Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online. It’s a great way to make passive income by promoting other people’s products or services.
There are many benefits to affiliate marketing.
The primary one being that it doesn't require any upfront investment, which means that you don't have to spend a lot of money before you start making money.
In this article, we'll take a deeper look inside affiliate marketing. We will cover:
- What is affiliate marketing?
- How affiliate marketing works?
- What are the best affiliate marketing networks?
- Types of affiliate marketing
- How to become an affiliate marketer?
- Tips for affiliate marketing success
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
It's called performance-based because the business only pays their affiliates when they have successfully generated sales or leads.
There are three components of affiliate marketing that are important to understand: affiliates, affiliate product, and company.
- Affiliates: The affiliates are the people who promote or sell products on behalf of companies in return for affiliate commission. They can be individuals or organizations.
- Affiliate Product: The affiliate product is the product that is being promoted by the affiliates in return for certain commission from the company.
- Company: The company is the party who pays commissions to their affiliates for promoting their products or services.
How Affiliate Marketing Works?
Here is the step by step process that explains how affiliate marketing works:
- Affiliates apply before the company to join the affiliate program to promote their products in return for commission.
- When the application to join the affiliate program is approved, affiliates are provided with their unique referral link (also called affiliate link), banners, email swipe copy and more, to be used for promotion.
- Affiliates can place their affiliate link or banners on their blogs or YouTube video description or social media pages and more. Affiliate link helps to track all clicks, sales to correctly attribute the sales to the affiliates.
- When a visitor clicks on the affiliate link, land on the company website and make a purchase, the affiliate gets eligible to earn a commission.
The commission is usually paid out as a percentage of the sale price, but some companies use other models, such as paying per lead or per click.
Above I have given a small example of promoting an affiliate program of a company.
You may probably also have heard of affiliate networks in affiliate marketing. Let's learn more about it next.
What are the Best Affiliate Networks?
Affiliate networks are companies that connect affiliate marketers (publishers) with merchants (advertisers).
It acts as a middleman between the publisher, who wants to promote products, and the advertiser, who wants to buy leads or sales from publishers.
The affiliate network is paid by the advertiser when a lead or sale is made, and pays the publisher a commission on their sales.
Affiliate networks provide a number of benefits to both merchants and affiliates.
For example, they help merchants by minimizing the time needed to find affiliates.
They also help affiliates by providing them with access to a large number of potential advertisers, as well as providing them with the ability to track their own sales.
Some of the more popular affiliate networks include ShareASale, Commission Junction, and ClickBank.
Types of Affiliate Marketing
There are three main types of affiliate marketing:
- Cost per sale (CPS) - This type of affiliate marketing pays the affiliate for every product sold.
- Cost per action (CPA) - This type of affiliate marketing pays the affiliate when there is an action taken, such as a click on an ad, or a purchase from the site.
- Cost per lead (CPL) - This type of affiliate marketing pays the affiliate when there is an inquiry about their service, such as someone filling out a form to receive more information about their product or service.
How to Become an Affiliate Marketer?
In order to become an affiliate marketer, you need to have certain skills and knowledge about the industry.
It is important to learn about the different types of affiliate programs and how they work.
You also need to understand how to build an effective website and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
You need to know how to find products and services that are relevant for the audience that you want to target.
You also need to know what type of commission rates are available, and which platforms offer the best deals.
Here are some tips that will help you get started with affiliate marketing:
Pick your niche.
Picking the right niche is very important for your success in affiliate marketing. It’s also one of the most difficult parts of the process.
The primary goal is to find a niche that has a lot of potential for profit, but not so much competition.
You don't want to pick a niche where there are already dozens or hundreds of people competing with you because you will have little chance at making any money.
There are many factors that go into determining which affiliate marketing niche will work best for you.
There are some things to consider when picking your affiliate marketing niche. For example,
- what you know about the topic or industry that you want to go into.
- What skills and experience you have in this field.
- What kind of content creation skills you have.
- The time and effort it would take for you to learn more about the industry or topic if it is something new for you.
- The amount of competition in the industry or topic that already exists and
- how hard it would be for someone else in the same niche to create content like yours (and get better rankings).
Choosing the right platform.
There are many platforms you can use to promote affiliate products - Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok and Blogging.
One of the best ways to start your affiliate marketing career is by launching your own blog.
You can easily launch your own blog on popular platform like WordPress.org. It is a free platform and is supported by almost all popular hosting service providers.
Now the next thing to do is to get a hosting plan and a domain name.
You can get hosting for your site from DreamHost at only $2.95/mo. It also offers a free domain name, free SSL certificate, backup and more.
Find the right affiliate program.
After getting your domain name and hosting, now it's time to find the right affiliate program.
To find affiliate program in your niche, you can join the following affiliate networks:
- ShareASale
- Clickbank
- Commission Junction (cj.com)
- Impact Radius
- PartnerStack
- JVZoo
- Amazon Associates Program
Another way to find affiliate program is to visit the websites of the companies. Or just use Google Search.
For example, if you want to check whether Elegant Themes has an affiliate program or not, you can either go to the Elegant Themes website or search for the term - "Elegant Themes affiliate program" on Google.
Both ways will allow you to quickly check whether a product has an affiliate program or not.
Once you find the affiliate program in your niche, join them as affiliates.
Create content around your niche/affiliate products.
After joining few affiliate program as affiliates, now it's time to create content around your niche or affiliate products.
Regarding affiliate products you could create content like review articles, listicle and comparison articles.
To create such articles, you are required to do some keyword research with tools like Semrush to check whether you'r not competing with the bigger boys in the affiliate marketing industry.
This step is necessary because you wouldn't want to waste your time, effort and money in something which is too difficult to achieve.
So always make sure before creating content that you're not competing for high competition keywords.
You can use Semrush to find low competition keywords in your niche. This is especially necessary because your site is new and there is negligible chance that you can get to the top of search engines with high competition keywords.
Once your site gains some authority, you can start targeting medium to high competition keywords.
Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success
It is important to note that not all affiliates are created equally. Not all affiliates are able to generate the same amount of revenue for their company.
Below I have mentioned some basic but important tips that can help you as an affiliate marketer to be more successful in this field.
- Decide on the niche that you want to focus on and create high-quality content for it. This will allow you to gain knowledge about your niche and build trust with your audience.
- Find the right products. As an affiliate marketer, it is your responsibility to find the best products for your audience. This way you can make sure that they will be interested in what you have to offer and be more likely to buy from you.
- Try to identify your competition. Find out what they are up to and what they offer so that you can be sure to offer something different or better.
- Create a website or landing page for your business so that potential customers can find you easily. If possible, use a platform like WordPress so that your site is mobile-friendly and easy to update regularly with new content.
- Optimize your website for conversion. You should always try to make your website as user-friendly as possible so that people who come across it feel compelled to purchase. Keep your website design minimal, popular WordPress theme like GeneratePress will help you achieve this.
- Focus on generating quality traffic instead of quantity. Quality traffic will convert better than just any kind of traffic because they are interested in your content and products.
- Promote your website on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram.
- Once you start getting some organic visitors to your site, try to get them subscribe to your email list. One of the best strategies to build your email list quickly is to offer a valuable lead magnet for free to your visitors in return for their email address. You can use popular lead generation plugin like OptinMonster to do this.
Last but not the least, be prepared for a long haul. It may take months before you start seeing results from your efforts, so don’t give up too soon.
Wrapping Up
Making money online has been a dream for many people. Affiliate marketing has been around for decades, and it's still one of the most popular ways to make money online because you don't have to invest anything to start.
You just need to promote someone else's product or service, and when someone buys it from you, you receive a commission. It's a great way to make money without having to create your own product.
But affiliate marketing is not easy.
You just need to work hard and follow the tips I have shared in this article.
If you like the article, please share it on social media websites. If you have any questions or want to add something regarding the article, please use the comment section below.
