What Is an Affiliate Marketer?
An affiliate marketer is someone who promotes another company's (or multiple companies’) products or services and earns commissions from the results they generate. Like sales or sign-ups.
The commission structure can vary. But it’s typically based on a percentage of the sale price. Or is a fixed amount per lead.
An affiliate marketer’s usual tasks include:
- Creating content to attract customers
- Building and maintaining an audience interested in their content
- Promoting products through blog posts, social media, and email
- Monitoring performance to improve strategies and boost sales
- Communicating with brands and/or affiliate platforms
- Following consumer trends
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate marketing usually involves joining an affiliate program to promote products or services on your own site. And when someone clicks or completes an action via your affiliate link, you earn a commission.
You can promote brands directly in your content by recommending them. Like Wirecutter does:
How do merchants track the results affiliate marketers drive?
It typically involves providing links that contain unique codes to each affiliate marketer. So the brands can tell which affiliate marketer should get the commission.
And because every affiliate program is different, you could earn a percentage of each sale, a flat fee per sale, a monthly amount for each active user you refer, etc.
Some programs even pay for leads or email sign-ups. No purchase required.
For example, the Semrush affiliate program offers commissions for both sales and trial sign-ups:
What Are the Benefits of Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing offers a number of benefits:
- It’s low risk. Your main investment is time and effort in creating content and promoting affiliate offerings. It’s a very cost-effective way to start making money online.
- It lets you earn passive income. Once you've set up your affiliate marketing system, it can generate income 24/7. Even while you sleep.
- It’s flexible. Affiliate marketing allows you to work on your own terms. You can choose your niche, what you promote, and your work schedule.
How to Become an Affiliate Marketer in 7 Steps
How do you become an affiliate marketer? Follow these seven simple steps.
1. Choose a Profitable Niche
A niche is a specific market segment. And the people within it typically share preferences, interests, and needs.
The niche you choose should ideally have high user interest and the potential for profit.
To find a good niche, first identify what you’re passionate about and knowledgeable in. And then verify that the broader market presents a profitable opportunity.
Use Semrush’s Market Explorer for this.
Select “Analyze Category,” make a selection from the drop-down, and click “Research a market.”
Review the “Service Addressable Market” data to see how many people in the market are actively ready and able to buy. And the “Market Traffic” data to see how many monthly visits the websites in this market get.
In this case, we can see this market has good potential.
From here, look for more focused niches using the Keyword Magic Tool.
Start by entering a broad keyword related to the market you’ve selected and click “Search.”
You’ll get a list of related keywords. But look to the keyword groups on the left-hand side and select the “By volume” tab.
These represent potential niche ideas. And they’re ordered by which ones get the highest number of searches in search engines each month—a good indicator of popularity.
Lastly, consider if the niche has products or services that can be easily monetized. Which is key for being a successful affiliate marketer.
2. Research Your Target Audience
Your target audience is the specific group of people most likely to buy what you're promoting. And understanding them helps you choose the right offerings to promote and content to create.
That can translate to more conversions and higher earnings.
You can start researching your target audience by analyzing your competitors’ target audiences.
Open One2Target, enter up to five rival domains, and click “Analyze.”
You’ll get a complete overview of their collective audience’s demographics, socioeconomics, and online behavior.
Browse the tabs, analyze the data, and use these insights to define your own target audience.
Let’s say you’re in the fitness niche and your target audience is health-conscious women aged 30-45 who want to lose weight through home workouts.
You can use that information to come up with topic ideas and select relevant affiliate programs.
3. Build a Platform
You now need to choose a platform (a blog, an Instagram account, a YouTube channel, etc.) where you’ll promote products and/or services online.
And where you choose to create content is important.
It should be a platform you’re comfortable with. And align with your niche and where your target audience hangs out to ensure you make the greatest impact.
Here are some popular platforms and the types of niches they suit best:
- Blogs: Ideal for in-depth product reviews and comparisons. Great for tech, finance, and lifestyle niches as well.
- YouTube: Perfect for visual demonstrations. Works well for beauty, gaming, and DIY niches.
- Instagram: Suits visually driven niches related to fashion, travel, and food.
- TikTok: Best for quick tips and trends. Fits well with fitness, comedy, and music niches.
- Pinterest: Excellent for visual inspiration. Ideal for home decor, craft, and cooking niches.
- Podcasts: Great for long-form discussions. Suits self-improvement, business, and education niches.
If you’re not sure, revisit behavioral data in One2Target to see what your audience prefers.
4. Join Affiliate Programs
An affiliate program is the partnership between the company (or companies) and the affiliate marketer (or marketers). And you need to be a part of some type of program to be an affiliate marketer.
These programs provide the structure and payment systems you need to succeed. And they typically have built-in affiliate marketing tools that make it easy to measure performance.
Consider the commission rates, available support, product/service quality, reputation, and payment terms when choosing a program.
Some popular affiliate programs and networks include:
- Amazon Associates: Great for a wide range of products
- CJ Affiliate: Suitable for tech and finance niches
- ShareASale: Ideal for various niches, including fashion and home goods
- Rakuten Marketing: Best for retail and ecommerce
- ClickBank: Perfect for digital products and online courses
- Awin: Excellent for European markets
- eBay Partner Network: For auction-based products
Start with one or two programs that align with your niche. It's better to focus on a few than spread yourself thin across too many.
5. Create Quality Content
Quality content is clear, valuable, and actionable. It solves problems, answers questions, and helps your audience make informed decisions.
Over time, that builds trust and authority.
And it makes your audience more likely to act on your recommendations. Which translates to higher conversions and more affiliate sales.
High-quality affiliate content typically includes honest product reviews and recommendations, clear explanations, and practical use cases.
Here are a few tips for creating great affiliate content for any niche:
- Know your audience. Research their pain points and needs.
- Do your homework. Test products yourself or gather detailed information from reliable sources.
- Be specific. Use concrete examples and data to back up your claims.
- Show—don't tell. Include screenshots, videos, or step-by-step tutorials.
- Update regularly. Keep your content fresh with the latest product information and industry trends.
And if you’re writing long-from content to promote products and services, use the SEO Writing Assistant.
The tool will analyze your writing in real-time. And provide tips on readability, originality, tone of voice, and SEO.
It also has Google Docs, WordPress, and Microsoft Word add-ons to help you analyze and improve your content wherever you write.
6. Drive Traffic to Your Platform(s)
Once your affiliate content is live, you need to get people to your website, blog, or social media profiles. Because you need visitors to start earning commissions.
If you’re primarily using social media, those platforms will be where most of your visitors come from.
So, work to grow your followers and increase your visibility through social media SEO practices like including keywords in your content, using relevant hashtags, and adding captions to videos.
For blogs and websites, the main ways you can drive traffic include:
- Organic: Unpaid traffic from search engines. Optimize your content for SEO to rank higher in Google.
- Paid: Traffic from ads on platforms like Google or Facebook. This costs money in addition to what it takes to create the ads, but it can deliver quick results.
- Referral: Visitors from other websites linking to yours. Build relationships with other site owners for backlinks (links on their sites that point to your site).
- Social: Traffic from social media platforms. Share valuable content and engage with your followers regularly.
- Email: Visitors from your email list. Build a subscriber list and send them targeted campaigns and exclusive content.
Consider diversifying your traffic sources based on what you learned in step two about where your audience hangs out.
And no matter which platforms or channels you choose, always create high-quality, relevant, and up-to-date material that resonates with your audience. And encourages them to take action.
7. Monitor Performance & Refine Your Strategy
Tracking your affiliate marketing performance shows you what's working (and what's not). To help you make strategic changes.
Go beyond the metrics that determine your commissions. And track things like website conversion rates, social media engagement rates, and click-through rates (CTRs) from paid ads.
Then, use this data to improve your tactics.
For example:
- See a drop in your paid advertising CTR? Test new calls to action in your ad copy.
- High bounce rate on blog posts? Work on writing more captivating introductions.
- Low website conversion rate? Try promoting different products or more prominently featuring your email sign-up form.
Small tweaks can lead to big gains. So, keep testing and refining to boost your results.
Can You Make a Living as an Affiliate Marketer?
Affiliate marketers earn an average of about $8,000 per month, according to a survey from Authority Hacker.
Top affiliate marketers can earn six or even seven figures annually. While beginners may struggle to make their first sale at first.
But your actual earnings can vary widely. It depends on your niche, platform(s), and promotional skills.
Still, affiliate marketing is a viable way to make a living when you consider how comfortable people have become with shopping online.
Affiliate marketing isn't going anywhere. But success requires hard work, strategy, and adaptability.
Become an Affiliate Marketer Today
Jumping into affiliate marketing is simpler than you might expect.
The key is to start with a niche you're passionate about.
Not sure where to begin?
Use Market Explorer to find niches with good potential. Then, start creating content and promoting products or services.
The sooner you begin, the faster you'll learn and grow.