Greg Gottfried YouTube video, transcript created for you.
Hey everyone, welcome to another video. In today’s video, I’m going to do a full affiliate marketing tutorial for beginners. So if you’re just getting into affiliate marketing, this video should be extremely helpful. I’m going to do most of this on the camera, and then also on screen recording. So we’ll go through everything step by step so you can follow right along.
Now, I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over five years now, and I think a lot of people make it more complicated than it actually is. I’ve made over a million dollars in commissions, and I’ll show you kind of the easy way, the medium way, and then the hard way to do affiliate marketing. You can make money with all of these. I will say though, as you go from easy to medium to hard, you will make the most money with the hardest way. But if you’re just getting started, you can start with the easiest way and just kind of dip your toes into this business model.
Now, before we switch over to the computer, just a quick heads up that this video is going to move at a pretty fast pace because there’s a lot of ground to cover. But without further ado, let’s switch over to the computer and get started in this.
So the very first thing to know here is, what is affiliate marketing? And a lot of people make it a lot more confusing than it actually is. So just by going to a thesaurus and typing in affiliate, you’re going to see what a lot of people don’t really think about here. So all affiliate means is teaming up with, or joining forces with, or to join up with a company. All it is is you partnering with a company or a brand totally for free, and they pay you on a commission basis. So they give you a unique referral link, and you can share that with anyone that you want. And when someone clicks on that link, it instantly redirects them to the company’s website. And the website looks exactly like it would if that person were to just go to that website on their own or find it through Google. The only difference is that now since they used your unique referral link, if they purchase anything on the website, the company knows that you were the one that referred them, so you actually get paid a commission on anything that they purchase on the site.
So with that said, I’ll walk you through everything from finding out which affiliate programs to join, to how to join them, to actually sharing your link with people and getting them to click on them, so you make commission. But one other really important thing to understand before we get into this to help you set your mindset right for affiliate marketing is that the word marketing at the end of affiliate is actually extremely important for online business. So the affiliate business model has been around for basically ever. People do it in person, people do it online. To give you an example in person, think about the people who go door to door, they knock on your door and try to sell you something. Whether that is a pest control service or solar panels for your roof, they are basically doing affiliate marketing. They are working for the company, and if you sign up with them, they get paid a commission by that company because they’re the ones that sold you the product. However, when you take that business model online, the marketing aspect of that name affiliate marketing becomes extremely important. So you can take your affiliate link and you can post that online, and then you can do online marketing to bring all the people to your link rather than you going one-to-one to try to make that sale.
So keep that in mind as we go through this whole tutorial because what we’re going to be focusing on is different ways to get all different people on the internet to come to your link through marketing. Now, don’t worry, you don’t have to be a marketing whiz to do this. I’ll show you how to do it the easy way, the medium way, and the hard way. So the first thing that I would tell you if you want to get into affiliate marketing is to think about what kind of products do you want to be affiliated with. Now, you can be affiliated with any type of product in any industry; you just have to make sure that company has an affiliate program. So think about what are your hobbies, think about what are your passions, think about what kind of things you would want to refer people to. This could be anything. It could be fishing, it could be boating, it could be mountain biking, it could be rock climbing, it could be camera equipment. No matter what it is, you can use it for this. So if you were to pick something like mountain biking, that’s what we’ll use for this tutorial. Go to Google and type in mountain bikes. Okay, now that you’ve typed in your general niche, now you wanna go through and see which websites online are the biggest websites that are selling this product. So let’s see who’s selling mountain bikes.
We’ve got bikesdirect.com. We’ve got bikesdirect.com again. We’ve got Specialized, which is a big mountain bike brand. We’ve got Diamondback over here, another big brand. And then as you scroll through the results, the number one ranking organic result, which is basically it means they’re not paying to be here. Google is just saying this is probably the one that you’re looking for is bikesonline.com. So that’s one that I’ll talk about in a second here. And then we have REI, which I know is an in-person store that also sells online. They sell kind of all sportsman gear. And then as you keep scrolling down, you’ve got Trek Bikes, another popular brand of bikes.
So what you are looking for is, what are the big brands that sell the product in your industry, and which ones of them have you bought from before, or do you own their products? Could you imagine yourself referring people to these products? So for instance, if I were into mountain biking, do I ride Trek Bikes? If I do, then this is a program that I want to consider. But if I don’t ride their bikes, then I’m just going to be looking over this result. I really don’t want to see if they have an affiliate program. So I know this is going fast, I hope you guys are hanging along with this. I’m just trying to cover as much ground as possible. If you’re enjoying this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments, and I’ll be checking these to keep answering them and help you out. But continuing to move along here, once you’ve figured out which ones of these websites you want to be partnered with, potentially, then what we’re going to do is we’re going to open up another tab in Google, and we’re going to search the name of that company and then affiliate program. So the first one we’re going to start with is Trek. And what we’re looking to see here is, does Trek’s website have an affiliate program? Not all websites do have affiliate programs, although a lot of them do. So as you can see, the Trek Affiliate Program by Trek Bikes. It’s really important that this is on the company’s website and not on other websites that are talking about the program. So click on this link. And now this is going to tell you everything about Trek’s affiliate program.
So as you scroll down here, you can see that you’re going to get 8% commission on aftermarket items. You’re going to get 4% commission on bikes, 5% commission on full suspension bikes. And then a couple other things here that I’ll explain in a second. But before we do anything here, we want to go back to that main page, and we want to say, okay, Trek, that’s one option that we have. Let’s see what are the other big websites, and see if they have affiliate programs as well. So the first result here, bikesonline. Let’s go figure out if they have a program. And as you can see, the first result bikesonline, not by the other websites, partners and affiliates, and they have a program as well. Now, something important to note here that applies to all different industries, not just mountain bikes is that a website like bikesonline sells all different brands of bikes. However, a website like Trek only sells Trek bikes. So keep that in mind that if you are referring people to a Trek product, you could send them right through the Trek affiliate program, but you could also send them to buy a Trek bike on bikesonline. So we really want to figure out in this next step which program has the best affiliate commissions. So when we look at these side-by-side, we know that on bikes and full suspension bikes, we’re going to get 4% and 5% as a commission through Trek. The other variable that we want to be looking at is the 30 day cookie duration. What a cookie duration is is that means when someone clicks on your affiliate link, how many days after that is the window of when they can make a purchase and you still get a commission. So for Trek, that is 30 days. So the couple of variables we’re looking at here are 4% commission on bikes, which would be most of their bikes, 5% commission on full suspension bikes, which are their really serious mountain bikes, and then also 8% commission on accessories, but these will be Trek-specific accessories. And also for the bikes, all this is Trek-specific accessories. Now, coming over to the other program, we’re going to compare side by side. If you scroll through their page for affiliates, you’ll find somewhere with their commission rates and the cookie duration. Now, they don’t actually have it on this main page here, but if you click sign up, it’ll bring us to their application where it has to say it here somewhere. So here we go, online sales, you’re going to get 2 to 4%. So the way that they break it down is orders that total less than $500, you’re going to get 4%. And then as that order value gets higher and higher, you get less of a commission. So that’s not as good as Trek. And then looking for their cookie here, we can see that the referral window or the cookie duration is 30 days. So it’s the same, they’re both 30 days. However, on Trek, you’re going to get a lot higher of a commission. So that’s kind of the initial work that you have to do here to find the best affiliate program for the topic or the industry that you want to go into. So if this all worked out nicely and you were like, hey, you know what? I only ride Trek Mountain bikes anyways so that’s what I’m going to be referring people to. Let’s just be an affiliate for Trek directly because they pay a great commission, and it’s better than these other websites anyways. So then what you would want to do is find the kind of join button for their program. Their says apply here. You click on this, and then you basically go through this application and give them basic information. It’s just who you are, what is your website that you’re going to be referring people to? I’ll talk about that in a second. And then how can they pay you? So they need a way to pay you your commissions. So you go to apply now, and you just start filling out this information. Now, something else that’s really important to note here before we get into the three ways of doing this is that you can join as many affiliate programs as you want. So you could join both of these mountain bike affiliate programs and then you just get links from both of them. You can use them interchangeably in the content that you create online, and then you’ll just receive commissions from multiple different companies depending on which ones you made sales for. Another thing that’s probably helpful to know is that Amazon has their own affiliate program. So if you just join theirs, you can refer to any product that’s on Amazon. Just type in Amazon affiliate program, and it’s called Amazon.com Associates Central. Instead of calling it Amazon affiliate program, they call it an Amazon Associates program. It’s just another way to say affiliate. So you can sign up on their page, and then you can get links to any product on Amazon. Okay, so now that you’ve figured out what kind of industry or topic you want to be creating affiliate content about, and then you’ve researched the companies within that industry and figured out which ones pay the best commission and you’ve gone and joined those programs for free, now you have access to your unique referral links. Now, I’ll show you what to do online to actually create affiliate content and put in your affiliate link and get people to see that content. So this in my mind is the fun part of this tutorial. This is where it breaks up into three different ways of doing affiliate marketing, easy, medium, and hard. So first, I’ll start you out with the easy way that any of you could literally start today, as long as you’ve done this process of finding out who you want to be affiliated with and you have your unique referral link. So if you go to Google and you type in Quora, Quora is basically a forum. It’s where anyone online can create an account, they can ask questions, and then anyone else can create an account, they can come in and they can answer those questions. Now, if you create a free account on Quora, you can then go in and you can search for mountain bikes. So you can search for whatever the industry was that you’re creating your affiliate content about. What you want to do here is look for people asking questions that you actually have the answer to because this is your hobby or your passion, and then see that it’s also a fit where you could recommend them a product on Trek, or you could recommend them a product on one of the other affiliate programs that you joined about mountain bikes. Now, I’ve done this for several years, just kind of on the side testing things out in the beginning, and I still make commissions from this to date. This is years later, and money still trickles in from commissions over on Quora. Okay, so that’s the easiest way to do affiliate marketing. You can start that today, and you’ll likely start to see some commissions rolling it over time. I don’t think you’re going to make the most money this way. There are better ways to do this. They can get a lot more people to see your link, click on them, you’ll make a lot more commissions. So with that said, let’s go from the easy way onto the medium way. Now, the medium way stands to make you a lot more money, but it takes a little bit more work. And essentially what that is is writing blog posts kind of like an extended version of what you would be writing to someone on Quora as their answer. A longer version of that that said least 1000 words, and then posting that on your own website. Now creating the actual website will take you about 30 minutes to an hour. So I have another video that you can watch that’ll show you how to do that. It’s really not that hard to do, but you need to set it up, right? So I don’t want to go through everything in this video and make this video super long. So I’ll show you what this looks like in practice. So the idea here is that you create a website on your topic or your industry, and then you write blog posts about what you think other people would be going to Google and they would be searching. So if we’re going off of the mountain bike industry here, if you were to type in best mountain bike helmet, and you look at all these results, these are probably all affiliate marketing websites. So ‘Best Mountain Bike helmets of 2023,’ okay, so the dead giveaway right here is it says, when you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. So that’s called an affiliate disclaimer. So if you see that on any page that means that there are affiliate links on that page, and the person who wrote it is doing affiliate marketing. So basically, this is just a blog article or a longer format post just like Quora, except they’re going into more detail trying to help you find the best mountain bike helmet. So basically, just put a photo to the product, write why it is good, why it is on your list, and then put a link to that product. So as you can see, buy now from Backcountry, from Amazon, from eBay, all of these are going to be affiliate links to the helmets that they talked about on the website. Now, this medium way of doing affiliate marketing is the one way that I had referred to earlier that I would say, if you are going to do this one, this is the one where you might want to do a little bit of research into the industry to see what kind of articles to write. Now, the reason that I say that is because on Google in these search results, which are basically each one of these, which ones come up when you search for something, some of these specific questions like best mountain bike helmet may be a lot more competitive than other things like best mountain bike seat, or best mountain bike gloves, or review of this specific helmet. Some certain searches might be a lot easier for you to show up, number one, two, or three, because the ones that are down at the bottom here, not as many people are going to click on. So there’s a website called semrush.com. This is the one that I use for my affiliate marketing websites where you can basically type in the topic or the industry that you want to go into, and it’ll show you which of the search terms are more competitive and which ones are easier for you to rank. Again, I’ve got another video on the channel showing how to do that. So we’ll put a link to that for that specific part of this process down in the description. Okay, so now that we’ve covered the easy way and the medium way, now let’s get into the hardest way I would say to do affiliate marketing, but also the way that you can stand to make the most money from affiliate marketing. Now, this way specifically is the hardest way because it has the biggest barrier to entry. I’ll show you what I mean by that. But you can make the most money from it. In the last three years, I’ve kind of been doing this one part-time testing it, while working on my other business models, and I’ve made over a million dollars in commission just from this way alone. So with that said, what this is, is instead of writing a short post on Quora or a longer post on your website, you basically take that post and you record a video, and then you post that on YouTube. Now, the reason that this has the biggest barrier to entry is because not many people want to be on camera. So it has a really big mental barrier to entry. With that said though, that’s what makes this specific version of affiliate marketing the most profitable, because it has very low competition. 99% of the people out there are not going to consider making a video. However, your entire life can change in one year, two years, or three years by doing this, doing something that not everyone else is going to do. Also, another important thing that I should say is that you don’t have to actually show your face on camera if you don’t want to. You can just record your computer screen, and then you can use a microphone to talk. So this could be as easy as just showing the search results on your screen, talking about what you see, and then showing the person where to click. Okay, so before I show you an example of what this looks like, let me just go back and tell you kind of what this process looks like. So you’re going to need to get a YouTube channel, which is free, and then you’re going to want to make a video, which is also free to do. You’re going to upload the video to YouTube. And then the last step is to optimize that video, which is also free to do, to make sure that it shows up when people go on YouTube and they search for things. So essentially, you just want to make sure that you’re making the video so it’s really helpful to someone, it answers their question, and then you title the video and you describe the video in a way that someone who’s looking for that topic is going to be searching for. So what that looks like in practice is basically you’re going to say, let’s see what it looks like when you search for best mountain bike helmet. Okay, so I’m going to show you the first video that pops up when I type in best mountain bike helmet. Okay, so now as I scroll down, the first one here is from Seth’s Bike Hacks, and this was uploaded four months ago, and it has 88,000 views. So just on YouTube ads alone, he’s probably made a good amount of money from this. If I had to guess, he probably made at least $10,000 from just that many views. However, you don’t even need 88,000 views to make money from affiliate marketing. I would say that you only need about a thousand views on a video to make a significant amount of money from affiliate marketing. And then, of course, the more views you get, the more money you’ll make. But this is definitely a significant amount of money just from YouTube ads alone. Now, one other thing that I should mention here is that Seth’s Bike Hacks, he actually probably also makes money from affiliate marketing as well. So on top of the YouTube ads, I would guess that he also made another few thousand dollars from the people that clicked on his links and they actually purchased products because of him. So here’s what his video looks like. As you can see, you don’t actually have to show your face. You could just be showing your computer screen, you can have text on the screen, and you can use a microphone to talk through it. So what he’s doing here is he’s showing on his computer screen a lot of different mountain bike helmets. So it’s basically the same as that article that I showed you earlier, just in video format. And you can see, he’s just scrolling through this and he’s talking about the different helmets. So for instance, as he talks about the Bell Sixer, he’s just showing the helmet and he’s saying why he thinks that one’s good. He’s showing it on his head, he’s saying why he thinks that it’s good. And then down here, he’s putting a link to it. So as you can see, for Amazon, so that is his affiliate link, and then he’s putting Amazon affiliate links here. So the Amazon links are going to be affiliate links because if you have a product page on Amazon, you can get a unique link for that product. So he’s just putting links to the different products that he’s talking about. And then as you can see, if we go to his description down below, he’s basically got everything that he talked about in the video. So he has a little snippet, or if you want to say the transcript, and then he has the links to the different products that he’s talking about. And I can tell you for sure that he’s making at least $1,000 from this video, but I would guess he’s probably making a lot more. So as you can see, if you put in the effort, you do a little bit of research on the products that you’re going to be reviewing in your video, then you’ll be able to make a lot more money from affiliate marketing than you could have with the easy way or the medium way. However, this does have a bigger barrier to entry because you have to be willing to be on camera. You have to be willing to make videos, and you have to be willing to put in a little bit of effort on the research side of things to make your video show up when people search for your topic on YouTube. And there you have it. That’s a comprehensive affiliate marketing tutorial for beginners, covering the easy, medium, and hard ways to get started with affiliate marketing. Remember, it’s essential to choose the right affiliate programs and products that align with your interests and expertise, create valuable content, and optimize it to reach your target audience. Whether you start with the easy way on platforms like Quora, build a medium-sized affiliate website with blog posts, or dive into the more challenging but potentially more rewarding realm of YouTube affiliate marketing, your success will largely depend on your dedication, effort, and ability to provide valuable information to your audience. With time and persistence, affiliate marketing can become a lucrative source of passive income. So give it a try and see how it works for you. Good luck!
