The Best Affiliate Marketing Classes for Beginners
If you like to express yourself through words and you like to share with people your interest or good buys, then affiliate marketing can certainly be a viable starting point for starting your online business. In this article, I will share with you the best affiliate marketing classes for beginners to help you fast track your business.
I have also produced a video walkthrough below to show you what it includes.
DISCLOSURE: Some of the links that I share in this article ARE my affiliate links. This means I may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. In fact, sometimes you'll get a discount or free credits just FOR using my link. 🙂
What is affiliate marketing?
According to Big Commerce, Affiliate Marketing is “the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person's or company's products. The affiliate simply searches for a product they enjoy, then promotes that product and earns a piece of the profit from each sale they make.”
Affiliate marketing allows you (AFFILIATE or PUBLISHER) to promote product or services online for companies (MERCHANTS or ADVERTISER).
This is done through affiliate programs. There are 10,000’s of affiliate programs out there, and 100's of MILLIONS of products/services that you can promote as an affiliate marketer. In fact, if you can buy something online, chances are you can promote that same product as an affiliate through their affiliate program. When you join an affiliate program (we will get to this), they give you a special link you put on your site to promote their products.
Is affiliate marketing easy to get started?
Affiliate marketing is relatively easy to get started compared to other types of online businesses. Basically, you just need to set up a blog website using blog software such as WordPress. Before that, you need to get web hosting to host your WordPress. I recommend SiteGround for this, since they provide excellent customer service and make it very easy for you to do the set-up.
You can then buy a domain name for your site which costs as little as USD$8.88 annually (the actual rate depends on the domain name) on the best value domain provider Namecheap and you are on your way to start your own affiliate marketing business.
By writing articles and building in your promotional links (or affiliate links) in the content, you can promote any types of products such as physical products or information products (such as e-books, software or courses).
How much do affiliate links pay?
The amount you can earn from commission varies depending on the affiliate programs, but generally, you can earn between 5 to 25 percent for physical products and 50 percent or more with digital information products.
Wealthy Affiliate Offers The Best Affiliate Marketing Classes For Beginners
If you have been looking for the best affiliate marketing course that will give you the solid foundation of knowledge and skill to do affiliate marketing, then look no further. Wealthy Affiliate offers a complete suite of affiliate marketing classes for beginners and advanced affiliate marketers alike.
Wealthy Affiliate is a popular online training platform and community that helps people learn affiliate marketing. It was started back in 2005 by Kyle and Carson and they have developed Wealthy Affiliate into a vast community of 1.5 million marketers and entrepreneurs.
It is thus developed by the users for the users and it is an established platform for 16 years straight.
How I started my affiliate marketing journey with Wealthy Affiliate
I first got to know about WA back in 2016. I started with free membership, logged in and looked around but did little about it as I found that I was a bit overwhelmed with too much information.
Another thing is I was busy with my physical product business so WA was another shiny object opportunity I saw on my entrepreneur journey, so I guess I was just not ready back then.
It did not germinate until…
Fast-forward to the end of 2019, I chanced upon the WA Black Friday Sale from the emails I received from WA. With the few years of online business behind me, I felt the need to learn more about affiliate marketing.
That was the time I got serious and paid for WA membership, and that was also the time I realized that “Boy, what have I been missing?” I started delving into the various courses and offering of WA.
Wide Variety of Training and Classes for Every Level
Oh, the membership comes with websites. Hmm, there are quite a lot of classes available for people of various levels. There seems to be a very warm and supportive community as I received emails informing me of some new following here and there once in a while.
There are more than a few types of training! There is this structured training which is called the Online Entrepreneur Certification, Affiliate Bootcamps and then there is a Training HQ where you can find a complete suite of courses and tutorials on many topics all related to affiliate marketing and online business.
In addition, there are also scheduled weekly live classes on various topics for Premium members. So I started with the Online Entrepreneur Certification course, hoping to lay the foundation and really learned about building niche websites for Affiliate Marketing with no fluff.
I also signed up and attended the weekly lessons on Saturday morning (It's Friday night for those of you in the US and Canada). The content of the live classes was interesting and very useful. I got to ask questions and clarify concepts. All the classes are recorded so if you miss a particular lesson, you can always watch the replay later.
Since all courses are online, you can take them when you are free anytime anywhere at your own pace. The courses are constantly updated so you are never stuck with old or out-dated content.
Right now, I am close to completing Level 2 of the course. I really like that they integrate each lesson with hands-on practice so that you learn through doing. As I go through the lessons, I am also building my niche site in the process and practice what I learned.
In fact, I just need to publish one more blog post with a focus keyword and I am done. I should be able to get that done over this holiday weekend. Even though I have taken a while to reach where I am and I wish I have done it sooner and be more productive, I am happy with the little progress I have made.
What I Have Been Working On
I have started a blog sharing my own journey and sharing with people who would like to start their own business online my lessons learned. I started this blog in the middle of last year.
So far I have written a few articles on the site, and I was informed recently that one of them was ranking on Google. Yay! I know it's still early days and I will have to continue working on this website, but I am thrilled to see that there is some result for my effort.
My Plans and Goals
I plan to complete the Online Entrepreneur Certification in the next 3 months and if my time permits, I will also want to get started on the Affiliate Bootcamp. One thing that I feel I need to improve on is the speed of execution. I need to write blog posts faster and more consistently.
In 6 months' time, I hope to start another website in a different niche once I get the hang of this. I will also make it a point to keep learning and attending the classes offered by WA.
My dream is creating multiple streams of income with my affiliate sites so that I can achieve financial security in the long run and do whatever I love to do to share my knowledge with the world.
Premium Membership Comes with Website Hosting
Wealthy Affiliate Premium membership comes with premium hosting of up to 10 websites which means that you can create up to 10 websites using your membership subscription and not having to pay separately for other hosting services.
The website hosting comes with SiteSpeed feature which provides the fastest website load times. This is very important as a faster website is ranked higher by Google which also means better visitor experience for people visiting your website. Your website visitors don't need to wait for the pages to load. A lot of websites lose traffic because they load too slowly and people lose patience and just go to other sites.
Not to mention that the web hosting also comes with SiteProtect which adds a three-point protection layer on your websites hence enhancing security for your site. Comment Spam, Back Office Hacking (passwords), and Website Load Speeds (Botnet Attacks).
The SiteSSL gives your websites free SSL certificates which give more credibility to your websites. It also helps with your website SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and ranking.
In short, hosting your websites on Wealthy Affiliate platform gives you a piece of mind so that you don't have to deal with many moving parts (like having to subscribe to separate hosting service and then protect your websites and deal with any security problems yourself.
Research Keywords with Jaxxy
The premium membership also comes with access to Jaxxy Lite which is an amazing keyword and research platform. Keywords are important for your websites to get ranked on Google Search Engine so that people can find you among the many other websites on the internet.
With Jaxxy Lite, you are able to perform unlimited keyword searches to find low competition yet highly relevant keywords in a matter of seconds. In fact, Jaxxy also provides you insight on competition analysis so that you know how many competing websites ranked in Google for a particular keyword and which domains are available for the given keyword.
You can also use Jaxxy to find new niche ideas or reverse engineer successful top ranking websites in your niche to see what they are doing right to lead to their results.
Combined with Jaxxy SiteRank, you will be able to track Your Website Rankings and Instantly find out where your website is ranking in Google, Bing, & Yahoo. You can then learn from the successful sites to help improve your own websites.
Spoiled for Choice on the Products to Promote
Inside Wealthy Affiliate, there is a section called Promote which lists many affiliate programs that you can sign up for. You can either look through the list or simply search for the ones you are interested in to read more.
They have also sorted the programs into categories such as Popular Categories, Popular Keywords and Trending Opportunities to help you with your search if you have no idea what to start with.
They also suggest programs that might interest you or programs that have high commissions or top rated to help get you started.
Once you select a program and click on it, you will be shown a summary of what the program is all about and the Program metrics just like the next picture. You can then decide whether to sign up for the program.
Once you click sign up for the program, you will then be led to the right place to sign up for it. All this saves a lot of time for us as otherwise we would need to search high and low for information.
Best of all, it includes affiliate programs from the various affiliate network so that you are not just limited to any single one. Therefore, we have more choice as to which program to sign up for.
Publish Quality Articles with SiteContent
When you start your blog websites, it is important that you generate content on your blog (i.e. publishing quality blog articles) consistently. Wealthy Affiliate prides itself to be The Ultimate Content Platform with SiteContent which offers a writing environment to help you create, manage, organize and publish your content.
SiteContent helps you efficiently build & organize your content, set & track your writing goals, and see how your writing abilities fair compared to the rest of the community.
It also comes with over 1+ million beautiful, niche related images for you to choose from. You can therefore easily select relevant images and integrate them into your content. What's more is the images are automatically optimized for fast website load times.
The platform also performs grammar and spelling checks for you. It finds and corrects 100’s of complex writing errors so you don’t have to. It also “learns” from your activity! So, as you continue to write using the platform the grammar and spelling checker will get even more efficient!
Before any content is published to your website through SiteContent, it is run through sophisticated “plagiarism checker” that compares your content to over 8 billion pages online. Since duplicate content is not good for SEO, this is very important.
Help
Another thing I am very impressed about Wealthy Affiliate is that even though they have many members, the support is top-notch. The support comes from two main ways. One is through technical support provided through SiteSupport and the other is through its very supportive and helpful member community.
Personally whenever I have a support request to add domain or CNAME to my website, I find that the technical support would get back to me very quickly and sometimes less than half an hour. The support team is therefore very responsive.
Since Wealthy Affiliate has members around the globe, someone from the community would jump in to reply and help whenever I ask a question.
You can also join the live chat which is always on or participate in any of the discussion under the various training topics. The great sense of camaraderie and belonging with the rest of the members on the platform is simply amazing.
In fact, when I first joined the platform, I quickly found myself made to feel very welcome and people start following me (when someone follows you, it means they can see your activity or blog article published on the WA platform). Therefore, you are never alone in this journey.
The investment needed to join Wealthy Affiliate – the Best Affiliate Marketing Classes
There are three membership levels in Wealthy Affiliate: 1) Starter Membership which is free and 2) Premium Membership which costs USD$49 per month and 3) Premium Plus Membership which costs USD$99 per month.
If you would like to see for yourself what WA is all about and have a feel about it, you can sign up for the free starter membership to see what it is like to be in this community. You can then upgrade to a paid premium membership when you are ready.
As mentioned earlier, I did not sign up for the Premium membership as I was pre-occupied with my physical product business when I first signed up and only seriously looked into affiliate marketing later on.
My recommendation is to sign up for the Premium Membership as soon as possible if you are serious about going into Affiliate Marketing. This is so that you can start getting the full benefits of the Premium membership like I am doing now.
I would definitely want to make full use of WA to enable my success now. In fact, I am so happy with WA that I recently upgraded my membership to Premium Plus when it was launched late last year. It was really a no-brainer for me knowing that there is so much value in this membership.
Many Ways to Affiliate Marketing
In fact, there are many more ways you can do Affiliate Marketing as you will learn from going through the various training of Wealthy Affiliate. For example, you can send emails to people if you have a list of contacts who may be interested in the products. You may even start your own YouTube channel to upload videos to promote affiliate offers.
And if you have a bit more money, you can even run Facebook ads or Google Ads to bring more traffic to your website
In conclusion
WA is an all-in-one membership for Affiliate Marketing and it has in the market. With WA, you have all the tools you need for a successful Affiliate Marketing business. You are only limited by your own willingness and ability to learn and implement.
After going through so many affiliate courses and training, I honestly think that Wealthy Affiliate offers the best affiliate marketing classes on the market today.
It's not only for beginners but also for advanced affiliate marketers because of the wide variety of classes available. So sign up for your FREE account today to let Wealthy Affiliate lay a firm foundation of affiliate marketing business for you.