What is Affiliate Marketing (For Beginners)

What You Should Know Before Joining Affiliate Marketing

Making passive income is one of the best ways to earn money online. You hardly get involved daily beyond your usual efforts, yet you can continue earning money for a lifetime if you happen to use affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In simple terms, affiliate marking is an arrangement that sees you earning a commission by promoting other people’s products or services on your platform. You receive a commission on each person who does the action desired by the company paying you. The range of actions includes making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or a site, clicking on an ad, and others.

People Involved in Affiliate Marketing

A look at all the parties involved is necessary to fully understand affiliate marketing and how to get start marketing affiliate products. There are four primary players in affiliate marketing;

1. Merchant

The merchant is the party with a product to sell. It could be a multi-billion-dollar company, or it could be an individual with a small business. The merchant can also be the creator, the vendor, seller, or the retailer. Thanks to the setup of this marketing model, merchants may not even be involved in the sales process.

2. The Affiliate

The affiliate is the party doing the promotions and the one who does most of the marketing work. The affiliate is also known as the publisher and has the role of promoting one or several affiliate products to potential customers. The publisher aims to convince customers of the value of the merchant’s product and why they should purchase it.

3. The Consumer

The consumer is an essential part of the affiliate marketing process. Their purchases provide the revenue that is shared in commissions and efforts. They are targeted on a range of platforms, from social media to digital billboards and more often on search engines using content marketing and blogs.

4. The Network

Ideally, the merchant would be working directly with the affiliate but in mostly not the case. The network acts as the intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate. In most cases, an affiliate can only access specific merchants through a network. They act as a database for a wide range of merchants’ products allowing the affiliate to pick the right product on which he or she can earn an affiliate commission.

Pros of Affiliate Marketing

Becoming an affiliate marketer offers the following advantages to an affiliate;

1. Low to no cost of entry in the business. There is little initial investment involved, and there is no need to stock, ship, or even spend money on service creation.

2. You do not need to be a marketing specialist to start with many things being learned along the way, and most strategies being customized and unique to your clients.

3. Flexibility and freedom of actions are provided since you work when you want and have a pick of the products you want to work with and experiment with several strategies.

4. You earn performance-based income, so, if you hit the right strategy and make the right effort, you can dictate the revenue you earn.

5. You do not have to struggle with customer care service as long as you promise

Types of Affiliate Marketing

There are several types of affiliate marketing, which are defined mainly by the platform where the convincing and promotion occurs. Some of the main ones include;

1. Webmasters

This type of affiliate marketing happens through sites where the owners leverage their traffic to drive leads and visitors to merchants’ sites or marketplace.

2. PPC and SEO affiliates

This form of affiliate marketing requires top skills in Pay per Click and SEO tactics. The affiliate has to invest money in optimizing the search engine and social media networks, as well as several advertising models drawing clicks that can then be turned to leads.

3. Content sites

This is a popular and one of the primary forms of affiliate marketing. The content varies from organization and product information to reviews, guides, and comparisons. The affiliate link is embedded in the material.

Other affiliate marketing forms include;

4. Coupon sites

5. Review sites

6. Email and newsletters

7. Social Media

8. Incentivized Traffic

Types of Affiliate Marketing Programs

Affiliate marketing programs refer to the arrangement between the affiliate and merchant and the expected performance. These programs offer different options, and finding the right one is essential for your success. The main programs include;

• Pay Per Click

• Pay Per Lead

• Pay Per Scale

• Sitewide Commissions

• One-Off Commissions

• Recurring Commissions

The Top CPA Networks

Picking the right network is integral to your success as an affiliate. One of the best models of affiliate networks is Cost Per Action (CPA) marketing, where the affiliate is given affiliate commission for every specific action completed. Affiliates have to sign up to the networks to get permission to promote offers. Top CPA networks around include:

1. Maxbounty (Click to See Details)

2. Clickdelaer (Click to see details)

3. Panthera Network

4. Clickbooth

5. CPA Lead

6. Adworks Media

7. CPA Grip

8. RenevueWire

When selecting the network to work with, ensure it has a good reputation and also many and varied products you can pick from. The network should offer regular payments and through avenues convenient to you and, more importantly, provides adequate support to manage your affiliate income and provide you with tools to maximize your earnings.

How to Promote Affiliate Products for Commission

1. Promote blog posts

Create a range of blog posts from tutorials to comparison posts as well as reviews and have the affiliate links well placed in the article. Then promote these blog posts, especially on Google search results, to increase your reach and target more quality leads.

2. Search Engine Optimization

Your site needs to be optimized to increase ranking and its reach to the relevant audience. A higher rank will earn you more traffic, but it will add to your credibility as an authoritative source.

3. Use banners and Buttons

In your best-performing blogs, you can add actionable affiliate link banners to boost the performance of the product links.

4. Add Promo Coupons and Incentives on the site

You may want to incentivize your clients by adding coupons and other incentives like a free trial to the products you are promoting. This strategy is especially useful in a highly competitive niche to give your readers something extra that they cannot get elsewhere.

5. Create Videos

Using videos improves your reach and the impact of your message while also allowing you to promote the content on various platforms. Videos have higher conversion rates and create a personal aspect to the content, which increases their appeal.

6. Leverage Your Social Media platforms

You can use links even on posts on your social media pages and also promote them as ads in these spaces. You can also push your top-performing blogs in these platforms but style it in a way that suits the respective social media platform.

SUMMARY

All in all Affiliate Marketing is a great way to earn something on a side or as a full time income. Above are some of the helpful methods you can use to get started, you do not need to try all at once; start with couple of methods and learn them before you jump to others. Once you get a grip on your niche and your method of advertising then it should be just matter of days or few months before you see the results come to Fruition.

I highly recommend this method as a beginner or starter on the online business venture, Affiliate Marketing method truly is evergreen, whatever the situation is you can use Affiliate Marketing to support your income stream.