How to Start Affiliate Marketing in 2025: From Scratch With no Money

Once you decide to earn a living online, affiliate marketing may come to mind. And no wonder! Thanks to social media influencers and bloggers, affiliate marketing is skyrocketing, with an estimated global value of up to $36.9 billion by 2030.

However, how to start affiliate marketing with no money online? Well, it’s not easy. At the same time, it’s not rocket science. Here is a step-by-step affiliate marketing guide our team put together.

Let’s dive in (with strong faith in yourselves!) and go through every hidden detail on beginner affiliate marketing from scratch to apply it today at zero cost.

How to start affiliate marketing with no money? Is it possible?

Yes, it is possible for beginners to roll out affiliate marketing strategies with little or zero cost. As you can imagine, there is always a trade-off, but it’s pretty consistent. Instead of high investment, you can rely on your creative drive, persistent effort, and your craving for new knowledge. Make sure you are genuinely motivated and devoted to your affiliate marketing project.

As you progress with the affiliate business, you can invest more in extra traffic sources, advanced tracking tools, etc., using the commission of your affiliate sales. But you’ll get there. First, let’s examine how affiliate marketing functions.

How does affiliate marketing work?

Affiliate marketing is a passive-income activity focused on promoting affiliate links acquired through an affiliate program or an affiliate network. As people click on your link and take the target action, the affiliate software tracks the metric, and you receive a commission from a brand or company for advertising its products or services. The whole process is straightforward.

The great thing about the affiliate marketing business model is that you don’t need to have any special set of skills. You need no experience in affiliate marketing, only an internet connection. You can choose an affiliate program product you like or use yourself out of a variety on the market.

For example, you have a TikTok account or YouTube channel where you regularly post awesome videos about sports. By joining and promoting a Nike affiliate link offered by CJ Affiliate programs, you get about 11%, every time your followers buy shoes, clothing, or sports gear after clicking your affiliate link.

The affiliate marketing model offers excellent opportunities for bloggers, influencers, and ordinary users to have a chance of earning money online. You don’t have to spend on goods production, shipping, warehouse facilities, or dealing with customers. All your efforts should pivot around on building your relevant audience that will convert with your affiliate program links.

Step-by-step guide to get into affiliate marketing for free

So, what does it mean: starting affiliate marketing with no money? Let’s analyze the steps for your affiliate marketing journey with zero-money input.

Step 1. Define your niche

To make it most profitable and advantageous for your own business, follow the steps to define your high-yielding niche:

1. Select a niche that inspires you.
2. Evaluate a good affiliate potential and proven demand.
3. Avoid overly broad niches. On the contrary, aim at a specialized niche. The specific product choice and precise targeting multiply chances to convert users.

Here is an overview of niches you may look into.

Comparison Table 1. Verticals (aka Niches) in Affiliate Marketing

Step 2. Use free platforms to create content

The next step to start earning with affiliate marketing with no money is setting up your free platform for bringing your content to this world. You can use social media or an uncomplicated affiliate marketing website to grow your loyal audience and earn passive income.

1. Leverage social media platforms

Social traffic channels offer free exposure and engagement. You can choose to create a few accounts on social platforms, not just one. Approach each platform accordingly:

• Facebook. You can create your following as well as join niche groups and share authentic recommendations.
• Instagram. Post product visuals, short reels, or testimonials to apply effective Instagram affiliate marketing.
• YouTube. Experiment with video tutorials, unboxings, and product reviews.
• Pinterest. Share curious pins that link to your blog or affiliate offers.
• X (Twitter). Share short insights, tips, and take part in real-time discussions.
• TikTok. You can go creative with quick, engaging videos demonstrating value.
• Telegram. Build a niche group or channel, share valuable tips, and post affiliate links naturally.

2. Create a simple website

You can build an elementary affiliate website without spending money. Employ platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Wix, Medium, or Google Sites, and be sure to double-check the latest free offers on the market.

Comparison Table 2. Free Platforms for Affiliate Marketing with Low or Zero Cost.

3. Build an email list

Begin to form your email list early with email marketing tools with current free plans, like:

1. MailerLite is a straightforward, cost‐effective email marketing tool for small email lists.

Free plan includes:

• Monthly limit of 300 contacts.
• No credit card required.
• 12,000 monthly emails.
• One operating user.
• 24/7 support for up to 14 days.
• Drag-and-drop editor, pop-ups, surveys and quizzes, and landing pages features are available.

Pros

• Great for non-tech-savvy users.
• Clean design.
• Strong support.

Cons

• Advanced segmentation or design customization may be available with higher plans.
• It’s not cut out for large mailing lists and complex automations.

2. MailChimp is a well-recognized email marketing platform, with a lot of features and developed automation.

Free plan includes:

• Monthly limit of 500 contacts.
• Email support for the first 30 days.
• Limited reporting and analytics.
• One operating user.
• 1000 emails per month.
• 1 audience.

Pros

• Trustworthy, well-established platform.
• Drag-and-drop editor.
• Wide library of templates.
• Numerous training materials available.

Cons

• Fewer opportunities to use the support service with the free plan.
• Advanced automation, filtering and testing capabilities are accessed from paid plans.

3. Brevo is a robust mid-sized platform with good value and a feature-rich interface.

Free plan includes:

• $0 per month forever.
• No credit card needed.
• Best for individuals and solopreneurs building an online presence.
• Daily sending limits of 300 emails.

Pros

• Intuitive user interface (UI).
• Designed for both light and full-fledged email campaigns.

Cons

• Free plan limitations.
• Very complex email campaigns may find limitations.

You can use email campaigns on their own to promote affiliate products or as a combo with other types of affiliate promotion.

To build your email list, you can:

• Create a lead magnet, like a checklist, eBrochure, or guide that provides value to your followers in exchange for email sign-ups.
• Use call-to-actions (CTAs) in your bio, blog posts, or stories on your social media accounts and hint followers at your sign-up page.
• Make good use of Instagram and Facebook Stories with swipe-up links or link stickers to promote your newsletters.
• Promote via YouTube videos and TikTok videos and link to your sign-up form in descriptions or bios.
• Use pinned posts. Pin an appealing post on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, inviting your followers to subscribe.

Take special care and ensure to follow your social media rules and recommendations when highlighting your affiliate links.

4. Be part of online communities

To approach digital communities, you can study threads and discussions related to your niche on Reddit, Quora, or forums honed for your field. There, you can make valid points and genuine insights, helpful recommendations, and answer users’ questions. Aim at creating content that is valuable, educates visitors and solves specific problems. When people find your advice sincere and trustworthy, they’re more likely to explore your affiliate links.

Step 3. Build and enlarge your audience

With a minimum or no budget to promote your affiliate program, you mostly have to rely on organic traffic channels:

Social media channels

You can harness the following practices to enlarge your social media following:

• Collaborate with other influencers or creators. Engage in cross-account partnerships, podcasts, and guest posts to drive new customers.
• Utilize hashtags and trends. Apply relevant hashtags and participate in trending topics to increase visibility.
  • For example, use 5–10 relevant hashtags with SEO keywords on Instagram or TikTok. Include keywords in captions, video titles, and video descriptions on YouTube. Proper keyword usage can dramatically boost the visibility and discoverability of your posts and videos.
• Engage with your audience. Try to reply to every comment and DM when possible. Ask questions, encourage interaction in the threads. The more engagement your post gets early, the more the algorithm boosts it up.
• Run contests or challenges. Offer small giveaways or run hashtag challenges to increase engagement and follower growth. Keep entry simple, like tagging a friend or subscribing to your newsletters.
• Design irresistible visuals. Eye-catching visuals stop users scrolling. Use Canva, CapCut, or Adobe Express to design professional-looking posts and thumbnails, even without design experience.

Here is a real-life story of an Adsterra Partner who grew his Facebook audience from scratch and is earning $9K a month passively with Adsterra.

“I got it to 3K members, then I did another trick to push it to 20K. … Sharing your group post to other bigger groups like yours is an incredible hack.”

Jeremiah Yahaya, Entertainment Blogger

Simple websites or web pages

You can leverage search engine optimization, also SEO and AI best practices and attract organic traffic. Get a good grip of the basic SEO principles and techniques: how to use relevant keywords of low volume, how to write clear titles and implement internal links. That will give you better positions and conversions with traffic coming from Google and other search engines. You don’t have to have a savings account in the bank to work with organic traffic, yet you need to possess time and apply consistency.

According to Trustpulse, SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the prioritized traffic sources for affiliate marketers as well as ad networks that provide high-quality traffic for affiliate offers. Blogging follows the third in the top 3. Out of all, SEO and blogging require no cost to start. Yet, PPC and a reliable ad network can be an effective tool to gain high-converting traffic, once you have the confidence and budget to kick off.

Step 4. Create content that converts well

The best approach to creating content that drives traffic and converts is to understand your audience and give out valuable and authentic material. It can be blog posts, video content, or social media updates. Always aim to provide handy and practical information that naturally highlights your affiliate links.

For example:

• Honest product reviews,
• Your own experiences in the matter,
• Charts and tables,
• More detailed tutorials,
• Granular how-to guides,
• Exhaustive listicles,
• Evergreen case studies,
• Personal stories,
• Event calendars,
• White papers,
• Other long-form content.

Step 5. Choose trusted affiliate programs

Once you pick the “right” niche, enter affiliate programs with offers for promotion within that niche. Your main objective is to find programs that are:

• Reliable,
• With positive reviews,
• With openly disclosed commission rates (not in fine print),
• Paying regularly,
• Suitable to promote an affiliate marketing offer without a website (if you do not plan to have a site),
• In lucrative verticals/niches, like E-commerce, Dating, LeadGen, Pay Per Call, iGaming, Mobile, Software, Health, Beauty, Downloads, Finance, etc.

Expert tip

Consider subscription or recurring offers with commission structures where affiliates get regular payments for a customer’s subscription or repeat purchases. It’s applicable to SaaS tools, online learning platforms, and software products.

Alternatively, look for well-established affiliate networks with thousands of offers to promote. Don’t particularly chase high-paying affiliate programs, as you can opt for low-competition products that are easy to sell and align with your niche.

Popular affiliate networks and platforms include:

1. ClickBank. It’s great for digital products.
2. ShareASale (Awin) and CJ Affiliate. They have access to a great variety of merchants in different niches, such as consumer products, house, business, technology, etc.
3. Amazon Associates. It offers a enormous variety of affiliate programs, but commissions can be low.
4. Impact and PartnerStack. They are often used for SaaS and subscription offers.
5. AvantLink. It’s a performance-based affiliate marketing network that focuses on quality partnerships with commissions for driving sales or leads, mostly in sports and gear.

Expert tip

If you find it hard to single out a vertical or an offer, always look for support in niche online communities and forums. Ask for advice with more experienced affiliate marketers on the subject: what presently sells or not, and what the current trends are. If you want more options to choose from, check out our Guide with 20 Best CPA Networks in 2025.

Step 6. Promote your affiliate links effectively

We delved into how to do affiliate marketing without money. Now, let’s discuss how to promote affiliate links effectively and what exactly you need to avoid for better and quicker results.

1. Promote only reputable, high-quality products. Choose products or services you would gladly use yourself. Endorsing low-quality or shady offers can quickly damage your credibility among your audience.
2. Avoid dropping “lonely” product links everywhere, as you can end up with flagged or banned links on some platforms.
3. Diversify your affiliate marketing efforts. Apply omnidirectional presence on the internet, promote your affiliate links and content across multiple traffic channels like blogs, email, social media, etc.

Alternatives to affiliate marketing with no money and no experience

Joining an affiliate program is not the only way to start earning without financial investment and no experience. You have a few monetization ways up your sleeve that you can combine with your affiliate marketing business or use on your own.

Let’s talk about them briefly. You can apply these free monetization strategies with any amount of traffic and start making money at once.

Smartlink (Direct Link)

This is a simple url that resembles an affiliate program link, and you can place it anywhere suitable on your social media or website. However, there is a critical difference. Smartlink contains thousands of ads and the algorithms are tuned so that they show the most relevant ad to the user with the best conversion possibility. Meanwhile, you get paid not only for clicks and conversions, but also for views.

Here is a real-life story shared by our Partner that tells about his methods for using X (Twitter) and Facebook traffic and earning 1000 commission per month with Smartlink.

“Adsterra likes high-value Facebook traffic, and it converts insanely well by Adsterra Smartlink.”

Abdu Abubakar, Blogger

You can go through a quick registration as a Publisher with Adsterra ad network and see how it works in your dashboard. Partner Care support team and live chat are available 24/7 for any inquiries and expert advice.

Display ads

If you have a mini website or a landing page, there are a few more alternatives at your disposal to earn revenue. By placing appealing ads on your site with a CTA button and directing users to the advertiser’s website, you can make a substantial income.

The advanced ad networks continuously enhance ad formats, so that advertisers and creators can easily work around the famous ad fatigue and have skyrocketing conversion rates. Here are a few of them.

Social Bar

Social Bar is the state-of-the-art ad format that appears naturally as push notifications on your web page. As it’s so intuitive for users, they are willing to interact and eagerly engage with the relevant ads. There are variable Social Bar skins that you can match with your website layout and design on desktop and mobile.

Social Bar ads are super-efficient and non-intrusive. They easily overcome adblockers, having up to 30X higher CTRs than web push ads.

Popunder

Popunder is a universal ad format that pops up behind the user’s window. Its main advantage is that it’s impossible to miss, and at the same time it’s not irritating. The user sees Popunder ad only when they have finished with the intended action in the browser.

Here is a real-life example shared by our Partner of making $50 a day, using Popunder on his monetization start.

“Like many other bloggers, I started with Popunders. They’re nice when we speak about payouts. You can make pretty much money with popunders”.

Akerele Oluwatobiloba Emmanuel , Blogger

Native ads

Native ads are another super-effective approach to earning affiliate income online. Once placed on your landing page or a website, they look like a blog post or another original piece. This native character of the advertising makes it high-converting and profitable.

More tips to start affiliate marketing for beginners with zero cost

The path of an affiliate marketing beginner with zero cost is not all rainbows and skittles. It can get gloomy to prioritize your steps and things can escalate. Here are some practical affiliate marketing tips and a checklist to get started.

Tip 1. Apply free AI tools

Free Artificial Intelligence tools for affiliate marketing are already here to re-form the space. It streamlines and accelerates content creation, topic and keyword ideation, crafting of personalized content, messaging, and emails.

Even with no budget, free AI solutions, like Perplexity AI and ChatGPT for affiliate marketing, now offer the capabilities of a whole marketing team. Ensure to perfect your AI prompts, and also humanize, uniqueize and fact-check your results.

Comparison Table 3. AI Affiliate Marketing Tools with Zero Cost

Tip 2. Deliver value, not just selling

It’s always a good idea to go about promoting your affiliate links strategically. Concentrate on helping people when you share affiliate links and root for your potential audience. Avoid just scattering affiliate links across the web. Focus on building authority in the niche.

Be transparent within your content marketing about affiliate links and your paid relationship. This way, you build the sought-after trust with your readers and visitors and follow the FTC compliance rules.

Tip 3. Track results

Even as a beginner affiliate marketer, you can rely on performance-based marketing. Use your affiliate dashboard provided by an affiliate partner or extra tracking tools to monitor which links perform best and the commission and earnings you get.

If you have an affiliate site and a few hours to spare, you can figure out and configure the free Google Analytics tool (GA4). By placing utm (a tracking parameter) to your affiliate link, you can then track where the users mostly come from and how well they convert.

Free tools like Google Search Console and the built-in analytics in social media accounts are also great for measuring your first metrics, like clicks, conversions, and overall engagement.

Tip 4. Use an affiliate marketing checklist

To cut a long story short, we compiled a checklist on how to start affiliate marketing with no money that can help you move faster and track your progress.

1. Foundation setup ✅ ☐

• Choose your niche. ☐
• Join trusted affiliate programs directly or through an affiliate network. ☐
• Research your target audience. ☐
• Define your free platforms for content marketing. ☐

2. Go live with free platforms ✅ ☐

• Register social media profiles (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, X, or/and YouTube, etc.) ☐
• Set up a free or low-cost website (WordPress, Blogger, Wix, Medium, or Google Sites). ☐
• Use SEO practices to generate content that will rank high on search engines. ☐
• Join niche communities (Reddit, Quora, Facebook Groups, etc.) ☐
• Begin building an email list (Mailchimp, MailerLite, or Brevo, etc.) ☐

3. Produce and share content ✅ ☐

• Write SEO-optimized blog posts (reviews, comparisons, tutorials, etc.). ☐
• Create social media posts and short video content (Reels, TikToks, YouTube videos, and Shorts). ☐
• Share genuine advice in online communities and niche forums. ☐
• Design visuals (Canva, Adobe Express, or free AI Tools). ☐
• Repurpose content across multiple platforms. ☐

4. Grow and build relationship with your audience ✅ ☐

• Post consistently. Set an effective schedule for your audience and a manageable schedule for yourself. ☐
• Take care of comments, DMs, and group discussions. ☐
• Get creative with value-packed lead magnets to grow your email list. ☐
• Arrange newsletters, giving value-rich information on how the affiliate product can solve a problem. ☐
• Organize collaborative events with other creators or niche influencers. ☐

5. Stay tuned and credible ✅ ☐

• Always be open about your paid affiliate partnerships. ☐
• Keep abreast of affiliate trends, advanced free tools, and best practices. ☐
• Try free affiliate marketing courses. ☐

6. Measure, tweak and scale ✅ ☐

• Track clicks, conversions, actual sales, and performing and underperforming traffic sources. ☐
• Pay attention to yielding content and update older posts. ☐
• Experiment and test headlines, CTAs, and visuals. ☐
• Consider partnering with an ad network, like Adsterra, to add paid advertising (Smartlink, Display ads, etc.) to your monetization strategy, with any amount of traffic you have. ☐

2025 Trends and future of no-money affiliate marketing

In 2025, getting into affiliate marketing with no money means concentrating on authentic content and meaningful communication with your audience. Below are the trends we currently observe that are opening more opportunities for affiliate marketers:

Interactive content and niche formats
New content and ad formats are evolving. They stimulate higher audience engagement in the continuous digital content noise and growing ad fatigue among users. Interactive formats, like live commerce, video, quizzes, social bars, and entertaining ads are getting more popular.

Sustainable approach
Present-day consumers are more discerning, that’s a fact. They expect genuine, high-quality content, a clear display of affiliate relationships, and alignment with personal values. And sustainability and ethical practices can be applied whether you have a budget for affiliate marketing or not.

Community affiliate marketing

Joining existing communities to naturally promote affiliate links is an effective way of affiliate marketing work. However, affiliates are now creating and expanding their own online communities from scratch to grow the most targeted audience.

One-influencer commerce

For an affiliate marketer, who is usually a creator, blogger, and an influencer, it can be easier to develop trust, credibility, and genuine connection with the audience. And large brands and companies are happy to pay a flat fee for that. Consequently, influencer marketing allows for effective monetization through affiliate links, brand-sponsored content, or smartlinks, etc.

All these trends can be put to practice with any or no budget you allocate for your affiliate business. To make it work, rely on credibility, transparency, and owning your audience.

Last thoughts

Being a successful affiliate marketer involves patience and consistency to build your traffic and authority. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, and of course, it doesn’t happen overnight. Stay focused on affiliate content creation, study SEO, and test free strategies. Starting with zero budget means your reputation and trust matter even more, you pick up faster and create fiercely.

By following the abovementioned steps and tips and staying committed to your undertaking, you can build a successful affiliate marketing business today with no money from scratch.

FAQ: How to start affiliate marketing with no money?