“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready… The teacher will Disappear.”
– Tao Te Ching –
A good friend phoned me and asked, “How’s that affiliate marketing thing going and by that way, how does that affiliate marketing thing work? This picture is a blast from the past like his phone call because… drum roll please… I have actually walked across fire just like this, Yes… I am a Fire Walker! What a high.
My friend (who shall remain nameless) was a trainer / coach / mentor at this particular event. We met and formed a life long friendship. I said “So what you’re asking me is how to build an affiliate marketing business, is that correct? There was a pause and he said, “no, I’m asking you how to scale Everest in just your underwear?” We both laughed, I replied “well I can tell you how to scale Everest in UNDIES easily, the other is gonna take some time.” But there is a lot of misinformation out there, just search the web or type “affiliate marketing proclaimed Guru” into any search engine and you’ll get the “Give me all your dough now, bye! See ya never” reply. I put my hand to my chin and said “buddy, give me a couple of days to put this into a simple, easy to explain format and I phone you back with all the high-flying details.”
I got off the phone and thought to myself, “self, how do I explain this affiliate marketing business in an easy and simple format
that everyone can understand?” The light came on after a few minutes of imitating the thinking man and I went to my go to resource which is WealthyAffiliate.com to get all my answers for my buddy and now for you the reader.
Now let’s sneak a peak at the steps of affiliate marketing and how affiliate marketing actually works. Then I’m going to be springing into the steps and on how and what the affiliate marketing business looks like and what you can do and the how to get started creating an affiliate marketing business plus how you or anyone for that matter can get started today and create your own personal online business. Sounds pretty darn cool, doesn’t it. Well to be completely honest, it is fracking amazing and like myself, you’re going to love it.
Okay So This Is How Affiliate Marketing Works
I really enjoy public speaking and that is actually weird because most people would rather die than speak publicly. A very successful public speaker once told me that the best way to test how easily understandable your speech or content is, go give your speech to a 5th grader class. If they don’t understand what you’re talking about, scrap it and make it simpler. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got.
Here is an incredible effective round house flow chart that shows just how simple affiliate marketing works:
I think this circular flow chart is a great example of how affiliate marketing works. You just need to understand some lingo used, like any business, and you need to go through a slight learning curve, like any business, and like me when you first get started it seems like a lot but it’s actually very simple when you break it down.
The key to success is having great coaching, training and mentoring and at Wealthy Affiliate you have the best in the business. Nothing anywhere on the web comes close to the coaching, training and mentoring here at Wealthy affiliate. They demolish the entire internet hands down.
This comes from the two founders of Wealthy Affiliate, Kyle and Carson. These two guys are sharp, intelligent and definitely out of the box thinkers with a massive suit of armor called integrity plus these two have been doing this successfully for just over 20 years and they and I are so confident in Wealthy Affiliate that they want you to take it for a test drive. Set up a starter account for free, no credit card required, and give us and yourself the chance to SOAR to infinity and beyond.
I’m getting carried away again let’s back up and take a brief look at this affiliate marketing thing working for us.
We, Me and You are the AFFILIATES: We can promote literally everything under the sun with affiliate programs. Companies like Walmart, eBay, Clickbank (thousand of products alone here) Amazon (More products than I could shake a stick at here) and the list is limitless, Tens of Thousands of affiliate programs promoting products and services that are literally limited by your own imagination. So we join the Affiliate Program and we get something called “an affiliate link”. I like to call these the “cash to come link.” And one of the best parts is, this link is unique to just you, no one else gets that same one as yours, so each is special, and we keep tabs on what’s happening on the playing field so we see exactly each sale that we make. Awesome!
SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!: So what happens is that Affiliate programs give us a piece of the action (aka commission) when we send them to their sight and they purchase a product or service. One of my passions is movies so say I set up a website that reviews, critiques and lambastes movies and then send them to Amazon to buy all the movies that I recommend or don’t recommend and Amazon sends me a piece of the action for all the movies Amazon sells which I believe falls in the 3 to 6% commission and when you move a lot of movies, the cash adds up quickly. I’ve found, depending on the affiliate program, they’ll typically pay tween 2% and 75% in commissions on average. Use your imagination, this gets sweet quickly!
The Sky’s The Limit: There are a lot of Affiliates that make 6 and even 7 figures a year (Inside Secret: Many of them are here at Wealthy Affiliate being coaches, mentors and trainers and they want to help, Now that’s extremely exciting). And this can happen for any individual that is willing to put in some elbow grease, ask for help when needed, and keeping on keeping on! The only limits that exist are the one’s you bring with you.
SO HOW DO YOU ACTUALLY BUILD A SUCCESSFUL AFFILIATE MARKETING BUSINESS? THERE ARE 4 – STEPS
These 4 steps are actually very simple and I like simple. Follow the steps, use the training and tools and coaching, mentoring and training and consistent perseverance and you’ll soon find yourself with a very lucrative and exciting business on your hands limited only by your imagination. Let’s take a peek at the steps.
Step 1:
Choose An Interest.
Every great thing starts with an idea, the genesis of all invention including your affiliate business. Come up with an idea for your business to promote. The term is called a “niche”. A funny word if you ask me because people call it a nitch or neesh depending on, well I’m not actually sure. I guess it’s the potatoe / pototoe thing. I do know this, pick something that you love or at least really like, it makes working so much more enjoyable. I told you that I love movies. What do you love? Sit back, relax and let yourself think and feel… It could be surfing, golf shoes, skeet shooting, kittens, horse racing, off-roading, kung fu and on and on. We once again run into the word LIMITLESS… Good Movie!
Step 2: Build A Website.
Your website is your virtual store, it’s your businesses foundation. You now own virtual real estate… Yay You. Think of it like a brick a mortar Target Store. Customers go into the front of the store. Get help finding the products they want and need and the store makes sales and generates revenue. Your website is your store were you interact with all the customers and suggest products and services that they’d love that will help improve the customer’s lives and you get good feeling someone improve their lives plus you earn revenue. I can tell you this that having a website is as essential as air is to life on earth. If no website, no affiliate marketing business
Great News For You – You can build a revenue generating, outstanding performing website at Wealthy Affiliate.
Greater News For You – You can get your website up and humming for completely free, with a Starter Account at Wealthy Affiliate.
Greatest News For You – The Wealthy Affiliate website hosting platform (Your website home address) ranks better in the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo… etc) and makes The Flash look slow with it’s blinding speed. With these qualities, you can have a distinct competitive advantage which can lead to a ton more opportunity as you grow out your website. Now that’s what I’m talking about, LaBron domination of the internet!
Step 3: Attract Visitors.
Step right up, Step right up! See the amazing… Famous words used many times to do one thing attract visitors to whatever you want them attracted to. With your affiliate marketing business the destinations your “traffic” will arrive is your website. You don’t make any money if no visitors come to your website.
So How do You ATTRACT VISITORS to Your Website?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking in search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) produces the result of FREE traffic (Attracting Visitors) to your website, now you have the opportunity of helping them. SEO isn’t the only way to get traffic, it’s just one that has been used for decades, by great affiliate business and produces long term traffic. So, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
So now that I have my website up and running, Now What?
I’m Glad you asked: Everyone needs proper training on producing massive “traffic.” Plus your website must be set up to rank well with Google, Bing, Yahoo etc… Wealthy Affiliate gives you front row seats to interstellar SEO training and access to loads of classes for SEO plus open door access to experts that want to (Coach, train and mentor) help you personally with creating your massive traffic campaigns, and all you have to do is ask.
As you build out and expand your website you’ll also discover many other ways to produce massive traffic other than SEO. Such as Podcasts, Social Media platforms, YouTube, Blogging and all this training is extensively covered in Wealthy Affiliate too. Once again the only limitations are the ones you put on yourself, limitless possibilities await!
Step 4: Earn Revenue (Show Me The Money)
This is the most exciting part: Drum roll please… You “making money” part of your business. The affiliate programs that you are part of like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, you name it… is were you are earning the cash.
The Win / Win Scenario and the Limitless Opportunity: Think of today’s landscape. Companies are always looking to advertise to move products and services. Remember when you would watch a TV show on a major network say ABC, NBC and CBS? You watch your show and suffer through the commercials, or so we always said. Today it’s nothing but streaming services Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, CBS Full Access and on and on. Paid services, no commercials. Corporations are always looking to advertise and promote, here is our big opportunity and getting bigger. Companies create affiliate programs which cost virtually nothing and we, the affiliates, promote and sell their products and services. These Corps pay us a commission (a piece of the action at some %) and they make money with little to no advertising cost. A sweet setup to say the least!
The Money Ocean of Opportunity: As a fairly decent guess there is roughly over 560,000,000 services / products and 
growing that we can promote as Affiliate Marketers. We market the product / service in exchange for commission. You dip into the Money ocean’s massive opportunity by using “magical go to links” on your website provided by Corporations that transport your customers to their website like Target, eBay, Amazon, Walmart and on and on… and when they buy products / Services we get “a piece of the action.”
Let’s talk about the Coronavirus Lockdown: One of the things that amazes me about human being is our ability to adapt and work with circumstances, good and bad, and make the situation work to a positive for us. The lock down totally was a downer but people adapted and thrived taking current technologies and creating new ones to keep on moving forward. The whole world was put into their homes and told to stay so people started working from home at a level never seen in the history of the world and started liking it. I recently saw an article were Disney wanted to bring back all the employee’s back to work at business locations and a lot of the employees said NO. They are saving time and money by not commuting to and from an office every day, we will see how this situation turns out. What is happening is that affiliate marketing is growing at it’s fastest pace ever. Good news for us and as it currently sits, we are looking at a business with the amount to be earned online at just over $12,000,000,000.00 this year alone and that’s BILLION! And projections for next year are only bigger, in other words folks: THE OCEAN OF MONEY IS GETTING BIGGER AND DEEPER DAILY!
Let’s Tap on Affiliate Programs: Finding these Magical Unicorns (affiliate programs) can be a little scary, at least it was for me, and challenging. Don’t get me wrong, there are Thousands and Thousands of affiliate programs but finding them can be time-consuming. Lots of DuckDuckGo searches for me or whatever search engine you prefer can chew up some of yours and my time and it did.
Great News Abounds: Within Wealthy Affiliate is a tool that does Affiliate Program searches. The program searches across the top affiliate programs, roughly searching 10,000 plus affiliate programs which makes it so much faster and simpler, a very good thing. Plus the incredible training that you will get and need to become successful in the shortest amount of time possible. Learning how to integrate affiliate promotions properly on your website to get the most people moving through your store plus we all need some understanding, and the more the better, on something called “The Customer Purchase Lifecycle”. I know these were all foreign and new to me at first but it’s critical training to be a high performer and a very successful Online Affiliate Marketer, which is what I want for you!
“So that’s the short version old buddy” as I told my fire walking friend. That’s basically how to build an affiliate marketing business. He replied, “I like limitless possibilities.” “I know you do, that’s why we get along so well”. Now If you are interested in limitless possibilities with building your own Affiliate Marketing Business and have no experience, like I and everyone else at one point did or need some help to build out an Affiliate Marketing Business that is stalling on you or failing to meet the results you want to get, I AND A TEAM OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL, I’M TALKING 6 AND 7 FIGURE SUCCESSFUL, CAN AND DO WANT TO HELP YOU PERSONALLY SUCCEED.
This is an extremely exciting time if you choose it to be. I want it to be an exciting time for you as it is for me. The chance to go from were you are to were you’ve always wanted to be. That’s’s your limitless question, “Where do you really want to be in your life right now!”
Always Remember This Absolute Truth: “You can’t get different results, by doing the same thing.” Take the road less traveled and create a free account, just have some faith and a touch of some “sick and tired of being sick and tired”! You’ll get access to awesome training by Kyle (He’s been doing this full-time for 20 years) just one of the trainers, websites, mentorship, research tools, direct support, hosting and networking.
It’s free, did I say free to try, you can get a “test flight” Starter Account for the total cost of nothing… no credit card required. If you are even remotely interested in becoming a Ninja Affiliate Marketer, get rolling right now with your free account, I will be reaching out to you ASAP of you joining.
===> Click Here To Your Test Flight Wealthy Affiliate Account!
Please if you have any questions that you want to leave for me, feel free to do so. I will make sure that I get back to you as soon as I can (usually within a few hours)
To Your Good Health,
Sean
Founder of StraightArrowAffilite.com
Proud Member Since 2009 of WealthyAffiliate.com
Many thanks for this insightful and thorough article on affiliate marketing. This post is actually quite significant. Because the simplest way for anyone to generate money nowadays is through affiliate marketing. And you have provided simple methods for doing that. Keep posting in this manner. On the whole, I’ll spread the word.
Hey Pasindu,
Thank you for affirming what I was trying to accomplish with the article. Simple and to the point. Plus I totally agree with you good Sir that the simplest way for anyone to generate cash in today world is affiliate marketing. Once again thanks for the positive feed back good and keep on moving forward.
As someone who is interested in affiliate marketing and online business, I found your article on how to build an affiliate marketing business to be very informative and helpful. I appreciated your detailed explanation of the different steps and strategies involved in building a successful affiliate marketing business, as well as your personal experiences and recommendations.
One question I have is whether there are any specific tools or resources that you recommend for someone just starting out in affiliate marketing. While you mention the importance of having a solid understanding of your niche and audience, I wonder if there are any other resources or tools that can help new affiliates build their business more effectively?
Hey there Ronnie thank you for the nice compliments and I hope that it helps you out on journey from here to ( you name it ). I can only give you the recommendation I follow myself. Kyle (One of the Co-founders of Wealthy Affiliate who has 20 + years of successful experience as an affiliate marketer) Wrote a post with this comment which is hanging on my wall “TO KNOW THE ROAD AHEAD, ASK THOSE COMING BACK!” Find the people who are the best and do what they’ve done, don’t re-invent the wheel, there’s no need. If you’re not already a wealthy affiliate member, I’d set up a free starter account and then go start your training here. Good luck to you Ronnie in all of your endeavors.