get started with affiliate marketing using WordPress

If you’re like most people, you probably wouldn’t mind making a little extra money from your website. But sometimes, it can be difficult to know where to start, which is why we’re going to show you how to get started with affiliate marketing – one of the most popular ways to make money from a website.

Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s products and services, earning a small cut of the revenue for every resulting sale made. It’s incredibly popular, with 81% of surveyed brands using affiliate marketing in one study. And the benefits of tapping into this market are numerous. It’s a largely passive income stream, for example, and has a low barrier to entry.

(Charts by Visualizer Lite.)

In this post, we’ll first explain what affiliate marketing is and the benefits of getting involved in it. Then, we’ll walk you through how to get started with affiliate marketing on your WordPress site. Let’s make some money!

An introduction to affiliate marketing

If you want to earn revenue from your website, you could place advertisements using a program like Google AdSense or start selling your own physical or digital product. The latter offers higher potential profit than the former, but takes more work.

But there’s also a middle ground between the two – and that’s where affiliate marketing sits.

Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting other people’s products and services online. You can do this by simply posting links in your content or creating entire reviews.

Either way, you earn a small commission every time someone clicks one of your affiliate links and ends up buying something. These commissions can either come as a percentage of the sale or a flat fee per order.

And here’s the best part:

While the seller will pay you a commission, the end price for the buyer doesn’t change – so they aren’t losing anything by purchasing through your link.

For instance, let’s say you run a tech blog and create a post about the top website builders. If the tools you mention have affiliate programs (which most online brands do), you can sign up and get special ‘affiliate links’. Then, you simply use these links within your blog post and start earning commissions.

The benefits of affiliate marketing

The main reasons to get started with affiliate marketing should be clear from the previous example:

  • You don’t have to create your own products, and in many cases don’t need to build additional content. Instead, you merely include affiliate recommendations in your existing content.
  • You can sign up for as many affiliate programs as you’d like. This is good news, as promoting popular products is a smart way to attract more traffic to your site and improve your brand exposure.

While the benefits are pretty big, there are some potential downsides to pay attention to:

  • If the commissions are small, you’ll need lots of content views for affiliate marketing to be viable.
  • You have to avoid spamming your site with too many promotions or pushing low-quality products, since this can hurt your reputation.
  • You’ll want to ensure that your affiliate links don’t harm your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

How to get started with affiliate marketing (in 4 steps)

For most sites, the benefits of affiliate marketing outweigh the drawbacks. It’s particularly well-suited to blogs and other sites that publish new content often. If you want to get started with affiliate marketing, simply follow these steps.

1. Consider your site’s focus

To get the most out of affiliate marketing, you’ll need to promote products and services that will be of interest to your website’s visitors. That means being clear about your site’s niche and the needs of your target audience. People will have to be intrigued enough to both click on your affiliate links and make purchases.

This means you’ll need to think about what problems your target audience has, and what kinds of products can provide solutions. You may also want to communicate with your existing audience directly. Try asking questions through comment prompts and forums, or even creating dedicated surveys. This guide presumes that you already have an existing site, but if you don’t have one yet, then you’ll need to build your affiliate marketing website before you can move forward with the remaining steps.

2. Choose your affiliate programs carefully

The Amazon Associates affiliate program is an easy way to get started with affiliate marketing using WordPress

Amazon’s affiliate program is excellent for newcomers to this market.

Once you know what to look for, you’ll still need to put thought into which products you promote. If you pick the wrong ones, you will see little profit, or even drive people away by pushing low-quality items.

You should follow these tips whenever possible when choosing affiliate programs:

  • Start by promoting only products and services you’ve personally used, so you can vouch for their quality.
  • Carefully review the terms of any affiliate program you’re considering – some require you to disclose the terms of your relationship.
  • Try to find reviews from other affiliates who’ve worked with the program or company.

If you’re having trouble finding affiliate programs, think about the products and services you currently use. For those you find valuable – and are in line with your audience’s needs – check to see if there’s an affiliate option. You can also check out Amazon’s affiliate program, which provides access to a huge library of products. We have a great guide on how to become an Amazon Affiliate.

3. Install affiliate marketing tools on your site

You can conduct affiliate marketing on any website, but WordPress users have a distinct advantage. There are a lot of excellent tools out there to help you get the most from your affiliate links – many of which are plugins. Adding a dedicated affiliate marketing tool to your site is one of the best ways to help ensure success.

Take ThirstyAffiliates, for example. This plugin helps you add affiliate links to your site and then organize and manage them. You can also include corresponding images, and track your links’ statistics. Pretty Links offers many of the same features, but focuses on optimizing your affiliate links. Both plugins have premium versions offering even more functionality. There are also plenty of alternative options to choose from.

4. Create quality content

A comparison of affiliate products.

You can create reviews and compare affiliate products to provide more value to your readers.

Remember that people won’t click on your affiliate links if you don’t encourage them to. This means you should create high-quality content that increases your conversion rate. How you do this is up to you, but here are a few suggestions:

  • Show your audience how the affiliate product or service will directly improve their lives.
  • Include prominent, carefully-designed Calls to Action (CTAs) that encourage clicks.
  • Consider creating full reviews for each affiliate item, with lots of images and detailed information.

You can also check out successful examples of existing affiliate content, which you can use as inspiration when working on your own site. The more effort you put into your promotional content, the better results you’ll see!

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing can seem intimidating at first, especially if you have no experience with this type of monetization. However, it’s actually a beginner-friendly way to earn money from your site. The barrier to entry is low, and the strategy won’t cause any frustrating downtime.

To get started with affiliate marketing, simply follow these four steps:

  1. Consider your site’s focus.
  2. Choose your affiliate programs carefully.
  3. Install affiliate marketing tools on your site.
  4. Create quality content.
Do you have any questions about how to use affiliate marketing? Ask us in the comments section below!
Free guide

4 Essential Steps to Speed Up
Your WordPress Website

Follow the simple steps in our 4-part mini series
and reduce your loading times by 50-80%. 🚀

Free Access

1 Comment
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Harish Kumar
May 4, 2018 3:08 pm

Thanks for the great article,its really useful for beginner like,I am going to start affiliate marketing using wordpress with the guidance of your article,keep doing this quality work.

Or start the conversation in our Facebook group for WordPress professionals. Find answers, share tips, and get help from other WordPress experts. Join now (it’s free)!