So, as a newbie with no prior experience making money online, how do you go from nothing to making your first $1000 with affiliate marketing every month?
To put it another way, how can you make money quickly and without an audience?
As you can see, this is exactly what I’ll be demonstrating to you in this post, and those who stick with me until the end will be shown an additional strategy for making even more money with your first $1000.
You can reinvest your affiliate marketing profits to grow your business to $10,000 and even as high as $50,000 per month by reinvesting the money you make from affiliate marketing. My personal traffic comes from my anonymous YouTube channels, where I don’t show my face.
However, we will not be discussing that strategy in this post as I have a few posts in the pipeline to cover that.
Affiliate disclosure: Just to be transparent, some of the links on this website are affiliate links. If you make a purchase, we will earn a commission but there will be no additional cost to you whatsoever. This is how we manage to keep creating free content. We never recommend any affiliate link that will not benefit our readers.
How to make money with affiliate marketing for beginners?
There are actually so many different ways you can make money with affiliate marketing. However, we’re going to cover a specific strategy in this post as I believe this is the quickest and easiest way to make your first $1000 as a complete beginner.
So what is this strategy I speak of?
We’re going to be promoting software products. Don’t worry if you’re not a software expert though. By the end of this post, you’ll know why it’s not so difficult and how you can get started today to get one step closer to reaching your first thousand and eventually hitting your freedom goals.
Why software products?
We’re mainly looking to promote mostly SaaS products. There are a few reasons why we’re doing this.
- SaaS products offer higher commission. With physical products, a good commission would be something like 3% on a $25 product. With SaaS, you can get 40% on products worth thousands. Some SaaS products offer as high as 70%.
- SaaS products are usually subscription-based. A lot of the affiliate programs offer lifetime recurring commissions. This means that you refer a person once and you make a percentage of their subscription every month for the entire customer’s lifetime. It’s a great way to earn passive income where you get paid every month without doing any additional work.
- SaaS products are generally more expensive compared to other type of products. As mentioned in the point above, it’s not uncommon for customers to be spending over $1000 on SaaS subscription. Some products can go as high as $10,000. This is great for beginners and in helping you make your first $1000 quickly since you don’t need a crazy amount of traffic like you would with physical products.
Just follow the below steps and you’ll be on your way to making your first $1000 promoting software products.
Find a good software to promote
First, head over to g2.com.
This is a site where you’ll find a wide variety of affiliate-promoted software products. There are categories like SaaS, sales marketing analytics, e-commerce management, digital advertising development, and so on. It has one of the largest libraries of software reviews you can find.
The main reason I want to promote software as an affiliate is due to the fact that there are potentially a lot of money to be made from promoting digital products and services.
Since there is no cap on how much you can sell, you stand to make a lot more money. You’re free to recommend however many people you want. There’s no limit.
Whereas, there may be a limit if you promote physical products such as Amazon cameras. This is due to the fact that the supplier has a capped inventory and the camera you want to promote probably only has around 10 that are available for sale. This makes it hard for you to scale your business to the moon.
That’s not all, either.
Digital products, services, and software can earn you as much as 50%, 60%, or even 70% commissions. There’s no limit to how much you can sell. You don’t need to worry about running out of stock.
Compare that to physical products where commissions would be much lower than 10%, sometimes less than 5%.
On G2, software is reviewed and classified by users, allowing you to pick the best fit for your needs.
In order to decide which software is the best based on all of those reviews, the site will show you a variety of options in the category or niche you choose to target. Then, you can focus solely on promoting that one particular piece of software.
As an example, suppose I’m looking for affiliate software. As a result, we’ll have access to a wider range of software options and will be better positioned to market those options.
You don’t want to promote products and services with low feedback ratings, such as those less than 3 stars, because that indicates that customers aren’t really happy using them.
Instead, focus on those with 4 or 5 star ratings and you’ll be fine.
Let’s take a look at the first piece of software right here, which is called PayKickstart, for example. It has 15 reviews with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5. This means that the software is considered high quality compared to the second one on the list. The entry level price of $199 would be great for an affiliate as you can earn 25% of that each month.
I have promoted Kartra as an affiliate myself. Applying for the program is easy. You just need to go to the Kartra site, click the affiliate program link in the footer, and fill out the application. Bear in mind, you would need to wait to get approved. They don’t approve anyone, so you would need to make sure to take the time to properly fill out the application form.
Kartra offers 40% recurring commission for any of their plans. As long as I get someone to subscribe to Kartra, I get 40% of the customer’s monthly subscription for as long as he/she remains a customer.
The best part is that all I need to do is refer a customer once, and then I earn quite consistently each month.
Nothing beats passive income, and they’re going to give you even more incredible features on top of that.
My affiliate link will be provided to me by them and I can access it via my affiliate dashboard.
I can then copy this link and send it to people that would be interested.
If they go ahead and buy off my link, I would earn those juicy recurring commissions when someone signs up with Kartra.
Check out my review of Kartra here: Kartra Review: How To Easily Manage Your Online Business In Less Time.
Now, what I want to demonstrate is that if you visit Google and type in “click funnels,” another software, you’ll see that many people are running ads for “click funnels,” and they have a lot of money invested in it. So competition is quite fierce for ClickFunnels.
Whenever someone types in “click funnels,” “click funnels,” or “click funnels,” they’re fighting to be at the top of the Google search results for affiliates who are promoting click funnels.
If your link appears at the top of the page, even as a promotion or even as an ad, you can expect to see a lot of signups for the software.
Using Google to search for “paykickstart will show that no ads are currently running for this product other than the actual company (at the time of writing this article).
So we have the opportunity to run an ad and be first on Google when someone searches for “paykickstart”. This means that we’re getting some traffic that has low competition and we’re inevitably going to be making money.
At this stage, what you need to do is go to g2.com and look for software that has a lot of interest, but no one is actually promoting it with Google Ads. This will allow you to jump into the blue ocean and be the first.
Let’s take a look at what I mean by that.
Drive Traffic
In the next step, you’re going to need to open a Google Ads account for traffic.
Google ads is a massive topic on its own so I won’t go into depth in this article.
Google is one of the best places to run traffic to since the majority (maybe like 99%) of the online world uses Google for searching.
At the bare basics, you’ll want to create a campaign with the name of the software you’re promoting and “review” at the end.
You can target every country and territory and allow to choose the display network. It’s better to start broad and let the algorithm figure out who your best visitors are, which should eventually drive your cost per visitor way down. For the sake of my wallet, I usually stick with English speaking countries that are considered first world. Nothing against second or third world countries, but it’s usually much easier to get sales from a first world country, in particular the US. At the end, it’s just a numbers game.
In addition, it doesn’t really matter where the clicks are coming from as long as they are actively searching for the software you want to promote. These kinds of software apps only require $5 to $10 a day, as scaling them to $20,000 or $30,000 a month would be impractical due to their small size and lack of searches.
In the next step, you must enter some keywords for which you want to rank first, so that when someone types in those keywords, you want to show up first.
Putting keywords in brackets indicates exact match to show up on your site. That is, if you put the keyword “[kartra review]” enclosed in brackets, your ad will only show when someone types the exact keyword “kartra review” on Google search.
Setting up a keyword without any brackets or quotes will result in a broad match, which isn’t very useful a lot of the times unless you really know what you are doing.
For example, if I just want to show up when someone types in “kartra” or “what is kartra” or something along those lines, then when I put in brackets, someone would need to literally type in this keyword and this phrase in order for them to see the website and sign up for the service.
Add an eye-catching headline and compelling copy that forces them to click on it, and you’re pretty much good to go. Any other further tweaking can be done after the campaign goes live.
When you’re at the top of the rankings, you’ll get all of the clicks and all of the red hot traffic, and you’ll be able to make your first $1000 dollars with affiliate marketing, even if you don’t have an audience or a following.
Set up an ad like I demonstrated, add your affiliate link, and then fast-forward through a variety of products and services.
Paid traffic can help you get to your first $1000 fast, however, if you do not wish to pay for ads for whatever reason, you can learn some free ways to drive traffic.
Check out our article which will show you how to drive traffic without spending a dime.
For a variety of reasons, you may not be able to make tens of thousands of dollars a month with just one software or one product, but if your goal is to just make your first $1000, then this is the best option for you.
If you do want to scale later on, you can keep reviewing other software and building out more sites till you get to that $10000 dollar per month mark.
