How To Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics For Free

I understand being on a shoestring budget. I get being broke. Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn a living online from the comfort of your own home. However, it can be tricky if you are trying to do it without getting some guidance. There are massive amounts of training and courses available. Knowing where to start can be tricky! However, you can learn affiliate marketing basics for free. You can even get up and running with a website free!

Eventually, you will want to invest some money into your affiliate marketing business, but this is one business that you can start free!

Wealthy Affiliate Free Starter Membership

If I were a newbie, I’d start out with Wealthy Affiliate’s free starter membership. This gives you access to all the tools that Wealthy Affiliate’s premium membership offers for the first seven days. After that, you can continue with the limited getting started course.

The great thing about this is you can tap into the premium members’ mentorship and knowledge while you have the first seven days free. You will likely discover why most people end up paying for the membership as it is very valuable to have a community behind you, but just getting started here will help you with the basics.

Another great thing about the Wealthy Affiliate starter membership is that you have the tools to create a free website. Wealthy Affiliate has a siterubix website creator that will host your website while you are getting it up and running. Free websites often aren’t as brandable as ones that you actually own and there are downsides to not owning your website, but if you have no money, this is a great place to get started. The advantage of starting it here is that you can eventually move it over to your own domain as you start to earn income from it.

SkillShare Affiliate Marketing Courses

After you have started your free SiteRubix site with wealthy affiliate and gone through as much training as you possibly can in seven days, you can sign up for your trial month of SkillShare courses. Skillshare has plenty of online marketing courses. These are a little better than YouTube because there tends to be more of a focus, some step-by-step actions to take and even a community to interact with. This is important because when you are getting started, you may not know what you don’t know.

The great thing about Skillshare is that it has an affiliate program. As you go through the courses during your free trial period, you can be reviewing them with your affiliate link. When people find your review and join, you will start to earn commissions. This is one advantage that skillshare has over YouTube videos.

YouTube Videos

YouTube has a wealth of information. There are videos on literally everything and anything on YouTube. This has its advantages and disadvantages. Anyone can make a YouTube video and promote something, but it is difficult to know whether they are an expert or not. There are loads of free affiliate marketing nuggets within YouTube. Spending some time on YouTube affiliate marketing videos can give you great ideas for content of your own. You can learn everything from how to optimize your channel to how to get subscribers fast. 

I would definitely encourage you to spend watch a video or two per day on YouTube. It will enhance the things that you learn in your wealthy affiliate training and your skillshare courses. This is especially useful if you are thinking about creating your own YouTube channel and monetizing it. While YouTube does not have an affiliate program, it does provide you some income by showing advertisements on your channel. Additionally, you are allowed to have affiliate links in the description, so you can monetize it that way.

Hit Up the Local Library

Here’s where you go a bit old school and head to the library. This is a great chance to spend some time away from your computer. Check out some books on internet marketing and affiliate marketing. Sometimes books may be a bit dated. Technology runs at the speed of light and some techniques that worked a few years ago aren’t working now. However, the basics of affiliate marketing are still the same. You lead someone to a sales page with your content, they buy the offer and you earn a nice commission.

Why should you bother with books? Part of being an affiliate is reviewing information. This can come from books, online courses, products or even software. Keep in mind that you can review the book on your website and use your Amazon affiliate link to start earning commissions. This is a great way to start reviewing products that you don’t have to purchase.

Reading books will give you many ideas about trying new things with your affiliate marketing. You may discover that you prefer email marketing over YouTube marketing. You may want to try your own course creation. Seeing different books and topics on the bookshelves of a library may trigger some content creation ideas. The library is still a wealth of information and it has a different feel than doing a Google search.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is a journey. Some people start out with a nice big budget in order to create fast sales through paid traffic. Others start out with a shoestring budget and start to hustle with content creation and sharing their own works within their niche. Be wary of the people who try to tell you that you won’t ever make money with your blog or that you need to spend thousands of dollars to have a professional looking website. With today’s technology, that is no longer true. Your website doesn’t need to look professional to earn you money and some professional looking sites don’t earn any money! A wordpress SiteRubix website will work just fine. You can even earn affiliate commissions with a simple YouTube channel. You just need to learn the basics of affiliate marketing and I’ve shared some great ideas for you to get started!

If you are starting out and don’t have money to spend on affiliate marketing training, my advice is going to be to stick with it! Don’t expect to earn money right away. It may take about 3-4 months before you start to see some consistent sales. This is normal. Google doesn’t rank new sites right away because there are many people who try out affiliate marketing, set up a site and then abandon it after a month when they haven’t seen a dime from the site. Your website does have to earn the trust of Google in order to get to the first page rankings and start seeing some organic search engine traffic. But don’t worry, consistent efforts will get you there. You’ll eventually get sales.