The Best Strategies For Affiliate Marketing That Work For Beginners

Do you know who Spencer Mecham is?

If you are an affiliate marketing nerd like me, you probably do.

But, if you’re part of the other 98% of the world who isn’t crazy about this “internet marketing stuff,” you’ve probably never heard of this man.

So, what’s he doing on Episode #202 of FunnelHacker Radio?

How did he get on there? How did he win the ClickFunnels Affiliate Program dream car contest?

What Strategies For Affiliate Marketing did he use?

You see, Spencer Mecham quit his full-time job more than 2 years ago and is now living the life of FREEDOM others only dream of.

Now, he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in passive income with affiliate marketing.

He started out with no email list, no social following, and went on to make $10k in his first two months and over $100k in his first year.

If you have no clue who Spencer Mecham is, he makes tons of money with affiliate marketing, and he also helps others do the same.

His company, Buildapreneur, is all about helping shape and guide you if entrepreneurship is where you want to go.

He is currently the number one ClickFunnels affiliate with over 2000 affiliates under him. And he is the first person to win a 2CC award for making over $1 million with affiliate commissions.

Here is the deal:

What I am about to show you here today is a proven strategy. It works for me, and a thousand other entrepreneurs, just like you.

Today, you’ll discover the best strategies on affiliate marketing that you can easily implement into your business.

Note: Even if you’re a super affiliate already, you can still learn a ton of new things from these strategies here today.

But first:

What Is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest and easiest ways to make a full-time income online.

Because you don’t have to spend time creating or developing your own product or service.

The simplest definition of affiliate marketing I found is on Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog:

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products or services. You find a product you like, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.

However, Wikipedia talks about 4 different parties involved in an affiliate marketing business: the merchant, the publisher, the customer, and the network.

Other definitions talk about 3 parties instead of 4.

Nevertheless, I will only explain 3: the merchant, the publisher, and the customer…

And show you where to find the best products and services you can promote as an affiliate.

Here is a quick overview of all three:

The Merchant

Sometimes, also known as the vendor, the product owner, the retailer, the brand or the seller.

The merchant creates or retails the product or service. It can be a huge company like Amazon or Jumia.

Or, it could be a single person like Frank Kern, who sells online courses to authors, coaches, and consultants.

From solo entrepreneurs to e-commerce stores to Fortune 500 companies, anyone could be the merchant behind an affiliate marketing program.

They don’t even have to be actively involved. They just have to have a product to sell.

It is the responsibility of an online merchant is to have a high converting sales page and a functional checkout process.

The Customer or End-User

These are the people looking for a solution to solve their problem or achieve a specific goal or obtain a specific item.

The end-user or customer makes the affiliate system go round because, without them, there isn’t going to be any sales or any commission to be made.

The affiliate will try to market to the consumer through any way they see the greatest opportunity to make a sale, be it social networks, banner ads or through a search engine using content marketing on a YouTube channel.

The Publisher or Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketers or publishers can range from single individuals to entire companies.

For you as an aspiring entrepreneur, this is an opportunity to recommend other people’s product and earn income based on your marketing effort without having to deal with shopping carts, customer support, shipping or logistics, returns.

All of that is managed by the merchant.

Your goal as an affiliate is to connect with people who are searching for solutions with the product that will help them achieve their goal.

Your responsibility is to attract and convince potential customers of the value of the merchant’s product so that they actually end up buying it.

One of the ways you can achieve this is by running a review blog.

BestReviews is an example of a successful review blog you could emulate:

Whether the customer knows that they are part of an affiliate system or not is mostly up to the affiliate.

Some affiliate marketers tend to be transparent about the fact that they receive commissions when customers purchase through their link, but others don’t.

Remember, your job as an affiliate marketer is to build trust with potential customers, and increase awareness for the merchant’s solutions that can solve their problems.

Now, let’s understand how and why an affiliate gets to receive commissions and know the systems involved.

How does affiliate marketing work?

Before we get into the juicy parts, let’s understand the make money affiliate marketing game works from a broad overview and a little techie overview.

I promise to keep it as simple as possible.

There are two important things to take note about how to make money affiliate marketing.

#1. Affiliate Links

Now, when a merchant or an online retailer wants to begin an affiliate marketing program, they get a specific tracking system.

They could partner with an affiliate network that runs all this for them or they can run it standalone as their own affiliate program probably using online marketing tools like ClickFunnels.

This tracking system installs a cookie across every page of the merchant’s website and offers every affiliate a unique ID or tracking code.

When you sign up as an affiliate, you get a special link.

This is your affiliate link and contained within this affiliate link is your unique ID or tracking code that works with the tracking cookie.

When a prospect clicks through your special affiliate link, the tracking cookie on the merchant site picks up your affiliate ID and stores that data as a cookie on the customer’s browser.

If the user completes the checkout process, the merchant’s website recognizes your affiliate ID in the cookie on their browser and the sale gets attributed to you as an affiliate, thus earning you a commission.

That’s how simple the tech stuff is.

#2. Cookie Duration

Another important thing to know is what’s known as the cookie duration.

The cookie duration starts when the prospect clicks on your affiliate link.

All merchants or retailers have the freedom to set their own cookie duration.

Amazon associates set theirs to 24 hours which is one of the shortest in the industries.

Generally, you find out lots of merchants who set theirs at 30 to 60 days cookie duration and sometimes as long as 6 months or even lifetime cookie duration.

The cookie expires at the end of the cookie duration window.

If the user completes a transaction before the cookie expires during the cart process, the shopping cart will pick up your affiliate ID in that cookie and attribute the sale to you.

For example:

Using Amazon affiliate program and their 24-hour cookie duration:

Let’s say, a prospect clicks on your affiliate link today and completes the checkout tonight (7 hours later) for a DSLR camera. You’ll earn a commission because the click was attributed to you and the sale was completed within the cookie duration window.

Alternatively, another prospect clicks on your affiliate link today and completes the checkout tomorrow evening (26 hours later) for the same DSLR camera. You don’t earn the commission because the cookie expired before the user completed checkout.

The longer the cookie duration, the more time and opportunity you have to close the sale and earn a commission for your efforts.

Now let’s see where we can find the best products and services out there you can promote as an affiliate.

Top Affiliate Programs And Networks

Here is a list of the top affiliate networks and programs that you can find many product and services to promote and make money affiliate marketing:

• Amazon Associates
• ClickBank
• ShareaSale
• Commission Junction
• JVZoo
• WarriorPlus
• ClickFunnels Affiliate Program

I only provided ones with many products and services you can choose from but be careful of the cookie duration.

Now, let’s get into the milk and honey…

Best Strategies For Affiliate Marketing

Please note that affiliate marketing is not about spamming people with your links or putting your links all over the place hoping someone will click and buy.

Lots of people get the make money affiliate marketing game wrong.

Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

As of any other thing in life, it takes a lot of hard work, time, or investment on your part if you are going to be successful.

But the rewards of affiliate marketing can be very fulfilling because you’ll actually be helping people.

And at the same time, it gives you the opportunity to work from home or anywhere in the world you.

Location and time freedom.

That been said, here are proven strategies to make money affiliate marketing:

The First Strategy For Affiliate Marketing That Works

This strategy I’m about to reveal is evergreen and has been working since the birth of the internet.

Let’s take a look at this scenario:

Cynthia is a busy mom who’s just recovering from previous childbirth.

She has been eating too much lately, is a little overweight and is looking for easy ways to lose weight without going to the gym.

One day, Cynthia goes to a friend’s place and this friend introduces Cynthia to homemade green smoothies.

After Cynthia had the smoothie, she not only felt better but she starts feeling more alive and healthy.

Now, Cynthia is sold on the green smoothies idea and decides to start making it herself at home.

Obviously, Cynthia’ll be looking for a blender and She’ll inevitably ask her best friend Google.

But here is the thing, Cynthia will be looking for more than just a blender and when you acknowledge that, you will have a head-up on your competition.

She probably types in a phrase that we call a keyword phrase and it will probably be a longtail keyword phrase meaning she’s going to search more than “blender.”

Odds are her search phrase will be closer to “best blender for a family of 4 for under $100.”

So how do you connect with her?

Well in this scenario, a content-heavy website that is focused on either blender reviews or getting fit through green smoothies could have a great chance of ranking high in Google for her specific search phrase.

Let’s say you have a specific post on your blender review site that has the title “seven best blenders for big families under $100”

Cynthia sees your post title in the Google search results and thinks “wow, this is exactly what I’m looking for…”

Then she clicks and heads over to your site.

Now it’s up to your copy to do the job of pre-selling the right blender for her. She’s already sold on a blender.

So no need of selling the idea of a blender. Just help her find the right one that fits her needs.

In your content, you need to find the benefits of the blender and attack the emotional needs of your readers.

If you don’t have the time or money to buy the blenders yourself and try them all out, a shortcut will be to steal the already written customer reviews on Amazon.

This way, you know for sure what your average reader wants or is looking for to get out of a blender.

If you help her realize that getting healthier with smoothies can be fast, easy, and fits her budget…She’s closer to taking a recommendation clicking through and purchasing from you.

Let’s look at a real-life example of a website that uses this strategy to make money with affiliate marketing.

Example Of The Affiliate Marketing Strategy In Action

You see, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation and online reviews have been shown to impact 67.7% of purchasing decisions.

Also, 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business.

A very good example of a successful review site would be ConsumerSearch.com that was bought by the New York Times for $33 million in cash.

Consumer Search is simply a site that compiles the reviews of different products and helps users find the best and most reliable product.

They make all their money through Amazon Associates.

Consumer Search gets up to 1.3 million monthly visitors and 87% of that traffic is free organic traffic from search engines.

This is because of the trust they have built up with their audience with the genuinely useful content they publish.

Creating a review site is one of the best and long-term ways of building up a passive income business with affiliate marketing.

But, if you don’t have that much time, the next strategy could work for you.

The Second Strategy For Affiliate Marketing That Works

This is a new and untapped strategy.

To explain this so you’ll understand, let’s take a look at this scenario:

A 33-year-old security guard who works swing shift gets off work every night at midnight and has a very difficult time falling asleep.

He believes he has insomnia and gets frustrated because he can’t seem to find sleep until the early hours of the morning.

And sometimes not falling asleep at all and feeling like his eyes are about to fall off.

If you’ve ever had challenges sleeping you understand how big of a problem this feels from his perspective.

That’s where you could come in as an internet entrepreneur.

In this situation, you could probably help this person and millions of others who have a hard time sleeping at night through Facebook advertising.

Think about it, what do you do when you can’t sleep? Watch Netflix, play with your phone or browse social media, right?

Actually, millions of people spend their evenings like this including me.

You could create a free e-book could be titled “Seven Natural Sleep Hacks To Fall Asleep Fast Without Pharmaceuticals.”

This is called a lead magnet.

You reach your audience and present the solution to the problem to be your free e-book via a Facebook ad and an affiliate marketing funnel.

You offer to send the e-book via email using a squeeze page funnel.

And right there on the thank-you is your first opportunity to present an affiliate offer.

This is what we call a bridge page where you bridge the gap from your website to the affiliate offer.

Plus it works best when you use a video. You could use a who-what-why-how script introducing the affiliate product that is the ultimate sleep solution.

Russell Brunson explains this script in detail in his bestselling book Dotcom Secrets.

 

NOTE: You should only be promoting products that you’ve tried, purchased, and had a great experience with yourself.

Remember, your goal is to build trust and to offer real solutions to their real problems…

If you have never written an e-book before, you could have a freelance writer on UpWork or any freelance site do the work for you.

Then, among the seven options in the e-book, you could put your affiliate link for a product, maybe a specific herbal tea that helps induce sleep.

You could also recommend the blue light eliminating glasses that help people fall asleep, I’m just saying.

I mean, not every option here could be an affiliate link but if you see some more good offers that could solve the problem, you can add them in there as well.

If you’re having a good day, your lead could take all seven recommendations just so they could sleep better and solve their problem.

Don’t forget, you also have their email address.

And now, you could follow-up with helpful emails and give more quality advice to help them sleep, then eventually make more offers, in other words, make more money affiliate marketing.

Here is the good part, you could host the e-book, build your affiliate marketing funnel, send your follow-up emails plus automate the entire process with easy-to-use email marketing tools for affiliate marketing like ClickFunnels.

You can read my ClickFunnels review here.

This is my favorite approach to the game of affiliate marketing because you are immediately getting the prospect’s contact information in a way that gives you the right to send email marketing campaigns in the future…

So you can take more time to build the relationship, give more value, and ultimately make more sales.

Further increasing your odds for success as an affiliate marketer.

Let’s look at a real-life example of this strategy in action.

Example Of The Affiliate Marketing Strategy In Action

Paul Mottley currently uses this strategy and grows his email list fast in the process.

He offers a cheat sheet on the front end and a 14-days free trial to ClickFunnels on the backend.

Paul uses an affiliate marketing bridge page to promote ClickFunnels on the backend where he now makes over $1k a month recurring commissions.

This strategy is also used by many ClickFunnels dream car winners like Spencer Mecham, Doug Boughton, and Rachel S Lee. They use a simple funnel called the viral affiliate funnel.

Although, it is hard to say if this was how they were able to win their dream cars but this enabled them to grow their email list fast with virtually no work.

IMPORTANT: Your big goal as an affiliate marketer is to grow an email list because that is your largest and most valuable asset for an affiliate marketing business.

I’ll be updating this post regularly as I keep looking and searching for more proven ways to make money affiliate marketing.

Tips To Become A Super Affiliate

#1. Stick with a niche

Niche is the most important factor that will contribute to your success.

Concentrating on one particular niche will be more profitable rather than selling everything.

Target a particular audience and stick to specific products.

Evolve around the niche you have built and promote products and services related to it.

Just for example, if you are in the fitness niche, you can promote yoga mats, thread mills, fitness wears, and so on.

#2. Treat it like a real business

Treating it like a real business means you need to dedicate a certain amount of time every day and put your FOCUS there.

This is very important if you want to make full-time income affiliate marketing because you’re only going to get results you deserve if you take ACTION and put in the efforts needed.

Secondly, just like every business, you need to identify a problem or gap in the market and provide a solution.

In other words, you have to focus on providing real VALUE to people so they trust you and take your recommendations.

#3. Measure and Track Everything

If you are sending traffic (especially paid) to your affiliate marketing funnel, you need to make sure you are making a return on your investment.

You can accomplish this by tracking the clicks to your landing page and affiliate offer, and also looking at how people engage with the content on your funnel.

This will give you the opportunity to make necessary adjustments on what’s not working or make you realize why your funnel isn’t converting well.

You could then tweak and optimize your funnel where needed and double your conversion and sales.

The best tracking tool out there for doing this is called ClickMagick.

You can hit me up here anytime you struggle with using the tool. I am here to help 🙂

#4. Be consistent

This is the same for everything you do in life. You’re not going to go to the gym for just one week and expect to lose 100 pounds.

That’s impossible.

In affiliate marketing, you need to have a well-planned schedule so that you can follow and put in the consistent work.

Plus, you must consistently work on your business and also invest in your own education. I’m talking about everything you learn which can help you hone your skills in online marketing.

A lot of people can’t find a balance between these two. Some spend too much time working on their business but they seldom improve their skills. So they may be doing the wrong thing again and again.

On the other hand, some people put too much focus on learning new things but never put into real actions so their business is not growing.

Remember, consistency is key for whatever commitment you have.

#5. Find A Mentor.

Like Tony Robbins said,

“If you want to achieve success, all you need to do is find a way to MODEL those who have already succeeded”

In order words, for you to succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to find a mentor whom you can model.

Mind you, modeling doesn’t mean you should copy.

I am no mentor as I just started my affiliate marketing journey.

However, as much as I love writing, I also love building sales funnels, and if you need any help building out your affiliate marketing funnel, hit me up here.

But if you want to see success fast promoting awesome affiliate products like ClickFunnels, then I would suggest you start with ClickFunnels Affiliate program.

Register for the Affiliate Bootcamp summit and join the One Funnel Away Challenge. It will be one of the best investments you ever made.

Conclusion On The Best Strategies For Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is my favorite way to make money online and a good way to monetize your online business from day 1.

It could be your route to ditching the boss, the nine to five, and the fear of losing your job.

But, it’s never as easy as it seems and if you do anything right, it’s hard.

Affiliate marketing is no different. To get ahead, you need to get started.

I hope these strategies for affiliate marketing help you do just that.

Free Case Study: “How to make $10k in 30 days as a ClickFunnels affiliate marketer.”

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