SEO

How to Start Affiliate Marketing With No Money in 2022 (5 Steps)

Published

2 years ago

August 19, 2022

How to Start Affiliate Marketing With No Money in 2022 (5 Steps)

If you do it right, affiliate marketing can make you money while you’re on the beach, in the mountains, or even taking a nap. I would know—I’ve been doing it for years.

I started my first affiliate marketing blog 10 years ago with just $40 and not a clue what I was doing. Now, it’s earning six figures, and I only have to work a few hours a week to run it.

In fact, that affiliate site receives over 100,000 visits per month from Google:

In this article, I’m going to teach you how to start affiliate marketing with (almost) no money. I’ll share how I did it and what you can do to get started today.

Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting someone else’s products or services and making a commission whenever someone buys after clicking your affiliate link.

For example, if you publish a blog post or a YouTube video sharing the best vacuum cleaners for pet hair and someone buys a product you recommend after clicking your affiliate link, you get paid a percentage of that sale.

It’s a great business model because it has almost no overhead and you don’t have to manufacture, or ship products, or handle customer service. You get paid to promote cool stuff.

The only way to start affiliate marketing with no money is to get an affiliate link and start sending it to people you know. While this is possible, it’s not scalable and won’t make you much money unless you’re constantly networking.

Instead, the most successful affiliate marketers create a website and social media channels in order to get traffic to their affiliate links. While social media accounts are free, a website does cost a few bucks.

Specifically, you need to purchase a domain name and website hosting. A domain costs you around $3–$7 for the first year, and hosting starts at $2.75 per month (paid annually, this is $33).

So you will need at least $36 to get started as of the time this post was published.

If you’re ready to make your website, I recommend following this YouTube video by WP Beginner. It walks you through how to get your hosting and domain name set up and how to use WordPress for complete beginners.

If you’ve got the $36 and you want to give this business model a try, I’ve come up with five simple steps to get you started in affiliate marketing:

Step 1. Find a niche OR a good affiliate program

The first and most important step is figuring out what you want to talk about and promote—in other words, your niche.

Your niche can be almost anything, from a hobby, to an interest, to a lifestyle. Like dogs? That can be a niche. Interested in cryptocurrency? Niche potential. You get the idea.

Niche selection is one of the hardest parts of affiliate marketing. You need to pick something you won’t mind creating content about for years to come. It takes time to build the brand authority and awareness to turn this into a full-time business, so don’t be afraid to spend some time here.

Now, there are a few ways to choose your niche. You can either pick a niche you’re already interested in, OR you can look for good affiliate programs first and base your niche on those program(s).

Finding high-paying affiliate programs with quality companies can be difficult. Usually, you’ll either find good products with low commissions (2%–4%) or crappy products with high commissions (20%+).

But every once in a while, you’ll find a high-quality product with a high commission rate. And if you do, it may be worth basing your niche around. It’s much better to get high-paying partners than just to promote Amazon products.

There’s nothing wrong with building an Amazon affiliate website. However, don’t expect to make a lot of money from this unless you’re able to get a huge amount of traffic and sales.

Last year, I sent Amazon more than $1.2 million in sales… and only made $47,310.

So yeah—it’s worth looking for a better affiliate program.

The best affiliate partnerships are made by creating a direct relationship with the brand you want to promote and working out a private deal.

So where do you find great affiliate partners?

Think about the things you already enjoy doing and look at your favorite products or services in those niches. See if any of those products have an existing affiliate program. If not, call a brand to get in touch with its marketing team or even the owner to try and work something out.

You can also find potential affiliate programs by searching for “[your niche] affiliate programs” on Google. You’ll often find lists of brands that have an affiliate program, as well as the details of the program.

Lastly, you can check popular affiliate marketing platforms like AvantLink, impact.com, ShareASale, and many more.

Ready to look for a niche? Here are two guides to get you started:

Step 2. Decide on one traffic channel

One of the biggest mistakes I see beginners making (and have made myself) is focusing on creating content for too many traffic channels at once. They make accounts on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest, all while managing their blog—it’s too much.

Every single one of these channels takes months or years to learn and build engaged audiences on. And each of them can fill enough time to be a full-time job.

Instead, choose one or two main traffic sources—my favorites are YouTube and Google because they can bring recurring organic traffic—and get really good at them.

Yes, you can have an account on every channel. Sure, you can share your blog posts on them pretty easily. But keep the bulk of your content creation and attention on one channel, then use the others to support that channel.

At Ahrefs, we specialize in search engine optimization (SEO)—that is, creating and optimizing content to appear in search engines.

Organic traffic from search engines like Google is one of the best ways to get recurring, passive affiliate revenue. It takes time to learn the skills and get to page #1 on Google. But SEO is worth learning in the long run because it brings you traffic every time someone makes a search and finds your content.

One of my sites received over 100,000 visits from Google in a single month without me creating or promoting a single piece of content during the entire month:

YouTube is similar because it’s also often used as a search engine, making it another great source of recurring visitors without the need for constantly creating and promoting new content.

Of course, which traffic channel you choose depends on your own preference and the niche you’re in. Some niches are much more competitive in search engines than others.

You can use Ahrefs’ free keyword difficulty checker to quickly see if the keywords in your niche are hard to rank for or not. Think of keywords you may search for in the niche and type them in the tool to get more information.

For example, “best vacuum cleaners for pet hair” may be hard to rank for:

Our tool estimates you’d need backlinks (links to your page from another website) from ~45 websites to rank in the top 10 for this keyword. And you can see some of the competitors are big brands like NYMag and HGTV.

The Keyword Difficulty (KD) score—35—is on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 being easy and 100 being extremely difficult. It’s on a logarithmic scale, which means it gets exponentially harder to rank for a keyword as the number goes up.

For comparison, the keyword “car vacuum cleaner” has a KD of 27, and we estimate you’d need ~32 backlinks to rank in the top 10.

If you find some low- to medium-difficulty keywords, it could be a sign Google is a great traffic source for you. Otherwise, you may want to consider a different traffic source to get started with.

Here are some guides to help you learn about different traffic channels:

Step 3. Create killer content

Regardless of the platform you choose to focus on, you will need one thing to succeed:

Great content.

Your content should be so good, so interesting, so riveting that people are eager to consume and share it. Whether that’s videos, pictures, or blog posts, the only way to stand out in this saturated market is to make your content really damn good.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you need the highest-quality cameras or the best-looking website. In fact, what makes content great varies, depending on the niche and the platform.

But typically, your content needs to be good at one of two things:

Entertaining
Informing

If you can both inform AND entertain people, you’ll do well with affiliate marketing. That can mean excellent storytelling, deep research, or great presentation of information.

Of course, capturing traffic from Google is going to be very different from Instagram or TikTok. The intention is different—one platform is used for learning, the others for entertaining.

Creating amazing content for Google involves a lot of research:

Then, you need to compile that research in a way that’s easy to understand, well written, and optimized for search engines. The goal is to create something that’s better than what’s already ranking on page #1 for your target keyword.

For example, a good article for Google may look something like this, which ranks #1 for “rv accessories”:

As you scroll down the article, you see recommended boxes that share product information quickly and easily; also, the products are recommended by people who have actually used them.

The goal with social media is still the same—to create something that’s better than what’s already out there—but it’s done in a different way.

Instead of presenting the best research in the easiest-to-digest way, it’s often about creativity, storytelling, and unique perspectives.

That can mean a low-quality, handheld video of yourself being real in a moment when life is super difficult. Or it can mean crisp, edited films with drone footage, awesome angles, and sound design.

For example, here’s a video I posted on TikTok that blew up and received over 1.7 million views:

Related Topics:affiliate Marketing money seo Start Steps

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SEO

Big Update To Google’s Ranking Drop Documentation

Published

14 hours ago

April 27, 2024

Max

Google updates documentation for diagnosing ranking drops

Google updated their guidance with five changes on how to debug ranking drops. The new version contains over 400 more words that address small and large ranking drops. There’s room to quibble about some of the changes but overall the revised version is a step up from what it replaced.

Change# 1: Downplays Fixing Traffic Drops

The opening sentence was changed so that it offers less hope for bouncing back from an algorithmic traffic drop. Google also joined two sentences into one sentence in the revised version of the documentation.

The documentation previously said that most traffic drops can be reversed and that identifying the reasons for a drop aren’t straightforward. The part about most of them can be reversed was completely removed.

Here is the original two sentences:

“A drop in organic Search traffic can happen for several reasons, and most of them can be reversed. It may not be straightforward to understand what exactly happened to your site”

Now there’s no hope offered for “most of them can be reversed” and more emphasis on understanding what happened is not straightforward.

This is the new guidance

“A drop in organic Search traffic can happen for several reasons, and it may not be straightforward to understand what exactly happened to your site.”

Change #2 Security Or Spam Issues

Google updated the traffic graph illustrations so that they precisely align with the causes for each kind of traffic decline.

The previous version of the graph was labeled:

“Site-level technical issue (Manual Action, strong algorithmic changes)”

The problem with the previous label is that manual actions and strong algorithmic changes are not technical issues and the new version fixes that issue.

The updated version now reads:

“Large drop from an algorithmic update, site-wide security or spam issue”

Change #3 Technical Issues

There’s one more change to a graph label, also to make it more accurate.

This is how the previous graph was labeled:

“Page-level technical issue (algorithmic changes, market disruption)”

The updated graph is now labeled:

“Technical issue across your site, changing interests”

Now the graph and label are more specific as a sitewide change and “changing interests” is more general and covers a wider range of changes than market disruption. Changing interests includes market disruption (where a new product makes a previous one obsolete or less desirable) but it also includes products that go out of style or loses their trendiness.

Graph titled

Change #4 Google Adds New Guidance For Algorithmic Changes

The biggest change by far is their brand new section for algorithmic changes which replaces two smaller sections, one about policy violations and manual actions and a second one about algorithm changes.

The old version of this one section had 108 words. The updated version contains 443 words.

A section that’s particularly helpful is where the guidance splits algorithmic update damage into two categories.

Two New Categories:

Small drop in position? For example, dropping from position 2 to 4.
Large drop in position? For example, dropping from position 4 to 29.

The two new categories are perfect and align with what I’ve seen in the search results for sites that have lost rankings. The reasons for dropping up and down within the top ten are different from the reasons why a site drops completely out of the top ten.

I don’t agree with the guidance for large drops. They recommend reviewing your site for large drops, which is good advice for some sites that have lost rankings. But in other cases there’s nothing wrong with the site and this is where less experienced SEOs tend to be unable to fix the problems because there’s nothing wrong with the site. Recommendations for improving EEAT, adding author bios or filing link disavows do not solve what’s going on because there’s nothing wrong with the site. The problem is something else in some of the cases.

Here is the new guidance for debugging search position drops:

“Algorithmic update
Google is always improving how it assesses content and updating its search ranking and serving algorithms accordingly; core updates and other smaller updates may change how some pages perform in Google Search results. We post about notable improvements to our systems on our list of ranking updates page; check it to see if there’s anything that’s applicable to your site.
If you suspect a drop in traffic is due to an algorithmic update, it’s important to understand that there might not be anything fundamentally wrong with your content. To determine whether you need to make a change, review your top pages in Search Console and assess how they were ranking:
Small drop in position? For example, dropping from position 2 to 4.
Large drop in position? For example, dropping from position 4 to 29.
Keep in mind that positions aren’t static or fixed in place. Google’s search results are dynamic in nature because the open web itself is constantly changing with new and updated content. This constant change can cause both gains and drops in organic Search traffic.
Small drop in position
A small drop in position is when there’s a small shift in position in the top results (for example, dropping from position 2 to 4 for a search query). In Search Console, you might see a noticeable drop in traffic without a big change in impressions.
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Small fluctuations in position can happen at any time (including moving back up in position, without you needing to do anything). In fact, we recommend avoiding making radical changes if your page is already performing well.
Large drop in position
A large drop in position is when you see a notable drop out of the top results for a wide range of terms (for example, dropping from the top 10 results to position 29).
In cases like this, self-assess your whole website overall (not just individual pages) to make sure it’s helpful, reliable and people-first. If you’ve made changes to your site, it may take time to see an effect: some changes can take effect in a few days, while others could take several months. For example, it may take months before our systems determine that a site is now producing helpful content in the long term. In general, you’ll likely want to wait a few weeks to analyze your site in Search Console again to see if your efforts had a beneficial effect on ranking position.
Keep in mind that there’s no guarantee that changes you make to your website will result in noticeable impact in search results. If there’s more deserving content, it will continue to rank well with our systems.”

Change #5 Trivial Changes

The rest of the changes are relatively trivial but nonetheless makes the documentation more precise.

For example, one of the headings was changed from this:

You recently moved your site

To this new heading:

Site moves and migrations

Google’s Updated Ranking Drops Documentation

Google’s updated documentation is a well thought out but I think that the recommendations for large algorithmic drops are helpful for some cases and not helpful for other cases. I have 25 years of SEO experience and have experienced every single Google algorithm update. There are certain updates where the problem is not solved by trying to fix things and Google’s guidance used to be that sometimes there’s nothing to fix. The documentation is better but in my opinion it can be improved even further.

Read the new documentation here:

Debugging drops in Google Search traffic

Review the previous documentation:

Internet Archive Wayback Machine: Debugging drops in Google Search traffic

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Tomacco

SEO

Google March 2024 Core Update Officially Completed A Week Ago

Published

1 day ago

April 27, 2024

Max

Google has officially completed its March 2024 Core Update, ending over a month of ranking volatility across the web.

However, Google didn’t confirm the rollout’s conclusion on its data anomaly page until April 26—a whole week after the update was completed on April 19.

Many in the SEO community had been speculating for days about whether the turbulent update had wrapped up.

The delayed transparency exemplifies Google’s communication issues with publishers and the need for clarity during core updates

Google March 2024 Core Update Timeline & Status

First announced on March 5, the core algorithm update is complete as of April 19. It took 45 days to complete.

Unlike more routine core refreshes, Google warned this one was more complex.

Google’s documentation reads:

“As this is a complex update, the rollout may take up to a month. It’s likely there will be more fluctuations in rankings than with a regular core update, as different systems get fully updated and reinforce each other.”

The aftershocks were tangible, with some websites reporting losses of over 60% of their organic search traffic, according to data from industry observers.

The ripple effects also led to the deindexing of hundreds of sites that were allegedly violating Google’s guidelines.

Addressing Manipulation Attempts

In its official guidance, Google highlighted the criteria it looks for when targeting link spam and manipulation attempts:

Creating “low-value content” purely to garner manipulative links and inflate rankings.
Links intended to boost sites’ rankings artificially, including manipulative outgoing links.
The “repurposing” of expired domains with radically different content to game search visibility.

The updated guidelines warn:

“Any links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results may be considered link spam. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”

John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, responded to the turbulence by advising publishers not to make rash changes while the core update was ongoing.

However, he suggested sites could proactively fix issues like unnatural paid links.

Mueller stated on Reddit:

“If you have noticed things that are worth improving on your site, I’d go ahead and get things done. The idea is not to make changes just for search engines, right? Your users will be happy if you can make things better even if search engines haven’t updated their view of your site yet.”

Emphasizing Quality Over Links

The core update made notable changes to how Google ranks websites.

Most significantly, Google reduced the importance of links in determining a website’s ranking.

In contrast to the description of links as “an important factor in determining relevancy,” Google’s updated spam policies stripped away the “important” designation, simply calling links “a factor.”

This change aligns with Google’s Gary Illyes’ statements that links aren’t among the top three most influential ranking signals.

Instead, Google is giving more weight to quality, credibility, and substantive content.

Consequently, long-running campaigns favoring low-quality link acquisition and keyword optimizations have been demoted.

With the update complete, SEOs and publishers are left to audit their strategies and websites to ensure alignment with Google’s new perspective on ranking.

Core Update Feedback

Google has opened a ranking feedback form related to this core update.

You can use this form until May 31 to provide feedback to Google’s Search team about any issues noticed after the core update.

While the feedback provided won’t be used to make changes for specific queries or websites, Google says it may help inform general improvements to its search ranking systems for future updates.

Google also updated its help documentation on “Debugging drops in Google Search traffic” to help people understand ranking changes after a core update.

Featured Image: Rohit-Tripathi/Shutterstock

FAQ

After the update, what steps should websites take to align with Google’s new ranking criteria?

After Google’s March 2024 Core Update, websites should:

Improve the quality, trustworthiness, and depth of their website content.
Stop heavily focusing on getting as many links as possible and prioritize relevant, high-quality links instead.
Fix any shady or spam-like SEO tactics on their sites.
Carefully review their SEO strategies to ensure they follow Google’s new guidelines.

SEO

Google Declares It The “Gemini Era” As Revenue Grows 15%

Published

2 days ago

April 26, 2024

Max

Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, announced its first quarter 2024 financial results today.

While Google reported double-digit growth in key revenue areas, the focus was on its AI developments, dubbed the “Gemini era” by CEO Sundar Pichai.

The Numbers: 15% Revenue Growth, Operating Margins Expand

Alphabet reported Q1 revenues of $80.5 billion, a 15% increase year-over-year, exceeding Wall Street’s projections.

Net income was $23.7 billion, with diluted earnings per share of $1.89. Operating margins expanded to 32%, up from 25% in the prior year.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s President and CFO, stated:

“Our strong financial results reflect revenue strength across the company and ongoing efforts to durably reengineer our cost base.”

Google’s core advertising units, such as Search and YouTube, drove growth. Google advertising revenues hit $61.7 billion for the quarter.

The Cloud division also maintained momentum, with revenues of $9.6 billion, up 28% year-over-year.

Pichai highlighted that YouTube and Cloud are expected to exit 2024 at a combined $100 billion annual revenue run rate.

Generative AI Integration in Search

Google experimented with AI-powered features in Search Labs before recently introducing AI overviews into the main search results page.

Regarding the gradual rollout, Pichai states:

“We are being measured in how we do this, focusing on areas where gen AI can improve the Search experience, while also prioritizing traffic to websites and merchants.”

Pichai reports that Google’s generative AI features have answered over a billion queries already:

“We’ve already served billions of queries with our generative AI features. It’s enabling people to access new information, to ask questions in new ways, and to ask more complex questions.”

Google reports increased Search usage and user satisfaction among those interacting with the new AI overview results.

The company also highlighted its “Circle to Search” feature on Android, which allows users to circle objects on their screen or in videos to get instant AI-powered answers via Google Lens.

Reorganizing For The “Gemini Era”

As part of the AI roadmap, Alphabet is consolidating all teams building AI models under the Google DeepMind umbrella.

Pichai revealed that, through hardware and software improvements, the company has reduced machine costs associated with its generative AI search results by 80% over the past year.

He states:

“Our data centers are some of the most high-performing, secure, reliable and efficient in the world. We’ve developed new AI models and algorithms that are more than one hundred times more efficient than they were 18 months ago.

How Will Google Make Money With AI?

Alphabet sees opportunities to monetize AI through its advertising products, Cloud offerings, and subscription services.

Google is integrating Gemini into ad products like Performance Max. The company’s Cloud division is bringing “the best of Google AI” to enterprise customers worldwide.

Google One, the company’s subscription service, surpassed 100 million paid subscribers in Q1 and introduced a new premium plan featuring advanced generative AI capabilities powered by Gemini models.

Future Outlook

Pichai outlined six key advantages positioning Alphabet to lead the “next wave of AI innovation”:

Research leadership in AI breakthroughs like the multimodal Gemini model
Robust AI infrastructure and custom TPU chips
Integrating generative AI into Search to enhance the user experience
A global product footprint reaching billions
Streamlined teams and improved execution velocity
Multiple revenue streams to monetize AI through advertising and cloud

With upcoming events like Google I/O and Google Marketing Live, the company is expected to share further updates on its AI initiatives and product roadmap.

Featured Image: Sergei Elagin/Shutterstock