How to start affiliate marketing: a beginner’s guide

Affiliate marketing is when a business works with a third party to promote its product or service with the aim of generating traffic and sales. The third-party publishers are known as the affiliates, and these people earn a commission fee via affiliate programmes when promoting the business, or a certain item from the brand. 

Anyone can be an affiliate, from an individual with a huge social media following, to a writer with a blog covering a specific niche. If you are interested in earning money through affiliate marketing, it’s important to have a clear idea of what it entails before giving it a go.

This article will explore what to do to get started, including planning and creating your content, choosing the right platforms, boosting your target audience and ultimately, the most interesting affiliate program for you.

Step 1: find your niche

Deciding on the niche that you want to make the focus of your content is a big decision, and the one you should start with when entering the affiliate marketing world. 

Before settling on a niche, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Am I an expert in this niche already, or am I happy to spend time becoming one?
2. Can I solve a problem or fill a market gap with my content in this niche?
3. How likely is it that this niche will prove profitable?

The goal is to build an affiliate marketing business around content that you love to produce, or at least have strong expertise in – and internet-savvy audiences will be able to tell if your heart isn’t in your content. Take time to research established figures in your potential niche to see what their content is like, how it performs and whether it engages you.

Step 2: choose your platform

Now that you’ve decided your niche, it’s time to think about the platform that you want to start publishing content on. Consider where your content expertise lies – it could be writing, imagery or video, for instance – and then think about which platform will best serve this.

Let’s look at some of the platforms you could consider.

YouTube

YouTube is the best platform for longer form video content – it’s also one of the most established. This is ideal if you want to share in-depth product reviews, video blogs (“vlogs”) of your day, or tutorials on how to do something. When it comes to affiliate marketing, you can earn money through affiliate links or discount codes shared in the description box that’s positioned under published videos.

Instagram

Instagram is well suited to those who are most confident in taking photos and creating short videos, known as reels. You can earn money through affiliate links shared on Instagram stories, or via affiliate discount codes shared in the captions on main feed posts.

TikTok

TikTok has boomed in popularity since 2020 and offers a great opportunity to earn money in affiliate marketing. Whilst you can post static images, TikToks best earning potential lies in its shorter form video content through discount codes shared in captions and affiliate links to items via their profile bio. 

Blogs and newsletters

If writing is where you specialise, launching a blog or newsletter is likely to be the best route for you. Focus your content around your niche, be it travel, product reviews or something more particular like pet care. You can use affiliate links within your copy for your readers to click through to, earning you a nice commission.

Step 3: choose your affiliate marketing program

Choosing the right affiliate marketing program is key, as not all will apply to your chosen content form. For example, if your focus is on cars, then LTK – the influencer marketing network for agencies and affiliates focuses on fashion, beauty and home only – and won’t be for you.

There are three main program types to consider for which best suits your niche:

1. High-paying, low-volume: niche products with fewer buyers, like fishing equipment
2. Low-paying, high-volume: lower priced products with mass appeal, like make-up
3. High-paying, high-volume: more expensive items with mass appeal, like credit cards

One way to find a good affiliate program fit is to do an online search for who and what your favourite brands work with, or even send them a message on social media asking this. Another way of determining this is to look at some of the more popular programmes and decide which best suits your needs. 

There are numerous factors to consider when choosing a platform, including the commission rate, the reputation of the program, and its earnings per click (EPC) rate. EPC is a metric that shows the average affiliate earnings per 100 clicks across an affiliate program, and will determine whether or not it is a profitable venture.

Step 4: build a content plan

The content you produce is the most important part of being successful in affiliate marketing. If you don’t curate carefully considered content that’s high-quality and engaging for your target audience, no one will click on your affiliate links. This is why it’s important to have a detailed content and marketing plan.

Try to plan your content at least a month ahead of time in order to give yourself a buffer. If you create content based around reviews, are you going to be buying a certain item next month, or taking a trip to a hotel that you can create content around? Do you have an experience coming up that you’ll be able to write a blog post about? 

Having these ideas planned is a good way to bank content ahead of time, and gives you more flexibility to create quick, immediate content ideas that crop up daily – especially if you use social media for your content, where popular trends come and go quickly. It’s also essential to have a plan in case something falls out – this always happens in the content world, so have some Plan Bs or Cs is always a good idea!

To get organised, use an online calendar to input the publication dates for your content so you can ensure both the content and your affiliate links are ready to go on the day.

Step 5: start creating content

Good content refers to copy (the words you use), any images or the videos created within your niche that engages your target audience. If it isn’t relevant, interesting or well-executed, your audience is unlikely to use your affiliate links.

Let’s look at an example. Mollie Campsie is a UK-based lifestyle influencer on both Instagram and TikTok whose content mainly focuses on midsize fashion. Her niche is being both tall and midsize by average UK standards. 

Campsie shares images and videos showing her trying on new clothes, chatting about her experience and whether she would recommend the items. This is engaging for her target audience as finding clothes that are both midsize and suitable for taller women is more difficult. Campsie then uses affiliate programme LTK to share links to the items she’s spoken about, as well as similar items to suit all budgets.

This is a great example of effective affiliate link use for fashion content, and Campsie’s approach can be applied to other sectors too. 

Step 6: drive audience growth

Your approach to building audiences will depend on the platform you’re using. For those on social media,  using hashtags effectively is a great way for the algorithm to pick your content up and share it with users who typically engage with similar creators. Collaborating with fellow creators can also help extend your reach, too.

For those whose content is published via blogs and websites, it’s important to be mindful of search engine optimisation (SEO) – this is when you ensure your pages are the most searchable (i.e. they pop up first, or near to the top in listings, when an audience member searches for something), using targeted, relevant keywords to rank high in search engines like Google. This helps web pages get consistent traffic.

Other ideas to grow and engage your audience could include:

• Encouraging social media followers to activate alerts for your new content
• Create a newsletter on a platform like Substack
• Build an email list with relevant contacts
• Engage with comments on your content

Building an audience from scratch can feel overwhelming, but don’t be disheartened if your content isn’t an instant success – many of the biggest success stories in this field had to graft for a long time to get to the level they’re at now. 

This is why affiliate marketing isn’t for those who want to get rich quickly, but instead have a passion for their niche that they’d like to monetise in the long-term.

Step 7: turn clicks into sales

Getting clicks on your links is the ultimate goal with affiliate marketing, so it’s important to include them in easy-to-find places that don’t come across like spam. Let’s look at where to place links for each content type:

• YouTube: put your links near the top of the description box following an explainer of the item. For example – Rimmel red lipstick in the shade 001: [put link here]
• Instagram: links aren’t clickable in Instagram captions, so add them to your Instagram stories instead using the ‘link’ chain-like toggle to make it interactive. Discount codes that followers have to manually put into a website to use can be included in captions
• TikTok: links in captions are also not clickable on TikTok, so link to products mentioned in your content via your bio. Be sure to direct users there within your content so they know where to go. You can also use discount codes in captions
• Blog or newsletters: link to items directly from the words referring to it. Be sure to not use too many links throughout your copy or it will come across like spam and appear robotic and disingenuous – aim to use one link every three paragraphs as a rough guide.

Ensure your content really demonstrates why an item is so great and why your audience needs it too to make their lives easier. Compelling content will encourage users to click your affiliate link to find out more and hopefully make a purchase, which then earns you that coveted commission.

So, why get started with affiliate marketing?

For those who are dedicated to succeeding and have found their perfect niche, affiliate marketing can earn you decent money,  and sometimes even more than the average full-time salary. It’s also a great option for people who want to approach affiliates as a side hustle to supplement their day job income.

It’s important to remember that being successful at affiliate marketing involves a lot of hard work, especially when it comes to creating your content. Quick, easy content that hasn’t had much thought put into it is unlikely to engage an audience and could put them off following you altogether. 

As mentioned above, take time to consider the content you want to create, how best to execute it, and when you would like to hit ‘publish’ on it. Having a plan of action gives you the best chance at success and getting clicks on those all-important affiliate links.

Tools to help you get started

These tools can boost your understanding and help you gauge what content is working best for you. Let’s look at some of the best tools and platforms to help boost your affiliate marketing business:

1. Google Analytics provides data that analyses and shows e what content has been performing best when it comes to affiliate link clicks
2. Semrush helps users improve their online visibility and analyse marketing insights with things like SEO, keyword research and backlink tracking
3. Rank Math is an SEO plugin for WordPress, which many websites are built upon, and helps users optimise their content for search engines
4. ThirstyAffiliates helps users keep track of their affiliate links and see which are getting the most clicks
5. Buffer allows users to schedule the publication of social media posts ahead of time.

There are many more out there, so it’s all about finding what tools and programs work for you – and with many offering free trials, it’s a good idea to test a few and see what ends up being the best fit for your particular venture.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing can prove fruitful for those who want to make money from creating content and are happy to put the work in to make that content the very best it can be. Finding a niche that best suits you is an incredibly important starting point and ensures you’ll be happy to keep creating content in this field in the long run if your business takes off.

Creating a detailed content plan, interacting with your audience, analysing performance data and picking the right program for your needs all gives you the best chance at succeeding as an affiliate marketer – so all that there is left to say is good luck!

For more support on affiliate marketing, check out our detailed guide to what affiliate marketing is.