What is Affiliate Marketing ?- For Beginners

What is affiliate marketing?

In simple terms, affiliate marketing is when you earn commissions for recommending products/services to readers (or people you know). This is done by joining affiliate programs, where you get unique links (tagged with your personal ID) that tracks whenever your links convert to a sale. If someone out there buys something through your link, it rains money. Or, well, usually a smallll percentage of the sale, but it’s a start!

Affiliate marketing as a monetization stream is perfect for bloggers, because we recommend things on a daily basis. It’s also a largely passive way to make money, which frees up your time to do other cool things, like travel and eat your weight in pie. Long story short: affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to monetize your blog, so you should read on to learn all about it!

Basic affiliate marketing vocabulary that you should know 

Here are some words that you’ll encounter a lot with affiliate marketing. To avoid confusion, I’ve defined them briefly here:

The merchant: AKA the retailer, the brand. This is the person who is selling the thing that you’re promoting. E.g. if I’m promoting an Amazon wafflemaker, Amazon would be the merchant.

In other circumstances, you may be the merchant if you’re offering a product of some sort to sell and are hoping to get other people on board as affiliates… but that’s a conversation we’ll have another time.


The publisher: You, AKA “the affiliate”. You’re the one doing the marketing by promoting merchant goods to your readers (the customers) in hopes that they’ll make a purchase from your link.

Deep linking: Deep links are links that point you towards a specific product or page (rather than the general brand website)… so let’s say I wanted to recommend a swanky hotel. A deep link would lead the reader to a specific hotel’s page, rather than the general Booking.com site.

URL masking: Often, you’ll find that affiliate links are a real, million character eyesore. It’s likely that your links will look like Merchant.com/dlfjlfjlfjdskl. And let’s be honest, few people are going to want to click on that. URL masking is therefore when you create a prettier, cleaner “vanity URL” that makes your links more clickable. Some people use bit.ly, which has tracking purposes, or the WordPress Plugin Pretty Link.


How much can I make with affiliate marketing?

The answer to this question is… a scary (yet inspiring/impressive) amount. It’s not uncommon for some bloggers to make tens of thousands a MONTH just off of affiliate sales.

Let that sink in for a second. I’m not drunk. That wasn’t a typo. 5 figures a mooonth.

No joke –  Michelle Schroeder-Gardner (who created the course I took to learn about affiliate marketing) is one of such wizards, and regularly makes over 50k a month of passive income from affiliate marketing on her blog, Making Sense of Cents). One blog post alone has earned her over $300,000 to date.


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