Welcome! Affiliate marketing has revolutionized how I create content and share more useful content for my audience! I have a number of free resources below to help you get started with using affiliate marketing in your own business.
Some of the information below includes affiliate links. When you click these links I may make a small commission from your purchase!
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
If you’re looking for some helpful guides to get you started on your affiliate marketing journey, I have a few freebie guides on my course page that give a broad overview about planning out your content and revenue generating ideas for your content business. Use these toolkits to guide you through the process. I’ve created a free Affiliate Marketing Starter Kit specifically to launch affiliate marketing in your content business.
I also created a free 11 Revenue Generating Ideas for Your Content Business guide, where I talk about different ways that content creators can monetize their platforms. One of these ways is to use affiliate marketing! Let’s dive a little deeper into how you can use affiliate marketing in your own business.
Affiliate marketing in content creation is a type of marketing where creators share information about a product or service and if their audience makes a purchase from their referral link, they may make a commission from that sale. Commissions for affiliate marketing can vary widely depending on the product or service you are promoting. Each affiliate marketing company or platform will have their own terms of how the link is created, how long after the click the sale must be made, and whether adjacent items purchased at the same time receive any commission as well.
I’ve created a free Affiliate Market Starter Guide that you can use to plan and guide you as begin using affiliate marketing. Start by narrowing down the top three brands you would like to talk about in your content. Then think about what these brands or products relate to for content topics. After you’ve selected your top three brands and three related topics, think about what keywords, phrases, or questions your audience will be searching for when looking for these topics.
Click to download Affiliate Marketing Starter Kit
Affiliate Marketing Content
This exercise should bring you to your first three content ideas! You know what topics you want to talk about, what your audience will be searching for, what questions you will be answering for them, and how you would like to deliver that content.
After you’ve narrowed down the types of affiliate content you want to make, you can start thinking about how you’re going to share with your audience the story of how you found solutions to problems with the different products or services you are sharing. This includes both the types of content and the frequency that you’re planning on sharing content.
Click to download the Starter Guide for Planning Content
Use this Content Planning Spreadsheet to create your own 12-month plan!
As you plan out your content, think about the questions you will be answering with the content you make. Affiliate marketing uses links to take your audience to the “solution” product or service. You’ll need to narrow down the companies that you would be best suited to work with as an affiliate marketer, based on the brands that you’ve chosen in the worksheet above. Many companies work with multiple affiliate marketing platforms, so many times you may be able to apply to one affiliate marketing program and work with all three companies of your choice!
There are many affiliate marketing companies that you can work with, some of the most well known in the fashion and beauty categories are LikeToKnowIt/LTK and Collective Voice (formerly Shopstyle Collective); for travel creators many travel brands can be found in one place on sites like CJ Affiliate or Brand Cycle. Sometimes a brand may even have links to their affiliate programs on their website, so make sure to check the brand websites that you are planning on talking about for information or their suggested affiliate marketing platform as well.
After you’ve narrowed all of those things down, it’s time to apply to the program! Often times you can get a quick response letting you know you’ve been accepted. Use the time while you’re waiting to get your approval to start creating links to plan out the next pieces of content you would like to create.
In my Create Content with Style Facebook group, we uplift each other and support each other as creators. I hope to see you there as well!
After You’re Approved
Green means go! And once you’re approved by your affiliate marketing platforms of choice, it’s time to start putting your links to work. You’ll need to decide what kind of content you’ll be making, for which platforms, and how often. Think through your content stories to go through what questions your audience may have about a particular topic. Let them know how they can reach the solution to the problem they are having, and add your creative spin on it!
The Affiliate Marketing Starter Kit guides you through how to use different affiliate links with the content you create, when you should use them, and how to keep them organized.
Ready to dive into creating content? Visit my Create Content with Style page for more content creation information.
Get access to all of my monthly creator update videos and access to different video course material I’ve created for different sites by becoming a Create Content with Style member on YouTube:
Join the community to get access to exclusive creator chats, to request topics, or receive access to monthly coaching videos for creators.
Looking for more great monetization ideas? Grab my free toolkit for 11 Revenue Generating Ideas for Your Content Business!
** All opinions are my own. This post contains affiliate links.
