How To Be Successful With Affiliate Marketing Without Followers - Tonya Lawson Media (2024)

You’ve probably heard of affiliate marketing. Maybe you’ve even thought about trying it out but aren’t sure you have a big enough social media following to make any real money.

But the truth is, you don’t need followers to make money through this method. You can earn a consistent monthly income through affiliate marketing WITHOUT followers.

What is Affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a way to make money online by promoting other people’s products and earning a commission on every sale.

You can promote physical products, digital products, services… really anything that someone else is selling. And there are affiliate programs for just about everything out there…and most of them don’t even require you to have a social media following in the first place!

How does Affiliate marketing work?

The process is actually pretty simple.

First, you find a product or service that you want to promote. Then, you sign up for their affiliate program, and once approved, they will provide you with your own unique affiliate link.

From there, you’ll promote the product or service on your website, blog, social media, or wherever else you can think of, and when someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you’ll earn a commission

Can I be successful with affiliate marketing without followers on social media?

Absolutely! There are a number of ways to succeed at affiliate marketing without followers, so let’s take a look at a few of the most comment methods of incorporating affiliate marketing into your business plan without needing a huge social media following.

How to be successful with affiliate marketing without followers

Recommendations to your own students

If you’re a private music teacher, chances are you’ve asked your students to purchase music and other supplies for lessons. You probably even sent them a link to make sure they purchased exactly what you told them to.

Did you know that you could actually be earning a commission on those purchases?

There are a number of music-related affiliate programs. Amazon, Sheet Music Plus, and Music and Arts are a few of them, but there are many more out there. Once you sign up for their affiliate programs and start recommending products to your students using your unique links, you will begin earning commission from each purchase.

Not only will this help you earn a few extra dollars each month, but it will also help support the companies that supply the materials you need for your lessons!

Create a Website

If you don’t already have a website, starting one is a great way to get started with affiliate marketing. You can create a site dedicated to a particular topic, product, or service and then start promoting relevant products and services through your unique affiliate links.

For example, let’s say you created a website about learning the guitar. You could then promote guitar-related products like guitar strings, instructional materials, and so on. And every time someone clicks on one of your links and makes a purchase, you’ll earn a commission!

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be an expert on the topic of your website in order to be successful (although it does help). You just need to be able to do the research and write quality content that will help your readers.

Get organic traffic using SEO

The most obvious way to earn money through affiliate marketing without followers is via organic search traffic. The best way to get this traffic is through search engine optimization or SEO for short.

SEO is basically how you get your website found on google.

Once your website is up and running, you will need to optimize it for certain keywords that people are likely to search for when they’re looking for products or services that you’re promoting. When people search for these keywords and find your website, the helpful information you’ve provided them in your content will encourage them to click through to your affiliate link.

Buy traffic with Facebook Ads

Another way to get traffic to your website is through paid advertising, such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads.

While this method will likely cost you more money upfront, it can be a great way to jumpstart your affiliate marketing efforts if done correctly.

When using paid advertising, it’s important that you target your ads carefully and only show them to people who are likely to be interested in what you’re promoting.

If you do it right, the money you spend on advertising will more than pay for itself in affiliate commissions!

Parasite SEO

While parasite SEO sounds kind of creepy, its actually a fairly common and well-accepted practice.

Parasite SEO is a technique where you piggyback off of the traffic of an already popular website by creating content that is relevant to their audience.

For example, let’s say you wanted to promote a guitar lesson course. You could write an article on your blog titled “5 Reasons Why Learning Guitar is Easy” and then include a link to your course in the article.

Then, you could submit your article to a popular website in the guitar niche (such as Guitar World) and hope that they publish it. If they do, you’ll get a ton of traffic from their audience and hopefully, some of them will click on your affiliate links.

Build an email list

One of the most important things you can do as a business owner is to build an email list. An email list provides you with a direct way to communicate with your customers without having to rely on social media platforms that could potentially disappear anyway.

A great way to start an email list is to offer a freebie in exchange for people’s email addresses. For example, you could offer a free downloadable practice log or theory workbook.

Then, once you have people’s email addresses, you can send out regular weekly or monthly emails with helpful information and links to blog articles you’ve written they may find useful. This will bring them to your website and lead them to the affiliate links in the article.

If you do it right, people on your email list will be happy to hear from you and will be more likely to click on your affiliate links.

How to get people to click on your affiliate links

Once a reader has made it to your newsletter or blog post, the only thing you should care about is getting the link click. This is what we call the Clicks First Rule. While the internet will tell you that you want visitors to stay on your page as long as possible, this is not the case in affiliate marketing.

In affiliate marketing, you actually want them to click off your page and purchase the product you’re recommending.

Choosing the Right Products

Choosing the right products to promote is one of the most important steps in affiliate marketing.

The products you choose should be relevant to your niche and meet the needs of your audience.

For example, if you have a blog about fishing, it wouldn’t make sense to promote a cooking course. However, promoting a fishing rod or bait would be a perfect fit.

Not only that, but the product should also be high quality and offer a good value. No one wants to buy a cheap, flimsy fishing rod that’s going to break the first time they use it.

Create epic content

Not only do you need to recommend quality products that will be helpful to your readers, but you also need to write epic content that is comprehensive and answers any questions they may have.

Your content should be well-researched and offer a unique perspective that is valuable to your readers.

For example, if you’re reviewing a new flute, you could write an article titled “10 Reasons Why the Yamaha YFL-222 is the Best Beginner Flute.”

In this article, you would go into detail about the features of the flute, explaining each one in detail and why it’s the best option for beginners. You would also include your affiliate link so that people can click through and purchase the flute for themselves.

Create Trending YouTube Videos

Websites aren’t the only place to earn affiliate commissions, you can also do it through YouTube videos.

In order to be successful with this method, you’ll need to create high-quality, engaging videos that are relevant to your niche.

For example, if you have a blog about veganism, you could create a video titled “5 Vegan Recipes Everyone Will Love.”

In this video, you would show viewers how to make 5 delicious vegan recipes. At the end of the video, you could include a link to where they can purchase the ingredients for the recipes.

If your videos are high quality and offer value to your viewers, they will be more likely to click on your affiliate links.

You can also embed the video in a blog post to boost your SEO.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are a number of ways to succeed at affiliate marketing without followers. This is something I do a deep dive on in Passive Income Academy. So don’t let a lack of social media following stop you from pursuing your dreams of financial freedom!