6 Affiliate Marketing Hacks For Beginners

Affiliate marketing hacks help you to generate more passive income. Many aspiring internet entrepreneurs seem to be intrigued by the idea of passive income, making money while they nap.

And the most popular source of this glorified type of income is Affiliate Marketing.

A significant number of people decide to join the bandwagon of affiliate marketers on the internet daily because of the unstoppable growth of the industry.

Here’s a statistic that will draw anyone into affiliate marketing: Jason Stone, an affiliate marketer, made $7 million in affiliate marketing revenue in a single year. Whoa! Here are some more examples of successful affiliate websites.

Additionally, annual affiliate marketing spending is projected to hit the $6.8 billion mark.

So you have decided to join the industry, but you feel it’s too saturated, and it’s going to be hard to find your footing in the affiliate marketing world. 

Chill, there’s still room for anyone provided they do it right, and we will cover how.

This is no quick way or shortcut to making it overnight, and this requires hard work and execution.

Best Affiliate Marketing Hacks

Below are unique affiliate marketing hacks that you can apply to generate progressive results in affiliate marketing:

Affiliate Marketing Hack #1- Put On Your Detective Hat

Your choice of a niche can make or break you! 

It is the part a lot of aspiring affiliate marketers develop a migraine on. 

And unfortunately, the most popular advice on picking a niche is to choose your passion, well here’s the hard truth: Your passion won’t necessarily bring you money, ouch! 

Affiliate marketing is not a passion project, it’s a money-making process. Is affiliate marketing legit? The answer is yes, it is a proven way to earn commissions by promoting products.

Of course, you shouldn’t go for something you can’t bear to talk about because it makes tons of money. 

You would end picking something you are interested in along the way.

So let’s reverse engineer the usual process, instead of sitting down and listing down all your interests and passions and see how you can monetize it, you should play detective.

Let’s get our detective mode on!

Step 1: Go on Flippa just sold, a place to buy and sell websites; this can give us insights into sites that are most valuable. This way, you can see the niches that are doing well.

Filter the websites by the most profitable and set the monthly income to $1,000-$20,000.

Flippa will show you website listings that are the most profitable, and you can select any of the broad niches that interest you at random, don’t sweat it, you can always change it later after going through the next steps.

Step 2: Go to the top two affiliate programs for physical and digital products to narrow down your niche. 

Related: 25 Best Affiliate Marketing Programs

Amazon= Physical Products

Clickbanks= Digital Products

Search the broad niche on Amazon and Clickbanks and go to their sub-niches. 

On Amazon lookout for categories with the Best Seller Rank:

And on Clickbank, look out for the niches with the most products.

Following this approach doesn’t just feed you with the theoretical idea of these niches; you get to see a preview of what you are going to promote to your audience.

Finally, do keyword research on your niche using Google trends.

It’s essential you do a background check on the relevant keywords related to your niche. You can be certain of driving traffic to your site and give you an idea of the type of products you can promote to your audience.

Affiliate Marketing Hack #2- Be A Guinea Pig

People buy experiences, not features. The most effective way to gain instant trust and attract an audience is to test these products and share your experiences.

People love unbiased reviews; therefore, you have to differentiate yourself from a salesperson.

Related: Best Affiliate Marketing Plugins For WordPress

Your job is not to sing the countless praises of why a certain product should be used, instead illustrate why this is beneficial for them.

Of course, you won’t be able to go through every single product you promote in the future, but as a beginner, this is content that catches the eye and quickly sets you apart.

Because by being a guinea pig, you are focused on being more informative than promotional, and people appreciate that.

People don’t want to be told to buy something they want to know the benefit of purchasing that certain thing.

Don’t rely on content that you can copy and tweak to sound like yours; instead, you should create content that’s worthy of being copied.

Here’s an example of a successful personal blog affiliate marketer: Just a girl and her blog, one of her top content is titled: “Before and after the home tour: Two and a half years later.”

This right here is exclusive content, and the post contained a lot of affiliate links to the products used in the process of designing her home.

So let’s say you are in the finance niche, and you are an affiliate for Freshbooks, you can create content titled: I used Freshbooks to track my finances: This was my experience! Or 

“This tool changed my budgeting habits”.

Always recommend not sell!

Affiliate Marketing Hack #3- Leverage Pinterest

Pinterest is currently an underdog people are sleeping on, and it is more impactful than you think. There are more than 2 billion searches on Pinterest every month, and 87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest.

Using Pinterest as a beginner is one of the fastest ways to gain traffic and promote products. 

Because let’s face it, gaining organic traffic from Google is getting more complicated day by day, and there’s just too much competition. 

However, with Pinterest, you stand a greater chance of building an audience.

For example, a successful affiliate site called: “What moms love” gets most of their traffic from Pinterest with over 6.4 million monthly views over all their pins.

Plus, people who go on Pinterest are ready to spend money as shopping is a top priority for 48% of Pinterest users.

You might be tempted to just direct people to Amazon directly from Pinterest, which might work, but it isn’t useful, especially for a beginner. 

Direct pinners to content that will help you establish trust and eventually lead to sales from your affiliate links.

Create roundup contents plus the guinea pig content hack to open the door for opportunities.

And remember their covers on Pinterest judge books; the higher the quality of your images, the better because 600 million of Pinterest’s monthly searches are visual.

You have to be creative with your marketing strategy, don’t go ahead and spam people with countless promotional offers, you will lose pinners trust ( yeah that’s the name for Pinterest users).

Affiliate Marketing Hack #4- Promote Discounted Products

Trying to get your footing in a saturated market can be extremely difficult, you need an extra edge to give you an advantage.

Everyone loves an opportunity to save; as a beginner, one of the best ways to encourage people to use your affiliate links is through the provision of discounts.

Related: 25 Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies To Earn More Money

A survey revealed that 83% of respondents said they were “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to click an ad offering a discount or promotion.

Here’s an example from a well-known affiliate site: “Who is hosting this“, they have a section solely dedicated to discounted product deals.

Amazon displays the best deals and discounts on their site, and you can promote those products.

Affiliate Marketing Hack #5- Keep It Professional

Stay away from the cheesy stereotypical affiliate marketing website designs.

Don’t let your website be one of those cliche copy and paste affiliate marketing sites that are just looking out to desperately earn commissions.

You want your website to scream authority, professional, and quality content.

Please keep it clean and simple. Don’t spam your website with banner ads all over and promotional links that don’t give content a place to breathe.

Be honest, how long do you last on those types of websites, and do you ever intend going back to that website? 

It’s a no brainer, nope. Those websites give me a headache, and honestly, I don’t take anything seriously; it feels spammy and salesy.

Most successful affiliate websites look professional and credible. For example, take a look at Home Grounds, a coffee affiliate site:

It’s clean, easy to navigate, and professional.

Affiliate Marketing Hack #6- Platform Hack: Create Videos

Do you know the highest-earning YouTuber is an eight-year-old toy reviewer named Ryan Kaji? Crazy, I know, he basically unboxes toys and talks about them.

I don’t think that level of success could have been achievable online by a child of his age, if not through videos. What’s my point? 

People love watching videos more than reading text-based content, imagine Ryan Kaji only owning a blog, that wouldn’t really have gone well for obvious reasons.

In fact, 59% of executives say they would rather watch a video than reading text.

Making videos is not a common approach taken by affiliate marketers; you can stand out with posting videos.

According to Hubspot, 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by video.

In the affiliate marketing world, blogging, email marketing, and ads are popular because the idea of making videos can be intimidating, time-consuming, and expensive.

Related: Top Benefits of Blogging

However, video is ruling the content marketing world, as 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.

Sure, getting traffic on your YouTube channel is no day’s work, you should promote your videos alongside your posts across all social media networks.

Related: How To Start A YouTube Channel

Create the video format of your blog posts; that way, your consumers can digest content in any form.

A great example will be from Location Rebel; almost every blog post on the site has its video format.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is not a rich quick scheme or a completely passive income, and it requires work and activity.

These hacks will help you stand out in this saturated market, and quickly disassociate you from the plenty of wannabes out there that get off the radar before even getting started.

And with that, go make waves in the affiliate marketing industry.