What is affiliate marketing? And how to get started with affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a potent lever to earn consistent, growing residual income with a very high Lever Rank of 85.
Affiliate marketing is a potent business model to leverage to earn consistent, growing residual income and is one of our favorite business models on Levered Income.
- Online Business
- Unlimited Residual Income Potential
- Inexpensive to Start
- Inexpensive to Operate
- Plenty of Tools to Leverage Work Units
- Intense Initial Effort
- Learning Curve
- Time to Earning Ramp
In terms of levers (as far as we define it here on Levered Income), affiliate marketing is a powerful lever for earning residual income over a long period. Affiliate marketing’s lever has a compounding effect on your time, meaning that work you have done in the past continues to earn for you in the future. Let’s answer what is affiliate marketing and how to get started making more money.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
So, what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate Marketing is primarily lead generation. As an affiliate of a company, you act as an outside sales force, bringing sales leads to the company you are affiliated with and ultimately converting these sales leads into customers. You typically receive compensation from these affiliated companies when these sales leads purchase a service or product from your affiliated company.
Although affiliate marketing is primarily considered an “online” business, it started “offline” through referral agreements between businesses or service providers. A simple example of a service provider referral fee would be a Family Law Attorney recommending a Personal Injury Lawyer and receiving a “referral fee” for the referral.
In the online world (our focus here on Levered Income), affiliate marketing is primarily done via an online portal with an audience (blog, website, social media account), referring via website “links” to a company that pays you a commission for purchases your audience makes from the company you are affiliated with. What is affiliate marketing? Here is a simple graphic of the process:
Your Audience
Notice how often I use the word “audience” in the above paragraph.
What is affiliate marketing? Your audience. Your audience is critical to your success. It doesn’t matter if you are a business, a performance group, or a social media influencer – your audience is your customer and vice versa.
As an entertainment producer of live entertainment productions, I am obsessed with audience response. It is an instant gauge of whether or not your show is being enjoyed by your audience (i.e., do they clap or not?). If they don’t clap or have some intended emotional reaction, you have lost your audience (in that case, no one will buy tickets, and you will be out of business shortly).
To acquire and keep an audience, you need to give them something of value. You need to inspire them, motivate them, and dazzle them. When I produce a show, I focus on knowing my audience first and then building a show that tells the story I want to tell them. I am always drawn back to a branding video I made for one of my entertainment companies a few years back:
Helping People
Successful affiliate marketing is more than just trying to “sell” someone or generating link “clicks” and hoping someone buys something. It is about adding value and helping people. You must believe that the information or experience you share with your audience helps them. You should only affiliate your brand with companies you trust and products you believe in.
The concept of a business actually “helping people” is simple, but I think this “helping people” portion is where most businesses go wrong. Apple Computer (actually just “Apple” now) was built on simplifying the barriers between you and your imagination. Successful businesses are formed to fill a “need,” so make sure that whatever you choose to do (whether it be letting people know the best diapers for sensitive skin, the best cat litter, or the best exercise ball), your goal (and the answer to “what is affiliate marketing”) is to help someone.
If you truly believe that what you are doing is helping someone, you are energized every day. Money and success will follow.
What is Affiliate Marketing and How to Get Started?
So, after a brief overview of “what is affiliate marketing,” how to start earning money with affiliate marketing. Here is an overview of what you will need to start your affiliate marketing business:
Training
The foundation of knowing what steps to take to start your business successfully. Training is an investment in yourself. Wealthy Affiliate has training programs to get you started for free.
Learn how to get your business rolling with the Affiliate Bootcamp Training Course from Wealthy Affiliate.
Get access to Bootcamp Core Training Level 1 for free!
Domain Name
A domain name is your digital address on the internet. A domain name reflects your brand and is your storefront on the internet. Check out Brandgy for more information on domains and branding. I use GoDaddy and Namecheap as the registrar for all our domain names.
Buy a domain name from one of the world's top registrars for as low as 88 cents, and put your business online today!
Web Hosting
Web hosting is where you build your website and host your files in the cloud for the world to access. You create your website on top of the foundation that supports your storefront. Currently, I use Namecheap for dedicated servers for larger, more complex websites, Wealthy Affiliate for all of my affiliate websites, and Amazon Web Services for large web applications and higher-traffic websites.
Website
Your website can be considered the actual building you construct on your digital real estate (Domain name) and digital foundation (Web Hosting).
Content
This is your “show.” It is what you build for your audience to enjoy and to hear what you have to say.
Audience
These are your customers. Take care of them, and they will take care of you.
Training is the Foundation of Success.
I have built several websites, including blogs, e-commerce websites, web applications, SaaS solutions, and service-oriented websites.
Even with my online business experience, I realized from the beginning that I needed to leverage other experts’ years of experience in the specific area to succeed (this applies to everything I do). I am focused on creating multiple diversified income streams; to achieve this, I need to understand “what is affiliate marketing” and get up and running as quickly as possible. I seek the maximum way to leverage my time into the maximum return.
As an elite-level coach, I know the importance of training. I have spent years perfecting processes that molded performers into elite-level athletes and entertainers. I wanted to find a comprehensive training program that would take me step by step through building a successful affiliate marketing business. I need to have a deep understanding of what is affiliate marketing, the process of building a successful affiliate marketing business, and it needs to be both repeatable and scalable.
I seek to leverage the power of an online business and affiliate marketing into something that will generate a consistent 6-figure income stream.
Cost does not equal quality. I firmly believe in the adage, “you get what you pay for.” Online businesses offer the business owner the ability to scale the business size for minimal cost. In my mind, a successful affiliate training program would have a lot of users and offer that training at a reasonable cost (since so many people are using it because it works – kind of a “chicken-egg” thing).
Online Businesses Tend to be Complex for No Good Reason.
In general, like everything technology-oriented, complexity is layered on top of a simple concept (affiliate marketing) with no real return for the complexity and a lot of time-wasting. Affiliate marketing is creating stuff for your audience. Stuff to help them, entertain them, or enjoy reading, watching, and experiencing. Answering “what is affiliate marketing” is simple – it is not fiddling with websites or something complicated.
In all of my research into what is affiliate marketing and how to get started, I came across the all-in-1 platform that I use today for my affiliate marketing websites, Wealthy Affiliate.
Wealthy Affiliate is the top affiliate marketing platform and provides courses, hosting, domains, and support all in one place. Join for free today!
I first signed up Wealthy Affiliate because of the training (it is free for the first multi-video training courses). As I dove into the training, I was very impressed with the quality of the production value of the platform and training videos (yes, I know the entertainment producer is coming out here) and the step-by-step nature of the affiliate marketing training process.
Everything in One Place
As I went through the free video training, I realized that Wealthy Affiliate is a complete platform for affiliate marketers, providing everything you need in ONE place with ONE login! I firmly believe in simplicity (I wear jeans and a black t-shirt every day), and the ability to entirely control your business in one area is fantastic. From my one Wealthy Affiliate login, I can:
- Buy Domains
- Host my Websites
- Build my Websites
- Monitor the Health of My Websites
- Research Keywords
- Write Website Content and Push it to my Affiliate Marketing Websites
- Build my Audience
And most importantly – get the training needed to do all of the above to build a successful affiliate marketing business.
Typically, you need to have accounts at multiple service providers to do the same things, and I still need to do this for my other web applications and online businesses.
This is my old workflow before Wealthy Affiliate:
- Log into my website hosting provider and create an account for the new website (I have dedicated servers with Namecheap and also use Amazon Web Services for more extensive applications).
- Log into Namecheap (my domain registrar) to update the name servers to point to the new website account I made in step 1. Note: I still use Namecheap and GoDaddy as I have hundreds of domain names registered there and have a workflow already established. The domain privacy automatically added with Wealthy Affiliate does make it a better deal than GoDaddy – even with my discount domain subscription with GoDaddy.
- Log into cPanel on the web server and install WordPress. (I used WordPress whenever possible – it is free, easy to use, and there is tons of online support).
- Log into the WordPress admin area and install my WordPress theme of choice (I use Elegant Themes – they are paid themes, but I like the extra functionality; they have free training, great support, and update their themes frequently (VERY IMPORTANT). It saves me a lot of time. I have a developer license with them (very inexpensive, and I have unlimited access to use all of the themes). You can check out Elegant Themes here.
We use DIVI on all of our WordPress websites.
Why?
DIVI is the most widely used premium WordPress theme in the world and makes it possible to design beautiful websites visually - without ever touching a single line of code.
- Log into my keyword research platform and do keyword research about articles and content I am interested in creating.
- Create content for the website (in this example, just a written article).
- Log into my stock photo account and buy licenses for images used in the article. (Wealthy Affiliate has a library of free photos for members.)
- Log back into the WordPress website’s admin area and post the article.
This is just a quick overview, and I left out a lot of other items, such as updating MX records for mail servers in Google, adding Google analytics, etc., etc. The point is the power of one login and focus on the task at hand. Even after doing this for many years, I still forget a step and have to go back and fix something. One login simplifies everything for me, and I can focus on “what is affiliate marketing” – my audience, not my website infrastructure.
What is Affiliate Marketing and How to Get Started – Final Thoughts
What is affiliate marketing, and how to get started? If you are starting in affiliate marketing or want to simplify your workflows, you can sign up for Wealthy Affiliate for free HERE. You can take the training course and build and host a website for free. I am frequently on the Wealthy Affiliate platform building my affiliate websites, so feel free to drop me a line anytime if you have any questions about getting started with Wealthy Affiliate.
Sign Up for a Free Wealthy Affiliate account and get a free beginner website and hosting package.
Also included for free is Level 1 core training and the Jaaxy keyword research tool starter package.
I hope you enjoyed this article on “what is affiliate marketing” and how to get started.
