Learn how to make passive income with affiliate marketing in 4 simple steps.
Follow this step-by-step guide to discover the tactics I’ve used to make over $1 million in affiliate commissions, fly to the tropics and live my dream life.
If you want to learn how to make passive income with affiliate marketing, you need to ditch the outdated and downright deceptive advice you’ve heard.
So-called “gurus” will promise “easy autopilot shortcuts” to get you to buy their latest junk course on how to build a landing page and buy solo ads to supposedly generate sales overnight.
That might’ve gotten results 20 years ago, but if you want to make life-changing amounts of income with affiliate marketing in 2024, you need to do what works now and treat this as a real business.
Earn Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing For Real
Passive income is defined as:
“…a type of income in which money is generated on a recurring basis with little to no effort.”
Is it possible to make passive income with affiliate marketing?
Yes, recent stats show affiliate marketers earn $65,800 per year on average and 20% earn $1 million+.
Affiliate marketing is the best way to generate passive income online because start-up costs are so low and the earning potential is huge.
And I’m about to show you how it’s done.
But first, it’s red pill time.
There are no shortcuts, secret back doors or hidden loopholes to this. There’s no way you can click your mouse a few times and sit back as you make profits on autopilot and anyone who tells you there is, is trying to pull one over on you.
You make passive income with affiliate marketing by investing energy UPFRONT and reaping the rewards after.
You put in the work ONCE to write that blog post or email and get paid for that work again and again.
This is the key to success – not selling your time for money but making your time work for you.
You don’t get rich by being lazy, but by building income-generating digital assets that work for you around the clock, so be ready to hustle and you’ll get to where you want to be.
And the great thing about passive income is that after you’ve built your business and put everything in place, you’ll be earning commissions even while you sleep.
This is the truth about affiliate marketing and becoming financially free.
How To Make Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing
Now let me show you how to make $30k/month passive income with affiliate marketing in 4 steps:
1. Start A Website
2. Choose Your Affiliate Niche
3. Create Great Content
4. Promote Products & Get Paid
Let’s go through it together.
1. Start A Website
We all know you need a website if you want to start earning commissions as fast as possible and grow it into a consistent passive income source.
Here’s the problem:
Too many wannabe 6-figure earners assume starting an affiliate website is hard or technical so they pay through the nose for unnecessary landing page software they don’t need and waste hours spamming links on social media trying to drum up sales.
I want you to succeed.
The good news is starting a website in 2024 is easier than ever and low-cost.
Before anything else, the first step is to create a website, set up hosting and register a domain.
Here’s how you do it:
- Go to WealthyAffiliate.com, enter your email and click Create Your Free Account.
- Under Websites, choose Build a Website
- Select the Register a Domain option
- Choose the Premium plan. They have monthly and yearly options so pick the best option for you.
- Enter the domain name you want to use (i.e., yourwebsite.com)
- Choose a WordPress theme
- Click the Build My Website Button
Congrats! You’ve now got a profit-ready affiliate marketing website! 😀
Here are a few other things to consider when setting up your site:
- Choose a name that’s memorable and easy to type.
- Pick A WordPress theme that’s simple and clean. GeneratePress is the one we use.
- Create a logo for your blog that represents you and your brand.
2. Choose Your Affiliate Niche
Now you have a website, it’s time to pick what your website is going to be about. It could be any topic you can think of.
This step is crucial because essentially you’re deciding what group of people you’re going to target which will directly influence what kind of products you’ll promote and how you’ll promote them.
Whether it’s surfing, photography, knitting, bodybuilding, cooking, origami or pole dancing – whatever you’re into, there are endless affiliate niches with millions of products you can promote.
Choose a niche based on your passions, skills and experience and you’re far more likely to succeed with affiliate marketing because your expertise will shine through in the content you create and you’ll find it a lot easier to connect with your target demographic and turn them into paying customers.
Not to mention, you’ll actually enjoy the process of building an online business.
But don’t stop there.
A common mistake affiliates make is picking a niche based on personal interests only.
If you want to set yourself up right to make money with affiliate marketing, you also need to check if your niche idea is popular and has profit potential.
In other words:
- Does the niche have a big enough audience to make it viable and
- Are there plenty of products and services you can promote
To check a niche’s popularity use a keyword tool like Mangools and run a few keyword searches.
Let’s say I’m thinking about starting an affiliate marketing website about learning languages.
I’d think about what kind of questions and phrases somebody interested in this topic would search for and check to see how many searches it gets on average each month.
For example, “is Spanish hard to learn” gets googled 3,400 times a month and “best online English speaking course” is searched 3,800 times a month:
Is this a popular niche?
Check.
Does it have profit potential?
This is easy to figure out. If you can think of a ton of products related to your niche idea, you’re onto a winner. When I think of language learning, I immediately think of books, online courses and live classes.
I’m confident that the “3 Ps” of passion, popularity and profitability are bulletproof when choosing your niche and starting an affiliate marketing business that generates passive income online.
Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough on choosing an affiliate marketing niche from our YouTube channel:
3. Create Great Content
You’ve got your website, you’ve chosen your niche and now it’s time to create Google-driven content that’s going to attract the right kind of buyer-ready traffic in droves.
We’re talking 1,000s, 10,000s and even 100,000s of people seeing your website in search engine results, reading your content and clicking your affiliate links every single day.
Let’s see how this works in practice…
Mangools tells us the keyword “best toys for dogs” gets searched 12,700 times a month:
Search that on Google and TheSpucePets.com comes up as the second result:
And when you look at the page you’ll see the owner of this dog blog has added his affiliate links to the content so people can go through to Amazon or Walmart to buy the dog toy they’re looking for:
Can you see that?
Because the owner of this website invested the time to create this post ONCE, he’s now getting 1,000s of pageviews each month, getting 1,000s of clicks on his affiliate links and making commissions 24/7.
And this is just one piece of content.
Now imagine you have 100 blog posts all getting ranked and generating traffic and sales.
More content = more rankings = more pageviews = more sales = more passive income.
So now you know why content plays such a crucial role in generating sales and income, let’s run through the most optimised way of creating content for your website.
I’ve broken down the content creation process into 4 sections:
- Planning
- Writing
- Analysing
- Outsourcing
Planning Content
You could create content like:
- Helpful how-to posts
- In-depth guides and tutorials
- Product reviews
- Best top 10 lists
- Response posts answering questions
The key here is to remember the target market you chose in step 2 and think about what kind of things they’ll search for in Google, then check with Mangools to see if there are a lot of monthly searches.
If there is, add it to your content plan and keep doing this until you have a list of 30-50 keywords you can target so you’re never stuck with what to do next.
Use Google Sheets to create a simple spreadsheet of your target keywords.
And for each post, you only want to target ONE keyword.
But keep in mind that not all keywords are created equal…
Keywords with strong buyer intent will get you more conversions because they indicate a person is closer to buying a product or service.
So prioritise keywords like:
- iPhone 14 review
- Best earphones for running
- Cheapest air fryer
- Buy potting soil
And always make sure your content fits with your affiliate niche so the content and products you’ll be recommending are relevant to your audience so you generate sales.
Writing Content
This is where the rubber hits the road, but here’s the thing:
You don’t have to be a professional writer to make passive income with affiliate marketing. Nobody’s expecting Shakespeare here, so just write as you talk.
Remember the purpose of your content isn’t to impress them with your wide range of vocabulary; it’s to connect, build trust and get them to take action (i.e., click on your affiliate links!)
Nearly 70% of people will see your website from their mobile so keep your paragraphs short (1-3 sentences max.) and use subheadings, bulletpoints and images to break up the text and keep people reading.
Try Grammarly too – it’s great for fixing any typos and spelling and grammatical mistakes.
And to make sure your post ranks high in Google, include your target keyword in:
- Your post’s URL
- Your main title (H1)
- Within your first couple of paragraphs
- A couple of subheadings (H2).
- And sprinkle it throughout your post where it makes sense
Analysing Content
Once you’ve published 20-30 posts you should start to see an increase in the number of impressions and clicks your website is getting from Google.
Google Analytics is the best way to track your progress and see how your content is doing.
This handy free tool will tell you how many clicks your website is getting, what your most popular posts are, what keywords you’re coming up for and how long people stay on your site.
See our step-by-step Analytics setup guide to get started.
Outsourcing Content
The end game here is to turn your website into a passive income-producing asset so you have more time to do the things you enjoy like spending time with family and travelling the world.
That’s why the last step of building a content creation system is outsourcing.
Once your website is generating revenue on a regular basis, you’ll want to reinvest some of the profits back into your business (and make your money work for you) by hiring writers to do the work.
You can find good-quality writers that don’t cost the earth on sites like:
As your business grows, you’ll get to the point where you can build a team and outsource every aspect of your affiliate marketing website so you’re hands-off.
Outsourcing is something we cover extensively in our free Commission Academy Advanced Course so be sure to check it out.
4. Promote Products & Get Paid
You’ve created super helpful content your readers and Google will love so now it’s time to finally get paid for your efforts!
So think about products and services you can recommend and find affiliate programs you can join.
There are 10,000s of affiliate programs online with millions of affiliate products you can promote for free.
There are:
- BBQ affiliate programs
- Kayaking affiliate programs
- Snooker affiliate programs
- Wedding dress affiliate programs
- Ghost hunting affiliate programs
- Baking affiliate programs
So whatever your website is about, you’ll have no trouble finding the right affiliate programs for you. Simply google “best [enter your niche] affiliate programs” and you’ll get a ton of options to come up.
When it comes to choosing what to promote, relevancy is paramount.
It would make no sense to promote knitting supplies on a website about golf for example. You can try, but nobody will click through and nobody will buy.
If you want to make a passive income with affiliate marketing just give people what they want.
And the beauty of affiliate marketing is you can build multiple income streams.
For example, let’s say you have a camping website. Don’t leave money on the table by linking to tents only. Find affiliate programs and create content selling backpacks, stoves, camping trips and even RVs.
And wherever possible, find high-ticket and recurring affiliate programs so you make more money.
There is no limit to how many products you can promote or how many affiliate programs you can join – the sky really is the limit!
To Wrap Things Up
By starting a website you’re building a digital asset you 100% own and control.
By selecting your niche not based on your passions and interests only, but by popularity and profit potential you 300x your income potential.
By developing a killer content strategy, targeting buyer-intent keywords, tracking your site’s performance and outsourcing the work, you’ll make more commissions faster.
And finally, by choosing high-ticket and recurring affiliate programs, you’ll make life-changing money as an affiliate within 90 days, not ten years.
I hope this 4-step guide has helped to show you what is possible and given you a roadmap you can follow to make passive income with affiliate marketing.
If you want more in-depth, click-by-click training and one-on-one support then check out the free Commission Academy course and join us on one of our weekly live hangouts.
Remember, we all have the same 24 hours in a day.
How you use those hours will determine not only your financial status but also your financial future.
