How To Start Affiliate Marketing In 2024: A Beginner’s Guide

In this beginner’s guide, I’ll show you EXACTLY how to start affiliate marketing step by step.

I’m going to walk you through the same process I would follow if I had to start over again today.

Because right now, in [current_year] is the best time to start affiliate marketing because the cutting-edge AI tools I’ll show you have made the whole process easier than ever and way more streamlined.

That, and more people are buying stuff online than ever before. I bet even your grandma shops online now.

Hey, I’m Simon if you’re new here and I started affiliate marketing 10 years ago. Since then I’ve attracted tens of millions of people to my sites and generated 7-figures in income.

Long story short:

I quit my call centre job, moved to Bangkok and met my wife and now we enjoy life on our own terms – and that’s all thanks to affiliate marketing.

I’ve also had the privilege of helping thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs just like you launch successful and profitable affiliate marketing businesses.

I’m not going to cover what affiliate marketing is – you probably already know if you’re reading this guide right now – so there’s going to be no fluff, no filler.

We’re just going to dive right into the action steps you need to take to start affiliate marketing from scratch and turn your dream business into a reality.

So let’s get right into it.

How To Start Affiliate Marketing: Video Walkthrough

If you prefer to watch, I’ve created a step-by-step video which walks you through the entire process from start to finish. Otherwise, read on.

How To Start Affiliate Marketing In 7 Steps

Step 1: Clarify Your Why
Step 2: Choose Your Niche
Step 3: Launch Your Brand
Step 4: Create Your Content Plan
Step 5: Find Products To Promote
Step 6: Expand Your Traffic Sources
Step 7: Repeat

These are the exact steps I take every time I set up a new affiliate business.

Follow these 7 steps and in the next 30 minutes, you’ll have your website set up in a niche you genuinely enjoy, be making money promoting products you truly believe in and be the owner of a successful business you can be proud of.

We’ve got a lot of work to do, so let’s dive right in!

Step 1: Clarify Your Why 🎯

The first thing you need to do is clarify your why. Now, I thought about skipping this step because I know how much you’ll be itching to get into the practical how-to, but trust me, clarifying your why is absolutely crucial.

If we were sat in a coffee shop somewhere and you told me you wanted to get into affiliate marketing, the first thing I’d ask you is:

“Why? What’s your main motivation for doing this? Like, really?”

Is it to:

• Make $10k a month to support your family without worrying about bills or debt?
• Reach $100k a month so you can live and work anywhere and travel the world?
• Pursue your passion and wake up every day excited to do what you love and get paid for it?

What do you want your online business to do for you? What are you hoping to get in return for your efforts?

Because knowing your big why is what’ll keep you going in the challenges and self-doubt. It’s the fuel that keeps you determined and moving forward.

So I thought it’d be helpful if I shared some of my answers to these questions to help you figure out what your answer might look like…

It sounds a bit cheesy but it’s true:

I started affiliate marketing because I needed to change my life.

You see, I always had this dream of living in Thailand and I’d been there a few times as a volunteer for 6 months at a time, but then my money would always run out and I’d be forced to fly back to the UK and get a call centre job.

I hated it. I hated answering to an incompetent boss, I hated having to ask permission to take time off and I knew I didn’t want to be chained to a desk wearing a headset for the rest of my life.

If I wanted to be in Thailand for good, if I wanted to live a life full of meaning and purpose where I could spend my time doing things that actually mattered, then I had to figure out a way to make money anytime and anywhere. I needed the freedom and flexibility to live life on my own terms.

And thank God, because that’s where I am now, thanks to the online income I’ve built.

So that’s my story. Now, it’s your turn. Share your big why with us in the comments!

Trust me, this is bigger than any strategy or tactic. It’s the driving force behind your future success.

Step 2: Choose Your Niche ⚽

So the next thing we’ll do when building our affiliate marketing website is choose a niche.

If we don’t have a niche then there’s nothing you can really do; you can’t build a website, you can’t promote products. This is really the first practical step in starting this business. You need to pick a niche.

Your affiliate marketing niche is the topic you’ll build your website around. Choosing a niche is super important because your niche determines:

• How much money you can make
• How much work you have to do
• How much you enjoy the process

Don’t worry though, because this is the fun part!

I really wish I were you right now. There’s nothing more exciting than finding your niche and planning your path to $10,000 per month and beyond.

Your niche could be anything! It could be raising kids, exotic pet care, competitive bodybuilding, fly fishing or even urban beekeeping or vintage typewriter collecting.

Here are 10 affiliate marketing niche ideas to help you get the ball rolling.

But you obviously don’t just want to pick any random niche…

You want to follow some kind of criteria for choosing the right one, and the most important thing to ask yourself is “Do I actually like this topic?”

So think about your interests, passions and expertise. What gets you excited? What do you love talking about or doing in your free time?

If you pick a niche you actually like then you’re going to be able to create content so much easier and enjoy the process so much more.

You’ll also be way more successful too because you probably already know a lot about the topic, what kind of stuff people in this topic buy and so on.

Here are a couple of niche site examples:

Expert Vagabond is a travel blog focusing on people who are interested in adventure travel, outdoor exploration and cultural experiences.

He promotes travel gear, flights, hotels and travel insurance and earns an affiliate commission every time someone clicks through any of his links and buys.

Another great example is Skyline Gardening:

This is a website in the gardening niche that offers practical tips and guides for designing and maintaining rooftop gardens.

They earn affiliate revenue by promoting urban gardening kits, plants, pots, and seeds on Amazon.

OK, let’s move on. I think you get the idea now of what a niche is.

So now what you want to do is write down a list of all of your hobbies and interests and then pick your favourite one.

You can pull up the note-taking app on your phone or grab a notebook and pen. And take as much as you need at this stage. There’s no rush and it’s important to land on a topic you actually enjoy.

Once you’ve done that, we’re ready to drill down and get more specific. You see, your niche can’t be a super broad topic like health and fitness.

I get a lot of beginners messaging me saying things like “Hey Simon, I want to get into the fashion niche” or “I want to start a travel blog”.

That’s great but it’s not specific enough. You have to niche down to find your niche within a niche.

How do you niche down?

I’ll show you.

The first thing you need to do is go to Wealthy Affiliate and create your free account.

If you don’t know, Wealthy Affiliate is an all-in-one training platform with website builders, AI content creators and tools and a community of over 2.6 million affiliate marketers from around the world.

You can test drive Wealthy Affiliate with a free Starter account which is pretty cool, so if you just want to try it out, though you’ll probably want to go Premium or Premium Plus+ at some point to unlock all of the AI tools and courses.

For $49 a month, you’ll get everything you could possibly need to launch your affiliate marketing business and scale up to $10k+ a month or more.

I’ve been using them for many years now and they just make the whole process super easy. They kinda consolidate everything for you in one place and show you how to build your business in a way that’s easy to follow.

Check out SUPER in-depth Wealthy Affiliate review to get the full scoop.

For now though, click on this link and enter your email.

Then enter your earnings goal, select Choose My Own Niche and type in your niche idea to find your niche within a niche idea.

Let’s say I want to go into the games niche. I’d type in “games” which’ll bring up a whole host of potential niche ideas I could run with:

I’ll go with board games. You can always change this later, so while you want to choose wisely, you want to try not to overthink it at the same time.

Simply choose one from the list or regenerate ideas until you find the right fit. Then hit Choose this Niche and click Continue.

So step 2 is choosing your niche and once you’ve done that we want to move on to step 3 which is building your website this niche.

Step 3: Build Your Website 🏗️

To build out your website you first need to come up with a brand name.

Your brand is going to be the name of your website and your online business going forward so you want to pick something that’s short, catchy and easy to remember.

The good news is with the help of AI, what used to take hours of brainstorming can now be done in a couple of minutes.

Here you can see I’m already getting a ton of really cool brand name ideas for my boardgame site:

Again, you can keep generating more ideas until you find something that fits.

Once you’ve done that, click the Finish & Build My Hub button and let Wealthy Affiliate’s AI build your very own custom-built website!

Congrats! You’re now officially up and running! 🥳

What used to take hours of coding and headaches can now be done at the click of a mouse.

This is your website “out of the box” and, as you can see, you’re basically starting with a blank canvas:

You can customise your website by:

• Choosing a theme
• Adding a logo
• Adding an About page
• Picking a font
• Choosing a colour scheme

This means logging into your website backend and getting familiar with WordPress.

If you hit customise you’ll see a ton of customisation options. You can change the font and heading size, add your logo, choose your colour scheme, change the layout and whatever you like to make it yours.

This can take some time, there’s a little bit of a learning curve in terms of how to publish posts, create pages, add images and all that stuff.

And this is where the Wealthy Affiliate training comes in. It’s going to walk you through how to do everything in an order that makes sense.

I recommend you go through it, lesson by lesson. It lays it all out step by step in a really easy-to-understand way. Also, feel to reach out to me and any of the other experts if you need any help along the way.

I’m in the members area every day helping people out so just DM me or leave me a message on my profile and I’ll help you out if you need.

Step 4: Create Your Content Plan 📝

Now you’ve got your website set up, the next step is to create content.

Through content creation, you can organically drive a ton of daily visitors to your site for free without any paid ads.

And it’s these site visitors who click your affiliate links and generate revenue for you.

You want to build out your site with content people will find helpful so that when they search Google for things related to your niche, your website will show up.

They consume your content, click on your affiliate links and buy stuff so you get paid.

We’re going to talk about finding relevant affiliate products you can promote on your site in the next step but for now, let’s dive into content planning.

Taking the time to sit down and plan out your content is crucial because, without it, you just end up creating whatever random content you feel like and that’s the digital equivalent of throwing sh*t at a wall and seeing what sticks.

With a solid content plan, there’s no guesswork and you only create content you know your target audience wants, where you’re answering questions people are actually asking.

And while this might seem like a lot of work, trust me, once you start seeing a few of your posts ranking on page 1 of Google and sending buyer-ready traffic your way, it’ll all be worth it.

I use Jaaxy to plan all my content. You can access Jaaxy from inside Wealthy Affiliate by clicking the Research tab in the top menu.

Then type in anything you think your target audience would search for:

As you can see, Jaaxy’s giving me a ton of keyword ideas – keywords are the questions or phrases people google. And under the Avg column, you can see how many times a keyword gets searched for on average per month.

And when you’re choosing which keywords to add to your content plan, you always want a nice mix of informational and transactional keywords.

Informational keywords are where you write general, helpful information-based posts.

For example, here are 4 informational keywords I could target on my board games website:

• Are puzzles good for your brain
• History of board games
• Are board games still popular
• Are board games good for you?

Transactional keywords are searches where people are likely to buy, so these are the best for generating sales.

Here are 4 transactional keyword examples:

• Best family board games
• Most popular board games
• Best board games for adults
• Where to buy Monopoly online

You can also get future content ideas from Google itself. Simply type in your main topic and see what questions come up in the “People Also Ask” sections.

Another place is a cool website I like to use called AnswerSocrates.com. Again, enter your topic and you’ll get a ton of keyword ideas you can put into Jaaxy to see the average monthly search numbers.

And if you want to make your life even easier, go to your Wealthy Affiliate Hub where you’ll see a ton of article ideas you can run with:

For example, if I look at Best Of/Top10 Ideas, I can choose one of these ideas and check the monthly search volume on Jaaxy.

Then, if I decide I want to write this article I can save it to My Writing Tasks and come back to it later.

content idea image

So use these tools to come up with a list of 5-10 keywords. Then, set a publishing schedule based on how much time you can realistically set aside.

And thanks to Wealthy Affiliate’s AI Article Designer, creating content is so much easier than it used to be. Let me show you how it works.

So from inside your Hub, go back to My Writing Tasks, select which post you want to write and hit Write Article.

my writing tasks image

This will take you to the AI Article Designer page where you enter your keyword, how long you want the content to be and any additional details you want to add.

article designer page image

For example, you might say you want the post to be written in a list format. Maybe you want your intro short and punchy. Or you can add any numbers and statistics you want included.

And when it comes to creating content, you always want to put yourself in your audience’s shoes.

Put them first. Focus on helping them out as much as you can through your content and the traffic, sales and commissions and everything else will follow.

So once you’ve done that, click Create Content Outline and wait a minute while the AI does its thing.

outline image

As you can see, it’ll come up with a complete article outline for you. You can edit or delete certain sections if you like, add a new section and then click Next: Author Settings then Create With AI Author.

So right now, there are two AI authors to choose from and they’ll be adding more in the near future:

One is Professional Copywriter and the other is Conversational Blogger. You can check out their sample articles as well to get an idea of their different writing styles.

When you’re ready, hit Create Article and wait a couple of minutes and you’ll see the full article.

article image

Now, this content is 100% original and unique. And as you can see, it’s really good quality as well. But I would definitely recommend you go through it and give it the human touch.

You never want to simply copy and paste AI-generated content without checking it first.

Once you’ve gone through it and are happy with it, you can go ahead and publish it to your website!

You see? That was easy, wasn’t it?

Then you go through your list and do the same for each post. Before you know it, you’ll have 100 high-quality posts on your site that are ranking in Google and attracting traffic.

Now you’re ready to find products to promote and generate sales.

Step 5: Find Products To Promote 🛒

There are 550+ million products you can recommend to earn affiliate commissions. There’s sure to be a ton of relevant products and services you can promote, whatever niche you’re in.

And that’s the key here: relevancy.

You’ll get way higher conversion rates selling a product someone already wants to buy than trying to persuade or convince them to buy something they don’t.

You’ll make more sales and more money when you promote products that make sense.

So for example, if you have a website that’s about fishing then it makes sense to recommend fishing rods and fishing gear.

What wouldn’t make sense is trying to sell to try and sell dog food!

Likewise, I’m going to struggle to make sales trying to sell Barbie dolls on a golf website – it just doesn’t fit!

What I can do though, of course, is sell golf clubs and golf balls.

So keep that in mind and maybe take a bit of time to think about the kinds of things people interested in your chosen niche actually buy online.

Now let’s look for affiliate products. There are a couple of ways I like to do this.

The first is with the Wealthy Affiliate Affiliate Program Finder:

Click Promote on the top menu and then type in whatever your niche is and you’ll see a list of relevant affiliate programs come up.

Google is another cool way to find products. If I type in “football affiliate programs” for example, I’m gonna be presented with a ton of potential options:

All these affiliate programs are free to join. Each of them have different commission rates, terms and conditions, payout schedules and so on.

Just fill out a quick form telling them about your website and sometimes you’ll get approved as an affiliate right away, other times you might have to wait a couple of days.

As soon as you’re approved they’ll give you access to your affiliate dashboard with all the links and tracking stats you need to start promoting and making money.

For example, let’s say I join the Amazon affiliate program and I’m writing a post, something like “Best board games for kids” and create a list of board games.

I can search for any product on Amazon and link to that product page directly:

Then, when someone checks out the post and clicks my unique affiliate links to buy whatever board games I’m promoting, those sales will get credited to me and I’ll be able to check my stats under the affiliate dashboard.

Hopefully, somebody buys and you make your first sale within the first month or two. That’s a pretty good goal, in my opinion, to try and get right now in [current_year].

Step 6: Expand Your Traffic Sources 📢

The next step, now you’ve picked a niche, created your website, published some content, added affiliate links and can see some steady traffic coming in, is expanding your traffic sources.

Google is the best traffic source in my view, but it’s not the only one and when it comes to driving traffic, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket.

There are 5.44 billion people online and no end of ways to drive boatloads of traffic to your site.

Here’s the traffic strategy I’m following right now:

TikTok/Shorts/Reels ➔ YouTube ➔ Website ➔ Email list

Notice I’m not trying to do everything. I’m purposefully focusing on a handful of social media sites and getting good at them.

You might want to focus on Instagram, Facebook, X, Pinterest or LinkedIn. The key here is to think about where your target audience hangs out and zone in on those.

And what you can do is repurpose your content. For example, you can take a blog post from your website, let’s say it’s a top 10 list of best board games and easily turn that into a YouTube video.

Then you can make a shorter version for TikTok. And if you’re going to post it on TikTok then you might as well post it as a YouTube short or Instagram reel. You get the idea!

Each social media platform works slightly differently so take the time to figure out how it works, mix your content between high-value, helpful content and promotions and engage with people and see how it goes.

Step 7: Repeat 📈

You’ve got the traffic flowing and your site is starting to generate sales that will increase over time, now the next step, which is the final step, is to double-down and repeat the process.

You want to keep building out your site with cool content your audience is going to find useful and helpful.

If you reach your first goal of, say, 100 posts published, why not aim for 300?

That’s going to give your site more authority in the eyes of Google so it ranks higher and it’s going to potentially triple your traffic, clicks, sales and revenue.

Another thing you can do is find affiliate programs with higher price points and higher commission rates. That’s going to enable you to earn more with the same level of traffic.

And I think one of the best ways to scale up your affiliate income is to build an email list. I use GetResponse to capture website visitors’ email addresses and send subscribers emails automatically.

Email is a powerful way to drive sales because it’s where people actively give you permission to contact them.

You can use your email marketing campaigns to continue helping them out, give them value, build a strong relationship with them and, of course, recommend products you think they’ll really like.

Another thing you can do to scale up in the future is paid ads. This could be Facebook ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, Pinterest ads, TikTok ads or whatever else.

I’d say this is an advanced strategy you should only get into once you’ve mastered the skills of creating content and driving conversions

This is where Wealthy Affiliate classes come in:

There are classes covering everything from how to build an email list, how to drive traffic from Pinterest, how to run Google ads and so on so you can work your way through those to scale up your income.

The Bottom Line On How To Start Affiliate Marketing

Phew! I know we’ve gone through a lot in this guide, but these are the exact steps I would use to start affiliate marketing today.

And as I said at the beginning, starting affiliate marketing has been one of the most empowering, life-changing decisions I’ve made in my life.

And trust me, if I can do this, anyone can.

So right now you have a choice to make. You can do what 99% of people do, which is to just watch video after video about how to start without ever actually doing anything…

Sure, they want to start an online business and they talk about it nonstop, but they’ll never pull the trigger.

Two to three years from now, they’ll still be watching videos like this one, nodding along with what I’m saying and wishing they had the guts to make it happen.

But I know that’s not you. You’re different.

You’re going to tackle each of the steps I’ve just outlined and knock them out one by one. You’re going to create your website, grow an audience, and start earning real, tangible income.

And you’re not going to wait days, weeks or months before you get started. You’re going to start your affiliate marketing business today – right now.

You’re ready and this is your time.

Starting Affiliate Marketing FAQs

I get dozens of questions every day from beginners like you, who are learning how to become an affiliate marketer for the first time.

Here are my best answers to the most common newbie affiliate marketing questions people ask when starting out.

Alright, I’ve answered a lot of questions – but keep them coming in the comments! 👇