Affiliate marketing allows you to earn a commission by referring customers to a particular business’s product or service. You get paid every time someone buys their offering, with the money credited to your account as an affiliate payout from the company directly or one of its affiliate partners. To get customers to take interest, affiliate entrepreneurs use a variety of online marketing techniques, including blogging, Facebook advertising, email marketing, and more.
The affiliate programs you join are created by companies who want their services and products to be marketed and sold. Sometimes, they’ll review your business and require you to provide information about your digital reach to see if you’re the right partner for their firm. They may review your business type or monthly website traffic to make sure you’re capable of bringing them good results.
Affiliate marketing is generally recommended for people with intermediate skills in online marketing. You need to have a following on social media or decent traffic on your website. Also, you need to know how to write copy or make a verbal pitch through a YouTube video. Your persuasion and value-conveying abilities will determine how many customers buy the product or service on your recommendation.
Most entrepreneurs start making money with affiliate marketing within the first month of getting started. However, they’re usually great with online marketing. For newbies, the average timeframe to see results is 3 to 6 month, as it can take a while to find the right affiliate partner and audiences to sell to. Also, you can put a few things (email campaigns, for instance) on autopilot once you start seeing results by to generate a passive income.
You can start up an affiliate marketing business with as little as $200. The startup expenses will typically include a domain name, a content management system, and a few tools that allow you to create landing pages and manage your email list.
Put simply, there’s no limit when it comes to making a profit with affiliate marketing. Google “affiliate marketing success stories” and you’d find several articles on affiliate marketers making a 7-8-figure income, and over $10,000,000+ in lifetime earnings. With the right approach and hard work, anyone can earn enough with affiliate marketing.
Depending on your social influence and marketing skills, you can earn good money even when you’re not in front of your laptop. For example, if you create a viral blog post and put an affiliate link inside it’ll be shared by others without requiring you to make an effort.
You can sell to a global audience. Merchants in almost every country offer online affiliate programs, without any restrictions on who can join as an affiliate
You just need a computer and an internet connection. You don’t have to invest in inventory or a physical office. If you need help with marketing, you can hire assistants from Upwork.
Some affiliates are conned into a program that was set up by a hacker to make quick money. The hacker will close down the program later and leave without paying a commission. The solution for this is to do some research on the affiliate program you wish to join
A major pitfall of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have control over the quality of the product you’re endorsing. This includes the item’s features, pricing, and more. The best way around this is to sign up with trustworthy merchants. For services, you can test out the offering first before making a recommendation.
Affiliate marketing basically means you’re helping a seller build a group of customers. You get a commission just once, while the seller enjoys greater profits when the customer purchases that product again. Also, anyone referred by the customer will go directly to the seller to make a purchase.
To get started with affiliate marketing, you need to understand its process. In most instances, you’ll need to
Make an account with an affiliate
Of course, a lot more happens in the backend of affiliate marketing. In general, four stakeholders determine its entire flow: Sellers, affiliates, customers, and affiliate networks. Let’s take a closer look at how each of them determine the affiliate marketing process.
As an affiliate, you can test your skills and luck with direct merchant programs as well as affiliate networks
The majority of entrepreneurs look at the bigger picture when it comes to affiliate marketing. Only a few go beyond, testing the waters with the sub-online-models of this business. A few popular sub-models include:
Just like any other online business, affiliate marketing requires you to pick a niche. While there are thousands of options available at your disposal, it’s good to go for the big three: Health, wealth and relationships. Products and services in these “evergreen niches” never face a declining demand because individuals will always search for solutions to the pain points in their everyday lives.
However, you should do further keyword research and find small niche opportunities within these broad categories. This is the easiest way to stand out as an affiliate. Below are a few ideas you can use to get started:
Other popular affiliate marketing niches include the pet market, web hosting, and extracurricular activities such as golf. A few of these pay out a high dollar value in the shape of commissions. Web hosting affiliates, for instance, can earn up to $250 per referral.
The majority of entrepreneurs look at the bigger picture when it comes to affiliate marketing. Only a few go beyond, testing the waters with the sub-online-models of this business. A few popular sub-models include:
There are several ways to earn money with affiliate marketing. Below are a few popular approaches:
Content marketing
If you create content on a regular basis, you can sign up for an affiliate program and insert the merchant’s link in your blog post/YouTube video/social media post. Because the original links are often long and unappealing, you can use plugins like Auto Affiliate Links to create simpler and easy-to-insert URLs. Most content management systems (Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, etc.) today offer these tools to make affiliate marketing easy.
“Tools I personally use” landing page
If you have an existing audience who regularly visits your website, you can sign up as an affiliate for high-value services, test them out, and then create a “resources” or “tools” page that mentions any of the services you like. Here’s an example from Digital.com, where the founder Matt shares a list of domain name and hosting providers that aspiring entrepreneurs can use to get their business off the ground.
Social media and influencer marketing
Another way to make money as an affiliate is to promote affiliate links through Facebook, Instagram and other channels. Success on each platform will depend on how much influence you have in your circles. For example, someone with 100,000+ followers on Instagram can earn a high commission by inserting affiliate links in his or her Instagram Stories, videos and posts. Also, if you have some money to spend, you can try and ask an influencer to share the affiliate link on your behalf.
Email marketing
If you have a decent list of subscribers, you can suggest a mix of general and affiliate products to them. This can be done with the help of a weekly newsletter. You can design a custom newsletter and give it a unique name to get recipients to take interest. Make sure to include your affiliate link in one of the sections/blocks, ideally in the mid-part of the newsletter’s body.
You don’t have to stick with a single method for making money. With affiliate marketing, you can try a combination of these methods to earn commissions from various sources.