6 Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies Online for Beginners 2020 (Plus 3 BONUS Killer Strategies)

Are you starting out in the affiliate marketing world and looking for the best affiliate marketing strategies online? I’m going to give you 6 best strategies that you can use to grow your affiliate income in 2020.

NOTE: If you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing, you can download my FREE guide, 4 Steps to Affiliate Success to understand how affiliate marketing works and how to profit from it.

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First, Some Fun Facts

Did you know that affiliate marketing started in 1989 by a company called PC Flower & Gifts? This company sold flowers online and was the first company ever to have an affiliate program. Amazon was close behind and started its Amazon Associates program in 1996. There are about 100,000 sites that use Amazon Associates today (including THIS one).

Affiliate marketing is expected to grow to a $6.8 BILLION industry by 2020. That means companies are spending a lot of money on their affiliate programs and it’s only expected to grow. As an affiliate marketer, you have a TON of opportunity to make money in this business.

Deploying the best affiliate marketing strategies online will help you become successful faster. Let’s talk about the 7 killer strategies that will help you grow!

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Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies Online #1 – Pick the Right Niche

A niche is generally just a topic, but it’s one that’s not too broad. For instance, weight loss is a niche, but it’s way too broad and too competitive. Weight loss for women over 50 is much more narrow and focused.

The problem with picking a broad niche is that it’s going to be WAY too competitive and you’ll never get your content into the mix. If you pick a more narrow niche, you have a much better chance of your content ranking in Google (and other search engines). We’ll talk a little more about this next.

You can really choose any niche that you’re interested in, but be careful about making it too narrow because then you may not be able to make money from it.

Your goals here are to:

1. Find a topic you will enjoy writing about. You’ll be doing a lot of writing and content creation.
2. Find a topic that’s not too competitive. You want to be able to rank in the search engines.
3. Find a topic that will make you money. That’s what we’re here for, right?

What you want to do when you think of a niche is then think about the people behind that niche. Can you help them solve a problem? Will they spend money to solve that problem?

Want to learn more? Here’s a lesson on niches from Wealthy Affiliate’s Free Training.

NOTE: To Get All 10 Free Lessons, Get Your Free Starter Membership Here. (No Credit Card Needed.)

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Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies Online #2 – Do the Right Keyword Research

In case you’re unfamiliar, keywords are how people find your content. You may have typed in “best affiliate marketing strategies online” and then you found this page.

How did I know to look for this keyword?

I used the keyword research tool that we have access to inside of Wealthy Affiliate called Jaaxy. Let me show you how I did it.

First, I typed “best affiliate marketing strategies” into Jaaxy.

The problem is that it only gets about 9 people per month for the #1 spot. It’s not really worth writing a whole article for that amount of traffic. We want LOTS of traffic.

Then what I did was go to Brainstorm in Jaaxy. This will give me lots and lots of ideas.

I typed in the phrase “best affiliate marketing strategies” again and here’s what happened.

What I’m looking for is a QSR under 100. QSR means quoted search results in Google, and it tells you how competitive a keyword is. The KQI is keyword quality indicator. Since this is a “Great”, I know it’s a great keyword to target. I know that if this ranks #1 on Google, I can expect to get about 42 people per month coming to this article.

42 people doesn’t seem like a lot, but as you write more and more and more, these traffic numbers add up. Also, this article will likely rank for other keywords that I’m not targeting, so there will be more traffic there.

And look at that column on the right side. I can click on each of those and get more and more ideas. The ideas and keywords that you can target are ENDLESS.

The importance of keywords is that they help you get FREE traffic from Google and the other search engines. If you want people to come to your site to read what you write, then you NEED to know how to use keywords properly as an affiliate marketing strategy.

Wealthy Affiliate will Teach You ALL About Keywords and How to Target the Most Profitable Ones.

Here’s A Keyword Challenge for You

Try Jaaxy yourself! See if you can find a great keyword! Look for:

• Traffic at least 25
• QSR under 100
• KQI “GREAT”

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Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies Online #3 – Deliver Valuable Content

In order to be a successful money-making affiliate marketer, you have to have content. And it has to be good content. You can’t just throw up a little article with affiliate links all over it and expect that people will buy from that.

You have to build trust and you do that by delivering value. A LOT of value.

One of the inspirations I use throughout my entire website is The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles. In his book, he talks a lot about value. In order to get rich, you HAVE to give value. He says:

“Your thought makes all things, animate and inanimate, work to bring you what you want; but your personal activity must be such that you can rightly receive what you want when it reaches you. You are not to take it as charity, nor to steal it; you must give every man more in use value than he gives you in cash value.”

Give MORE value than the money you get back. This is also called the Law of Compensation.

This law says the amount of money or good that you receive will be in direct relation to:

1. The need for what you do
2. Your ability to do it
3. The difficulty there is in replacing you

You can learn more about this important law from Bob Proctor:

There is a need for affiliate marketers, as we saw in the industry growth. ($6.8 BILLION, remember. Everyone is shopping online these days!)

The difficulty there is in replacing you will come with practice. DELIVER MORE VALUE THAN YOU EXPECT TO RECEIVE and you will be irreplaceable.

Your ability to do it comes down to the right training. Wealthy Affiliate will show you how to do it ALL.

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Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies Online #4 – Email Marketing

“The money is in the list.” I’m sure you’ve heard that a time or two. The list that’s being talked about here is an email marketing list. There are a couple of reasons why growing an email list is one of the best affiliate marketing strategies online.

1. You build trust with the people coming to your site.
2. Your list is YOURS and nothing can happen to it.

What I mean by the second reason is that if something happened to your site and it went down and you had to start over, you would STILL have your email list that you could send promotions to and have a source of income.

That list is YOURS to have forever. Make sure you treat your list well! You won’t want to just send out a bunch of promotional messages, hoping that they’ll buy from you.

Your email content should be treated no differently than your website content. Provide more value than the money you get back. (This should be your new mantra! Get it tattooed somewhere. lol)

I personally use and love ConvertKit for my email marketing. You can try it out for free for 14 days to see if you like it.

Wealthy Affiliate Premium Members Have Access to Incredible Email Marketing Training and List-Building Strategies.

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Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies Online #5 – YouTube

Honestly, YouTube scares me (lol), but it’s something that I personally know I’ll need to get into in 2020. There is an incredible opportunity to grow your affiliate marketing income with YouTube. Why? Because, like Google, YouTube is a search engine and therefore you can target the right keywords to get in front of the right people.

Did you know that there are 1.9 billion people on YouTube every month? Yes! That’s why it’s great to learn about YouTube and how to get in front of the right people on that platform. Here’s a small snippet of the YouTube training that Wealthy Affiliate offers its Premium Members:

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Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies Online #6 – Pinterest

Now we come to my personal favorite affiliate marketing strategy online – Pinterest. Yes, you heard me right. Pinterest. I honestly didn’t know what a powerhouse Pinterest was for getting traffic to your site until I saw a post about it in Wealthy Affiliate.

Pinterest is considered a social media platform, but in reality, it’s a search engine. A pretty search engine. 🙂 And in order to get in front of people on Pinterest, you would use keywords (like we talked about above) to target the right people.

I started a new Pinterest account just a couple of months ago in November 2018, so my account had 0 viewers and activity.

This is what it looks like today, January 24, 2019.

My traffic from Pinterest is steadily growing as more and more of my pins get out there. Your pins can also rank in the search engines, so that’s a double-win for Pinterest!

You can’t just go into Pinterest and start creating pins all will-nily. You can, but it won’t get you very far as an affiliate marketing strategy! There are tips, techniques and strategies to follow. You can read about the training I went through here in order to make this HUGE growth happen this quickly.

Pinterest is truly something special that a lot of affiliate marketers aren’t taking advantage of currently.

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Bonus Killer Strategies

Here are 3 additional bonus strategies from Wealthy Affiliate member dylanrieger:

• The Best of Strategy (with year)
• Mixture of Best of’s and Reviews
• YouTube (As mentioned above, but Dylan has additional information you won’t want to miss.)

Read about these strategies here.

Finally, here’s an ultimate how to start affiliate marketing for newbies guide from fellow WA’er, Nigel. Don’t miss this one!

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I hope you enjoyed these best affiliate marketing strategies online for beginners 2020. (Whew, that’s a mouthful isn’t it? lol) As you can see, all of my strategies are things I learned from being a member of Wealthy Affiliate. Wealthy Affiliate is the absolute best affiliate marketing training platform out there.

When you ask yourself, “If I invest in this, will it make me money?”, the answer will be YES for Wealthy Affiliate. (Of course, we can’t guarantee this because it depends on your level of effort. But I believe Wealthy Affiliate will help you make money. Check out these Success Stories and see what it’s done for others. )

You can start as a Free Starter Member, and you can even stay a Starter Member as long as you like. (I don’t recommend if you want to make a lot of money in affiliate marketing, because you’ll have access to so much more as a Premium Member that will REALLY grow your affiliate marketing income. But it’s up to you!)

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Do you have any questions about these best affiliate marketing strategies? Do you have any additional strategies that you’d like to add? I didn’t even touch on Social Media, and that’s probably a whole other article! lol. Leave me comments below and let me know what you think of these strategies.