How to Start Affiliate Marketing With Zero Budget

Affiliate marketing is simply a great way to earn additional income stream online. It mainly entails actively promoting products from product merchants and earning a commission for your efforts. Affiliates do this by directing consumers through affiliate links to the websites of products merchants. They earn a commission when someone they refer purchases something or completes a desired action, such as joining a service or email list. The commission affiliates earn is directly related to the efforts they put in to promote products online. So, there are practically no limits to the commissions an affiliate can earn. The icing on the cake is that you can start affiliate marketing and do pretty well even with zero marketing budgets. For this reason, even if you are still skeptical at the moment, you can actually start affiliate marketing today with no money down if you diligently use the following strategies.

Carefully Choose an Affiliate Platform

In addition to promoting products from your own blog, you can apply to promote out of very popular and reputable affiliate networks. Aside from the fact that these platforms are free to join, many of the programs are always actively looking for publishers who can promote their products effectively. You can take quality time to diligently search for affiliate products on these top affiliate networks before you choose products to promote.
FlexOffers
Amazon Associates
Shopify
ClickBank
CJ Affiliate
ShareASale
There are many more affiliate programs available online besides the ones just listed above. You can research well and make your own choices bearing in mind your niche, the products you know and are passionate about and what your audience is likely to patronize. If you carefully choose a niche and products that appeal to you are your audience to market, you are in business.

Free Blogging

Blogging is a very viable content marketing strategy to market your affiliate products. But first, you must be able to post quality content regularly with a view to building a good following/audience. Next is to establish credibility for your blog by making its online presence strong. You can then follow up by positively engaging your blog readers to click on your affiliate links. You can even blog for free on free platforms like Blogger, Quora and Hubpages. However, irrespective of whatever blogging platform you decide to use, producing high-quality content within your niche is of utmost importance. If you focus your blog on product reviews, tutorials, how-tos, tips and tricks and Q&As, your blog will attract a lot of curiosity from your readers. That way, you can generate a lot of traffic to your affiliate links even if you blog on the free blogging platforms.

Carefully Choose Your Niche

If you want to succeed easily in affiliate marketing, you must first establish yourself firmly within a niche. It is all a matter of deliberate choices though. Expert marketers recommend that the best niche to work in is one that you are both passionate and knowledgeable about. After choosing a niche, you can easily determine which brands and products to promote. The niche you choose for your affiliate site directly ignites your passion to put in more efforts in your marketing up to a point where you begin to see good SEO results in terms of organic traffic. The trick is to deliberately choose a niche in untapped areas with less competition. Next is to learn who and what your audience likes with the use of affiliate marketing tools like social listening tools, website analytics, and social media insights as you post more quality content. Never lose sight of the fact that nobody pays you to create and post content. It is what the content you create and post does thereafter that helps you to earn commissions. The content you post directly influences your performance since every affiliate program is a performance-based marketing system. If you happen to know what products your audience wants and enjoys, you can recommend more of such affiliate products to them. That ultimately helps to bolster your earnings.

Join Your Audience’s Conversations

You can join the conversations of your audience organically and get to interact and know them better. The reason is simple. If you know your audience well enough, you can market to them more effectively. If you actively join these conversations by commenting with affiliate links you benefit from clicks on the links. So, you may want to leave these comments where your audience hangs out, whether on social media, message boards, or forums. These comments only work well when the audience is discussing topics related your niche, your content or the products you are promoting. They obviously won’t work as well when the discussions are unrelated. You must however avoid spam messages in such discussions. If you engage in spam techniques in your discussions, you risk getting kicked off most platforms for rules violations.

Leave Glowing Reviews

If you habitually appreciate others, they remember you. Reviewing a product or brand positively is at the heart of affiliate marketing and the product merchants never fail to notice that. You can always take advantage of that by leaving positive reviews on review platforms while not forgetting your affiliate links in the process. If you are consistent and positive in your reviewing process, readers will start to notice and trust your input the more. However, it is very important to always give honest reviews/feedback particularly on products you have personally experienced. Make sure to leave these reviews on review-style websites or the review section of a product website. If as you leave comments you promote your affiliate links as well, you can also steer other users to your original content, such as your blog or eCommerce store.
 
Final Words

As can be gleaned from the foregoing, it is possible to start affiliate marketing without making a huge investment to get started. What you really need most at the outset is your time, effort, and consistency. These can get you off the starting blocks but when you begin to earn income from the business, you may decide to reinvest some of your earnings to expand the business. It is about this time you can decide to use paid strategies like PPC ads and some investment in marketing software and tools. Until you start making money, you can depend on the foregoing strategies to start affiliate marketing even with no money down.