What is Affiliate Marketing?

By definition, affiliate marketing is a referral arrangement in which an online retailer (advertiser) pays you a commission when users purchase their product from your referral link.

Unlike other ad types which pays based on clicks or views, affiliate marketing works on a CPA (cost-per-acquisition), or CPL (cost-per-lead) basis. In other words, you only earn a commission when someone takes an action (i.e buys the product or signup for a free trial).

Because there is less risk for the advertiser, affiliate programs pay out much higher commissions to publishers compared to Google AdSense or other types of ads.

Affiliate marketing requires a more hands-on approach. You have to find a product or service that you believe will be helpful to your users. After that you have to strategically add it in your blog posts and other areas of your site, so users can purchase the product using your referral link.

How Does Affiliate Marketing / Tracking Work?

First, you have to find a company or product that you want to promote. You need to select a product or service that you believe will be relevant to your blog’s topic and useful for your audience. The product or company you choose will be called a ‘Merchant’.

Next, you have to partner up with the company by joining their partner program. This makes you their ‘Affiliate’. Some companies also use the terms associates, partners, etc.

Once you have joined their partner program (also called Affiliate Program), you will get a unique affiliate ID. You will need to use this affiliate ID in all affiliate links that you add in your website to promote the product.

You can promote the product by adding an in-depth product reviews, recommend it in your articles, display banner ads, sending an email newsletter, and more. All traffic you send to the merchant website with your unique ID will be tracked.

Once a user makes a purchase, you will earn a commission. Your payment is issued once your earnings reach a particular threshold typically 45 – 60 days.

How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

First, you need to make sure that you are using the right blogging platform, and you are allowed to run affiliate marketing campaigns on your website.

For example, if you are using WordPress.com, then there are some restrictions regarding the products and services you can link to. For more details see our comparison of WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.

On the other hand if you are on self-hosted WordPress.org website, then you can add any affiliate link you want and efficiently manage your affiliate campaigns.

If you haven’t created a website already, then you can get started right away. Simply follow the instructions in our step by step guide on how to start a blog, and you’ll be up and running in less than 30 minutes.

Next, you need to let your users know how you make money from your website by adding a disclosure page. See WPBeginner’s disclosure page and feel free to use it as a template.

You will also need to add a privacy policy and terms of service page to your blog.

These are amongst the must have pages for every WordPress blog. They not only save you from legal issues in the future, but they also help you build trust with your audience.

Finding Affiliate Products and Services to Promote

There are many ways to find products and companies that you can partner up with as an affiliate. Here are some of the easiest ways to find the products you can promote.

1. Become an affiliate for products you already use

First, you need to look at the products and services that you already use and find useful. This makes it easy for you to convince your users about the product since you already know the pros and cons.

Next, you need to go to the product’s website and search for terms like ‘Affiliate program’, ‘Partners’, or ‘Affiliates’. Many companies are actively looking for affiliate marketers to promote their products that’s why they add a link to their affiliate page in their website’s footer.

2. Look for products other blogs are recommending

Another way to find products is by looking at other blogs similar to yours. You will be able to find many similar blogs that are using affiliate marketing to make money.

But how do you know that they are promoting affiliate products?

First, look for the obvious and easily noticeable banner ads on their website. Take your mouse to the banner ad, and you will see a link in your browser’s status bar.

This link will usually have an affiliate ID. Affiliate ID helps merchants track which affiliate partner is sending them traffic / sales.

Sometimes these links may look like internal links, but when you click on them they will take you to a product website with affiliate marketer’s ID in the link. You will also find similar affiliate links through-out their content.

3. Join Bigger Affiliate Networks

Another way to find products to promote is by joining affiliate networks. These websites act as a middleman between affiliate marketers and merchants.

You will notice that many products and companies that you want to partner with already use an affiliate network. This helps you quickly find a lot of products that you can start promoting on your website.

4. Reach out to Companies

If you really want to promote a product but can’t find any information about their affiliate program, then you can simply ask them via email.

Some companies may not be actively promoting their affiliate program. If they have an affiliate program, then they can invite you to join.

What are Affiliate Networks? Why You Should Join Them?

Affiliate networks act as a middleman between you (the affiliate marketer) and merchants (companies that want to sell their products).

For merchants, they provide their platform as a service to list their products, track affiliate traffic, manage affiliates, and send payments.

For affiliate marketers, they offer an easy to use platform to search for products, sign up as an affiliate, track your campaign performance and earnings.

Following are some of the most popular affiliate networks that you can join.

• ShareaSale – One of the largest affiliate networks with many high-paying affiliate products for almost every category imaginable. Popular WordPress hosting company, WPEngine, uses ShareASale to manage their affiliates. WPEngine’s Affiliate program offers a very generous payout to their affiliate partners.
• CJ Affiliate (Formerly, Comission Junction) – Another top affiliate network with a huge number of merchants and products neatly organized in categories and easily searchable. Companies like GoDaddy, Expedia, and many others use CJ.
• ClickBank – This is a large online marketplace for selling digital products in various categories from different vendors. It is easy to use and has tons of learning resources for new affiliate marketers.
• Amazon Associates – Amazon is world’s largest ecommerce store with millions of products. You can sign up for their affiliate program and start earning by sending people to a website they already use for their online shopping.

Which affiliate networks should you join?

You should join affiliate networks that have the products you want to promote. You can join multiple affiliate networks for different products. We use all the above networks and few others.

Make sure that you always check the network program policies. You also need to review program policies of individual products and merchants. This will give you a clear idea about your earnings, payments, additional incentives, and more.

Affiliate Marketing Tips to Increase Earnings

Now that we have covered the basics, let’s dive into some more tips on how to actually make money from affiliate marketing.

1. Choose good products and companies to promote

As an affiliate marketer, you don’t have control over the future of products that you are recommending. That’s why you need to make sure that you are recommending the best products from reputable companies.

The best way to do this is by recommending the products and services that you have actually used. If you want to recommend a product that looks useful, then feel free to contact them to learn more.

If you ask nicely, most companies will gladly offer you a free account or copy to review / test their product or service.

2. Offer highly useful and valuable content

You can add affiliate links and banners anywhere on your WordPress site. However, simply adding links will not result in convincing your users to actually buy those products.

You need to convince your users by offering useful and valuable information about the product. Many affiliate marketers do that by writing in-depth product reviews, video reviews, product comparisons with pros and cons, and more.

3. Keep your audience in mind

Keep your website’s audience and their interests in mind when choosing the product. For example, if you run a fashion blog, then you would want to promote fashion accessories, clothing, and similar products that your audience would want to buy.

You also need to make sure that you are not just recommending products because they are offering higher commissions. If a user buys a product based on your recommendation, and it doesn’t turn out useful, then they will never trust your recommendations again.

Affiliate Marketing Plugins and Tools for WordPress

As your blog grows, you will be recommending a lot of different products. This will make it difficult for you to manage all the affiliate links, banners, and ads spread all over your website.

Luckily, there are excellent affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress that you can use to help with management.

1. ThirstyAffiliates

Manually adding links to your content becomes quite difficult as your site grows. You will have to copy the URL with your affiliate ID every time you mention the product and paste it into WordPress.

This is where ThirstyAffiliates can help. It is an affiliate link management plugin that allows you to easily add affiliate links in WordPress.

It also lets you change lengthy affiliate links into cloaked pretty links which are more user-friendly.

ThirstyAffiliates also has the option to automatically replace keywords with affiliate links which can significantly help you boost your affiliate revenue.

2. AdSanity

AdSanity is the best WordPress ad management plugin and a must-have for every affiliate marketer’s toolbox. It allows you to create banner ads from your WordPress site and manage them from a single dashboard.

AdSanity also makes it easy to insert ads into your WordPress posts, pages, and sidebar widgets. You can use it to manage your third-party ads like Google AdSense ads and banners as well. For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to manage ads in WordPress with AdSanity.

3. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to see where your users are coming from and what they do when they are on your website.

It also helps you track your outbound affiliate links using Google Analytics. This enables you to find out which affiliate links are clicked more often and help you discover missed opportunities.

Need more tools? See our full list of top affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress.

We hope this ultimate affiliate marketing guide for beginners helped you learn how to become an affiliate marketer. You may also want to see our ultimate WordPress SEO guide to bring more visitors to your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Guide for Beginners – Step by Step appeared first on WPBeginner.

What is Google AdSense?

Google AdSense is an advertising network run by Google that allows bloggers and website owners an opportunity to earn money by showing text, image, video, and other interactive advertisement on their websites. These ads are targeted by site content and audience.

Google AdSense is hassle free because you don’t have to deal with advertisers or worry about collecting money. Google administers and maintain relationships with the advertisers. They collect the payment, take their management fee, and send the rest of the money to you.

AdSense offers cost-per-click ads (CPC) which means that you earn money every time a user clicks on the ad on your website. The amount received per click varies based on a variety of factors.

Video Tutorial

If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

Getting Started with AdSense

First thing you need to do is sign up for a Google AdSense account. If you have a Gmail account, then you can use your existing account to sign up.

Once you’ve submitted your application, you will receive an email within 6 – 8 hours telling you whether you have passed the first step of the review process. If you passed the first check, then you can log in to your AdSense account and get your ad code.

Start by clicking on the My ads tab and then click on the New ad unit button.

This will bring you to a create new ad screen, and you will be asked to choose an ad type. You can select from ‘text and display ads’, ‘In-feed ads’, and ‘In-article ads’.

If you are unsure, then start with the text and display ads.

Next, you need to provide a name for this ad unit and select the ad size, type, style, and colors.

The name of the Ad is only used for internal purposes, so you can name it anything like “SiteName Sidebar”.

The next option is choosing the Ad Size. While Google offers a wide-variety of ad sizes, there are certain sizes that are listed under recommended because those are the most popular among advertisers.

What that means is that these ads are likely to have a higher inventory thus a better payout.

After that you will need to choose Ad type. We recommend having both text & display ads.

Ad style allows you to control the display of your text based ad units. We recommend using your site’s color scheme for best results.

The custom channels feature allows you to better track the ad performance based on sites. You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.

For ‘If no ads available’ option, you can either choose to collapse the ad space or fill it with your own ad. This is shown when Google cannot find an appropriate ad (which rarely happens).

Once you’re done with this setup, simply click on Save and get code button. You will be prompted with a message “Ad successfully created”, and you will also see the Ad code.

Copy your ad code and paste it in a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit. You will need it in the next step.

Adding Google AdSense in WordPress

You need to determine where you want to show the ad on your website. Ads are most commonly displayed in the sidebar. You can add Google Adsense in your sidebar by using WordPress widgets.

Simply go to Appearance » Widgets page in your WordPress admin area. Next, drag & drop the ‘Custom HTML’ widget to the appropriate widget area and paste your Google AdSense code in there.

For better placement control and tracking, we recommend that you check out AdSanity WordPress plugin. (See: Best Ad Management WordPress solutions)

AdSense Best Practices and Frequently Asked Questions

Over the years, we’ve answered several AdSense related questions. Having used AdSense on several of our sites such as List25, we’ve learnt a whole lot about optimizing. Below are some AdSense best practices and frequently asked questions.

What’s the best AdSense Ad Size?

Although ad placement is key, we’ve found that the best sizes are 336×280 and 300×250. These ads tend to fit on most screen sizes and have the best pay rate as well.

What’s the Best AdSense Placement?

This entirely depends on your layout. The goal is to get more clicks, so you want to place your ads in a more prominent spot. We have found that ads within post content towards the top of the screen tends to get the most clicks.

Several users have asked us about adding AdSense in a floating widget because it will be very prominent. We strongly recommend against that because it is not allowed by Google Terms of Service. If you violate their TOS, then you can get banned from the program.

Can I click on my own Google AdSense Ads?

Often beginners are tempted to click on their own ads or ask their family members to click on their ads. Please don’t do that. Google’s algorithm is very smart and knows when you’re clicking on your own ad. This can get you banned from the program.

What is Page RPM in Google AdSense?

RPM stands for Revenue per Mille meaning revenue per 1000 impressions. This is determined by multiplying the total number of clicks and cost per click and then dividing that by the total number of pageviews.

Can I use my Blogger or YouTube AdSense account with WordPress?

Yes, you can. If you started using AdSense on one of Google’s hosted platforms like Blogger or YouTube, then you can change your AdSense account type and use it with WordPress. You’ll need to provide Google AdSense with the URL of the site you want to monetize by filling out an application form.

Simply login to your AdSense account and then under ‘My Ads’ click on ‘Other Products’ option. Next, you need to click ‘Upgrade now’ and complete the application form.

What is CTR in Google AdSense?

CTR or click-through-rates differ vastly for different kind of websites. Your ad clicks depend on a lot of factors like your website’s topics, your audience type, ad placement on your site, and more. The ideal CTR for Google AdSense is really hard to define because you don’t have access to the click rates of other websites like your own.

However, Google AdSense has built-in tools that will start showing you messages if your site is not getting a good CTR. You can follow the optimization guides shown inside Google AdSense dashboard to improve your ad revenue.

When and how does Google AdSense pay publishers?

Each month, Google AdSense calculates your previous month’s earnings and shows them on your your ‘Transactions’ page. If your earnings match the required threshold, then your payment is processed and released by the 21st of that month.

There are multiple payment methods available including direct electronic transfer, wire transfer, check, Western Union, and more.

Why Google AdSense rejected my application?

Google Adsense may reject your application if your website doesn’t meet the AdSense program policies or their terms and conditions.

What are the requirements to get Google AdSense application approved?

Here are the minimum requirements to get your Google AdSense account application approved.

• Your website and all its content must comply with AdSense program policies and terms and conditions.
• Your website should be at least 6 months old.
• You, the applicant, must be over 18 years old.

Note: Even if your application meets all the requirements, Google AdSense still reserves the right to decline your application.

Can I add Google AdSense in my WordPress.com blog?

WordPress.com does not allow you to add Google AdSense to your website unless you upgrade to the Business plan. For more on this topic, please see our guide on the difference between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.

What is the difference between Google AdSense vs Google AdWords?

Google AdWords allows you to advertise on other websites including those participating in the Google AdSense program.

Google AdSense allows you to make money from your website by showing ads on your website.

We hope this article helped you add Google AdSense in your WordPress site. You may also want to check out our guide on 25 ways to make money online blogging.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Properly Add Google AdSense to Your WordPress Site appeared first on WPBeginner.