Introduction

Thanks for downloading my guide “Caffeinated Affiliate Marketing Quickstart”!

I hope the information in this guide helps you start or grow your affiliate marketing
business.

I will be sharing my personal strategies that have helped me become a

successful six-figure affiliate marketer in the first 18 months of starting online.

I encourage you to read the guide at your own pace and not to get overwhelmed
as there are multiple ways to approach affiliate marketing.

Most importantly, take action on what you learn, and if you need more help,
check out my Youtube Channel:

Caffeinated Blogger YouTube Channel

You can also reach out to me on Instagram:

Caffeinated Blogger Instagram

I hope you find all this information useful.

Let’s dive in!

Greg Kononenko

The Caffeinated Blogger

What is Affiliate Marketing?
Are you ready to make some extra money… or maybe even get a job-replacing
income?

Well, then affiliate marketing can help you!

You can earn a commission for promoting another company's product or service
online.

As an affiliate marketer, you'll be the driving force behind generating traffic and
conversions for the merchant's product.

For every sale or conversion that you make, the merchant will pay you… and you
won’t have to create your own product, or do any customer support for these
products or services.

There are affiliate products in every possible niche you can imagine, such as:

Affiliate programs paying 5% on purchases of TV’s worth $1,000’s of dollars…

Ranging to digital services paying 90% on recurring payments of $99/month and

high retention rates.

We’re going to cover all of this in this guide, including ways to drive traffic to your
affiliate links.

What Are the Best Niches?

Choosing the perfect niche for affiliate marketing can be a daunting task,
especially for new marketers.

But don't worry, with a little bit of research and strategy, you'll be on your way to
making money in no time. Here are a few tips to guide you through the process.

What are your interests?

First, think about your interests. When choosing a niche, pick something you're
passionate about or have a lot of interest in.

Or at least something that you think you can pretend to be excited about! 🙂
Promoting something you're excited about will make you sound authentic and
help you become an expert in the field.

So, make sure you have a passion for something and that you're good at it before
making a final decision.
Research profitability

The best niche for affiliate marketing should also be profitable.

So, if you find a niche that appeals to you, make sure it has high-paying offers and
consider dealing with evergreen verticals that do well even in times of recession.

Some of the places to check the profitability of certain niches are the stats
provided to you by Affiliate Networks, and we will discuss that a little later.

Some suggested profitable niches:

Here are some of the best niches to consider:

● Technology
● Wealth Building / Making Money
● Health and Fitness
● Fashion and Beauty
● Lifestyle
● Pet Care
● Hobbies
● Travel
● Personal Finance
● Relationships
● Home and Garden
● Education
● Self-Help
● Sports
● Spirituality

These are just a few different niches you can look into.

Where to Find Products To Promote?

Here is a list of sites you can take a look at:

Amazon Associates

With Amazon Associates, you can earn a commission on pretty much anything
sold at Amazon.com.

What makes this program even more valuable is that you earn a commission on
everything new that someone you refer purchases, even if it’s not the product you
linked to.

As long as the purchases are made within 24 hours of them clicking your link, you
will get credit for everything they buy.
So if they just buy a $1 pen via your link, and an hour later they buy a $2,000 TV,
you will get paid for the sale of both of those items meaning potentially 4% of the
$2,000 purchase which is $80 - not bad for referring the person to buy a pen!

Clickbank

With 6 million digital products in over 20 categories, reaching 200million people

worldwide, ClickBank is a popular choice among affiliate marketers.

What’s more, this program offers very high commissions, as high as 75%, and
ClickBank is known for its regular reliable payouts, which is a huge drawcard.

There are plenty of products sold on a recurring basis, which means a great
source of recurring income for you, as well as products with upsell options to
help boost your income.

ShareASale

Whereas Amazon Associates is focused entirely on Amazon products,

ShareASale houses affiliate programs for 4,500+ merchants, both big and small.

From one spot – the ShareASale dashboard – you can sign up to all these
merchants, generate links, and view your statistics.

This is one of the biggest online platforms, along with CJ:

CJ

CJ Affiliate - formerly known by the lengthier name of Commission Junction – is

another affiliate network that brings together thousands of different merchants
under one roof (a lot like ShareASale).

Along with ShareASale, CJ is one of the biggest affiliate networks out there, which
means that you’ll be able to connect with thousands of both big and small
merchants.

How To Find Best Products to Promote?

Each affiliate network will have a slightly different way to search and filter
products.

Lets use Clickbank as an example. For Clickbank, you can go to the Marketplace
where you can search products by categories, which will look like this:
Once you click on the category, you will be able to sort and filter the products
and you will see information as follows:

“Rank” means the volume of sales the product is generating, so the

highest-volume offers will be the ones that are selling the best (converting the
best).

“Gravity” means the number of affiliates that have been paid recently by this
vendor. In this case, looks like over 1,900 affiliates have successfully made sales
for the Alpilean offer - which is amazing!

So this means that Alpilean is selling well and converting for a ton of different
affiliates.
And on average, if you make a sale, you can expect to make $140.81 commission
(including the main product and any upsells).

These are the basics of looking for a product on Clickbank.

On the other networks, it will be a little bit different, but you can apply the same
overall principles using the stats that those other networks provide you.

How To Get Your Affiliate Link?

The process to get the link to promote will be a little different for each network.

On Clickbank, you need to click the “Promote” button:

And then Create your Hoplink:

And you will get your hoping as shown below:

That link at the bottom is the link that you can promote anywhere - in your email,
on your website, on your social media profile, on YouTube, in SMS messages, etc.

As long as someone clicks that link and buys the product, that sale will be
credited back to you.

Now all you need is to get traffic to that affiliate link!

How Can You Get Traffic?

A lot of people think that you have to spend $1000’s a month to buy traffic using
advertising.

That’s not true at all, in my experience.

Yes, a lot of people make a lot of money running ads on Google and on YouTube,
but…

Personally I make over 90% of all my online income using only free traffic.

That’s right, I don’t pay anything for traffic - I get it free - and it means that all
affiliate commissions that I make are pretty much 100% profit, because I don’t
have any expenses to generate those sales.

I’m going to list some of the best free traffic sources available to you today online.

YouTube
YouTube is a monster!

It’s owned by Google and it’s the 2nd largest search engine in the world (Google
being the 1st largest).

There are billions of people watching billions of videos every day on YouTube…

And MANY of them use YouTube to get informed on a particular issue, such as:

- How to lose weight

- Best microphones for recording vocals
- Which guitars are suitable for beginners
- Etc…

And as you can imagine, if you make a video about these topics and recommend
a solution (such as link out to some $300 guitars on Amazon), many people click
on the links to buy those products you suggest!

This is called “selling through content” and it’s exactly what I personally do.

It’s super-powerful and an amazing way to get traffic from YouTube.

I’ve made a whole YouTube video on this topic:

Watch: How to Get Traffic From YouTube

Blogging / Niche Websites

This is one of my favorite ways to get traffic and make money!

I run 4 niche websites right now, and one of them is a blog called TravelCroc.com
which is a travel blog.

My blog right now ranks for over 20,000 keywords in Google Search, which sends
me 100,000’s monthly visitors for free!
For example, if you type in “snakes in spain” into Google, then currently my
website is ranking at the very top of Google for this search term:

If you choose correct keywords, and if you write high quality content on those
keywords, you can also grab top positions in Google Search and get a ton of free
traffic to your website.

Once the visitors are on your website, you can make money from them in a
variety of different ways.

The simplest way is by showing automated ads on your site, like I do on

TravelCroc:
Ads like this can generate $20 - $60 USD for every 1,000 visitors, in a fully
automated manner.

But since this guide is about affiliate marketing, let’s talk about that.

You can place affiliate links on your website to promote various related things on
your website:

You could publish an article about “best travel bags”, rank it on Page 1 of Google,
get tons of organic search traffic (for free!) and then refer those people to buy
those bags via your affiliate links.

For example:
As you can see, this article has links to buy this bag on Amazon, Bloomingdales
and Travelpro, and if the visitor buys this bag via ANY of these links - you will get
paid.

I’ve made a super-detailed video about how to set up a niche website, get traffic
and drive affiliate sales.

Here it is:

Watch: How to Start and Affiliate Website Making $2k / Month

What’s Next?
Well now you have a solid basic understanding of what Affiliate Marketing is all
about.

The biggest thing that I want to stress is that you need to commit to learning one
way of driving traffic, and stay consistent until you succeed at it.

For example, if you choose to do YouTube, then keep doing YouTube until you
succeed at it - don’t chop and change.

You know YouTube works. It’s not like it works for others but somehow it can’t
work for you. That’s impossible. You just need to learn it fully, until you master it.

It took me about 3 months of working part-time to start getting my first bits of

traffic to my first website and to earn my first $1 online.

However, in the following 3 months it skyrocketed to around $3,000.

And in the following 6 months after that I was making a job replacing income
(over $10,000 a month) where I was brave enough to quit my day job to start
working online full-time.

But that would not be possible if instead of working on the same traffic method
for 3 months, I kept chopping and changing every week starting something
different.

So - consistency is very important.

Want More Info and Training?

For further free training, make sure to follow me on YouTube and Instagram:

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel here

Follow me on Instagram here

If you would like more advanced, detailed training with some personalised help
and support, you can consider my courses below:

Caffeinated Niche Profits (click to open)

- Learn how to build profitable, passive websites by targeting keywords with
almost zero competition

Jet Video Academy (click to open)

- Exactly how I started a YouTube channel and grew it to 330,000
subscribers while making passive affiliate sales

Thank you for reading this guide, I wish you all the best with your affiliate
marketing journey!

Greg Kononenko
The Caffeinated Blogger

Caffeinated Blogger YouTube Channel

Caffeinated Blogger Instagram