In this guide, I’m going to show you how to start affiliate marketing with no money and no experience.
If you’ve been thinking about earning income online but feel stuck because you don’t have the budget or the skills yet, you’re in the right place. The truth is, affiliate marketing is one of the few business models you can start from scratch without creating your own product or investing upfront.
I’ll walk you through everything step by step, in plain English, so even if you’ve never made money online before, you’ll understand exactly what to do next.
We’ll cover how affiliate marketing works, how to choose a niche, how to find products to promote, and most importantly, how to start getting your first clicks and commissions using free tools.
So if you’re ready to build something that can grow into passive income over time, keep reading.
If you’re just starting, I recommend reading my full affiliate marketing beginner’s guide here
How to Get Started
Let’s get started by knowing what affiliate marketing is first. Affiliate marketing is a marketing system where affiliate marketers promote someone else’s products and services and earn commissions from the sales. Many businesses have used it as a marketing strategy to increase their sales. Affiliate marketing is not only for affiliate marketers. Bloggers and YouTube content creators can also be affiliate marketers.
According to Affiliate Marketing statistics of 2021, about 80% of businesses have affiliate programs. The industry has an estimated global worth of around $12 billion and is projected to grow by more than 10% in the succeeding years.
A low-level affiliate can earn an average of around $300 per day. A mid-level affiliate earns anywhere from $300 up to $3,000 per day. A high-level affiliate earns more than $3,000 per day. But there are affiliates, considered gurus of affiliate marketing, that make more than $10,000 per day.
These earnings still depend on your commitment and hard work. These figures prove how lucrative affiliate marketing is even today and will also serve as your inspiration to work harder.
Can You Start Affiliate Marketing With No Experience?
Yes, you absolutely can start affiliate marketing with no experience.
You don’t need a marketing background, technical skills, or even a website to begin. What you really need is a willingness to learn, test things, and stay consistent.
Affiliate marketing is beginner-friendly because you’re not creating your own products. Instead, you’re recommending products or services that already exist. Your job is simply to connect the right people with the right solutions.
At the start, you might not know everything, and that’s completely normal. Most successful affiliate marketers learned by doing, not by waiting until they felt “ready”.
The key is to keep things simple:
Pick one niche, use one platform, and focus on helping people solve a specific problem.
As you gain experience, your skills and results will grow naturally over time.
Step-by-Step: How to Start With No Money and No Experience
If you’re wondering what to actually do first, here’s a simple step-by-step plan you can follow.
Step 1: Choose a simple niche
Start with a niche that people are already spending money on, such as health, personal finance, or technology. Ideally, pick something you’re interested in so it’s easier to stay consistent.
Step 2: Pick one free platform
You don’t need a website right away. You can start with free platforms like a blog, YouTube channel, or even social media. The key is to focus on just one, so you don’t spread yourself too thin.
Step 3: Join an affiliate programme
Look for beginner-friendly affiliate programmes with products related to your niche. Once approved, you’ll receive your unique affiliate links to promote.
Step 4: Create helpful content
Start creating content that answers questions or solves problems. This could be how-to guides, simple tutorials, or honest product reviews.
Step 5: Add your affiliate links naturally
Place your links where they make sense, within your content, not forced. The goal is to help the reader, not just sell to them.
Step 6: Focus on getting traffic
Share your content consistently. This could be through search engines, social media, or video content. Over time, this traffic turns into clicks and commissions.
You don’t need to do everything perfectly. What matters most is getting started and improving as you go.
Not sure what step to take next?
If you’re still trying to figure out how all of this fits together, I’ve broken it down in a simple way based on my own experience.
[Read my full beginner guide here]
Market Research for Affiliate Marketing
Let’s also do some market research to verify the information we have for Affiliate Marketing. Let’s learn how many people are searching for it online and how it is trending.
Search Volume
To check the search volume, we will use Jaaxy. Jaaxy is an advanced keyword search tool that allows us to review a keyword’s monthly average search volume, traffic, quality, SEO ranking, and much more. Best of all, Jaaxy gives you 30 free searches.
The Jaaxy results show us that affiliate marketing has around 39K average monthly searches. And if your website ranks high in search engines, you can get up to 6K+ website traffic. This means you have a better chance of getting more sales.
Search Trend
To help us determine the search trend for affiliate marketing, we will use Google Trends to show us the direction of affiliate marketing at a given time and its trend projection to help us identify its sustainability.
In the graph above, you can see that affiliate marketing has been on a steady rise for the past two years. Then it reached the peak of its popularity around the middle of the year 2021. Although the trend may seem to have declined, it remains popular as it remains above the 50% popularity mark on the graph. Affiliate marketing has been around since the early days of the internet, and it looks like it will stay for a very long time.
How to Choose the Right Niche
So now we have learned that affiliate marketing is a profitable business, but what niche will you choose? There are plenty of money-making niches nowadays. Here are some of the recent top-performing main places and sub-niches.
- Health and wellness – natural health and wellness, health and wellness coaching, health and wellness programs
- Technology – new technology trends, mobile computing technology, multitouch technology
- Personal Finance – managing personal finance, personal finance advice, personal finance planning
You may be inclined to try multiple niches, but before you do that, consider the following:
- Is it something that you are interested in? – This is the first thing you should consider when choosing a niche. Is it something that you will enjoy or something that you are passionate about? If you will be marketing products for a while, it is best to choose a niche that you like.
- Will it solve a problem? – Since people generally look for answers or solutions online, check if your niche can provide them. Determine if your niche will be able to offer solutions that your customers will find useful or valuable.
As mentioned before, consider choosing a niche that can solve a problem or problems. Problem-solving places are proven to remain relevant in the long term. To help you with this, think about the issues related to your home and list them down. For instance, using the Health and wellness niche, we could be dealing with the following topics:
- What are natural health and wellness products?
- Where can I find a health and wellness coach?
- What are the best health and wellness programs?
This list can go on and on. After listing them, determine whether your chosen niche offers solutions to these problems. Also, consider whether your sub-niches can provide solutions.
How to Get Your First Affiliate Sales
After selecting your niche, it is now time to think about getting your audience to purchase. There are several ways you can do that. But to make it more effective, let’s determine the type of audience that will be interested in the niche you’ve selected. Taking the example niche before, for health and wellness, you can have an audience who are:
- Health-conscious
- In the elderly population
- Fitness enthusiasts
- Dieticians
- Medical professionals
- Recovering patients
There could be more beyond this list. But no matter how much they are interested in your niche, they are not your buying customers yet. So, how are you going to get them to purchase? Take a look at some of our suggestions below:
- Focus on the high-paying audience – Look at your list of possible audiences and identify which of them are your high-paying audiences. These are the customers who have the highest probability of making a purchase. Then create solutions to surround these types of audiences.
- Be honest and transparent – Being honest and transparent in your posts allows you to gain the trust and credibility of your audience. For example, let your readers know that you have affiliate links on your post by putting up a disclaimer where they can easily read it. Letting them know about this beforehand gives them the freedom to leave if they don’t like the idea. Include a thank you message on your disclaimer for the visitors who decided to stay on your post to read and possibly buy your products.
- Write quality blog posts – Write quality blog posts that will offer value to your readers. Although your goal is to make more sales, if you aggressively push for it on your blog post, it can backfire. Instead, you should provide useful information that your readers will find relevant. Like offering honest reviews about the product or showing product comparisons that will enable your readers to choose for themselves.
Ways to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
There are several ways to make money with affiliate marketing, but if you’re starting with no money and no experience, it’s important to focus on the methods that are simple, low-risk, and beginner-friendly.
Let’s go through the best options to start with, and a few that you can explore later as you grow.
Affiliate Programmes (Best Place to Start)
Affiliate programmes are the easiest and most direct way to get started.
These programmes allow you to promote products or services and earn a commission when someone purchases through your unique link. You don’t need to create anything yourself, handle customer service, or manage deliveries.
Commissions can vary depending on the company, but many programmes offer anywhere from a small percentage to higher payouts for digital products.
Before joining any affiliate programme, look for:
- Products that are relevant to your niche
- Fair commission rates
- A good reputation and reliable payments
- No upfront fees
Once you’re accepted, you’ll receive your affiliate link, which you can start adding to your content straight away.
Content-Based Affiliate Marketing (Free and Beginner-Friendly)
This is where you focus on creating helpful content and naturally recommending products within it.
For example, you can:
- Write blog posts answering common questions
- Create simple how-to guides
- Share honest product reviews
- Post short-form content on social media
This method works well because people are already searching for solutions. When your content helps them, they’re more likely to trust your recommendations and click your links.
Best of all, you can start this with completely free tools.
Platforms like social media and video-sharing sites give you access to a large audience without any upfront cost.
You can:
- Share tips related to your niche
- Create short videos explaining simple topics
- Recommend products in captions or descriptions
Over time, as your content grows, so does your audience and your earning potential.
Methods to Explore Later (When You Have Some Budget)
Once you’ve started making some income, you can expand into other methods, such as Dropshipping
This involves selling physical products through an online store. While it can be profitable, it usually requires some upfront costs for tools, marketing, or suppliers.
Creating Your Own Products
You can create your own digital or physical products and promote them alongside affiliate offers. This gives you more control, but also requires time, effort, and sometimes investment.
If you’re just starting, keep things simple. Focus on promoting affiliate products through helpful content using free platforms. Once you gain experience and start earning, you can always expand into more advanced strategies later.
What You Need to Start Selling Your Affiliate Marketing Products
Here, we will talk about the tools you can use to start selling your affiliate marketing products. The good news is, they do not cost anything. All you need to do is be consistent and dedicate time to market your products using these tools effectively. Let’s go ahead and check them out:
Building a website for Affiliate Marketing (My #1 Choice)
Having a website is a must with affiliate marketing. This is where you will be uploading your posts that promote your products with your affiliate links. You can also direct your customers here to view all the products that you sell.
Nowadays, there are many free website builders you can use to create your website in just a few minutes. And some offer free website hosting as well. After completing your website, you can immediately start writing your posts, share them on your social media, promote your products with your affiliate links, and so on.
Social media is a powerful platform where you can promote your affiliate marketing products. Popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are just a few examples.
These platforms allow you to create a business account or page to promote your affiliate products without paying for anything. You can link some of your social media platforms so that each time you make a post, it gets shared on both. Otherwise, you can also do it manually, so you can expand your audience reach.
Start a YouTube channel for Affiliate Marketing.
You can make affiliate marketing videos and upload them to your YouTube channel. I did mention earlier that you can create tutorial videos related to your niche. Aside from that, you can also generate unboxing videos behind the scenes or go live to engage with your audience in real-time. By doing these, you can increase the number of your subscribers and your income as well.
You can also join social communities for affiliate marketing. Social communities are groups that share the same interests and usually support each other. You can find these social groups on social media platforms. You can also look for social groups that are related to your niche. This allows you to target people already interested in your place, which means there’s a high chance that they will purchase your products.
Final Thoughts
Starting affiliate marketing with no money and no experience might feel overwhelming at first, but as you’ve seen, it’s completely possible when you keep things simple.
You don’t need expensive tools, technical skills, or a perfect plan to begin. What matters most is choosing a niche, creating helpful content, and staying consistent over time.
If you take anything away from this guide, let it be this: You don’t need to wait until you feel ready. The best way to learn affiliate marketing is by actually doing it.
Start small. Pick one platform. Create your first piece of content. Then improve as you go.
Over time, those small steps can grow into something much bigger, a steady stream of traffic, clicks, and eventually passive income.
If you’re serious about building something that lasts, rather than chasing quick wins, it’s worth learning the right foundations from the start and treating this like a long-term asset.
👉 You can explore a full beginner-friendly affiliate marketing guide here and see how it fits your goals.
The sooner you start, the sooner you give yourself a chance to succeed.