Affiliate Marketing for Beginners – How to Get Started
During the past year, we’ve seen unprecedented growth in the e-commerce space. This in turn has carried over into the content and marketing arena, as many e-commerce brands have begun purchasing content businesses, which they use to increase market share and reduce long-term customer acquisition costs.
How?
Affiliate marketing is an online business model and advertising method where a third-party publisher (the affiliate) partners with a company and gets paid by generating traffic to said companies’ services or products. It can be one of the many ways to make passive income.
But how can you succeed with an affiliate marketing site? How can you ensure that yours grows into a valuable piece of online property?
Ben Hill, who recently divested of his affiliate site through FE International, offers his firsthand knowledge.
Advice from an Affiliate Marketing Expert
Hill is the founder of the content site Recovatech. On the site, he reviews recovery tools such as massage guns, foam rollers and home workout equipment. Hill previously built, grew and exited another content site through FE International and is now building his second site, Recovatech.
As a successful affiliate marketer, Hill shares top tips for anyone who wants to grow an audience. Affiliate marketing is not an endeavor that yields overnight success, but if you implement best practices, there’s a high likelihood, you’ll see a decent revenue stream over time.
Optimize Your Site for Crawling and Indexing
For Hill, timing has been essential. Some of his success he attributes to catching a wave and getting in at the right time. However, timing aside, many who get into affiliate marketing give up too soon if they don’t see desired traffic within a short period. Even two months is not enough time to get your traffic going, according to Hill.
“Beginners can get frustrated because they won’t have a lot of traffic or sales in the first few months,” he says.
According to Google, The crawling process begins with a list of web addresses from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners. “As our crawlers visit these websites, they use links on those sites to discover other pages. The software pays special attention to new sites, changes to existing sites and dead links. Computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.”
Google offers its Search Console to give site owners granular choices about how Google crawls their site. This means you can provide detailed instructions about how to process pages on your site. You can request a recrawl or opt-out of crawling altogether using a file called “robots.txt.”
Hill started his previous blog in November of 2019 and saw little traffic when he first started out. There was, however, a slow and steady increase in traffic month by month, signaling to Hill that he was on the right track. But it wasn’t until March of 2020, where all of a sudden, “it went crazy,” as Hill puts it.
“Traffic and sales went through the roof. Every time I got a sale, I would get an email notification, and my phone was going off the hook all day long.” Hill attributes his success to consistently posting new, original and detailed product reviews that customers were searching for.
Create High-quality Content That Will Drive Conversions: Ideal Frequency of Posting and Content-length
For affiliate marketing beginners, it’s vital to maintain a frequent posting schedule. According to Hill, posting new content should not be a once-a-week occurrence. He suggests posting daily and underscores the fact that Google favors long-form, in-depth content.
Around 1,000 words or more seems to be the sweet spot with Google’s current algorithm.
When looking to optimize your site for search engines, your content should have descriptive and accurate titles on your pages. Google likes fresh content as it makes your site seem relevant.
Hill recommends updating your content to cater to different trends and seasons. This will signal to the algorithm that your content is essential and up to date. You’ll want to highlight what people are looking for in that specific season. Think parkas in the winter and shorts in the summer. If there are trending topics, leverage the hype and feature it prominently on your page.
For visuals, you’ll want to keep in mind that your content or page titles aren’t just in image form. Google does not understand non-text formats as quickly as text; therefore, it’s wise always to include a text version of the title on your site.
Learn more about how to boost website traffic.
According to the SEO auditing platform Content King, you should make it as easy as possible for search engine crawlers to discover your page. You can take several steps to ensure this, some of them being acquiring backlinks, using an XML sitemap, and manually requesting the indexing of your URL’s via Google Search Console.
Google also highlights the importance of sitemaps as they show which pages are essential to your site and provide information on how often the site is updated. Sitemaps are also crucial for crawling non-textual content like videos or images.
“Although Google won’t limit crawling to pages listed in your sitemaps, it will prioritize crawling these pages. This is especially important for sites with rapidly changing content or pages that might not be discovered through links. Using sitemaps helps Google discover and prioritize which pages to crawl on your site.” Read all about sitemaps here.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines is also a reference worth looking into as they offer practical steps you can take to optimize your site’s visibility in Search and how you can help Google find your page:
- Ensure that a link from another findable page can reach all pages on the site. The referring link should include either text or, for images, an alt attribute, that is relevant to the target page. Crawlable links are <a> tags with an href attribute.
- Provide a sitemap file with links that point to the important pages on your site. Also, provide a page with a human-readable list of links to these pages (sometimes called a site index or site map page).
- Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most).
- Make sure that your webserver correctly supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature directs your webserver to tell Google if your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
- Use the robots.txt file on your webserver to manage your crawling budget by preventing crawling of infinite spaces such as search result pages. Keep your robots.txt file up to date. Learn how to manage crawling with the robots.txt file. Test the coverage and syntax of your robots.txt file using the robots.txt Tester.
Ways to help Google find your site:
- Ask Google to crawl your pages.
- Make sure that any sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
Choose the Right Niche: How Much Knowledge Is Needed?
As an affiliate marketer, having a high level of knowledge about the space is not a prerequisite for success. You should, however, choose a topic within the field that interests you to a certain extent.
“When you’re working on something day and night, and it’s not making you money right away, your main driver cannot be the income aspect. That will only get you so far. In the beginning, when I wasn’t making any revenue, I still had an interest in what I was doing which motivated me to keep going,” Hill says.
Before choosing a niche, it’s essential to look at the competition and what type of content already exists. Hill believes his first affiliate site saw rapid growth after a while due to the niche he chose being reasonably new. Because of his consistent posting on the subject and in-depth reviews of the products, he competed for top ranking spots for several keywords on the first page of Google Search. “I was outranking sites like Men’s Health, and that was cool to see,” Hill says. He attributes his high ranking to the fact that he was in a particular niche, thus avoiding casting his net too wide.
Hill recommends putting more energy into the pages that you see are performing well. “I will keep tweaking and improving the content I see is driving traffic. I focus my attention on the top pages and make sure I’m creating content in line with what I see is doing well. I might stop doing other things and channel more effort into certain pages and topics.”
The pages that drive traffic and see high conversion rates are the ones worth putting more effort into.
Read more about building website value and how you can develop a content strategy.
The Importance of SEO: How to Utilize the Power of Keywords in Affiliate Marketing
If you want to grow your content site, implementing SEO is a must.
“I think a good technique when starting is looking at your competitors, gauging their top-ranking sites and deciding if you think you can write better, longer-form content offering a different viewpoint. That could, over time, garner you a top-ranking spot. Take advantage of people that don’t put in more effort than you do because it will pay off almost every single time,” Hill says.
When doing research on his competitors, he can discover pages that are ranking number one in Google Search, but don’t have great content.
“I was considering going into a certain space, and there was a big website, but the article was two paragraphs long, and there wasn’t a whole lot to it. I realized I could write content better than this and be able to outrank this site on certain keywords.”
Hill also highly recommends the SEO plugin Yoast for WordPress. “I follow that to the T as far as their recommendations go.” According to Hill, it will tell you where you need more keywords or build out your website as far as internal linking goes.
“People always ask me; ‘how is it that one person can sit here and rank that well in Google Search? Who are you paying?’ I tell them, ‘I’m just applying SEO best practices.’ I make sure I include alt tags and have main keywords in the headline and all my headings. I also stay away from any black hat SEO techniques.”
Hill will examine competing sites and their top pages to see what they are ranking for in terms of keywords.
SEO tools like Ahrefs can help inform you of competing sites and the keywords they are ranking for.
Ahrefs’ Site Explorer combines three powerful SEO tools in one interface: Organic traffic research, backlink checker and paid traffic research.
Hill will do a competitor audit and take something that hasn’t been written about, for example, a new product model, and will rank well because there isn’t any other content like it.
He recommends using Google Trends, which can be helpful in affiliate marketing, to stay in the loop on trending products and topics.
“If you type in a product, it’ll tell you what people are looking for. In my case, people searched for a product I knew wasn’t the best one on the market. That gave me the idea to write a blog post about why you shouldn’t buy that specific product. That type of content killed it on the site. I would say ‘don’t buy this product, by this instead,’ and I saw a large amount of traffic to those articles. It was amazing to me because I was saying the opposite of what everybody else was saying.”
As an affiliate marketer, you have to be flexible and be able to pivot on certain things. If Hill discovers that certain products have shipment issues or lousy customer service, he will stop promoting those products and find other companies instead.
“At the end of the day, you never know what’s going to work. You can have all the right tools and the right SEO practices. You can have this beautiful, perfect article, and it will get no traffic. With affiliate marketing, you have to keep thinking outside of the box.”
There are plenty of free SEO tools available. Here is a collection of the best free SEO tools that can be helpful to grow your affiliate marketing business.
How to Know if an Affiliate Program is Good
There’s a sea of affiliate marketing programs and platforms to choose from. Starting in affiliate marketing, Hill found Goaffpro, an affiliate marketing app for websites that use platforms such as Shopify, Woo Commerce, Wix and Squarespace.
With Goaffpro the e-commerce stores will provide their affiliates with referral links to promote their products. Its automated payments gave him the confidence that he would get paid for each referral, and he would receive a commission rate of about 10% through the sales.
“As a marketer, it’s nice because I don’t have to wait for the company to pay me. Many companies physically have a person sit there and pay you. With some companies, I had to remind them that they needed to pay me. Eventually, I would stop promoting products for them because of that,” Hill says.
According to Hill, there are pros and cons to many of the affiliate programs; certain programs have more optimal ways of tracking metrics. With Shopify’s Goaffpro, affiliates can check earnings, payments, update payment settings, and generate referral links to products. “It’s great if you want to dive deep into the transactions,” he says.
Read our guide on the Best Affiliate Programs for Beginners and How They Make Money.
Diversify Your Affiliate Marketing Programs
Amazon is another well know avenue for affiliate marketing. There are various tiers of revenue available ranging from 1%-10% depending on the product category. The highest paying category is Luxury Beauty, Luxury Stores Beauty and Amazon Coins. For Hill, most of the products he targeted on his site garnered a 4% return.
In April 2020, Amazon announced a cut in commission rates. CNBC reported that commissions for furniture and home improvement fell from 8% to 3%. Grocery products saw a reduction in commission from 5% to 1%.
“It’s not wise to put all your eggs in one basket. You shouldn’t just do the Amazon Affiliate Program. If you’re fully invested in just one program like that, it could wipe you out. Diversifying your affiliate programs would be a huge takeaway from my standpoint,” Hill says.
Reach Out to Brands
Hill wants his reviews to be genuine and offer his audience information to make an educated decision about their purchases. “I want to help people. Some affiliate marketers may be in it for the money and will put together a top 10 list, without ever having touched the products they are talking about.” Hill underscores the importance of being genuinely interested in the products and ranking them according to the worth you’re getting from them.
He also recommends reaching out to brands within your niche even if they don’t have an affiliate program set up. He would find smaller companies looking for press and ask if they needed someone to promote their products. “I’ve asked several companies if they would start an affiliate program, and I recommended they install the plugin for Goaffpro.”
“I was working with a company that was unknown at the time. I just happened to buy their product to test it, and I liked it. I created a buyer’s guide which included several other products, and that became one of my most popular pages.” Hill kept recommending the smaller company’s product, which he felt was just as good as the larger company’s equivalent.
“I started promoting them heavily because I personally loved them, and they saw a substantial increase in sales coming through my site,” he says.
The Bottom Line on Affiliate Marketing
There is no secret to overnight success in the affiliate marketing space. But with some patience, creativity and research, there’s a great chance of success and building a valuable piece of “property” online.
In the process, you can also help people find the best products for them, promote something you love and make money doing it; that’s the key takeaway from Ben Hill as he’s currently growing his new affiliate site.