Affiliate marketing is a robust method of making a living, at least at the beginning of 2025. It requires dedication, attention, and passion; but if you invest the required time and effort, it will pay back… eventually.
To make paybacks come quicker and more frequently, we’ve prepared a dedicated article for you, where we elaborate on the best affiliate marketing strategies for beginners, which bring in the dough.
Consider this, more than 80% of the companies worldwide rely on affiliate marketing programs to spread the word about their goods and/or services. They won’t be doing that for no reason, but you gotta join the hype train properly to make the most out of digital possibilities.
Affiliate Marketing 101
Simply put, affiliate marketing is an advertising strategy, where affiliate marketers can earn commissions from product owners for promoting their wares. Commission earning requires meeting a specific set of KPI requirements.
Affiliates usually act as mediators, bridging the gap between product and website owners. In the case of ad networks, affiliates are referred to as advertisers. They test and experiment with marketing approaches, ad formats, traffic sources, etc. to figure out the best marketing combination and scale it up.
Purpose of Affiliate Marketing
Traditional marketing strategies and methods can be expensive and sophisticated. For an average small or medium-sized business, digital marketing costs about $51–10,000 a year, which can leave even a medium-sized enterprise bankrupt. Affiliate marketing can lower these costs, making ad strategies more effective and less risky. It can be an optimal decision for small businesses that cannot afford big spending on digital marketing.
Affiliate marketing, as a particular case of performance marketing, helps to cut costs by letting businesses hire marketers only when they actually need them. On top of financial efficiency, affiliate marketing involves field-trained marketers, who know every nook and cranny of the industry, making them highly coveted and competitive.
What we are trying to say here is that the demand is persistent and relatively inflexible, meaning the popularity of affiliate marketing will go on. But you need the right partners by your side to increase your chances of making a profit.
Consider trying out HilltopAds ad network if you haven’t yet: diverse ad formats, a plethora of traffic sources, individual terms for experienced partners, all-encompassing stats, and all-around expertise at your disposal.
Speaking of which, it’s time to go through the affiliate marketing tactics that work in 2025 and will likely continue for years.
Select the Right Program
The right affiliate program or network is the foundation of your success. Take your time to pick one by reading reviews or forums online. You don’t have to limit yourself to just one, but you do have to compare the options and pick the most credible. Be warned, however, that paid negative reviews are a thing nowadays, so take every bit of information with a grain of salt.
Affiliate networks and programs do differ in terms of payouts, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When picking them, consider the following:
- Vertical and niche specialization
- Hold period
- Payment solutions available
- Payment models available
- Offer KPIs
The same offer can be run on several networks with different terms. That’s why professional affiliates assess their traffic type first, and only then pick an offer — a solid approach when you want to maximize your returns.
Monitor the Legislation of Target GEO
When working with grayhat products, like adult or iGaming, consider rereading the local legislation of your target GEO from time to time.
The thing is, there is a trend toward legalization worldwide, so previously forbidden methods of promotion might become available.
As an example, Uzbekistan has approved licensing rules for online gambling and lotteries recently. Monitoring GEOs on its own might not be a perfectly self-sustainable strategy, but it’s a nice addition to other approaches.
Collaborate with Nano and Micro-Influencers
Collaborating with social media influencers helps you generate sales for a product. Nano and micro-influencers can be the first to get in touch with, because they often have small but loyal and attentive audiences. They are more affordable, compared to big sharks, which charge more, have a mixed bag of an audience, and give the impression of alienation due to the sheer size of their user base. In addition, such collaborations can bring you fresh affiliate marketing ideas.
According to Upfluence, micro-influencers have an engagement rate of approximately 3.9% on Instagram, and 18% on TikTok, compared to 1.2% and 5% for mega-influencers. Moreover, nano and micro-influencers are more likely to advertise your products with more passion and engagement which can benefit your earnings.
Embrace S2S Tracking
The first cookies were created more than 30 years ago… not the yummy ones (bakery namesakes were already known in the 7th century). It’s all about the cookies that facilitate tracking, targeted advertising, and content personalization. So far they have been working, but there is a looming threat of phasing out third-party cookies by Google. While the company itself is being sued for monopolizing the market, the future of cookies is still vague. That’s why advertisers and publishers should consider alternatives in terms of tracking user data for maximum personalization.
In particular, we’re referring to S2S tracking, a.k.a. cookieless tracking or postback. Unlike cookies, this method transfers the information from server to server directly, mitigating the problems of pixel tampering or cookie stuffing.
Setting up postback might be difficult initially, but the list of benefits makes up for it:
- More precise and robust tracking
- Enhanced tracking opportunities
- Resilience to malevolent activities, e.g., cookie stuffing and misattribution
- Support of advanced network features, e.g., CPA Goal
And best of all, our managers will help you to set it up right, including token synchronization and ensuring all the data is transferred correctly. Register on our platform to try out postback, alongside other features.
Use Content Marketing
To leverage your conversions and profits, you can start creating various types of media content. High-quality articles, podcasts, videos, all of these can boost you as an affiliate. That way, you build an engaged audience that will be glad to support you through buying products/using offers you promote.
The core of content marketing is delivering relevant, accurate, and high-quality information to your audience. Look into the topics your audience is interested in and create comprehensive content that addresses their needs. Focus on offering solutions to their problems rather than simply providing generic information.
Blogging is a very effective affiliate marketing strategy so you can make it your prime one. Social media can also be effective, so consider this option as well.
Optimize Your Website for Conversions
Optimizing your website is essential for increasing affiliate conversions. Develop relevant, well-organized content that appeals to your target audience. Improve your website’s loading speed by minimizing the use of external scripts and eliminating any distracting visual elements. Ensure that your text and images are optimized for mobile devices, as they represent the majority of online traffic.
Incorporate relevant keywords throughout your content to enhance your chances of achieving a high ranking on search engines. Use internal links generously to assist search engines in effectively indexing your website. Regularly create new content to foster audience engagement, which then can be converted into your profit.
Set Up Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best channels for further traffic monetisation and for follow-up campaigns, cross-selling, and some other activities. By gathering the user base on your own, you can retarget it afterward, knowing their preferences and having established some contacts.
To make the users subscribe, either the offer has to be a bargain or you can give away some gifts, like eBooks. Next, keep the audience in touch with regular newsletters. Occasionally, you can send a few letters, inviting people to buy some lucrative items.
This approach can synergize well with influence marketing. In fact, many of the methods we are mentioning here can synergize with each other, so dare to experiment and try out new combinations to create a lasting impression.
Diversify Creatives
Ad creatives are banners containing pictures, animations, text, or any type of information that catches users’ attention, calling them to take a certain action. As the name suggests, creatives can and should be creative. A nicely designed banner with visually appealing content is more likely to get desirable attention. Being visible is the first affiliate marketing step to success.
It is important to make various types of ad creatives. You can make a pack of 10 different creatives with unique elements or even styles. It widens the coverage of your ad, enhancing the chances of it being seen. Moreover, some websites track used elements in ads and may block some of your creatives if they are too similar, e.g., Facebook.
That’s why you can invest in creating lots of creatives. Many of them are likely to flop, but there will be some shining stars that will make up for it, and you get some experience along the way.
Promote Yourself on Social Media
Nowadays social media is a very strong tool that you can use for achieving almost any goal. You can insert affiliate links in your posts and video descriptions and mention them in the blog, convincing your audience to “leave a like and click the link down below”. Any affiliate marketing strategy will only benefit from it.
Social media platforms can be chosen based on the type of content you want to create and the audience’s expectations about the content. For example, Instagram and TikTok are great for short video formats and/or image media. YouTube, while not exactly a social media platform, is a great place to build an audience. And Telegram serves as a popular redirection platform, where users are warmed up before being sent to an offer page. This is true in particular for binary options and iGaming.
Use Direct Link for Ultimate Efficiency
Direct link is designed for people, who want to do less and earn more. Every time a user clicks on a Smart Direct Link, the most relevant offer from thousands of advertisers is displayed. Advanced algorithms analyze users’ activity and assign the appropriate offers to it.
For a direct link to work, you need to make a straightforward landing page that contains the link. This landing page URL can be placed anywhere in your advertising. The landing page will receive your traffic, and consumers won’t see relevant advertisements until they click on the Smart Direct Link.
You can include a direct link to your landing page or use third-party services like Linktree, which allows you to contain multiple links to all your pages in one convenient location, acting as a bridge to all of them.
Be Honest with Yourself and Your Audience
One of the best and most effective affiliate marketing tips is being honest and transparent. Building trust is essential. People react positively to honest product recommendations and ads.
Treat your audience as your friends. Make friendly, helpful, and respectful content. Sooner or later you will find yourself, surrounded by people with the same interests, who see you as a trustworthy source. That way, any recommendation is going to be seen as friendly advice.
Create a Clear Call to Action (CTA)
Telling your audience that a product is very good is not enough. You should always state what action you expect from your audience: “Buy Now,” “Sign Up,” “Download Now,” etc. This way, the reader knows precisely what you’re recommending and doesn’t have to think when they are engaged.
You can make a “big red button” with a CTA to clarify the instructions. This button should be at the end of a promotional social media post, article, or email.
Consider Pay-Per-Call Vertical
If you have tried many verticals and want something interesting and very effective, try pay-per-call advertising, a relatively underexplored affiliate marketing vertical.
At its core is the call center, where employees process the calls and turn leads into customers. It can be very effective as in the modern world full of bots and AI voices, real humans on the line can be a sign of effort and customer-oriented service. But as always in such systems, there is a human factor. A person on the line can have little qualification and instead of gaining leads — lose them. Prior to opting for a PPC offer (not to be confused with Pay Per Click) consider making a call yourself to check things out, as if you were a lead yourself.
This vertical is marked by high-quality leads and a short time for lead approval. True, there is a single point of failure, but if you know how to avoid it, you can make lots of money quickly.
Smoothen Your Funnel
Getting straight to action can be great, but like with many things in the world, haste makes waste. Affiliate marketing is not an exception. When trying to convert people do not throw users into the main website. They can be easily distracted and lose interest there. Instead, use pre-landers, to smoothly introduce users to a product or a service you promote.
Pre-landers help to warm up the users and work through their objections before getting to the main website. They help to avoid abrupt transitions that can cut off potential leads. A great thing about pre-landers is that you decide what to put there and how to catch users’ attention. Pre-lander can take the form of a spinning wheel, doctor’s review, forum page, system threat, or news outlet, but it has to be informative and engaging to prepare for the offer.
Specialize in a Vertical
One of the main affiliate marketing tips for beginners is to be persistent in your sphere. Whether you like the aforementioned Pay Per Calls or not, make sure to stay focused on your vertical of choice. In 2025 it’s just not feasible to spread out your efforts as verticals evolve and their respective approaches grow more nuances and details. Factoring in them all from all the verticals imaginable is a death sentence to your marketing efficiency and budget.
Adult Goes Beyond Adult
The last bit of info, regarding verticals, concerns adult in particular. There is a stereotype that adult traffic works with adult offers only, but… that’s not true. You can advertise finance, iGaming, nutra, travel, as well as eCommerce ads — almost anything for horny users.
Visitors of adult websites are very tolerant of ads. Moreover, they are so engaged in their content that when they click on your ad they mean it. Consequently, you are at lower risk when experimenting with creatives: if they are not engaging, the users will ignore them completely.
Conclusion
There are lots of affiliate marketing strategies, and some outperform others under the right circumstances. Practicing and experimenting is the only way to find your own omnipotent technique that will define your character and style as an affiliate.
The strategies we mentioned here can be a sturdy base for both beginners and those who want a fresh look at ordinary things. You are welcome to use the strategies we provided or create your own. If you ever need any help, you can always register on HilltopAds and get assistance from our managers.
