Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online if you’re looking for a good income source. Online affiliate marketing is one of the biggest industries in internet advertising. Anyone can make tons of money by becoming an affiliate marketer.
In this article, you can learn what is affiliate marketing, basics of affiliate marketing for beginners and how to do affiliate marketing. Also, you can start right away by joining the best affiliate networks in the world listed out for you.
What is Affiliate Marketing for Dummies?
- The affiliate marketing is the process of promoting the product or service of a company to earn a commission by generating a valid sale or lead.
- The person who does affiliate marketing is called as the affiliate marketer.
- In simple words, the affiliate marketer helps the company to sell its products/services. For every sale generated by the affiliate marketer, a part of the sale amount will be paid as the affiliate commission.
Learn more –Â How to start an affiliate marketing business without a website.
Step-by-Step Guide to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing for Beginners:
The Process of Affiliate Marketing Explained:
- For advertisers, letting the potential affiliates know about their products & services and tracking the sale & lead is a complex process. So, most of the advertisers approach affiliate networks to do these tedious jobs for them.
- The affiliate network connects potential advertisers to skilled publishers. When an advertiser approaches the affiliate network to promote their product/service, they will feature it on their network in front of thousands of potential publishers. The publishers will promote the advertiser’s offer through the targeted traffic source.
- When the publisher generates a lead or a sale, the advertiser will pay the affiliate via the affiliate network. The affiliate commission will be deposited in the affiliate account and it will be processed as per the terms of the affiliate network.
- For connecting the advertisers with the potential affiliates and managing, tracking the conversions, the affiliate network will collect a network fee from the advertisers.
- There will be different tools available for the advertisers on the affiliate network to track their offer performance and affiliate performance.
- The affiliate networks are the heart of the affiliate industry. Affiliate/publishers are the blood vessels of the industry.
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Basics of Affiliate Marketing:
How to do Affiliate Marketing to Earn Money:
- The first requirement to do affiliate marketing is a traffic source. An affiliate can promote offers to generate lead or sale only if there are customers. Websites, social media, search, email are some of the traffic sources used by the top affiliates.
- To start affiliate marketing, you must join the affiliate network. Follow the terms of the affiliate networks to get approval. Few top affiliate networks approve affiliate accounts automatically.
- After joining the affiliate networks, browse the offers listed on the network. Use the filter to search the relevant offers in the targeted category.
- When you click an offer, the description and terms for the offers will be given. Make sure you’re aware of allowed promotional methods before promoting.
- For each offer in the affiliate network, a lot of creatives and links to different landing pages will be given. Use the creatives to promote the offers.
- When someone makes a purchase of a product or completes an action by clicking your affiliate link, you will be paid instantly by the advertiser.
Different Sources to Promote the Affiliate Offers:
These are some of the best marketing techniques to promote affiliate links and earn the commission. Top affiliate marketers use all these sources to do affiliate marketing.
1. Blog/Website:
- The blog is the best of the best source to promote affiliate links. The blog can generate high sales and leads compared to other marketing sources.
- You can promote the affiliate links of a product or a service on your blog by writing reviews about them. And also comparing the products & services is one of the best ways to promote affiliate offers.
- When the visitors read your review, there are chances to convert the visit into the sale if you’ve properly optimized the post.
- Top affiliate marketers use the blog as the primary source to generate an affiliate commission. If you’re a beginner, you can read my guide on – How to start a blog.
2. Video Marketing:
- Video marketing is one of the best-proven ways to generate a higher conversion rate. According to a survey, people like to watch videos more than reading articles.
- There are a lot of video marketing platforms available on the internet of which YouTube works the best.
- Starting a YouTube channel is easier compared to starting a blog. Start a YouTube channel in the category you’re targeting. Then start creating the review videos, then leave the affiliate link on the description. In the end of the video, ask the visitor to buy the product or sign up for a service.
- The conversion rate of an affiliate offer through video marketing will be higher compared to any other marketing technique if the video is properly optimized.
3. Email Marketing:
- Email marketing is the advanced marketing technique to promote affiliate offers. Bloggers, email marketers use this promotion method.
- To do email marketing, the affiliate should have a genuine subscribers list. Only a few advertisers allow promoting their offers through email newsletters.
- The affiliate manager must approve the affiliate to promote the offers through email newsletters. The affiliate should follow the CAN-SPAM act to do email marketing.
4. Social Media:
- Social media marketing is a trending marketing technique. This technique is simple and the best way to target potential customers. Since social media has a large user base, you can easily see high conversions.
- Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest & Instagram are the best social media platforms to promote the affiliate offers. Affiliate Marketing is a good option to earn money on Facebook and make money on Twitter.
- You can start a Facebook page promoting it to get likes. Once there are enough fans, you can start promoting the affiliate links.
- Paid promotion is the best compared to the fan page promotion. Social media like Facebook allows its users to promote posts to targeted customers by paying some money.
5. Search/PPC:
- The search/PPC affiliate marketing is an effective way of promoting affiliate offers.
- Unfortunately, most of the advertisers do not allow search/PPC promotion to protect their trademark. But, there are few high paying affiliates offers that accept PPC traffic.
- The affiliates must invest a lot of money to start a PPC campaign and there is a risk of losing money if wrong keywords are chosen.
- The affiliate must abide by the terms of the search engines to start a PPC campaign
Different Affiliate Marketing Models Explained:
There are different affiliate networks available in the industry, which can be primarily categorized based on the nature of the conversion term. Affiliate offers are categorized under three sub-categories they are the sale, lead, and action. These are explained in this section.
1. Cost Per Sale(CPS) Affiliate Marketing:
- The CPS affiliate marketing is the basic type where a conversion will take place only when a sale is generated after clicking the affiliate link/banner.
- Most of the affiliate networks are CPS networks. Through CPS affiliate marketing, the affiliates can earn more money per sale but the conversion rate will be low compared to other models.
- CPS affiliate networks will be lenient in approving affiliate account compared to the CPA and CPL affiliate networks.
- Affiliates should concentrate on branding their web property to become a successful sales marketer.
- Learn more about CPS affiliate marketing and find the best CPS affiliate networks in the world by clicking the link given below.
Recommended article – CPS affiliate program.
2. Cost per action(CPA) Affiliate Marketing:
- The CPA program is called a cost per action affiliate program. In the CPA model, an affiliate will be paid when a visitor clicks the affiliate link and completes an action.
- The action can be like filling forms, downloading mobile apps, completing surveys, PIN verification, downloading software, signing up for trials, research, etc.
- The conversion rate of CPA offers will be higher compared to the CPS offers since no purchase* is involved in this process.
- The CPA affiliate networks have different tools, like lockers to help the affiliates to increase their income.
- Most of the CPA offers allows for incent traffic. So affiliates can earn by offering little incentives to the visitors for completing the action.
- Learn more about CPA affiliate marketing and find the best CPA networks in the world by clicking the link given below.
Recommended article – CPA affiliate network.
3. Pay per lead(PPL) affiliate marketing:
- The pay per lead(PPL) affiliate networks are also called as cost per lead(CPL) affiliate networks. Doing pay per lead affiliate marketing is simply called as lead marketing.
- Lead marketing is the simplest and profitable in the affiliate marketing industry. The affiliates will be paid when they generate valid lead to the advertisers.
- The PPL offers to include double opt-in sign-up, single opt-in sign-up, and email submits.
- The pay per lead affiliate networks allow only experienced affiliate marketers to their network to prevent fraudulent activities and to generate quality leads.
- Learn more about the pay per lead affiliate marketing and find the best pay per lead affiliate networks by clicking the link given below.
Recommended article – PPL affiliate networks.
Advantages of affiliate marketing:
- Affiliate marketing is profitable compared to publishing CPC ads.
- Affiliate marketing can be done without a website through other traffic sources.
- Affiliate websites are given more respect compared to the websites filled with CPC ads.
- The affiliates don’t have to worry about invalid activities unless they try to cheat the system.
- Monetizing the blog with affiliate links and CPM ads/CPC ads will double the income.
Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing:
- Affiliate marketing is advanced. Beginners will struggle to learn about the system and make a good profit.
- Affiliate marketing might not work best for websites of all categories.
- The affiliate networks can generate less money compared to the CPC ad networks if the affiliate doesn’t know how to promote the affiliate offers.
- For bloggers, affiliate marketing is a challenge. It’s difficult like installing Google ads on the blog. They must research, analyze and should know the ways to promote the offers to make the profit.
- Getting approval from the few best affiliate networks is hard compared to getting approval from the advertising networks.