that is when I discovered affiliate marketing.

Since I have zero knowledge about it, I needed to find something or someone that will teach me the basics of it. That is when I found Wealthy Affiliate!

What I like about Wealthy Affiliate (WA) are the following:
  1. Supportive community
    • I am not exaggerating, they answered all of my questions and they are the source of my motivation and encouragement.
  2. All-In-One marketing platform
    • WA offers everything you need to start a blog or an affiliate marketing business. They are domain registrar, web hosting service provider, website builder also gives you access to thousands of WordPress themes!
  3. Provides a very lucrative program
    • They offer a $24.50 per month, recurring or $175 per year, recurring for each person you refer to WA. Because of this program, thousands of its members make somewhere between $100 to $5000 which they thought they couldn’t
  4. Well, there is so much more I love about WA  which I couldn’t possibly share it all so why not try their Free Starter account today and see it for yourself?

CLICK the Banner below to Learn More About Affiliate Marketing!

What is Wealthy Affiliate and What is Included In It?

Did I Add Value to Your Life?

Well, I hope you learned something from me today.

I want to hear from you!

You can let me know what did you learn to form this article. Or, maybe you have burning questions. Or, maybe you are an expert to affiliate marketing and you have some tips to add!

Whatever that might be, please don’t hesitate to share it in the comment section below!

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