Affiliate Marketing

There are many ways to be successful through affiliate-marketing, having been an affiliate marketer for many years and through in depth research, I have found that ClickBank offers some really good initial advise on how to be successful. This article lays out the process that we have found to be the most reliable and sustainable while still being very inexpensive. Many affiliates try to skip steps 2 & 3 and go straight from picking a product to immediately promoting it. This makes it really difficult to succeed, and doesn’t set up your business for success, so make sure to implement the steps in the order they’re listed here.


The following subjects are covered in this article:

Step 1: Choose Your Niche

The more you focus your efforts on understanding one area, the better you will understand the needs of the customers in that area.

This video shares strategies and tips for picking a niche for your new affiliate business. Be sure to spend plenty of time on this step! Don’t rush it when getting started.

Step 2: Build Your Platform

Building a platform gives you a means of communicating with potential customers.

In this video, we walk you through the process of developing and building your platform, which will be the basis for growing your audience and promoting products to them.



We typically do not recommend using free web hosting solutions, because you don’t technically own your website and can potentially lose what you’ve built at any time. It is worth investing a relatively small amount of money to use a paid web hosting service.

Step 3: Grow Your Audience

Attracting a larger audience means a larger pool of potential customers.

We share our steps you can take to start growing your audience and getting traffic to your platform. If you’re not sure how to get visitors to your site, this is the video for you! Just make sure you’ve watched Steps 1 and 2 first.


Step 4: Promote Products

Once you’ve created a platform and an audience, you can begin to promote products.


Traffic Sources

There are many different ways to get traffic, both free and paid. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages.





Conversion Rates

Your conversion rate is the percentage of order form visits that become purchases. It depends on many different factors:

  • Where is your traffic coming from? (Free vs paid, warm vs cold)
  • How well does your audience know, like, and trust you? This can have a huge impact on your conversion rate.
  • Conversion rates can vary widely, even among products in the same niche. Things like sales copy, pricing, page layout, and vendor reputation can have a big impact on how many Hops it takes to convert a sale.

Because there are so many different factors that can affect conversion, there is no way to tell how many Hops it takes to lead to a sale. For some affiliates it may only take a few Hops, whereas others may take hundreds or more.


Next Steps

Now that you have gone through these videos and have a solid understanding of how to be a successful affiliate, visit the Affiliate Marketing Section of our Online Store Front and select some specific guides we offer to fine tune your new affiliate marketing skills. You may also want to search for some niche products to promote. You can find either of those by going through the categories or by using our “Search” feature located at the bottom of the page.