Affiliate Marketing: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide

Passive income: it’s the dream of every digital business owner, but to generate such income, your site needs to carry the load.

Enter, affiliate marketing.

Designed to drive traffic from your website to major retailer pages where audience members can purchase products and services – and when they buy, you profit.

In fact, affiliate marketing is how many digital entrepreneurs get started, but these links don’t generate sales on their own.

They need well-written, powerful content designed to attract traffic and drive sales. And that’s where we come in.

At SEO.co, we develop content for affiliate sites of all sizes, building extensive backlink networks and allowing you to focus on developing other parts of your business.

Here’s how it works.

Affiliate Marketing 101

Affiliate marketing is a rapidly growing sector, with affiliate marketing spend expected to reach $8.2 billion by 2022, up from just $5.4 billion in 2017. That makes this a great time to break into this sector, but you need to be prepared. Typically, you can only become an affiliate site if you have something of an established audience and if you’re committed to growing that readership to generate sales. If you have that basic framework in place, though, it’s easy to get started by registering as an affiliate for major sites – and effective affiliate marketers can earn tens of thousands of dollars per month in passive income. But don’t be fooled, because passive income can be something of a misnomer.

The problem with framing affiliate marketing income as passive is that you can only generate passive income if you’ve done a lot of front-end labor first. Unlike some other sectors characterized as such, though, one of the great advantages of affiliate marketing is that you can offload much of that front-end labor, including to companies like SEO.co. By contracting with another company to develop key content areas for your site, though, you’ll hit those key marks in no time.

Another important thing to remember about affiliate marketing is that those individuals who are generating huge profits through this method are often running multiple sites, each with substantial readership. After all, partner merchants only pay a small commission on sales, which is potentially pennies, depending on your niche. Higher priced sectors will, of course, generate larger commissions, but are likely to generate fewer sales.

Finally, top earning affiliate marketers may devote almost all of their blog space to product reviews and other marketing-forward content, which many independent bloggers don’t find very satisfying. Though it’s possible to embed affiliate links into a more conventional blog framework, such sites are unlikely to be as profitable. Affiliate marketers should fully understand these strategic issues before they get started.

Types Of Affiliate Marketing

While the above section focuses on earning money through affiliate marketing based on sales, and that is one model, known as Pay-Per-Sale (PPS). This is the most common form because it functions at no risk to the merchant – but it also typically pays the best since you’ve closed the sales loop.

The other two major types of affiliate marketing are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Pay-Per-Lead (PPL). PPC marketing is fairly well-known approach due to the efforts of PPC marketing agencies, but it isn’t actually a very common model. Furthermore, when you do work as a PPC affiliate, you’re generally paid a very low rate since there’s no guarantee any of those clicks will lead to a sale. Furthermore, far more people typically click on a given link than ultimate make a purchase from it.

As for the third model, PPL marketing is poorly known, and is a shared risk model, with both the affiliate and merchant invested in the conversion process. As an affiliate, however, you’re paid based on clicks that lead to a form submission, a pre-order, or trial sign-up. This model tends to require building niche relationships; people are so overwhelmed by email today that they’ll only put themselves on another email list if they’re really interested in a product or service.

While these payment models are among the most common ways of framing affiliate marketing relationships, there are also many other ways of describing them. These include:

• Unattached Affiliate Marketing: Promoting affiliate links outside of a content niche. This approach is essentially strategy-free, but it also means that any profit is based on little more than luck.
• Related Affiliate Marketing: Unlike unattached affiliate marketing, this approach requires you to build a niche. However, it doesn’t involve promoting items you actually use, which can reduce how powerful your promotional efforts are and may compromise your ability build trust and generate sales.
• Involved Affiliate Marketing: This marketing model involves promoting products that you personally use, and is an approach built on trust. You’ve tried something, you’re passionate about it, and you think others will like it, too. This approach involves greater investment, since you have to actually purchase and use the products presented, but it tends to be the most profitable within its subset, whether you’re going the PPS, PPL, or PPC route.
• Pay-Per-Thousand Impression: Recall the PPC model mentioned above? As little as those tend to pay, an even lower paying model is the Pay-Per-Thousand Impression advertising route. This is more often used in international marketing models based on ad displays, but it is an option that can work for sites with huge traffic numbers, but less audience consistency.

Technical Elements – Getting Started

If you’re ready to get started as an affiliate marketer, then you’ll need to understand the technical aspects of the process. It’s fairly simple, but here’s what will need to happen – both on your end, and behind the scenes:

• Choose An Affiliate Program: There are many different affiliate marketing programs out there, each with their own benefits. The most popular of these, however, is Amazon’s, which has a relatively low bar for entry, is easy to use, and works well for bloggers because so many people shop with Amazon. Their commissions can be low, but it’s a good program for generating a lot of sales.
  Alternatively, there are programs like CJ Affiliate and Awin which offer large networks, but are less centralized in terms of site of sale and how each merchant wants links handled. You’ll want to do your research to figure out what type of program will be best for you.
• Sign Up: When you sign up for an affiliate program, you’ll be assigned a tracking code associated with your account. This code allows the merchants to track what sales comes from your promotional efforts since that code will be affiliated with your custom product links.
• Share Your Links: To earn money with your affiliate status – whether you’re operating on a PPC or PPS basis – you’ll need to share those links to generate income. How you do so, and in what context, will depend on a variety of factors, such as whether you’re committed to building a niche, but the goal is to keep pushing out links to increase the odds that you’ll make a sale.
• Get Paid: Like other online business tools, different affiliate programs pay on different schedules, but the ultimate end of this process is that if you drive sales (or clicks, or leads, as the case may be), you’ll get paid. And if you’re going to run a website anyway, you may as well earn money in the process.

Affiliate Marketing Demands Brand Awareness

How many websites can you name off the top of your head? If you’re like most people, you have favorite sites for news and commerce, know where to find information for local services, and might even be able to rattle off a few big names in media, gaming, and other related industries. But even if you spent a few days thinking and listing every website you visit or could remember, you’d probably only come up with a few dozen, a few hundred if you’re diligent and have a great memory. That’s fine for going about your daily life, but it’s bad news if you’re a website owner trying to profit via affiliate marketing.

The fact is, your website is one of millions of active sites today, and unless it’s one of the top ranking pages in its niche, you likely struggle with brand awareness – but we can change that. Our team creates unique, high-value onsite properties designed to increase organic SEO for affiliate sites, as well as an extensive backlink portfolio because you can’t just on your content and associated social media to deliver traffic. You need a web of connections across high-value sites, and we’ve got the inside track.

In addition to top-performing sites with recognition as household names, we also work with smaller blogs and niche sites with top authority rankings. This helps us match your content needs with the most appropriate site, regardless of your niche. There’s no specialty so narrow that we can’t find the right fit.

While we can get your site features on top performing pages for maximum visibility, remember that as an affiliate marketer, you’re also competing with some of the biggest brands in the business. Media giants like the New York Times and BuzzFeed use affiliate marketing to generate add revenue, and while that’s critical for their survival in today’s media landscape, you’ll need to work hard – or have someone working hard for you – to achieve even a fraction of their reach.

Success Depends On “Who You Know” – And We’ve Got Contacts

Building a great diverse backlink portfolio, at least via white hat practices, requires multiple approaches to be successful. Your site will need quality onsite content that encourages organic, natural backlinks, as well as a network of publishers, and this is where working with SEO.co can give you a powerful advantage. We have a powerful network of quality publishers, allowing us to position your content so that it’s picked up by major media networks. The fact is, it takes a lot of legwork to build these connections, but we’ve already covered that territory, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business. As the saying goes, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

The other key players in our powerful web is our writing team. We’re able to get content representing your brand onto so many top sites because our team brings their expansive knowledge to the content development process. At a moment when there’s growing interest in the potential to create machine generated content and when many sites are cluttered with poor quality writing, we guarantee only the best.

You Stay In Control

When you’re an affiliate marketer, Our network may help your business break into powerful publishing networks and, critically, generate top quality content, and all that can feel pretty out of control for Type A entrepreneurs – bu don’t worry. At the end of the day, this is your business and we want and need you to direct the process. Our clients have final approval on all orders, including placement, link choices, and edits. Though our team has extensive SEO expertise, you’re the expert on your own brand, and all content should be consistent with your voice and goals.

If you’re ever unhappy with your onsite content, or completed work for your backlink library, all orders are fully refundable, resulting in minimal risk. That means you can stay in control of your content and your finances, for a process you can trust.

Up To The Minute Knowledge

Anyone who’s been around the SEO world for a few years know that standards change constantly, and affiliate marketing is subject to the same types of shifts. That’s a lot to keep up with, but our skilled team builds content based on up-to-the-minute industry knowledge. That includes considering critical search engine changes, like the growth of voice and visual search tools and zero click marketing strategies, as part of your full content marketing plan.

Remember, our end goal is to drive the most traffic to your page and help you generate affiliate link purchases, so we keep up with changing standards so you don’t have to.

Get Started With SEO.co

Recent changes to affiliate marketing reimbursement rates, especially from sites like Amazon, have made this niche much more profitable, but they’re also likely to increase competition in this arena, which means you’ll need higher ranking content to compete. So, say goodbye to the struggle with in-house SEO and backlink building because we’ve got a better way. Get started with SEO.co today and start seeing results.

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Ryan Nead

VP of Business Development at SEO.co

Ryan Nead is the Vice President of Business Development at SEO.co. Ryan has spent the last 10 years as a digital marketing consultant working with enterprise clients and top brands on digital marketing initiatives that drive digital results. He has worked with brands like Smashburger, Fatburger, PHH Mortgage and Con-Way (now XPO Logistics). He resides in Texas with his wife and three children.

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