What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a model of advertisements in which companies pay a small commission on every sale done by a third-party publisher and promoter. The third-party promoters are known as affiliates.
Affiliate marketing is nothing new but new-age technologies revolutionised marketing tactics. Digital marketing brought a new and potentially large customer base. Analytics provided additional abilities to merchants to check the rate of conversions, the saleability of certain products, and many more things. Cookies, a small file stored in a device that gets generated by a link click, help the merchant to sell back his product to the right buyer and it is usually generated with an expiration date which lets the affiliate get paid if the buyer delayed their purchase.
The internet glorified affiliate marketing, followed by Amazon which popularised the practice by introducing affiliate marketing programs. By 2021, Amazon was the world’s biggest network with over 900k affiliates onboard.
Websites and blogs integrated affiliate links with their product review pages and received a commission when a purchase was made. Many bloggers are earning a huge amount of money this way. For example, ryrob.com is making five figures in dollars every month. Affiliate marketing is basically a pay-for-performance marketing model, the more you sell the more you earn.
[Key Notes
- Affiliate marketing is a marketing model in which merchants compensate marketing affiliates for business created by their advertisement contrivances.
- Digital marketing, cookies, and analytics revolutionised entire marketing practices and made affiliate marketing a 12 billion-dollar industry globally.
- Involved affiliate marketing, unattached affiliate marketing, and related affiliate marketing are the three main types of affiliate marketing.
- Affiliate marketing is gaining popularity day by day and has become more diverse and prominent than ever. 80% of brands across the globe are using it.]
How does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Let’s take an example of Amazon, the affiliate partner creates an affiliate link to the shoe with a unique reference ID and posts it on the blog. A reader (can be anyone, let’s take an example of a mother) visits the blog to read the review in the morning and clicks on the link. A cookie will be generated and saved on his device. Suddenly, she got a call from someone and left without buying the product. After doing her daily chores, spending some time with her family, and having dinner, she returns to the Amazon at night. While scrolling through the products, she decided to buy a jacket for her daughter as well. Since the duration of an Amazon cookie is usually 24 hours, the affiliate will receive a commission from both products even if he hasn’t promoted another product.
How to become an Affiliate Marketer (Affiliate Marketing Guide for Beginners)
Your journey as a successful affiliate market begins with these steps:
- Choose a well-explored platform
- Choose a product niche
- Join affiliate platforms
- Create high-quality content
- Drive traffic to your affiliate landing page
- Get clicks and convert them to sales
Step 1. Choose a Well-Explored Platform
Why should you choose a well-explored platform? Because as a beginner you have to learn a lot about the whole affiliate marketing, and the platform should not be one of them. Your focus should be on content and traffic. Platforms like Instagram, Telegram, Tiktok, and one will perform well if you know how to bring people to you. The easiest platform to derive traffic among all is a blog and a YouTube channel.
Starting a blog is made easy and cheap by WordPress. Setting up a blog costs a few dollars a month. You can see detailed tutorials on blog creation on Youtube. Once the site is ready, do some search engine optimization to increase the chance of better ranking. Use creative ways to add affiliate links.
Another best platform is YouTube. Unlike a blog, creating and uploading content on YouTube costs nothing. Make great videos and include affiliate links in the description.
Step 2. Choose a Product Niche
Nowadays there is a lot of competition in blogging, with 32.7 million bloggers in the USA alone. If you want to stand successful, niche down. Select a micro niche. A micro niche is a group of products inside a big section of products. For example, food is an enormous category, while the grilled sandwich is a micro niche, limited to a single type of product.
Keeping your topic tight to a specific keyword will help you reach and build a specific audience, and potentially help rank higher in search engines ultimately resulting in more revenue. Once you succeed in driving traffic to your blog, you can expand into other categories.
Though you are gonna be the only creator, in the beginning, choose a niche within your interests. Most affiliate blogs failed due to inconsistency in their early days. If you are passionate about a topic and know certain things, it will be easier to keep your motivation alive.
Also Read – What is Influencer Marketing? An Ultimate Guide
Step 3. Join Affiliate Platform
There are three types of affiliate platforms that you can select to join.
1. High-Paying, Low-Volume Program
These niche products are usually the software. Although the commission is high, the competition is also high for the small audience. For novices, this type of affiliate program can be quite difficult to compete with experienced and skilled marketers to generate revenue.
2. Low-Paying, High-Volume Program
These types of affiliate programs pay less but have the most buyers. Amazon usually pays a 10% commission on almost every product. Let us understand with an example, a PlayStation game costs $50. You will only get $3-$5 for each sale you make but the audience for the game is huge, you can make good money.
The product portfolio in this niche is also huge, you can select any product of your interest. One other good thing is that you will be paid a commission for the entire purchase instead of a single product you promoted. But to generate good revenue, you need to drive tons of traffic.
3. High-Paying. High-Volume Program
These types of platforms have products with mass appeal and also pay high commissions. The downside of these product categories is that they require a high degree of experience. Some marketers also use spammy tactics to sell these products. It is difficult for novices to compete with experienced marketers. So, stay away.
If you are going to target general customers, go with a high-sales and low-commission model. This model contains clothes, daily use stuff, food materials, electronics, etc.
If You are gonna target a business audience, then go with the low-sales and high-commission model. This model generally contains software, web hosting, domain, and other similar products.
You can search various affiliate programs on the internet in just a few clicks. If you can promote a certain product, you can also reach the company directly.
Step 4. Create High-Quality Content
The key to bringing success in affiliate marketing is creating high-quality content and embedding affiliate links naturally. Don’t just bluntly paste your link. This method will not bring traffic and sales.
Don’t just try to sell, find and solve the actual problem of people. Going the extra mile to solve problems will reward you a lot. If you are selling software, the best method is to buy it, use and write a review on it. Embed the affiliate link in the review. If you don’t have enough money to buy everything, start with whatever you have at home and ask the product feedback from the person you know, who purchased that product.
Step 5. Drive Traffic to your Affiliate Landing Page
You have created a blog and great content. The next step is to bring people to read it. You can consider three methods to drive traffic.
1. Paid Traffic
You can pay search engines to send traffic to your blog. The advantage of pay-per-click ads is that the moment you start paying search engines, you get traffic on your blog. The disadvantage is that you bleed money from your revenue. The beginner always ends up paying more money in ads than the revenue generated. It takes time to understand and optimise a campaign. Paid traffic is only a great strategy for high-paying affiliate programs because the moment you stop paying, the traffic halts. For a low-paying affiliate program, it’s not a good strategy.
2. Search Engine Optimization
The practice of optimising blog posts around a keyword to rank high in search engines is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). As long as your blog will maintain top positions, you will receive passive traffic more consistently.
The most basic thing to understand in SEO is to find the keyword that your targeted audience is using to search for a certain product and create content around those keywords. Second thing is to push the page by making backlinks and taking care of other technical things like page speed and many more.
3. Email Marketing
Creating an email list is also a good way to communicate with your target audience. You can send them emails of new arrivals of their interest. This will ultimately result in more clicks and sales.
To build an email list, ask the visitors to subscribe to the newsletter. Never buy email lists.
Also Read – Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing: Dos, Don’ts, and Strategy
Step 6. Get Clicks And Convert Them To Sales
Creating great content doesn’t guarantee you click on affiliate links. A few things you must remember are link placement, context, and callouts. Link placement plays a crucial role in clicking. If you put links at the bottom, you will get a few clicks as most of the readers don’t go that down. If you place a link in the introduction, it will look spammy. Readers will leave your blog which will result in an increase in bounce rate and hence a fall in ranking.
Blend the link with the content. Your link should fall in the flow of content.
Always compare multiple products and place the links of all in your blog. Let the reader decide which one to choose. Don’t impose your choice. Let’s understand with an example, if you are promoting a shoe, don’t introduce the blog with, “Today, I’m going to review the best shoe.” This will look spammy.
Instead of doing this, do,” Today, I’m going to review three different shoes you can buy on (platform’s name) under $50. These are shoe name1, shoe name2, and shoe name3.”
Use callouts like tables, buttons, and boxes to attract the reader’s attention. Place the best product in the ‘our pick’ section. That will bring the most sales.
Affiliate Marketing Jobs
In 2022, the average annual payout for an affiliate marketing job in the USA is $59k. According to Glassdoor, an affiliate marketing job paycheck starts from $58k and goes up to $158k annually including commissions, bonuses, and profit sharing.
Super Affiliate Bizleads Automation Summit
We have already written in detail about the Super Affiliate Bizzlead Automation Summit. The Bizleads Summit is a three-day conference event, which takes place every year. This summit is intended to help delegates improve their marketing skills. The Bizleads Summit 2022 will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 1-3.
Beginner marketers can take advantage of the most recent marketing automation techniques and can learn from market experts. Participants will be able to attend workshops and seminars, hear from industry experts, and network with other marketing professionals.
This summit will be a watershed moment for newcomers or those looking for fresh marketing strategies.
Also Read – What is Marketing Automation Bizleads Summit? Easy Steps
FAQs
How to start Affiliate Marketing with no money?
The best way of making money with affiliate marketing without spending is Youtube, Instagram, and other similar platforms which do not charge for posting content.
Is Affiliate Marketing worth it?
According to a report by Statista, businesses spent more than $8 billion in 2022 alone. Pat Flynn, an affiliate marketer earned over $100,000 from affiliate commissions in 2017 alone. If you can do affiliate marketing right, then yes, it is worth it.
How to start Affiliate Marketing?
Create a blog or upload videos on social media platforms, and include your affiliate link in contempt of the description.