If you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing or need a quick crash course to check that you’re still up to date, follow these simple beginners tips.

Research your affiliate products

It’s easy to just leap in and think “that seems good”.

But it pays to do at least a bit of due diligence before selecting an affiliate program to promote.

It should go without saying that you should check the quality of the product itself. After all, you don’t want to be promoting second-rate products as their low quality would affect refund rates and your credibility.

You should also check how long your chosen company has been in business. There may be a copyright date at the end of the pages and that’s probably correct.

But it doesn’t take long to check the Wayback Machine to see how the site has evolved over time. The WhoIs data will also tell you how long the domain has been registered for as well as other information such as how many times it’s moved around on the internet.

Write good pre-sell content

It’s not your job as an affiliate marketer (regardless of whether you’re a beginner or an intermediate level or have reached experienced status) to do the hard sell.

Your job is to warm up the customer and make them predisposed to a purchase.

That’s quite a major difference.

It usually means that you need to approach your content from the aspect of a potential purchaser.

If there’s a similar product on Amazon, take a look at the reviews. And if there are also pre-sales questions (what colour is the lead was one I saw on an electrical product, questions can be that simple!) then you can use those to help shape your pre-sell content.

The trick is to be on the side of the person reading your content. Treat them the same as you would a close friend and you won’t go far wrong.

If you can use the product in context, do so

You can see this being done all the time on YouTube.

People recommend the blender they’re using in the recipe they’re creating. And all sorts of other “product placement” oblique sales techniques.

That’s a neat way to not sell the product at all yet get sales.

If the product you’re aiming to sell is just a by-product of the content you’ve created, that’s great.

Enough people will think it’s a good idea to use the same stuff that you use to earn you a nice commission.

If you want to get clever, you can weave in some NLP-style embedded commands such as “you may not want to use the blender I use but…”

I’ve bolded the command in that snippet but obviously you wouldn’t do that on the content you create.

There are lots of those type of commands around but if you write normally and drip in the occasional affiliate link there’s a good chance you’ll pick up sales just by being helpful to your site visitors.

Build a list!

Scary as the thought may be, it’s the really big thing I wish I’d done when I was a beginner affiliate marketer.

Because building a list puts customers in your sales funnel before you send them off to the affiliate product you’re promoting.

Then you can send them friendly, helpful, emails and promote other related products as well as the product area they first joined you about.

Be careful to stay reasonably on topic – you wouldn’t want to promote a sky diving course to people who were afraid of flying for instance – and mix in information along with links to affiliate products.

If you’d like to know more about becoming a successful affiliate marketer, check out my Affiliate Marketing Quick Start Guide.