Tips on How to Be Successful At Affiliate Marketing

Tips For How To Be Successful At Affiliate Marketing

*This post may contain affiliate links. Please see my disclosure.

Anyone who wants to have a profitable blog usually at some point wants to try affiliate marketing. And to be able to make an income from this you have to know how to be successful at affiliate marketing.


To be able to be successful at affiliate marketing there are some key things you need to do.

In this post we will go over some of the main things that are required for any blogger to do in order to be successful at affiliate marketing.


What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is where you are payed a commission when you help send customers to businesses and they purchase either a good or service from that business.

Affiliate marketing can be one of the fastest and easiest ways to start making a profit from your blog. You don’t have to worry about keeping a stock of products or the customer service that is required by anyone offering something for sale.

All you have to do is get a buyer to a seller. I mean in all reality it is a bit more to it than buyer to the seller, but to sum it up that is what you are doing.

If you want to get the nitty gritty on Affiliate Marketing for Beginners go ahead and check out my blog post just for that:


Affiliate Marketing 101: Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Tips For Being Successful At Affiliate Marketing


How to be successful at affiliate marketing

Learn How to Take Baby Steps

I know that video you watched or that ebook you got was all “OMG MAKE ALL THE MONEY TOMORROW”. They lied, I’m sorry.

To be successful at affiliate marketing you have to be patient, willing to learn from mistakes and most of all, willing to take baby steps.

It might take you over 6 months to get that first sale, and that’s ok! You are not a failure because you didn’t make some 24 hour goal someone who has been doing this for years set for you.

After the first sale, it will get easier. You will start making faster progress, but it’s not going to be anything those clickbait headlines promised you.

Make Sure You Get An Email List Going

Being successful at affiliate marketing is not as easy as throwing up a website, putting affiliate links all over it, and watching the money start flowing in.

One of the biggest contributors to affiliate marketers being successful is their email list.

However many times when people just start off with affiliate marketing they just try to get people to click through their affiliate links. This is not the way to go about affiliate marketing if you want to be successful.

Once you send a person off your site, that’s it, they are gone.


Now how much better do you think it would be if you were able to keep in contact with some of those people you were about to away? You would probably be able to get a conversion at some point in time, and maybe even repeat conversions.

That sounds much better doesn’t it?

So make sure you get one going right away and get your email list started.

If you don’t already have an email list going I recommend using MailerLite. You can use them for free up to 1,000 subscribers or 12,000 emails per month. So that can easily get you going with your email list without having to make any big investment.

Recommended Reading

Opt-In Freebie Ideas to Help Grow Your Mailing List

Make Sure You Have Tried The Products

If you want to make sure you aren’t successful at affiliate marketing then the best way to do this is to loose the trust of your audience.

And how can you do that?

By trying to shill anything and everything at them.

What would happen if you promote something to your readers and subscribers that ended up causing harm to them?

You will loose their trust, and it will make it very hard for you to be successful at affiliate marketing.

Promote products or services that you have used and love.


It is also going to be kind of hard to sell a product you hated using or have never even used at all.

How are you going to genuinely explain the benefits and why the product or service would be good for anyone if you have never used it?

Provide Your Readers/Subscribers With Value

Being successful at affiliate marketing does not consist of just putting links all over and making money.

Sure it used to be that way back when search engines weren’t using AI and there wasn’t tons of content all over the internet.

Affiliate marketers have to change with the times, and that requires providing value to your readers and subscribers.

Keep Creating Consistent Content

This kind of goes with the providing value. You have to create content consistently to be successful at affiliate marketing.

I’m sorry to break it to you, but there is no such thing as truly passive income.

To get a return out of anything in life you have to nurture it and contribute to the growth. And that even applies to income from affiliate marketing.

Don’t Get Distracted

It is easy to get distracted with all the information out there about how to make money blogging and how to make money online.

There are tons of courses, ebooks, case studies, and even more bombarding you day in and day out.


With all of this available and in your face it’s easy to keep trying tons of different things to try to make something work.

But what will get you the most results is to keep up with consistency, instead of spreading yourself thin trying to get everything under the sun to work all at once.

Instead of trying to do all of the social media platforms just pick one or two and concentrate on those.

Instead of trying to cover every topic you can think of in your niche, pick one or two and create some awesome content around those and don’t move on to another topic until you have covered everything you can.

Track Your Links

If you don’t track your affiliate links that people click you are going to have no idea what is working and what isn’t.

When you track your affiliate links you are giving yourself the ability to optimize your marketing strategies and know what is working best.

One of the best ways I like to track my links is to use a tracker and cloaker. This way instead of having some big ugly affiliate link I can make a unique link that looks nice and I can see how many clicks it gets.


Many of these come with great ways to look at reporting and allow you to test different strategies with your links.

My two favorite link tracker/cloakers are Thirsty Affiliates and Easy Affiliate Links.

Test Out Different Things

Didn’t I say be consistent and don’t get distracted? Yup!

But now I’m saying you should test different things? Yup!

But Hold Up! I am not saying when you’re doing great on Instagram to throw everything out the window and start up trying to get Facebook going.

When I say test out different things, that just means when you’re doing great with one thing, like Instagram, change up something and see if it performs better.

While doing this testing do not stop what you were doing. You are just going to be trying out something a bit different from what you are currently doing, this is what they call split testing.


Successful affiliate marketers are constantly doing A/B split tests, and then when they find task B performs better than A, then they implement B and start over split testing by tweaking their new process a bit more.

You want to always be improving as a affiliate marketer, and split testing helps you with that.

Niel Patel has some great ideas for split testing you can try out here.

Make Your Links Stand Out

You can’t expect many clicks on your affiliate links if your links don’t stand out.

Make sure that your links are a different color from your standard texts.

And for links that you really want clicks on, make them bold or even a brighter color than your normal links.

So if you want more clicks, make your links obvious to your readers.



Bonus Affiliate Marketing Tip:

Learn From The Experts

One of the best things you can do for increasing your income from affiliate marketing is to learn from the experts.

Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is an awesome course that shows you how Michelle from Making Sense of Cents earns well over $50,000 a month with affiliate marketing.

This course features 6 modules that give you over 30 lessons and over 20 worksheets, along with bonuses and access to an extremely helpful Facebook group that is only for students of the course.

You can check out Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing here.


Now What?

Now that you have some tips on how to be successful with affiliate marketing, what to do now?

If you haven’t started your blog yet, that’s the first thing you need to do to get going. Just follow my step by step guide to get your new blog going:

How to Start A WordPress Blog with SiteGround

If you’re new to blogging or just need some affiliate programs to join, go ahead and check out the following blog post to find some affiliate programs you can start using to make money blogging.

Best Affiliate Programs for New Bloggers
The Best Recurring Affiliate Programs for Bloggers

After you have some programs to promote you need to go out there and start promoting your affiliate links.

Check out some great ways that can get you up and running promoting your affiliate links:

How to Promote Affiliate Links

Tips on How to Be Successful at Affiliate Marketing


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