How to start affiliate marketing with no money? In the article, we wrote all the instructions and told about the risks.
Indeed, all these stories of advertisers about success in affiliate marketing are fueling interest, so surely you would like to conquer the advertising industry too. But sometimes some reasons can stop you from mastering affiliate marketing, such as lack of experience or advertising budget.
We often talk about effective advertising strategies that can be used even by beginners. We also prove the capabilities of beginners by talking about their successful case studies. You can see that affiliate marketing is friendly to everyone, even newcomers in the marketing business. But what to do with the main difficulty? Unfortunately, the desire to try to create a campaign does not add money for the start…
We understand your feelings, and that's why we created this article – how to start affiliate marketing with no money. At all! We are confident that affiliate marketing is so multifaceted that it allows you to start in any conditions!
We will figure out the main issues:
How to start affiliate marketing?
Where to look for offers for advertising without money?
Where can you find free traffic?
What are the risks?
Let's start exploring a new side of affiliate marketing possibilities!
How to start affiliate marketing
If you have not yet fully understood the basic terms, then we suggest paying a little attention to them. This will help you better understand the main topic of the article.
What is affiliate marketing? This is the advertising of business’ products or services with the help of third parties - advertisers.
An affiliate marketer is a person with knowledge of affiliate marketing. An affiliate selects a product or service and advertises to attract new potential customers to the business. Affiliates don't need a business to make money from advertising. You just should choose a suitable offer and create an advertising campaign. Therefore, anyone can become an advertiser.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Let's understand a little about how affiliate marketing processes work.
1. Firstly, the advertiser needs to select an offer. We propose to separate offers into two categories – mainstream and adult. As a rule, advertisers choose offers of the niche in which they want to work or have experience.
If you are just starting and are thinking about profitable niches, then ClickAdilla’s team recommends you start with adult verticals. The fact is that adult industries are evergreen and suitable for a wide audience. Here are the main reasons to choose the adult vertical:
- Adult niches do not depend on external factors and maintain high popularity;
- Products and services are interesting for a wide audience. The audience is men and women of all ages and different interests.
- High demand allows you to start in affiliate marketing and get your first conversions.
- Stable development of adult industries in all GEOs. This means it will be much easier for you to remain competitive.
2. If you have already chosen an offer, then you need to find a traffic source. Sources can be paid or free. Since you clicked on this article to learn about affiliate marketing without money, we will talk about free sources.
3. After the source is found, the advertiser needs to decide on the advertising format and create a creative.
These are the basic steps to get conversions and profits. Now we propose to talk a little about each step in detail.
Offers for beginners
As we have already said, adult products or services can be the best solution when starting affiliate marketing. But where to look for a business that provides offers to marketers?
We offer two ways - you can search on your own or use CPA networks. Difference of methods:
1. Search on your own.
In this case, you look for the business owner directly. This may take a lot of time, but as a result, you may not get the offer you would like to advertise. Therefore, if you are looking on your own, we recommend paying attention to referral programs.
Referral programs offer registered users to receive a special link to invite other users. In this case, the advertiser receives profit for each targeted action performed by invited users. For example, an affiliate may receive money for simply registering on the platform or may receive monetary rewards for user spending.
Referral programs can have many advantages and disadvantages. Some advertisers are not willing to spend time advertising referral programs, since there is no guarantee of making a profit. The fact is that you never know whether the user will take the target action.
But on the other hand, you can successfully advertise referral programs and receive excellent payouts. Moreover, this is an excellent opportunity to create passive income, because some programs offer a percentage for all expenses that invited users will make in the future.
Opinions about referral systems can be subjective and depend on the experience of a particular marketer. However, our team recommends paying attention to the referral systems of some businesses to get acquainted with the processes of affiliate marketing.
2. CPA networks.
CPA networks are platforms that offer lists of offers for advertising. A business owner cooperates with a CPA network and offers the product or service, and an advertiser finds this offer. Therefore, we can say that such platforms are intermediaries between the business owner and the advertiser.
This is definitely the easiest and most comfortable way to search for an offer. You save time on searching and agreeing on cooperation. You also receive a list of offers from proven businesses, so you just have to choose the most suitable one.
You can also see the lists of top offers from the CPA network to advertise the hottest offers and keep up with trends.
Note: we can highlight another way to master affiliate marketing without money or with minimal investment. You can find quite a lot of information about affiliate marketing on Amazon. It is the resale of goods. This is a fairly popular way to make money on the Internet. The main problem is the high competition in sales on Amazon. But you can try if you have a small investment and are persistent towards your goal. You will have to master marketing to attract potential customers to earn money.
Traffic source for beginners
We will tell you about several options for free traffic sources.
Social network
There are several ways to attract an audience on social networks:
1. Comments
You can write comments about a business that offers a product or service. If you decide to use this method, then be prepared for the fact that the social network's policies may consider your actions as spam.
Tip: If you decide to use this method, then create several accounts. Users don't trust fake profiles, so add photos, personal information, and posts. Make your accounts more “human".
Risks: Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that these profiles will last long. Your profiles can likely be blocked very quickly on suspicion of spam. This means that you can spend a lot of time and not get results.
Features: writing comments does not guarantee that you will receive the target audience. To give you a chance to attract the attention of interested users, we recommend writing comments on public pages and accounts on the same topic as your business product or service.
2. Create an account
This is one of the best ways to make money on social media. You can attract an audience that will be interested in your product or service. The main feature is that this option is more suitable for business owners who plan to increase awareness of their offer and improve sales.
If you still plan to advertise different offers but want to create an account on a social network, then there is a solution! You can create an account about one niche. For example, you can create a profile and share products from a specific marketplace. This can be a great affiliate marketing option if the marketplace offers you personalized links to advertise through a referral program.
Tip: If you want to advertise this way, be prepared to spend a lot of time developing your account. The point is that you will need a lot of time and quality content to have a chance of attracting an interested audience.
Risks: You may spend a lot of time and effort creating content but fail to grow your account. You will need good SMM skills and an understanding of trends to get organic growth for your profile or group.
Feature: Hundreds and thousands of social media accounts are created every day. This created huge competition. Therefore, if you really want to attract an audience, then stock up on time, quality content, and marketing knowledge. You will also need a desire to follow trends. If you are not ready to spend a lot of time without a guarantee of attracting an audience, then you can buy advertising for your account directly on the social network. Yeah, developing a social media account can cost a lot of money!
Blog
If you have a website, then you can create a blog. This is a great way to attract potential clients, but there are some caveats. The fact is that you will need a lot of time to create quality content. Also, you will not get quick results.
Tip: You can improve your performance with SEO optimization. Find key search words and use them in your texts. This will help improve your site's ranking and attract more users.
Risks: SEO optimization is quite a complex job so you may need precise knowledge. If your articles are poorly optimized, your potential customers may not see your site.
Feature: A blog requires a lot of time investment before it starts making a profit. In addition, you need knowledge and experience to achieve the desired results. This advertising method is great for long-term business. If you don't have a product or service to advertise, then you can try making a blog about one niche. You will be able to write about products from this niche and advertise products through referral programs.
As you can see, all free traffic sources require a large time investment from you. So you can definitely try your hand at affiliate marketing without money, but! Let's highlight the main pros and cons of advertising without a budget.
Pros and cons of affiliate marketing with no money
You have probably already made the first conclusions by reading up to this point. But let's summarize.
Pros:
- Opportunity to take part in advertising processes and master some principles of affiliate marketing.
- There are different earning opportunities.
- You can really make a profit.
Cons:
- There is no guarantee of earnings.
- You can spend months and years before you start receiving your first payments.
- You do not become a professional advertiser, able to advertise any offers through different advertising formats.
- You are limited in the choice of offers.
- It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to remain competitive.
- Spend a lot of time creating quality content for your business.
- Difficulties in reaching quality traffic.
- It is extremely difficult to attract the attention of the target audience.
How to start affiliate marketing with a guarantee
Whatever one may say, guaranteed earnings in affiliate marketing require investment. Yes, advertising without a budget can bring in a lot of profit in the future, but you can never be sure that this will happen.
Therefore, if you want to not only try to participate in advertising processes but also earn good money in affiliate marketing, then you will need a small investment in the first stage. In the future, you can develop your campaigns and use the money you earn to expand your marketing business.
The good news is that you can try advertising on any budget! For example, ClickAdilla offers to start advertising with a minimum deposit of $50. Moreover, our team likes to please our clients, so we create attractive bonuses to make your start easier financially.
If you are afraid of losing your investment because of a little knowledge, then we will give you one of the proven advertising strategies so that you can start in affiliate marketing with minimal investment!
Strategy with a minimum budget
Choose offers that are suitable for a wide audience. The wider the audience that can be interested in the offer, the cheaper the advertising can be in the end. This is why we recommend advertising products or services of an adult business.
The next step is choosing an advertising network. If you are a beginner, we recommend choosing those advertising networks where you get a personal manager. For example, ClickAdilla supports its clients and provides expert managers who are ready to support you 24/7. You can read our blog article with complete instructions on how to choose the best advertising network!
The next step is choosing an advertising format. We recommend three formats that are time-tested and have attractive traffic prices:
- Push notifications. This format is similar to regular inbox notifications. Push notifications are quite native advertising, and novice advertisers can easily set up their first campaign.
- Banners are also a simple advertising format. Banner advertising is great for getting started in affiliate marketing because you don’t need the experience to make creatives.
- Popunders. We recommend choosing popunders to start with, as this type of pop-ads is the most native. The format is easy to create a campaign, and the traffic prices will please you.
Read ClickAdilla's blog for tips on creating the highest-converting campaigns, and learn from our clients’ case studies to improve your skills.
Conclusion
We hope this article will help you decide on the way to get started in affiliate marketing. Regardless of the strategy you choose, we wish you growth and excellent profits in your marketing business!
Drive high-quality traffic in ClickAdilla to multiply your investment!