Affiliate Marketing Guide |IPPEI | Best Online Business

Updated On 2025-06-05

What is affiliate marketing? (And how does it work?)

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance marketing where an individual earns a commission for promoting another company’s product or service. This marketing strategy involves three parties: a brand, a customer, and a marketer that isn’t directly employed by the brand (called an affiliate). Affiliate marketing works by using unique affiliate links to track referrals and pay commissions for each sale or action generated through those links. An affiliate link is a custom URL that typically includes the brand’s website domain and a tracking ID that is unique to a specific affiliate. Affiliates typically obtain these affiliate links through an affiliate network that hosts the affiliate program for the brand, such as Awin or Impact.

Unlike sponsorships, where a third-party marketer can get paid a flat fee for promoting the brand in their content, an affiliate marketer gets paid commissions for driving customers to take specific actions.

What are the affiliate marketing commission models?

CPA (Cost Per Action): Affiliate earns a commission for driving the customer to take any action that the brand deems as valuable and payment worthy. This is the most broad type of affiliate marketing and it can include actions like sales, leads, downloads, and free trial signups.
CPL (Cost Per Lead): Affiliate earns a commission when they generate a lead for a brand. Common actions for CPL affiliate marketing include form fills, newsletter signups, application downloads, and free trial registrations.
CPS (Cost Per Sale): Affiliate only earns a commission when a customer makes a qualifying purchase after clicking on the affiliate link. CPS affiliate marketing can be either a percentage of the sale or a fixed payment amount per sale.

An example of a CPL affiliate program is Inuit Credit Karma on the AWIN affiliate network. The Credit Karma affiliate program pays $7 when a new member signs up but it’s free for new members to join the platform.

credit karma affiliate program details

An example of a CPS affiliate program is Bluehost on the Impact affiliate network. Bluehost pays affiliates $65+ per sale.

What are the types of affiliate marketing?

The types of affiliate marketing are:

Unattached affiliate marketing
Related affiliate marketing
Involved affiliate marketing

Unattached affiliate marketing is when an affiliate promotes products and services they don’t actually use themself. Unattached affiliate marketers usually don’t build a personal brand or audience to promote products to, they typically rely on paid ads to generate impulse buying decisions. An example of unattached affiliate marketing is a Clickbank affiliate running Facebook Ads to a landing page that promotes a weight loss pill.

Related affiliate marketing is when an affiliate has an audience and promotes relevant products in their niche, but they don’t always use these products themself. It’s based on niche relevance, not direct product experience. An example of related affiliate marketing is a travel blogger like Nomadic Matt giving his readers a range of different hotel options to stay at even though he’s only stayed at a handful of them himself.

Involved affiliate marketing is when an affiliate personally uses the product they are promoting to their audience. This type of affiliate marketing has the highest trust level and so tends to boast the highest conversion rates. An example of involved affiliate marketing is the finance YouTuber Andrei Jikh recommending that his audience buy Bitcoin through Gemini because he uses it himself and shows it in his content.

gemini affiliate link

How to start affiliate marketing?

To start affiliate marketing :

Pick an affiliate marketing niche like health personal finance, or travel
Sign up for beginner-friendly affiliate programs like Amazon Associates or ClickBank
Choose a marketing channel to drive traffic to your affiliate offer such as SEO, organic TikTok, or Facebook Ads
Create helpful content like reviews, comparisons, or tutorials to stimulate interest in your affiliate offer
Track your affiliate campaign performance with tools like PrettyLinks and Google Analytics 4
Scale by doubling down on the channels and content types that are driving sales

What are the best courses to learn affiliate marketing?

Course Name	Best For	Drawbacks
The Project 24 System by Income School	Generating organic Google traffic by publishing blogs on a content website.	Long-term strategy that doesn’t produce income immediately and model is becoming harder with Google AI overviews and ChatGPT taking clicks.
Commission Hero by Robby Blanchard	Earning immediate commissions by running paid ads to ClickBank offers.	No passive income potential and conversion rates tend to be low because many ClickBank products are low-quality.
Affiliate Formula by Nicholas Fowler	Creating short-form video content for TikTok affiliate marketing.	Success depends on how your videos perform on TikTok algorithm and it can be difficult getting social media users to navigate to your bio and click your affiliate link.
YouTube Affiliate Masterclass by Greg Gottfried	Creating passive income online by promoting affiliate links with YouTube videos.	YouTube affiliate income can take a few years of consistent content production to make a decent income.
Savage Affiliates by Franklin Hatchett	Learning a range of traffic channels (SEO, paid ads, and organic social media) and two of the most popular affiliate programs (Amazon Associate & ClickBank) in one program.	Broad coverage of traffic channels can be overwhelming for beginners compared to more focused courses.

These are some of the best affiliate marketing courses .

What are the best tools for affiliate marketing?

Link management tools

Link management tools help you organize and monitor your affiliate links so you never lose out on commissions because of broken or untracked links. They can also cloak your links so your audience doesn’t easily know that you’re an affiliate.

The best link management tools for affiliate marketing include:

PrettyLinks (WordPress plugin to shorten and cloak links)
ThirstyAffiliates (Link management + reporting)
Bit.ly (Free URL shortener with analytics)

Analytics and conversion tracking tools

Analytics and conversion tracking tools help you measure which content converts, which traffic channels drive the most sales, and where you can make improvements. Advanced tracking tools drive 35% improvement in affiliate marketing performance, according to WeCanTrack.

The best analytics and conversion tracking tools for affiliate marketing include:

Google Analytics 4 (Traffic + behavioral insights)
Google Tag Manager (Event-based tracking)
RedTrack.io (Advanced affiliate attribution & split testing)

Content creation and SEO tools

Content creation and SEO tools help you understand which keywords to target and what kind of content gives you the best chance at ranking for your target keywords.

The best content creation and SEO tools for affiliate marketing include:

Surfer SEO (On-page optimization via NLP and competitor gap analysis)
Ahrefs / SEMrush (Keyword + backlink research)
Jasper AI or ChatGPT (AI-assisted content drafting)

Email marketing tools

Email marketing tools help affiliates capture leads and promote affiliate offers to their list long-term. Email marketing is an important aspect of a successful affiliate marketing strategy. In fact, a survey by Authority Hacker found that affiliates who use email marketing earn 66.4% more money than those who don’t.

The best email marketing tools for affiliate marketing include:

ConvertKit (Made for creators + affiliate-friendly)
MailerLite (Great free plan with automation)
ActiveCampaign (Advanced automation for scaling)