What is affiliate marketing? The basic concept of affiliate marketing is to market the products of other companies or people on a commission basis on the Internet. The affiliate marketer will get a sales commission on every sale from a merchant done via the affiliate marketers’ links.
In one sentence, Affiliate marketing can be explained as:
“Promoting products of other or companies on the Internet.”
Disclaimers
Affiliate Disclaimer: The post contains links to merchants and services. These links are affiliate links. When you click on these links and make a purchase, I may receive a commission from the purchase. The purchase will be of no extra cost to you.
Third-party Disclaimer: We are not legally responsible for what happens when you click on third-party links because we have no control over third-party websites, content, functionality, or security and cannot be held responsible for any technical or other damage to your device, such as a computer, mobile or tablet used when clicking a link to connect to other platforms, download material, install, modify or distribute any material, software or other.
Earnings and Result Disclaimer: Programs or products mentioned in this post, article or review that involve earning money will not work for everyone. There is no guarantee for success because too many factors influence the results, such as skills, knowledge and circumstances that we do not control. We intend to provide you with opportunities and tools that can potentially be helpful to your success.
Opinion Disclaimer: All views and opinions expressed in this post, article or review are my own, not the merchant(s) or provider(s) views or opinions. Projections in this post, article or review are not endorsements.
The 10 Steps To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing
1. Research affiliate programs: Thoroughly research the affiliate program you’re interested in. You can find information about commission rates, payment terms, and product categories.
2. Choose your niche: Choose a niche that you’re passionate about and has potential customers interested in the products or services you promote.
3. Select an affiliate network: An affiliate network is an intermediary between publishers (affiliates) and merchant affiliate programs. It allows you to find and join various affiliate programs.
4. Create content: Create content related to the products or services you’re promoting that will attract potential customers to your website.
5. Set up your website: Choose a domain name that’s related to your niche and set up a website.
6. Sign up for an affiliate program: Sign up for affiliate programs of the products or services you want to promote.
7. Add affiliate links: Add affiliate links to your website or content so that potential customers can click on them and purchase the products or services you’re promoting.
8. Monitor your performance: Monitor your performance to ensure that you’re getting the best results from your efforts.
9. Promote: Promote your affiliate links on social media, emails, and other channels to reach a wider audience.
10. Get paid: Receive payments for the sales you generate through your affiliate links.
Definitions and Explanations of What is Affiliate Marketing
So what is Affiliate marketing? Affiliate Marketing is usually described as a compelling and straightforward concept to market goods and services. As such, it is characterized as one of the easiest and quickest ways to earn money online.
Several terms on the Internet can be confusing and difficult to understand when describing affiliate marketing. The following are some explanations for some of the terms being used.
Advertisers and merchants are the ones that have a product to sell or a service to offer, either physical or digital. They are commonly referred to as affiliate merchants.
Bloggers, influencers, publishers or salespeople are commonly named affiliates. You will be an affiliate if you have a website, write about a product you use and love, and put a link to the product on a merchant’s website.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing – Can You Make Money Off It
There are benefits for both affiliates and merchants from using affiliate marketing to reach customers. The benefits for the affiliates are a potential increase in traffic to your blog or social media platforms and the opportunity to earn money.
For the merchant, it is an excellent method of doing commercials without the cost of direct commercials. Affiliate marketing is a kind of word-of-mouth approach to selling products for merchants.
As an affiliate marketer, there are a lot of tools that will help you automate the process of marketing, giving you greater exposure faster than doing it manually.
A merchant can also benefit from using automation tools in the administration of its affiliates. Activity and payouts can be automated and monitored, and ease the company’s administration toll.
There is always a risk involved when doing online business. The risk applies to the merchant, affiliate, and customer. Mutual trust and good systems to prevent fraud are essential in this business.
There will always be bad apples in any business. But once you know what you’re doing with affiliate marketing, you’ll be reducing the risk of fraud through hard work and diligence in a well-designed website with good-quality content.
Affiliate Marketing is the Reason For the Rise of the Giant Companies Online
Affiliate marketing has been the contributing factor to the rise of many big companies online. One of them is Amazon. Amazon was one of the first companies to make use of affiliate marketing and has thousands of affiliates that promote Amazon’s products every day.
Google has its program and tools for affiliate marketers to use, and it is essential to understand how Google uses its search engine to facilitate end-users, affiliates, and merchants in finding what they are searching for Information is a very valued commodity today, and it will be even more valuable in the future to come.
Bing and Yahoo are also influential performers in all this but have only a small percentage of the search traffic compared to Google.
How Can I Start With Affiliate Marketing
It isn’t tricky to start with affiliate marketing. Pre-requisites are access to a computer, an Internet connection and a burning passion that you want to share with the world. After you have the pre-requisites in place, do the following tasks to get started:
- Research the market related to your passion. Cars, Health, Pets, Food and drinks, Children’s Equipment, and Home training are some hot markets to enter as an affiliate marketer. But remember, choose a market, also called a niche, that fits your burning passion.
- The next step is to find a hosting platform for your website. There are many hosting platforms to choose from, and it is easy to be confused about which will fit you best. One of the better ones, which has good site support, a fast hosting platform, education, and a thriving community, is Wealthy Affiliate (WA).
The platform is the one I started learning about affiliate marketing and is a good place to start out as a beginner. WA has everything you need to get started and grow your online business. The pricing is also very attractive as you get a lot of extra tools and training in addition to the hosting itself for $49 pr. month
Another very good alternative is WXP.net. It is highly recommended no matter how experienced you are. - To build your website, you need to choose which software to use as your website builder. WordPress is a free website builder and very easy to use. A massive library of plugins is available to expand your website’s functionality, and it is free.
Most hosting services offer managed WordPress hosting, which means you don´t have to worry about keeping the CMS up to date. - The next thing is to start writing articles about your passion. Articles and blog posts (content) on a website are the most crucial thing for your business. The content can be reviews of one or several products, or you can write about your experiences with a product or how to do stuff.
- After producing content on your website and getting some traffic to it, you should apply as an affiliate for affiliate programs related to your selected niche. Once you get approved, you can start to promote products or services from the affiliate programs that have approved you as an affiliate.
The way to promote the products is to provide your affiliate link for the specific product on your website, email, or social media channels.
Remember to do thorough research about the product or service you have chosen to promote in order to produce a good article that shows your visitors that you know what you are writing about.
In your research, you should try to find specific words or phrases, called keywords” that people are searching for. Try to think about what phrases or words you would search for yourself and use that as a basis for your keyword search.
The keywords you find you will use in the content you create.
Keyword research and how to utilize them will be described in a future blog post.
How to Promote Your Affiliate Link
As written above, you will receive your affiliate links for each chosen product or service. The links you have received put you in a position to promote your content on your websites, and you can send them out in newsletters, emails, classified directories, YouTube videos, and other channels.
You can use one or all of these methods of promotion for the best results. There are many tools to help you do this. The important part is how to drive traffic that is interested in what you are offering.
If you write interesting and helpful content, people will get their curiosity triggered to visit your website, and as such, the chance of getting commissions from sales will increase concerning the number of visitors to your marketing channels (website, social media and more).
How Do I Get Paid When I Have Received My Commissions?
A merchant can use several options today to pay you your commissions. Depending on the affiliate program you are registered with, they offer payout by checks, bank transfer, PayPal, Payoneer and Stripe, to mention some methods.
The commissions are generally paid at the beginning of every month after verifying the related sale. In other words, the payout can take some time. I received my first commission ever 45 days after the article about the product was published.
Why Do Companies Make Use of Affiliate Programs?
The companies that offer affiliate programs do it for some rather obvious reasons. It is a way to promote their product without using too much money on advertising. The most potent marketing force there is the “word-of-mouth” marketing method.
When I buy a product or use a product and am very satisfied with it, I will speak positively about it to my friends and family. My actions will trigger interest in some of them, and they will check this out and maybe buy the product themselves. In this case, the company that provides the product hasn’t used a single dollar on advertising.
An affiliate program is based on the same principle, but the difference is that there is a small expense in commission for each product they sell. Letting a blogger or a digital marketer write about their products on their blogs is a cost-effective method for companies to promote their product.
A lot of bloggers have thousands of visitors each day and month. In this way, the company saves a lot of money on advertising but at the same time increases its reach to its target group of potential customers.
Some of the companies that have affiliate programs are Amazon, Google, ShareASale, Clickbank, and Digistore24 are examples of other companies with affiliate programs.
To find out if a company has an affiliate program, visit their website, and most often, you will find a link to it in the footer (bottom of the page) of the site.
Some Final Words
Affiliate marketing is a great way to follow if you’ve been looking for a way to make extra money or create a full-time income by working from home.
Connect with several merchants to have more sources of revenue than just one to secure your business from suddenly being without any income.
By doing a bit of work every day, researching new topics to write about, and creating new and unique content every day, will develop your capability to do this kind of work each day.
Do good research on content and which companies you would like to be an affiliate of. The commissions the different companies pay their affiliates vary quite much.
The essential part of every business undertaking you start to build is that it is not “a get-rich-quick” endeavor. It takes time to get noticed and get traffic to your website.
