The key to becoming a good affiliate marketer is to leverage the right affiliate marketing strategies for beginners. 

The way to do affiliate marketing successfully is a combination of mindset, productive daily habits, and marketing. Good strategies are the difference between being successful or not. Although this article is targeted to beginner affiliate marketers, these strategies should be leveraged for all skill levels.

Affiliate Marketing continues to gain attention. People want to make money online. Companies want to expand their sales. 

The online eCommerce industry made $500 Billion Dollars in 2018. And is projected to make $700 billion dollars by 2022. That’s half of a Trillion Dollars last year! And close to 1 trillion dollars in 4 years. Source Statista.

I mean, who doesn’t want a tiny sliver of $500 Billion dollars?

You just need to tap into the 135,000 searches a month for making money online. And get your content to show up for some of those 1.6 Million searches a year. Source Jaaxy

Yes. That is your goal 🙂 

Follow these strategies daily to reach your affiliate potential and tap into this billion-dollar world.

10 Affiliate Marketing Strategies for Beginners

1. Focus on VALUE, NOT MONEY

This is a big one. Hence, why we talk about this strategy first.

Your affiliate marketing business is not about money. It is about helping people solve their real-life problems. 

So you can not…

Focus on the money. The commissions. The sales of the products.

The money only strategy does not work!

Brad Hussey proves this point here. 

At the beginning of 2018, my primary focus was money. Not only did my business generate 25% less revenue as compared to the previous year, my behavior was desperate and unfocused…

– Brad Hussey, Web Designer, Coding Instructor, Entrepreneur, Affiliate Marketer

Why were Brad’s sales down?

Because…

People do not buy products. 

People do not buy something just to help companies reach their revenue goals.

People buy solutions. 

People buy something to solve a real-life problem they have.

Do you want to be a successful affiliate marketer in 2020? Focus on people.

Your primary mission as an affiliate marketer is to help people.

• Help them understand which of the million solutions are right for them.
• Research their problems and options to know which the best solution to recommend to them.

This is where your value comes in. When you help someone make the right decision for them, you add value to their lives and become a trusted source. You help them make a good decision. An educated decision. You help them solve a real problem in their life. You help make their life a little easier, one decision at a time.

Pat Flynn reinforces this point here.

A lot of people do it [affiliate marketing] the wrong way by taking an income-first rather than a serve-first approach. These folks push random products and over promote them without providing true value to their audience.

– Pat Flynn, a well-known affiliate marketer making $60,000 affiliate commissions per month

2. SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is hands down the preferred marketing strategy.

SEO is the act of optimizing your content for searches. This optimization started for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Today, these searches expand to social media, forums and information sites. YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.

It doesn’t matter if you have a global affiliate website or a local store website.

Optimizing your content for online searches is the number way to go. Use SEO strategies for your blog content, for YouTube videos, Facebook posts, Pinterest posts, etc. These strategies help you optimize your content and drive traffic to your website based on appearing in search results.

But SEO is not just about generating traffic to your website.

SEO is the best way to understand what your audience needs.

The beauty of search engine optimization is that SEO teaches you to research your audience. You learn what your audience needs. You learn what your audience wants. You learn what your audience is looking for.

When you understand your audience, you can easily offer your audience what they need. This helps you with a value focus approach. (Affiliate marketing strategy #1).

Out of all the different marketing strategies you can implement, every one of them involves understanding your audience. And SEO is a good way to learn the importance of research.

SEO Page Optimization Checklist

3. Show Up to Work Every day!

Notice how I referred to affiliate marketing as a business in strategy #1. I said, “Your affiliate marketing business”.

That is what affiliate marketing is. Although, we may perceive it as the act of marketing affiliate products to someone. Or just a way to make money online. This is the wrong mindset.

Treat affiliate marketing as a business. Treat your business like a job.

Where the only way to get the job done is to show up every day. And do the work that is expected of you.

If you do not treat affiliate marketing as a business, It will likely fail. If you do not take action every day, you may miss a golden opportunity to make your life whatever you want it to be. To work for yourself. To travel anywhere you want. To control when you work and when you don’t.

Take your job as an affiliate marketer seriously. Show up every day to “work”. Take actions every day.

No effort. No sales. No money. No success. 

Daily actions are needed for success. This effort applies to any business. Regardless of what you recommend, your own products or someone else’s product.

You can manage your affiliate marketing plan with Trello. Setup daily goals and always know the next actions you need to take. I learned this trick from a Wealthy Affiliate member, which I do everyday 🙂

4. Learn Something New Everyday

Training is key. For the beginner, intermediate and expert marketers alike. 

When it comes to the marketing and online world, learning something new every day is inevitable.

Embrace knowledge as power. Absorb information, all the time.

Use new information to determine what your next blog post will be about. Use new information to learn a new marketing strategy like how to set up an email marketing campaign. Or how to optimize your content for searches (SEO).

If you want to be an affiliate marketer, then you need to:

• Study affiliate marketing every day.
• Research new affiliate products and marketing strategies.
• Learn about the audiences you are targeting and new products they should know about.

The way you continuously learn is to:

• Setup daily goals to complete affiliate marketing training.
• Read related free guides and ebooks.
• Set up Google alerts to receive daily blog posts on affiliate programs, products, and digital marketing products.

Your education and research never stop. Your education doesn’t stop with your first commission. Your learning does not stop after making $5,000 a month. 

Do you think doctors stop learning after they graduate med school? No. Thank goodness.

My favorite ways to continue learning affiliate marketing skills: Weekly Live Webinars

5. Build Out Value Funnels

I am always reading about affiliate marketing and marketing in general.

I probably read 1000 words every day. Some days, I read 5,000 to 10,000 words. 

Recently, I read a free download by Aaron Fletcher. He mentioned…

“It’s usually a good idea to date before you get married“. 

I laughed. But then thought about the truth in this statement.

Aaron’s point is that your audience needs to trust you before they will buy anything from you. You earn this trust by offering your audience things of value. A common value thing in affiliate marketing is information.

A value funnel offers your audience free information, free guides, free help.

Once your audience has interacted with some of your content, they begin to trust you.

And when they trust you, they are more likely to buy from you. 

A way you build trust is to create value funnels.

A value funnel looks something like this:

• Offer a free guide download for a person to sign up to your email campaign.
• Send this person 3 – 5 informative emails to help them solve the problems they want to solve.
• Include solutions in every 3rd and 5th email.

A way to reach more people to sign up to your email campaign is by running a Facebook ad which looks something like this:

• Create a Facebook ad that offers your free guide download.
• A person clicks on the Facebook ad to be taken to your blog post or landing page with the free download offer.
• The person exchanges their email address to get the free guide.
• This person is now in your email campaign series that is mentioned above.

The reason this is called a value funnel is because you create multiple steps of interactions with this person. As they gain value with each step of the funnel, you work to build a relationship with this person which builds trust. Then this person is more likely to accept your product recommendations which means they buy your affiliate products.

All successful marketers today use some sort of value funnel. This is an affiliate marketing strategy work that works.

Learn more about Aaron Fletcher’s value funnels here. (It is free : ) 

6. Embrace Marketing, Technology, and Change

If you use technology today, then you already experience constant change.

If you own a computer, you always have software updates that release new features and security protection. If you own a smartphone, then you already know how a new version of your phone replaces your version with a year or two time.

As an affiliate marketer, you will be introduced to new technologies, new products and new marketing strategies every day.

If you do not like change, then affiliate marketing is probably not for you.

Perhaps, you just need to realize your entire life is about change. You grow up, you move to different homes, you start and end different jobs. The people you interact with on a daily basis change over time.

Online marketing is no different.

Online marketing is constantly changing. The technology of the internet is constant change. The way people connect with each other online is constant change.

Affiliate marketing today uses online marketing to help you make affiliate commissions. So, if you go into affiliate marketing, you go into online marketing.

To do affiliate marketing the right way, you need to embrace this constant change.

Learn from the constant change. Use change as a way to help other people know how to benefit from changes in products and solutions.

A great example of this in affiliate marketing is how social media changed the way people connect. Before social media, you connected with people by phone and email. Today, you connect with people through your Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram accounts.

Social media has changed where marketers spend their time these days. They know to leverage Social Media to find people to connect with and help them solve their problems.

Change is inevitable. Embrace it. Use change to fuel the tomorrow of your business.

7. Mobile First, Desktop 2nd

Another good example of technology change is the impact of mobile devices.

In 1940, the first Hewlett-Packard (HP) computer was invented. This computer changed how people worked. Source: Computer History.

In 1990, the World Wide Web (www) was born. The web changed the way people connected to information. Changed the way people worked because they could share information digitally, saving paper trails and thousands of trees a year.

In 2020, the word desktop refers to the desktop computer. Or laptop : )

When creating websites, you create content to be read on two different devices:

• Desktop computer
• Mobile device

Each device has a different view to display information.

The desktop view is larger, wider and typically has more images and more media because your computer can load the pages faster.

Mobile devices are smaller. And even though they are fast too, they are not as fast as bigger computers. The screen sizes are smaller which makes text smaller and harder to read. A typical mobile view will have fewer images and media. The focus on mobile is the text or the one video or the one image.

In December 2018, Google announced its mobile-first indexing strategy.

This means that Google will predominantly use the mobile version of your content for indexing and ranking. In the past, Google primarily used the desktop version of your content to rank for a person’s search query. Source: Google.

Today, in 2020 and beyond, this means you must create for mobile viewing, not desktop. Keep your content simple. Don’t use too many images.

Or build out your content with two versions: a desktop version and a mobile version. The mobile version takes priority over desktop.

Assume your audience will read your content and buy your recommendations from a mobile device. Hence, the mobile-first strategy, and desktop second. 

8. Treat Content Like a Product

Gone are the days when people buy from you just because you are selling it. These days it is all about trust. After all, there are 100+ places a person can buy what you are selling.

So, the word product takes on a different meaning today.

A product can be a physical product you buy. Or a service you buy.

A product can also be:

• your website
• a free guide
• a free training tutorial
• aa visual infographic that explains the steps of something

Because your number 1 goal as an affiliate marketer is to offer value to the people who need it most, treat your content like a product.

Take pride in your content as if it were a product. Build it out your product better than anyone else.

Make your content product so good that everyone wants it. Even if you give it away for free.

The free content product will allow you to recommend solutions, aka affiliate products, in different steps of your value funnel. (Affiliate marketing strategy #5) 

9. Search Boes Beyond Words

Search now happens on many devices. Your computer, phone, and smart speaker.

People search for different types of information. Content to read, images to view, videos to watch and questions to ask Alexa or Siri.

Entrepreneur says this here:

Creativity of content will take center stage and affiliates will branch into rich audio-visual content. Slideshows, images and video demonstrations of products and services will reign over the traditional approach to content. The written word, of course, will also continue to gain scale as companies create relevant how-to pieces, buying guides, editorials and other educational pieces to bolster their promotional endeavors.

– Entrepreneur 

This means your search needs to be targeted for more than just words. You want to appear for:

• Text search
• Image search
• Video search
• Voice search

This may seem overwhelming for a beginner affiliate marketer. But this supports why you need to embrace change. (Affiliate marketing strategy #6).

Technology has changed the way we consume information.

Keep this in mind when you create your blog post. All you have to do is to optimize your words for text and voice searches. Optimize your images for visual image search. And optimize your videos for video searches.

You will learn this strategy with good affiliate marketing training. I recommend Wealthy Affiliate where you learn how to optimize your content for search engines, YouTube videos, Pinterest pins and more. 

10. Avoid Shiny Object Syndrome

The last and final affiliate marketing strategy for beginners is to avoid shiny object syndrome. This means to avoid distractions. You do not need to learn all marketing strategies at once.

Focus on one website. Learn one strategy at a time. Build out your online business one step at a time.

In other words, invest in 1 good training course. Complete the entire course and complete all the recommended actions. A good training course will provide you 3 – 6 months of training, if not more. 

I suffered from shiny object syndrome in 2018. Here’s my story:

I bought training from Wealthy Affiliate in late 2017. I completed half of one course. In mid-2018, I bought another affiliate marketing product called AffiloJetpack. The marketing was great and I thought AffiloJetpack would be better than Wealthy Affiliate. I was wrong. I not only wasted $747, I wasted about 3 months of time. If I had just stayed focused on completing all 120 lessons and viewing all 300+ recorded webinars, I would be 3 months ahead of where I am today.

Time is one thing you can not get back.

You can only learn to treat time with the utmost respect. Because once it’s gone, it is gone forever. You are onto a new day, one day closer to the end of your life. So treat time wisely.

Focus on one thing at a time. You will be challenged in the world of affiliate marketing, to spend your time and training in many places. Start and finish one thing. Then move onto the next task, skill or new training. 

I hope this helps layout some real strategies to be a successful affiliate marketer.

If you want good training, start here.

If you are not interested in making a piece of the projected online sales, then don’t do anything.

Got Questions?

Feel free to comment below.