Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another affiliate marketing video. In today's video, I'm literally going to walk you through, step-by-step, how to start affiliate marketing for a total beginner. Now it's going to make this video special is I'm going to literally walk you through on the computer what are the first steps once you found out about affiliate marketing to actually get started. So by the end of this tutorial, you can start your business today. Now, a couple of really small things before we get started in this video. First is that this video is literally going to be on screen recording and on the camera so you can follow along on your computer. That should make this very unique. And then secondly, I have to mention this, and I want to do it in the beginning of this video just to get it out of the way. This is going to be a very long tutorial, but it's going to move at a fast pace to try to get a lot of information in. And overall, this is going to be a condensed version of my full affiliate marketing masterclass. So if you're not already enrolled in that, I'll put a link in the description. That is just the full fledged best thing that I could offer you to start affiliate marketing, literally sharing everything I know about the business model. Now, I wanted to say that early on so that once you're watching this free tutorial and you realize how much value I'm giving to you in this video, you're going to really understand how much value that course is packed with. So with that said, let's switch over to the computer and let's get right into this tutorial. Now, the most important thing of all is to understand what exactly is affiliate marketing. And the reason that I say this is so important is because so many people are overcomplicating what this business model really is. So in the simplest terms possible, what affiliate marketing is is you partner with companies. Those companies give you a unique referral link to the products that they sell on their website. You then share your referral link with other people, and then when those other people click on your link and they make a purchase from the company, the company pays you a commission on whatever they bought. Now that is how simple this is. Affiliate marketing is basically just a complex way of saying referral programs. So what's important to know here is that you can join as many affiliate programs as you want. It is totally free to join them. You don't have to be exclusive to just one company. You can join programs for all different companies. And then something that's really important to know is that you're not really binded to them by anything. It's not like you're signing up to be an employee for that company. Think of it more of as an independent contractor or a freelancer. So basically, anyone who makes purchases through your unique referral link is going to make money for you. It's not like you're getting a salary or you're not getting paid by the hour. The only way you get paid is through the commissions on your referral link. Now, the last thing that you might be wondering before we move on from explaining what affiliate marketing is, is the commission itself. So different companies out there have different types of commissions. Some of them are a flat rate, so you might get something like $50 or $100 for anyone who purchases anything through the website. I'll explain that a little bit later in this video so that makes sense. Or in most cases, it's just a percentage. So now that hopefully we're on the same page as to what affiliate marketing is. Now let's get into the next section of this video, which is what kind of companies have affiliate programs, how do you join them and things of that nature. Now, the main takeaway here that I can share with you from years of experience with this is that almost all companies have an affiliate program or they might refer to it as a referral program. Now, obviously not all companies are going to have this, but to give you an idea here, Amazon Associates is the name of Amazon's affiliate program. So literally any product that is sold on Amazon, you can be an affiliate for. Now, what I'll show you here that you earn up to 10% commission on anything that's sold on Amazon. What that means for you is just by joining one affiliate program here, Amazon's, you can then get unique referral links to any product sold on their platform, which means that you can create your affiliate marketing content on pretty much any niche that you want to go into. Now, although Amazon's affiliate program is really good to know about, I would say a lot of people who are advanced in affiliate marketing, they're not using Amazon's affiliate program. And you might be wondering why, because it's so simple. You can join one program and get unique referral links to all the products sold there. The reason is because individual companies who sell their products typically offer higher commissions on the sale compared to Amazon. And then additionally, a lot of products that are really good for affiliate marketing and have high commissions are not sold on Amazon. Again, we'll get into this more as this video goes on, but I wanna keep this step by step just so all of this makes sense. So while we are on this topic of finding out what companies have affiliate programs, what I would recommend to you to do is to go to Google and type in a niche. And what I mean by a niche is an overall category or an industry. And what I would recommend starting with, especially for this tutorial, to give you a good idea, is thinking about what are your passions, your hobbies, your interests? What do you already know a lot about? Now, if something doesn't immediately come to mind to you, the other question I would ask yourself is, what do your friends or family come to you asking you for advice on. That might give you an idea of something that you don't realize you actually do know a lot about. Now, whatever that is, type that into Google here. What I'm going to type in here is website building software. And simply because over the last 10 years of building online businesses, I have spent a lot of time with different website building software tools, and that is something that I simply know a lot about. So I'm going to type in website building software. Now we're not going to type in affiliate program or anything. Just follow along with this for a second. So when you scroll through here, what you wanna do is identify which brands you know a lot about or you've used in the past. Now the first is an ad by Squarespace. I've definitely used Squarespace in the past. As I keep scrolling through here, I can see this is an article. If you get lucky enough and you get one of these kind of search results right here, this is just going to give you a bunch of brands that you should recognize right off the bat. So for me, I currently use Wix. I currently use WordPress. As I said, I have used Squarespace in the past. I don't prefer their software, but I definitely know a lot about it. And then the rest that are here I don't have much experience with, but I have already found three that I know a lot of information about. Now, if you don't have this kind of section right here, keep scrolling down. And although you might see some brands popping up here, you can click on one of these lists and this is just going to give you kind of the big brands that you should hopefully recognize. So what you wanna do at this stage is pick out one, two, or three of these brands. If you have three, that's going to give you a lot to work with. If you can only pick out two, that's totally fine. And if there's one, you might have to repeat this step in a minute here, but let me show you what that is. So once you've got these brands in mind, then let's go back to Google. And what we are then going to do is type in the name of the first brand and then affiliate program. So Wix affiliate program. And what you are looking for at this stage is figuring out if that company has an affiliate program. Now you're going to find two types of results here. The first is going to be from the actual website themselves. So this is Wix, and this is talking about their affiliate program. This is what we are looking for. What we are not looking for is other companies talking about the affiliate program, but it is not actually from Wix. So I'm going to click on this. This brings us to Wix's website, which is exactly where we wanna be, and then it talks about their affiliate program. However, what I would be doing from experience is scrolling through their website and seeing if I can find out how much they pay in commission. Now, not all websites are going to tell you this, and you won't know this until you really go through their application, which I'll show you in a second here. But sometimes you can just scroll through their homepage and you can find out how much they pay. Now they don't actually say it on their website, so we'll have to wait for the application, which would be right at this button right here. But first, I just wanna take you back to Google and I wanna show you what I would do next. So I've already found one hit. I already found a company that I know a lot about and they have an affiliate program. I haven't figured out how much they pay in commission yet, but that's okay. Before moving on to the next step, I want to go here and type in the next company that I was considering, which is WordPress. Now as I've searched this, I've just kind of connected two and two in my head that WordPress itself is actually free to use. Now without getting too complicated in this video, I'm just going to skip over that for now. You can't be an affiliate for a tool that is free, basically because they won't be making any money to pay you your commission. So this kind of works out that I was able to show you that, but let's keep moving on here. Let's go to the next one, Squarespace, and we'll search that. And again, the perfect hit right here from Squarespace's website. We can click on that, and it's very similar to Wix's setup here. Let's scroll down here and see if we can find out how much they pay in commissions. And they're not going to share it on their page either, so we'll have to start their application to find out. Now, this is where I'm going to jump in and give you some of my personal experience to hopefully help you even more. Now, I have used Squarespace in the past to build websites. It didn't really fit what I was personally looking for, so it's not something that I regularly talk about or I use regularly. What I do use regularly is Wix, and then also, even though WordPress is free, I've paid for years for a website host called Bluehost to actually use that WordPress. So instead of actually searching for WordPress, I'm just searching for Bluehost, which is basically the service you have to pay for in order to use WordPress. So if you click on there, they have an affiliate program, and this is perfect. We have another company that I know a lot about and I can create content on, and this is going tell us that they pay at least 70% commission on each sale. So right off the bat, we now have Wix as an affiliate program and we have Bluehost as an affiliate program. So that gives us two programs that we can join and create content about. You can join just one company's affiliate program. However, if you have experience with another similar product and they also have an affiliate program, I highly recommend joining their affiliate program as well. One, because it's totally free to do, but two, and more importantly, is this is going to open up the opportunity to make really good affiliate content comparing the two products. Since they are so similar, there are bound to be people online searching for what are the differences between the two, which one's better than the other, and really which ones should they be buying when they're compared side by side. Now, the personal experience part that I wanted to tell you about is that I have joined both the Bluehost affiliate program and the Wix affiliate program several years ago, and I actually created affiliate marketing content for their services. So this is pretty cool. I'll be able to show you the dashboard. I'll be able to show you real videos that were created from these two specific affiliate programs and that will tie all of this together. So hopefully, we are still on the same page here and you were able to go to Google and search for companies that you know a lot about, figure out which ones of them have affiliate programs, and then hopefully we're able to find two that are similar products that you have experience with and both of them have affiliate programs. So now before we talk about what kind of content to create for affiliate marketing, first, let's talk about how to join these programs. So once you have made sure that you are actually on the company's official website and you are on their affiliate program page, now you just click Join Now or Get Started Now, whatever button is there. Now, once you've clicked on that, it's going to bring you to their application. Now the application is very straightforward. They just basically need to know who you are, what your name is, what your contact information is. You can create a username and password to log into your dashboard where you're going to have your referral link. You can track how much you've made in commissions, and then it's going to ask for your company information, which is very important to know that you do not need to have a company set up to start affiliate marketing. You don't need to have an LLC, you don't need to have a business entity or a selling permit. You can do all of this just as an individual person. You don't need to legally set anything up. So where it says Company Information, you can put your first and last name. So you do not need to have a company name. And then your company website, this is basically they're asking where are you going to be promoting our products? This is something that we will come back to in a second here, but I'll show you how to do this for free, so you do not need to have an existing website, you don't need to pay for a website, and you don't need to have a following of any kind. I'll talk about that in a second here. But as you keep scrolling through here, just fill out this general information. All of this is basically for them to just be able to keep track of who you are and where to pay you your commissions. Now, once you filled all of that out, you literally just hit Sign Up. Now on some of these programs, they instantly approve you, on other programs, they say, okay, we got your application, we'll get back to you in 24 to 48 hours, and then you can log in and get your referral link. Okay, so to keep this step by step, I'm going to leave this application open because what you are going to need to fill out in order to actually sign up here is the company website. So briefly, we're going to jump ahead one step and then we'll come back here and we will continue step by step. Now, traditionally, up until I found out about this a couple years ago, you would have to go pay for a website. You'd have to physically create a website, whether that's on Wix or using Bluehost like we were just talking about, and then customize that entire website so it is branded as your website, and then you could come back to the application and you could put in that website name and then you could submit the application. Now, this required you to pay for website hosting and to do all the work to put the website together. What I found out a couple years ago and have been doing since is that you can create a YouTube channel 100% for free. It takes substantially less time compared to putting a whole website together, and then you can come back to the application and you can put your YouTube channel link here instead of an actual website. Now for the sake of time and keeping this tutorial going along, I'm not going to go through these steps of creating your YouTube channel and how to customize it. That is going to be covered in the full masterclass. So remember, that link is in the description for all of these details, really step by step. However, once you've put the YouTube channel together, it could be a totally new YouTube channel, then you can put it in the company website, and then you can actually sign up for the program. This is going to be the same for Wix. You're basically just going to repeat this process and go to Wix's affiliate program application and join theirs as well. So this is where it's going to start getting fun. I'm going to log into my Bluehost dashboard, show you how you actually get your referral link, and then what my favorite part in this whole video is going to be is showing you what kind of content to create and then showing you some of my real examples. Okay, so this is my Bluehost affiliate dashboard. You're going to see something similar to this looking dashboard for whatever affiliate programs that you are joining. All the companies use some of the same and some of the different affiliate tracking software. So your dashboard might look similar or might look different. However, once you are in your dashboard, it's going to track your earnings, but what you're looking for at this stage is going to be actually creating your referral link to that company. So on this dashboard specifically, you have CREATE AND SHARE LINK. You're going to be looking for something similar to this. You can literally just hit Create, and then this is going to be your referral link. So if you copy this link here and you go to that link, it is automatically going to redirect just to Bluehost website. And then anyone who clicked on that link has the same experience as if they were just to go to Google and then go to Bluehost or go to Bluehost website directly. The pricing is going to be the same, everything's going to look the same, and they can basically just get started now. They can go through and purchase what they were going to purchase. However, since they used that link of yours, this is going to track it on this dashboard and make sure that you get paid a commission on anything that they buy. Now, something that is important to know, it's a little bit more advanced, but I want you to know it from the start here, is that you can go to specific landing pages. Now, not all affiliate dashboards are going to allow you to do this, however, most of them should. So when this would come into use is that if the product that you're talking about in your affiliate content has multiple different variations of their product, so they have one for $1.99 a month, they have one for $8.99. And if you wanted to create affiliate content specifically about one of these, so it wasn't just sending someone to the general Bluehost now you can sign up, but you wanted to send them specifically to the product that was $8.99, for instance, you could select this product and then you could copy the link at the top, the website URL, and then you can go back and you can go to a landing page. Here's where you can paste that, and then once you click Create here, it's going to give you a different link down here. And this link, when someone clicks on it, is going to redirect them specifically to the page over here that you copied the address of. This is what's called the landing page. So when someone clicks on your link, where are they going to land? Is it going to be the specific page that you selected here or is it just going to be generally Bluehost? Now, where this really comes into play is on physical products that are purchased online. So for Amazon, for instance, you could get a link to a specific product on Amazon, and then you could put that in your affiliate content rather than sending someone just to the homepage of Amazon. So hopefully, we're all still on the same page now. You should know how to actually find your affiliate links or your referral link, and then how you can link to specific products from companies if you'd like to do that as well. Now, let's get into my favorite part of this video, and that is what kind of content do you create for affiliate marketing? And then I'll show you some of my own examples as well, just so all of this comes together nicely. When it comes to creating content for affiliate marketing, and this is probably going to be the most important and valuable part of this entire video, the type of content that you want to create is educational content. Your content is going to work by far the best for affiliate marketing, and what I mean by that is getting people to click on your affiliate link and go make a purchase, when you are helping them do something. Now, this applies to all niches. So what you want to come back to is think about what are your friends asking you for your advice on or your opinion on, and what are you responding to them? Are they asking you, hey, I need to make a website. How do I create a website? That's great content for you to make for affiliate marketing. Another example, are they asking you what is the best software that I should be using to create a website? That, again, is great content for affiliate marketing? So let me tie that together so it makes sense. To help someone who is in the situation of they don't know which website software to use, and they are a beginner, but they need to make a website, then I should be sharing my knowledge on the topic by creating content, something around the idea of what is the best website building software for a beginner. This allows me to share my knowledge and help that person as if I was talking to them on the other side of the camera. And then I can have my recommendations for them. I recommend using Wix because it is the easiest for beginners. It's basically drag and drop, compared to using something like Bluehost where you really need to know what you're doing because it's a little bit more complicated. This is the type of content that you want to be creating. And just to show you some proof on this, let me show you some of my own examples. This is a perfect example of this that a total beginner could do. So Wix versus WordPress, a simple review video sharing my experience with both of these tools. Again, just sharing my knowledge to anyone who is considering these two tools and doesn't know which one is better for them. Now, the reason that I wanna show you this video specifically is that this video was shot on my smartphone in my car, no microphone, no anything. Just sharing my experience with these two different tools, and this is something that any total beginner could absolutely do today. Now, two very, very important things that I wanna discuss right now is that, at first glance, you might be looking at this and seeing only 3,100 views and thinking that this was not a successful video. So first, let me show you what a crowd of 3,000 people looks like. That is all of these people plus the upper decks. And the very, very important thing to know here is that all of these people who came and watched this video specifically were all specifically interested in Wix or WordPress. So it's not like I was just talking to a crowd of random people here. Every single person that came in and watched that video was absolutely interested in those two tools and just figuring out which one to use. And then, obviously, once they figured out which tool was better for them, they could go down and they could click on the affiliate link to either Bluehost or to Wix. So although this looks like a very unsuccessful affiliate marketing video, this is, at its simplest form, how easy this business model can be. Now, to the second thing that I had just mentioned is very important. That is why is this a video and not a text-based article on a website? So if we go back a couple steps, remember I had said to create a free YouTube channel to use as your company website instead of paying for and creating an entire website. Well, that actually is going to help you a ton in affiliate marketing. I've been doing affiliate marketing for years now, and I still currently own several affiliate marketing, niche-specific websites with text articles on them and several YouTube channels that are about niche specific topics, creating affiliate marketing content, and the YouTube channels are doing so much better than the websites. Now, I wanna keep this video moving, and I don't wanna get too much into the weeds here, but the websites have stopped performing well because of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence. So that strategy for affiliate marketing where you're creating the website and writing text-based articles is just declining as it gets so much more competitive. However, over on YouTube, artificial intelligence cannot compete with this strategy because YouTube and Google, they're looking for content that is created by real people. They wanna see a real person on camera, even if you're just doing a screen recording and you're not showing your face, you'd rather do the more private faceless approach to this, just having a real person talking, sharing their real experience. That is what both YouTube and Google is craving right now. They're trying to get rid of the artificial intelligence kind of fluff content. So with all of that being said, if you create a brand new YouTube channel and you just use your smartphone to create videos about things that you genuinely know information about, and you're trying to help people with educational content, you will do extremely well in affiliate marketing. Now, for those of you who have gotten this far in this video, all I can recommend to you at this point is my full YouTube affiliate marketing masterclass. Hopefully, seeing how helpful this totally free tutorial was puts into perspective just how much is jammed into the full masterclass, and the kicker to all of it is that you get added into a group for private ongoing support from me directly. With all of that being said, I will leave the link to the masterclass down in the description below, and I really hope that this video has started you on the journey to affiliate marketing. It truly is a business model that can change your life forever. As always, if you guys have any questions at all, just let me know down in the comments. Otherwise, I will see you guys all in the next video.