How To Start An Affiliate Marketing Side Hustle

If you’ve ever bought a product or service after following a link from a review website or YouTube, there’s a good chance that affiliate marketing was involved.

The good news is that you won’t have been charged extra for following the affiliate’s link. However, as long as certain criteria are fulfilled (more about this later), the affiliate will have received a percentage of the sale as a commission, paid for by the business providing the product or service.

Many businesses, like Outplayed, use affiliate marketing to advertise and promote their products and services.

In this article, you’ll find out how affiliate marketing works as a side hustle, how to get started, and the amount of money you can expect to make.

We’ll be looking at affiliate marketing from the affiliate’s perspective, rather than the business whose product or service is being marketed.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing involves promoting and recommending products or services and earning a commission for each successful referral.

It involves a mutually beneficial partnership between a business and an affiliate, which aims to bring attention to and promote the products or services provided by the business.

Affiliates are independent individuals or groups who promote a product or range of products, often within a certain niche. This could be a specific type of tennis equipment, an online course, or a Matched Betting service like the one provided by Outplayed.

The affiliate will often be a content creator who makes YouTube videos, runs a website, or posts blog posts, for example. You can also make affiliate earnings by making referrals to friends and family.

There’s a great deal of freedom with being an affiliate, as you can choose your methods for how to reach customers.

Affiliate marketing gives businesses a low-cost, low-risk, and potentially highly effective way to market their products or services.

The affiliate benefits from earning a passive income once they’ve set up their marketing and have started to receive some commissions.

Another bonus of affiliate marketing is that you’ll naturally learn new skills while you develop your marketing, for example, graphic design, website design, and presentational skills.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Businesses using affiliate marketing schemes pay their affiliates some form of reward for a successful referral. This often comes in the form of a commission on the sale, but it could be a fixed bonus amount, free products or services, or perhaps a combination of these.

One of the most common ways that businesses track referrals is to give their affiliates a unique link. If your affiliate link is clicked and the customer then goes on to purchase a product or service, this will be registered with the company’s affiliate scheme.

One way to track a referral is to add a tracking cookie containing a unique identifier to a customer’s computer or device when they click your affiliate link. The user’s activity on the vendor’s website, including purchases, will be tracked.

As long as certain criteria are fulfilled (for example, you might need to have generated a certain number of commissions in a given period and for your link to be the first affiliate link clicked by the customer), you’ll receive your reward.

Getting Started In Affiliate Marketing

When you start with affiliate marketing, it’s commonly advised that you specialise and choose a niche. You’re best to choose something that you’re interested in, especially if you already have some expertise in the area.

For example, you might look to market a product that relates to a sport or musical instrument that you play. Since you’re competing with lots of other affiliate marketers, choosing a specific type of product or service can be a good starting point.

For example, you might be a keen guitarist and could look to affiliate with a guitar-related business. You could start by focusing on effects pedals, online guitar courses, amplifiers, or a specific type of guitar accessory.

Choosing a niche can be tricky as you need to try to find something that will be sufficiently in demand to get a decent amount of traffic through your affiliate link, whilst trying to avoid very popular products where you’ll compete with lots of well-established affiliates.

You’ll need to find companies that have affiliate schemes; if they have such a scheme, they’ll usually have a link to an affiliates page at the bottom of their website.

A great place to start as an affiliate marketer is by signing up with Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates.

Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing

As with anything, affiliate marketing has its fair share of pros and cons. The good news is that there are plenty of positives:

• Affiliate marketing is worth billions of pounds worldwide

• Independence

• A great source of passive income once set up

• Low initial and ongoing cost

• Good scalability

• No prior experience needed

• Ideal as a side hustle for a second income

• Convenience and flexibility - you can choose your own hours

• A great way to improve your skills, for example, technical and presentational abilities

• If you have a YouTube channel that you use for affiliate marketing, this could drive more traffic to your channel and lead to making money from ad revenue on some of your videos

• You can market someone else’s product without worrying about customer service

Here are some disadvantages of affiliate marketing:

• You’re tied by the rules of the affiliate schemes - you need to abide by a company’s terms and conditions, which can change at any time

• Strong competition from other affiliate marketers, often in the same niche as you

• Can be slow to get started and make money in the early stages

• No guarantee you’ll make money

• Tempting to fall into the trap of producing spam marketing campaigns - definitely something to be avoided if you want to gain respect and have longevity as an affiliate marketer

Setting Up Your Affiliate Marketing

Once you’ve chosen a niche and signed up to a company’s affiliate program, you need to start promoting them.

The company will probably expect you to actively market them, rather than just passing on your affiliate link to friends, family, and on social media platforms.

Two ways to promote your chosen product are by setting up a website or using an existing platform like YouTube.

Setting up a website

When setting up your website, you can personalise its design and layout. You can combine text, videos, and an online store, to give a few examples.

There are now several great website builders, so you don't need any prior knowledge of web design to make a highly effective site. Here are a few examples, with a list of pros and cons for each.

Wix

Wix is one of the most popular website builders in the world, and often rated as the best. Here are some advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

• Beginner-friendly intuitive drag-and-drop website builder, so no coding is necessary.

• Two website editors are included - the simpler and more user-friendly Wix Editor, ideal for newcomers to web design and the more advanced Wix Studio Editor, more suited to more experienced website designers.

• Over 900 professionally designed and highly customisable templates.

• A free plan is available for as long as you want, so you can get comfortable with the tools and build a website before upgrading to one of the paid plans.

• Wix’s App Market includes a range of apps and integrations.

• Wix SEO Setup Checklist helps you optimise your site for search engines.

• Advanced security, including SSL certification, with data encrypted between your site and visitors.

Disadvantages

• Once your site is live, you can’t change your template.

• Expensive compared to similar website builders.

• Only their most expensive plan includes unlimited storage.

Hostinger

Hostinger is a very cost-effective website builder, which is also well suited to beginners.

Advantages

• Great value for money and much cheaper than most alternatives.

• Library of royalty-free images.

• Intuitive user interface.

• e-Commerce tools.

• Free domain name for one year.

• Very easy to build a site using their AI website builder.

• Free SSL security.

Disadvantages

• Their free plan is time-limited.

• Changing your template after your site is live erases your existing work.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a very well-established website builder, originating as a blog hosting service in 2003. It’s evolved a great deal since then and is now highly rated as a great website builder.

Advantages

• Plenty of great mobile-responsive templates.

• Email marketing built in.

• Templates can be installed, switched, and previewed whenever you want.

• Most plans come with e-commerce features.

• Free SSL security.

Disadvantages

• More expensive than many alternatives.

• Limited customisability.

• Their free plan is time-limited.

YouTube

An alternative to creating your own website, or something to run alongside a website, is to do your affiliate marketing on YouTube.

You can easily set up a YouTube account and add videos to your channel, putting your affiliate link in the caption or within the video itself.

A potential pitfall with using YouTube is that your content could be taken down or blocked, which isn’t something that can happen with your own website. Reasons for your content being taken down include copyright infringement or using affiliate links that aren’t allowed.

Types of Products You Can Market

There are many different types of product you can market, but they generally fall into one of three categories:

1. Physical products - for example, sports or camera equipment 
2. Informational products - for example, online courses and training 
3. Services - for example, Matched Betting or trading software

Physical products are probably the easiest to market, largely because you can just sign up to Amazon Affiliates and create affiliate links for any of the products they stock.

Although the commission is relatively small - about 1-10% - you get paid commission on anything your referred customer buys over the next 24 hours, not just the item linked to from your affiliate link.

Services often pay higher commissions. For example, Outplayed’s affiliate scheme pays 40% on all subscription revenue they receive from customers you refer. That means you keep getting a 40% cut every time they make a subscription payment.

How to Market a Product

There are several ways you can promote and market a product that you’re an affiliate for, whether you’re using your own website, YouTube, or another method.

Product Reviews

Reviewing the product you’re promoting is an obvious way to sell its benefits to effective customers. Many sites will offer free products to affiliates to allow them to review them. You’ll sometimes be allowed free access to online services you’re promoting, especially if you ask the website for this.

The most important part of doing product reviews is to be honest, since your reputation and integrity are crucial if you want to prove you’re trustworthy.

It’s important to highlight both the pros and cons of the product and service you’re promoting. People know that there’s no perfect product out there, and it’s important to set their expectations correctly with them.

You’re much more likely to garner respect and repeat customers if you give the full picture when reviewing products.

Here are some ideas for organising your review:

• Make sure you include the product name and the fact it’s a product review in your title.

• Include your affiliate link clearly at the start and end of the article.

• It’s good to personalise your review with a story explaining how the product worked well for you.

• Conclude your review with a recommendation to buy the product, with bullet points explaining why.

Tutorials

Tutorials are ideal for promoting a product, as you can show prospective customers how it works, incentivising them to buy it using your affiliate link.

They work well with physical products, informational products, and services.

If you were promoting a service like Outplayed, for example, you could do one or all of the following:

• Run through a Matched Betting offer with step-by-step instructions, using clear screenshots and clarifying anything that might be harder to understand.

• Summarise one or several of their Matched Betting and value betting tools.

• Recount your personal Matched Betting journey, how much money you made, any issues you had, and how you spent the additional side income.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is a popular and potentially very lucrative side hustle. Once you’re up and running with successful referrals, the commissions generated provide a passive income, earning you money whilst you do other things.

Although affiliate marketing can be tricky at first, the journey has the potential to be highly rewarding as you earn money whilst developing new skills.

If affiliate marketing isn’t for you, many other side hustles are available, from Matched Betting to selling digital art online or stock photography.