How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Earn Money While You Sleep

Do you want to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing but don’t know where to start?

Isn’t affiliate marketing all about making a lot of money with little effort?
At the very least, that is what a quick MSN and Yahoo search would have you believe, but the reality is a little more complicated than that.

Yes, affiliate marketing can earn you money.
Excellent value.
And, yes, you can make money while you sleep.

In this post, we’re going to show you how to make quick money with smart affiliate marketing.

Because this is such a large guide, feel free to use this table to go to the section that most interests you:

What Do WE Understand About Affiliate Marketing?

Unlike other aspiring experts and false prophets, we only teach what we do.

Syed Balkhi, our CEO, is one of the world’s top affiliate web marketing experts.
We’ve created and managed several high-profile periodicals that attract thousands of site visitors each month.
These are probably familiar websites, such as WPBeginner and IsItWP.

And here’s the thing with these websites: they don’t sell anything.
So, how do they make a living?

2 words: affiliate marketing.

That is why we are so thrilled to share with you the EXACT techniques we utilize on our own magazines to drastically improve income with affiliate marketing in this post.

Before we go too far, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what affiliate marketing is and how it may help your business.

If you are already an experienced professional, please proceed to our section on how to make money with affiliate marketing.

What Exactly Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when an online merchant compensates you for traffic or purchases generated by your recommendations.

It’s basically traditional advertising done in a much less intrusive manner.
Instead of advertising an item on your website with attractive ads like this:

A blog containing an excessive number of advertising

Simply insert the item link into your article as follows:

Affiliate link for Bluehost

Bluehost, a company that provides self-hosting alternatives for websites, is the affiliate partner in the image above.

So does that mean you can create a website, including a bunch of affiliate links, and then sit back and watch the affiliate commissions roll in?
No, but we will get there.

In the meanwhile, you only need to understand the essentials of affiliate marketing:

You recommend a service or product to your admirers via your website, blog, or email list.

Your fans use your affiliate link to purchase the services or products.

You earn money as a commission on sales made through your affiliate link.

Let’s break this process down into greater detail so you know exactly how to create an effective affiliate marketing strategy.

But first, let’s take a quick look at two things you should know before diving into affiliate marketing.

What You’ll Need to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

To get started with affiliate marketing, you’ll need two things:

Create a website or blog in your niche.
Select affiliate products to promote.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these in greater detail:

1. Create a Website or Blog for Your Niche

To make money with affiliate marketing, you must first create a website.

There are numerous possibilities for building your website.
However, we strongly advise you to use WordPress.

With WordPress, anyone can create a professional-looking website in minutes, even if they don’t know how to code:

Furthermore, WordPress provides additional tools to help their websites function better than other website builders.

This means additional functionality on your website and a better user experience (UX) for your visitors.

If you want to make money with affiliate marketing, WordPress is unquestionably the way to go.
If you need assistance constructing your website, check out these tutorials: How to Start a WordPress Blog

After you’ve created your website, you’ll need to decide what you want to advertise.
This brings us to the second need for getting started with affiliate marketing.

2. Select Affiliate Products to Promote

If you’ve done the legwork to identify a specialized niche, selecting affiliate items to promote should be simple.
Choose things that fit your niche and are related to your content.

Signing up with an affiliate network is one of the finest ways to choose your affiliate merchandise.

Affiliate networks are businesses that connect sellers and affiliate online marketing specialists so that both parties can profit.
Affiliate marketers use affiliate networks to earn greater product options to advertise on their websites.

There are numerous affiliate networks available, but here are a few of the most popular:

ShareASale
CJ Affiliate
ClickBank
Amazon.com Associates

One of the advantages of affiliate networks is that they often have more information on how well an item sells.
You can then use that data to boost your affiliate marketing revenue.

Check out our informative post Earnings-Per-Click: How to Win Big at Affiliate Marketing for more information.

Any moment you can make data-driven decisions rather than “choosing your digestive tract” is an excellent opportunity to optimize your affiliate approach.

Okay, now that you’ve established your website and determined which products to promote, it’s time to dig right into our step-by-step procedure for making money with affiliate marketing.

Let’s get started!

1) Create Affiliate Income-Generating Content

Most newcomers to affiliate marketing simply publish some arbitrary material and include affiliate links within the piece.

That method may or may not work, but if you truly want to increase your affiliate income, you must ensure that the content you provide reaches your target demographic.

Your target market is someone who wants to buy something but is unsure whether it is worthwhile.

Sometimes the user is unsure about the thing to purchase to meet their demands.

As an affiliate online marketing specialist, it is your responsibility to assist consumers in locating the best product for their needs using high-quality content, assisting them in making a purchasing decision, and then directing them to the item website to complete the transaction.

That implies your article should target investigative intent keywords — the types of terms your target market employs on Msn and Yahoo to investigate the item they want before making the buy.

For additional information, see our guide to selecting the proper keywords.

2) Promote Your Affiliate Products in the Content

You already know what kind of content you’re going to create: investigative.
You’re looking for topics that are relevant to your target market’s search for a solution to a problem.

After you’ve completed your keyword research and developed your content ideas, it’s time to start incorporating affiliate links into your content.

The placement of your affiliate links will be determined by the article you are authoring.
If you are performing an item review, it makes no sense to include affiliate links to 5 different things.

On the other hand, if you’re promoting the “Top 10 Devices for Repairing X,” you’ll want to include multiple affiliate links to boost your chances of making more sales.

The goal is to put your links as strategically as possible.

Here are a few pointers to help you get the most out of your affiliate links’ positioning:

Just connect where it makes sense: Do not put an affiliate link if it does not fit within your article.

This will have a negative influence on the user experience (UX) and cost you more lost sales in the long run.

Include links as soon as possible:

If you are showing multiple things in one article, be sure to include your affiliate items first.

Most people will not bother reading an entire article.

You want to ensure that people see your affiliate links as soon as possible.

Get more out of your website’s space:

To promote your affiliate products, you can employ drifting bars, inline banners, and sidebar widgets.

These increase the impact of your content and eventually lead to more purchases.

Here’s an example of an affiliate link from an IsItWP message on the top WordPress dish plugins:

Affiliate links for IsItWp

The list contains several possibilities, but the first two are affiliate links.

This allows the user to investigate all possibilities while increasing the likelihood that IsItWP’s affiliate links will be visible.

Again, you want to promote your links as frequently and aggressively as possible.

Pro-Tip: Invest in an affiliate link plugin before you begin inserting multiple affiliate links across your website.

Consider having to comb through and upgrade a large number of expired affiliate links when you have no idea where they are on your website.

You’re looking at hours of migraines and a lot of money lost due to expired links you forgot about. Fortunately, an affiliate management plugin can help you avoid this headache. Pretty Links is one of the best ones on the market.

lovely hyperlinks

WordPress affiliate link tracking plugin

Pretty Links is an affiliate marketing management plugin that allows you to keep track of your affiliate links more effectively. It is simple to set up, incredibly user-friendly (even for less tech-savvy internet marketing pros), and allows you to automate your marketing.

It also allows you to cloak affiliate links to make them appear brief and sleek, making them easier to share via e-mail and social media networks. And if the need arises to update outdated affiliate connections from your colleagues, you will be able to do so in minutes rather than days.

Furthermore, if you do encounter any difficulties, they have a fantastic support group to assist you at every step of the journey.

Since you’ve created the correct type of content and strategically placed your links (using an affiliate management plugin), it’s time to begin things off with targeted conversion campaigns.

3) Convert Your Website Visitors Into Affiliate Customers

One of the most common mistakes that new affiliate web marketing professionals make is assuming they need to 10x their traffic in order to 10x their profit.

It actually does not function this way, which is excellent news for you.
Assume you’re advertising an item on your website that pays $50 in affiliate revenue for each transaction you make.

Assume the affiliate conversion rate is 2%, which means that for every 100 site visitors you direct to that website, two of them will purchase the item.

That means your CPC (cost per click) is $1 per click. (CPC = total affiliate money divided by total traffic sent)

But what if you could send twice as many people to the affiliate goods website? You might also quadruple your affiliate income based on the CPC value. The best aspect is that you don’t need to generate traffic to your website. Rather, you might simply launch a conversion optimization project that increases your earnings.

You can enhance your income by converting more of your current traffic into affiliate customers with conversion optimization tools such as OptinMonster. Without a doubt, this is MUCH EASIER than considerably increasing your traffic.

OptinMonster can help you increase your affiliate earnings in the following ways:

a) Create a Popup Project that promotes an Affiliate Product.

Like it or detest it… You can’t simply dismiss that popup!

Making a popup project is the simplest approach to capture your visitors’ interest and convert more of your site visits into affiliate clients.

OptinMonster has over 50 pre-built design styles to help you make the best recommendation for your affiliate product.

From there, we offer a variety of targeting rules and project kickoffs to ensure you’re showing the right message to the right people at precisely the right time in their client journey. In fact, Top 6 Electronic employed this exact method to improve their affiliate income by 30%.

They created a website about vehicle sittings to help parents choose the best one for their child. When the viewer leaves this website, the following project will almost probably appear on their screen:
Project Top6 is being used to boost affiliate sales. This little initiative had a huge impact. It piqued the audience’s interest and directed them to the affiliate item web page.

b) Show Projects When Users Are More Likely to Purchase

Targeting is extremely crucial in popup projects. You can present a popup project to the right users at the right moment with the right targeting. For example, research show that the optimal time to display a popup is when a user is about to leave your website.

With OptinMonster’s Exit Intent technology, you can display a popup promoting an affiliate offer at the exact moment your users are about to depart.

Our customers receive great results when they combine Exit-Intent with Page-Level Targeting. You can create affiliate offers for certain web pages on your website using page-level targeting. As a result, when a site visitor reads one of your posts, you can display them a project that highlights the EXACT affiliate item you are promoting in that article.

Because the offer you promote as part of this project is highly targeted, it is more likely to convert than a standard project.

FlyWheel, a WordPress holding business, increased interaction by 660% by using page-level targeting.

Take, for example, the workout company Crossrope. By collecting deserting traffic with exit-intent popups, they increased their email list by almost 900%.