FREELANCE

How to Make $2000 a Month through Affiliate Marketing

How to find, market, and sell products for major profits

How does an extra $2000 a month sound to you? How about $5000? No more need to go to work groggy from the six hours of sleep you got last night. No more need to be pushed about by your boss. And no more need to constantly stress about whether you will make it around till the next payday. With affiliate marketing, you can make a great living from the comfort of your very own sofa, and all you need is a computer and internet access.

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that the amount of money you make is entirely up to you. The more you work, and market the products, the more you will make. This amount of effort is the difference between a small side hustle and a new full-time job.

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is the process of marketing and selling other companies' products. Once you manage to sell the product you get a commission, which is usually a percentage cut of the actual product's price. This is a great business model for those who want to start making money on the internet, but don’t know where to start. As it is a simple, free, and lucrative way of earning money.

The first step you will want to take to become an affiliate marketer is to choose your affiliate program, which will be the network through which you are selling. They determine what types of products you can sell, which is important if you focus on a specific niche. They also determine how big your commission is, as some networks offer bigger commission rates than others.

The networks offering better profit margins, however, also typically require you to have already existing and well-established traffic to your products. This is why for beginners I recommend using the affiliate network, amazon associates. Even though they don’t offer the largest percentage of commission, there are no entry requirements, and they have a massive inventory of products to market.

If you want to level up in affiliate networks, here are a few things that are good to keep in mind.

Finding your affiliate program.

There are plenty of horror stories about affiliate programs and networks, many relating to illegal organizations or pyramid schemes. This ends up making a lot of people wary of joining these programs.

It’s therefore important to know how to find a plan that offers high-quality products that you can readily endorse. Do not fret, as the growing number of wealthy and successful affiliate marketers proves that there are reliable and quality affiliate programs out there. You just have to make sure you’re looking in the right place.

How do you choose a good affiliate program? Here are some tips you may want to look over before choosing one:

It sells products you are interested in.

One of the best ways of knowing if this is the kind of program you wish to promote is if you are interested in purchasing the products it sells yourself. If that is the case, chances are, there are many others who are also interested in the same products.

Join ones that offer real and viable products.

How do you know this? Do some initial research. If possible, track down some members and customers and see if they gave any testimonials on the credibility of the program.

Be aware of the minimum quotas that you must fulfill or sales targets that are too hard to achieve.

Some affiliate programs impose prerequisites before you get your commissions. Just be sure that you are capable of attaining their requirements. A program that does not do this is Amazon associates, which is why I so strongly recommend it to all the beginners out there.

Be aware of the things that members are not happy about in a program.

Like with the ones mentioned above, you can do your research at discussion forums. If you know someone in a certain affiliate's program, there is no harm in questioning them about downsides that may be involved in the network. Knowing the kind of program you are getting yourself into will make anticipating and preventing any future problems you may encounter much easier.

Find ones that pay well.

Certain programs offer bigger commission checks than others, so look closely for ones with a higher percentage commission. Do not waste your time with programs that do not reward you substantially for your efforts.

The table below shows Amazon associates' commission in percentages for all the different categories. This can also help you narrow down which products you want to try and market online, as some pay better than others. Generally, products that are pricier, and therefore harder to sell, will have more generous commissions.

If you are using a different affiliate network to Amazon, you should be expecting higher percentages than the ones below. But this is just a good way to see what the entry rates are.

Selling your product

The next and probably most important step is to actually sell your product, and make money off of it. There are two main ways to do this, free or paid affiliate marketing, and I’ll talk about both of them.

Free

There are many ways to promote your product free of charge, and this is a great way to start your affiliate marketing journey, as it requires no initial costs. This also means that your profit margins will be very high, as you will be able to keep all the commission from your affiliate sales, instead of spending a portion of it on the ad campaign.

In the beginning, you are going to want to leverage everything you have got. This includes any level of social presence you may have online. If you have a decent-sized following on any social media app, you can use this to your advantage, by giving ‘recommendations’ to your followers for books or products you love.

Then you link the affiliate link to the product, and those who buy it will earn you a profit. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are all great platforms for this. I have even seen people have tremendous success using TikTok to promote certain affiliate products, so don’t be shy and try them all out.

If you are a member of any Facebook groups, you could post product recommendations into the group which specifically target the certain niche your Facebook group is in. For example, if you are in a Facebook group for aspiring chefs, you could post a recommendation mentioning some new cookbook you love. This is a great method as you know what all of these people are interested in, as well as what they would potentially buy.

You can also go a more personalized route, although I recommend being very careful with this. You can reach out to some contacts on your phone or email, and give them recommendations to certain products you think they might enjoy.

This method has both pros and cons, as knowing these people means you’d know exactly what type of product they might buy. Yet it can also come off as annoying if they know you are making a profit off of these recommendations, and you keep berating them. So tread lightly with this method.

Then there are also free blogs you could promote on, like Medium. If you are talking about something in your article which relates to one of your affiliate products, you can link it, and your readers who like it can buy it, earning you a profit.

For example, at this moment I could add a cheeky recommendation for some other sources I find helpful about this topic. One of my personal favorites is the book From Nothing by Ian Pribyl. It offers great information and resources for aspiring internet entrepreneurs and is what I can credit the majority of my freelancing success to.

See what I just did there ;).

I will make a commission if you buy this book, yes, yet I am also giving the reader something of value. It is a great book that I have read myself, relating to the topic at hand, and one that I truly highly recommend. This is also a key to affiliate marketing, which is that you need to give genuinely good recommendations or your followers will be turned off by your posts and stop following you.

Paid

Using paid marketing is a little more complicated as it will cut your commission check in half, decreasing your profit margins. Yet, for experienced marketers it is also much easier to scale with this method. That is however why I recommend newbies to start off with the free affiliate marketing strategies, and once you've gotten comfortable with those, then move on to the paid ones.

These include hosting online websites with products and then advertising the products. Or starting an online blog, and paying to make your blog articles and promotions rank highly in Google's search engine. Running ads on Instagram or Facebook is also a great way to get your products out there.

I truly advise anyone currently wishing they were in a more financially stable position, to give affiliate marketing a try. It’s not the unreachable fairy tale dream some people make it out to be. With just a bit of consistency, you’ll have your freelance business generating passive flows of income in no time. The fact that you can gain huge profits without any initial monetary investment is what makes this business model so special.

The more you work, the more you make. So go, and prove to yourself that you can succeed as an online entrepreneur.

On your marks… get set… AFFILIATE MARKET! ;)