How Do You Earn Commissions Online? Your 2024 Getting Started Guide

Simon
Simon is a former UK call-centre worker who has gone on to build several highly successful affiliate marketing businesses in various different niches & become officially recognized as a Super Affiliate by the world's largest affiliate marketing training platform. He has since relocated to Thailand & now teaches affiliate marketing to others through Commission Academy.

Quick Answer: You earn commissions online through a process called affiliate marketing. You sign up as an affiliate for online retailers and make a percentage of the earnings from every sale you generate.

Learning how to earn commissions online might be your first step to:

  • Financial freedom
  • Working from home
  • Quitting your day job
  • Escaping the 9 to 5
  • Becoming your own boss

Do it right and it’s a superb way to make money to boost your income and provide for your family. You can live the laptop lifestyle where you want and spend time doing the things you love.

Just imagine what your life would look like…

It’s Monday morning and you wake up naturally at 09:30 – no alarm. The sun is shining and you’re feeling good about the day ahead.

You make a cuppa tea and open up your email on your phone. Turns out you made 12 new commissions while you were sleeping. You take a sip of tea when your phone buzzes again. You smile because you’ve just made another sale.

You make your way to your home office and start on a new blog post. The words flow and you lose track of time. A friend messages to see if you’re free for lunch. You own your schedule now so you say β€œSure, why not?!”

This isn’t an elusive dream that could maybe happen “one day” – it’s the life of an affiliate marketer and it’s yours if you want it.

The Best Place To Get Started?

Why Commission Academy of course! πŸ™‚

We are on a mission to equip aspiring entrepreneurs like you with the skillset you need to succeed online. The 16 complete click-by-click video lessons will cover everything you need to know about banking commissions daily.

Check out the Commission Academy Crash Course right here Β»

How Does Earning Commissions Online Work?

You earn commissions online when you become an affiliate and promote products or services. Companies like Amazon, Etsy, eBay and Walmart all have affiliate programs you can join for free that enable you to receive a cut of the earnings from every sale you generate. Affiliate commission rates can vary anywhere from 1% to 75%.

This is what’s known as affiliate marketing and essentially, your job as an affiliate marketer is to match the right people with the right products.

The key to earning big commissions online is helping your target audience as much as you can so they trust you enough to take you up on your product recommendations.

How To Earn Commissions Online

Pros & Cons Of Earning Commissions Online

4 Steps To Start Making Commissions Online

Earning affiliate commissions online is a very simple 4-step process that you are going to be learning more about here at Commission Academy.

Let’s give a quick breakdown of the process.

1. Pick A Favourite Topic

Your very first task is to decide on your affiliate marketing niche. It’s as simple as writing a list of your hobbies and interests and choosing one you like the most.

Mad about makeup? Passionate about powerlifting? Excited about electronics?

If your chosen topic has products and/or services you can promote around it then go for it! It’s a winning affiliate marketing niche and you can absolutely earn commissions with that topic.

2. Build A Website

Now you’ve decided on your direction, it’s time to start a website based on your topic.

Your website will be open for business and generating commissions for you 24/7 and is the foundation of your online business going forward. It’s where:

  • You’ll drive your traffic
  • You’ll promote products
  • People will click your links

Building a website might sound daunting but the good news is you no longer need to be a technical whizz to create a professional website you can be proud of.

In fact, we’ll show you how to use a state-of-the-art website builder to get your website live on the web in under 30 seconds, even if you’ve never built a site before! πŸ˜‰

3. Create Content, Get Traffic

You’re only ever going to generate commissions when you’ve got real people clicking on your links and buying stuff. And the best way to get free traffic to your site is to create content that targets keywords and gets ranked in Google.

What is a keyword? It’s simply a phrase or question people type into Google search.

Let’s say someone is thinking about buying an air fryer. They’ll probably search for “best air fryer”. That’s the keyword. And here are the search results:

google search results

When a person clicks on any of these websites, clicks on a link and buys, the website owner earns a commission.

Your traffic and sales will come as you create content with every post targeting a specific keyword so your website comes up in Google like this. You could create helpful how-to guides, answer questions or write winning product reviews. And the more content you create, the more money you will make.

100 posts = 100 target keywords = 100+ Google rankings.

4. Promote Products, Get Paid

Complete steps 1 to 3 and you’ll have a website based around your chosen topic being built out with good and unique content that’s getting a steady stream of free and organic traffic from Google and other search engines.

Now it’s time to join some affiliate programs and start earning commissions! πŸ€‘

Amazon is the biggest affiliate program. If you go to Amazon.com and scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see “Become an Affiliate” in the footer menu:

become an amazon affiliate

The Amazon affiliate program is free to join and once approved, you’ll get a unique affiliate link you can add to your content to promote their products.

You’ll earn commissions every time someone comes to your site, clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase.

Let’s say you link (via your Amazon affiliate link) to this LG fridge, at the price of $1049.95, with a commission rate of 4.5%, you would make $42!

And Amazon is just the beginning – big brands like Samsung, Nike, Booking.com, Walmart, Target and Airbnb (and a ton more!) all have affiliate programs that pay up to 50% commissions for every sale you send their way.

join affiliate programs and earn commissions online

There are 10,000’s affiliate programs online with millions of products and services you can promote as an affiliate to earn commissions.

Gardening, photography, parenting, surfboarding – whatever your niche is they’ll be a ton of affiliate marketing programs out there. I hope you’re starting to see the HUGE earning potential of this!

Ready To Start Banking Commissions?

We’ve earned $100,000s in affiliate commissions over the years and helped our students achieve the same.

Now it’s your turn…

Whatever your reasons for becoming an affiliate marketer, our Commission Academy crash course will take you through how to make your first commission and how to generate a steady stream of income until ultimately, you are the savvy owner of a successful and profitable online business.

Get started HERE.

I hope you’ve found this guide helpful and I hope it’s given you a few “Aha!” moments. If you have any questions at all, let us know in the comments! πŸ™‚

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8 thoughts on “How Do You Earn Commissions Online? Your 2024 Getting Started Guide”

  1. why are so many affiliate marketing adverts promoting this kind of business? do you have to sign people up as part of the program? also
    If you are promoting a product and writting reviews, are these actual reviews or just your opinion?

    Reply
    • Hi there, thanks for commenting. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by your first question but regarding your second, reviews will concist of your thoughts/opinion on products or services. If you’d like to elaborate on your first question, I’d be happy to answer it.

      Reply
  2. Once you have created a niche website, you say that people might still be clicking on an original link and buying the product and you still get the commission even if the page has been “dormant” for several years. Presumably, would it be helpful to revisit that page whenever a new/better product comes to the market? By the same token, would it be a good idea to review the contents of the blog and to show it has been updated by putting the date of your review ? Or is it better to add new blog pages independently from the original one on the same site as people may access the blog via different URLs? So the question is how to capitalise on what you started with, so you don’t waste too much time with promoting and updating your product niches? Thanks.

    Reply
    • It entirely depends. Some content is timeless; meaning that it there is no need to update it. However, if you’re writing about something dynamic that could change, then yes, it is best to update your content as & when is needed to provide the best value to your readers.

      Reply

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