As being a blogger you may have tried different tools and technique to monetize your blog. Most of the blogger are using adsense, chitika and other PPC advertising programs to monetize their blog. Although these advertising programs help us to earn few bucks from our blog but unfortunately they pay very less amount for each click and for  beginners it will be much harder to meet the minimum threshold  criteria of that program. So, what will be the best program to monetize the blog ? The answer is affiliate marketing, therefore this post affiliate marketing for dummies is a guide for beginners who want to learn more about affiliate marketing programs.

I have seen many cases in which a newbie blogger left blogging when their Adsense account is rejected. Your blogging career never ends when your Adsense account is rejected therefore always search for alternatives. If we compare the earnings of Adsense then I can guarantee that when you use right techniques then you can earn far better amount from affiliate marketing because they do not have any pay-per-click strategy. They will directly pay you the percentage of commission which is much higher amount then your Adsense earnings.

Advantages of using Affiliate Marketing

• Whenever you apply for any advertising network you have to wait for more than 24 hours but if you want to promote any affiliate products then you can join affiliate marketing at any time and you don’t have to wait for your application to be approved
• You don’t have to worry about your site traffic or any other terms and condition that are required to be followed while applying for advertising network. Your application will get instantly accepted.
• No matter how many posts you have or how much traffic you are getting? If you can make a sale through your link then you will get paid instantly.
• Some of the affiliate programs are even offering more than $100 per sale which is quite higher amount than any other advertising network.

Disadvantages of Using Affiliate Marketing

• As earning from affiliate marketing depends on your sale therefore it will be much harder to make a single sale if the price of the product you are promoting is high or if you are getting fewer visits.
• If you are getting fewer visits, Adsense or other PPC advertising will daily show you some few cents of earning in your dashboard however in the case of affiliate marketing you might not see any earning for several days or months until you make a sale.

Affiliate Marketing for dummies

At the initial stage of blogging when I heard about the affiliate program instantly I searched on Google for Affiliate marketing for dummies but I can’t find any good resources that perfectly explains the term affiliate marketing therefore here I will be covering all the detail aspects of affiliate marketing that you need to know before promoting any affiliate products.

As being a blogger to monetize my blog I have been promoting more than 10 products in ITDigitalWorld and you will not believe that within 2 months of promoting my first affiliate products I made more than $450 which is equal to 4 months of other advertisement earning and till now I paying my bills from affiliate commissions. So, guys let’s get started with the guide affiliate marketing for dummies.

An Introduction to affiliate marketing : Affiliate Marketing for dummies

Affiliate marketing is the process in which you will be promoting the product of any company on your blog by sharing the link or promoting that link on any website (YouTube videos) and whenever any visitor buys any product going through your link you will be rewarded with the certain percentage of commission.This process of promoting link and earning commission is called affiliate marketing.

Many companies offer more than 50 percent of commission however you can find other companies who can pay up to $125 per sale. One of the perfect example of such company is Hostgator and this is the secret of my earning because each month I am earning more than $200 from this company.

How can I join affiliate marketing programs?

There are several steps to join affiliate program of each network. As I am promoting Hostgator in my blog I will guide you through joining its affiliate program. In order to join the affiliate program of Hostgator just click on the affiliate link which you can see on the top left side of HostGator website. After going to the affiliate page Click on the Sign Up Today! link and finally after filling the sign-up form your account for Hostgator affiliate program will be created.

As I am a great fan of Hostgator hosting I am promoting its affiliate but it’s your choice to choose your own affiliate company but the commission rate may differ from company to company. Before promoting any products on your website make sure that they do have an affiliate program. If you don’t have any idea about their affiliate programs then you can directly search on google by typing “company name affiliate” For example if I want to search about Hostgator then I will type “Hostgator affiliate”. I am sure that this trick will helpful to you.

Guy’s if you are not sure about which affiliate program you have to join then just check out this guide: 10 Best High Paying Affiliate Marketing Programs for bloggers to earn more money

Moreover with the growing number of online merchants it may be a headache for you to sign up for each affiliate program, therefore, in-order to overcome this problem there are several websites with thousands of merchants in one place. One of the great example is ShareASale.

Note: This post is about Affiliate Marketing for dummies  therefore here I will also provide a brief introduction of ShareAsale affiliate program which may be helpful for you if you don’t want to sign up for individual affiliate program from their website.

What is ShareASale?

ShareASale is an affiliate website having thousands of affiliate merchants in one place. It means that you don’t have to visit each website and sign up their affiliate program each time instead when you create a ShareASale account then you can join any affiliate program with a single click from their merchant store.

How Can I earn from Affiliate marketing?

So guys after creating an affiliate account in any of the merchants websites just get an affiliate link from there and then finally promote that link to your blog. Right now I am also using Hostgator affiliate therefore here in this post I will  show you the example of Hostgator.

Example:

Login in to your Hostgator affiliate account and in the middle of your dashboard you will see your affiliate link and that is the link you will have to promote in your blog or in any other place like YouTube videos. You can see that I am promoting those link here in this blog by using the banners, writing reviews and by recommending to my visitors and whenever any of my visitor clicks on that link and sign up for their hosting within 60 days I will get paid $50 for each sale. You can see their commission rate in the figure that I have mentioned above in this post.

Guys this is the screenshot of the commission that I have earned for Hostgator and for each sale they paid me $50 and currently I made $400 from their affiliate. Since one of my sale is a duplicate sale it means that the customer who purchased this hosting account already had an existing account with Hostgator, therefore, I didn’t get paid for that sale.

It doesn’t mean that you have to use the same affiliate program that I am using, you can even join ShareASale which is far better than Hostgator because they do have thousands of merchants in one marketplace and you don’t have to worry about creating an individual account in each affiliate program.

Affiliate Marketing for Dummies video Guide have a look

How To Promote Affiliate Products

So, now after joining any affiliate programs, next step is to promote their links to earn commissions. In this affiliate marketing for dummies guide, I will also guide you through the steps to promote affiliate links.

Affiliate Marketing for dummies tips to increase affiliate sales

Writing an Honest Review Post

Nothing is better than sharing your own experience. Readers love reading your experience, therefore, review post on any topic can be a strong weapon to generate more sales.

A review article introduces the product to your audience and at the same time, your opinion helps them to identify why they should be buying it. Do remember that, a review post most be genuine and honest because your readers are buying that product because they trust you not the product.

While writing a review post always show the positive and negative side of the product, it helps your audience to understand the problems and advantages that they may face in future.

Promoting Banners

Adding banners can be another solution to promote your affiliate products. Suggest your visitor to buy it by adding some banners in your sidebar or in the header below your post title.

As we cannot always write a review post a banner can be its alternative. Similarly, another advantage is that banners can be displayed on each and every page this puts the products in front many audiences which may lead to more affiliate sales.

Offering Discounts 

Everyone love to save money and believe me offering discounts to your visitors will be a great incentive to them. Most of the affiliate company provides coupon codes to their promoters and its a great idea to share it with your audience.

Feature your review post

It’s your goal to get more visitors to review post. So, we cannot only depend on search engines to drive traffic to our post. We can use several techniques like linking review post to another article getting more organic visits or we can even make the review post stick to the top of the homepage.

This helps to put the post in the face of many audiences and can result in more commission.

 Affiliate Marketing for dummies : Conclusion

I hope this post (Affiliate Marketing for dummies ) will probably guide you through the each aspect of affiliate marketing and guy’s if you like this post please share your thoughts in the comment below and share this article with your friends and family.