Affiliate marketing has become a successful business model for many entrepreneurs, bloggers, and marketers. If you’re just starting out, the idea of affiliate marketing might sound a very interesting topic for your business.
Attention! Just because it’s a lucrative market, it doesn’t mean that you should just jump into it without any idea whatsoever. You’re basically setting yourself up for failure if you do!
Instead, before you can profit from affiliate marketing, it’s important to understand what’s it really about, how it works, who the major players are and what are the pros of cons for using affiliate marketing to make money online.
Here is a guide about affiliate marketing – What you need to know
Affiliate Marketing Basics
Affiliate marketing is a method for you to earn money online by promoting products, services, or businesses and getting commissions for every successful sale. Make sales-make money!
One of the most common examples of this is the referral link whereby you as a publisher put a link on your blog/site, which then takes the user to another site. If he buys something, you’ll get a commission from that purchase.
There are other variations of this – asking a user to perform some kind of action like signing up, completing forms or getting email addresses. Generally, you can expect to use a unique link of some kind for an affiliate product or service.
As for the commission amount, it depends on the affiliate program itself. Some give you a percentage of the sale while some might give a fixed amount for every conversion.
Tracking the conversions can be done in various ways. Some use a link with a code that’s only unique to you to track where the conversion comes from. Others might give you a unique “coupon code” that users can use which lets them track conversions.
Promotion Methods
Using ads or banners to promote
This is the easiest and most straightforward example of promoting affiliate products. Whether you have a blog or a personal website, you can promote affiliate products by using and placing banner ads.
Visitors who are interested in the product/service will then click on the ad, which then takes them to merchant’s page which they can then purchase it. If the sale was successful, you’ll then get a commission from it.
Add links to your content
Another method for promoting affiliate products or services is to include the link inside of your content. This works well, especially if you’re a blogger or a content creator.
One of the more common ways to do this is to include a link to a relevant product in an article. Similarly, you could create content on a particular topic and include an affiliate link to products that are useful to the reader or user.
Payments
Affiliate marketing is very effective because gives merchants a higher ROI as it’s performance-based. Meaning, they only pay for actual customers instead of just visits. A good affiliate program will offer a multi-channel attribution to ensure that affiliates that create the most value will receive the most payment.
Some of the more common types of payment method used by merchants are:
CPS (Cost Per Sale) – You’ll receive a flat fee per sale or a percentage of the product or service value.
CPL (Cost Per Lead) – You’ll receive payment for every validated, completed lead.
CPC (Cost Per Click) – You’ll receive payment for driving traffic to the merchant’s site via ad clicks.
CPA (Cost Per Action) – You’ll receive payment when users complete actions you advertise
The Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing
Just like with any other marketing programs, there are various advantages and disadvantages for using them. While affiliate programs might seem lucrative, especially for a blogger or an entrepreneur, it’s a good idea to be aware of what the pros and cons are before joining an affiliate program.
Pros of affiliate marketing
Inexpensive: In general, you won’t have to pay to join an affiliate program. Majority of the affiliate company will handle the service and product, which means you won’t have to worry about inventory or supplies.
Easy to join: The barrier of entry for an affiliate program is very low. You just have to fill up a form and then you can start promoting the products immediately. Though some programs might be harder to join than others.
No need to deal with shipping or product returns: As an affiliate, all you have to focus on is promoting the merchant’s brand, product, or services. The actual product or service itself is handled entirely by the merchant.
No need to create product or service: Your focus as an affiliate is to just deliver the clients and customer. The merchant will take care of the rest, as starting your own online store can take quite a bit of effort.
There are no special requirements: As long as you can promote the affiliate products or services effectively, you don’t need any other training or licenses. (Though it helps to set up a website!)
It makes money 24/7: Just like any other online business, you can do affiliate marketing at any time, even when you’re asleep!
Cons of affiliate marketing
Of course, as great as affiliate marketing seems, it’s not entirely perfect. There are a couple of downsides to it.
Building up referrals takes time: In order for an affiliate to make any significant amount of money, it’s going to take quite some time to generate enough referrals
You need to be good at internet marketing: Yes, there’s no special training required to be an affiliate BUT if you want to be successful, you need to be good at (or at least know) Internet Marketing.
You need to have some coding knowledge: To add the affiliate links and ads into your website, blog, or even an email list, you need to have some basic understanding of how web codes work and how to put them in.
There are advertising restrictions: Certain affiliate programs will enforce advertising restrictions, such as not allowing email marketing or using PPC ads with certain keywords.
It’s very easy to start your affiliate marketing business, but first, you need to know effective marketing tips and techniques. So you can make money online pretty fast.
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