What Do You Mean By Affiliate Marketing?
If you’re anything like the average person, then the words, “affiliate marketing” mean very little to you, and may seem like it is all Greek. However, affiliate marketing is actually something very useful. It is sometimes labeled as “passive income.” Affiliate Marketing is the process of earning money or commission every time you promote someone else’s products and services, and the consumer buys something based on your referral. How affiliate marketing works is when you are singing the company's praises or their products and your affiliate marketing and promoting earns the company a sale, you get affiliate commissions off of that purchase as a result of your excellent marketing. If you were promoting Cheerio’s cereal, you would be paid anytime someone bought Cheerios based on your recommendation. It is essentially making money while you sleep. The long and short of it is, you use your skills as a marketer to refer others to a particular product, and when someone buys it because of you, you get paid from it.The funny thing is that we are promoting things every day, in our day-to-day lives. We promote certain brands of clothes depending on what we wear, we promote the kind of phone we bought and use all the time, and we promote the kind of car we believe in and trust every time we get behind the wheel, etc. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to actually get paid for purposely promoting a product, when it is something that we do subconsciously every day? That is possible through affiliate marketing, as well as you can earn money online through affiliate income, encouraging people to buy their products and services. If you are scared of scaring off your friends as a result of you constantly bugging them to buy things you are promoting with your internet marketing, don’t be. There is a right and wrong way to go about affiliate marketing. Innovation Exchange has an amazing article with ten suggestions on staying friends with your friends, while still making a decent amount of income through affiliate marketing campaigns.
Affiliate Marketer; Mystery Terms Unraveled:
Advertiser: The advertiser, or merchant, is the company or individual that the affiliate is teaming up with. The advertiser creates and produces the product that you are promoting. They are the reason you have something to get paid for at the end of the day.Affiliate Link: This is the unique link or code that is given to the affiliate by the advertiser, that your audience will click on to learn more about or buy the product you are promoting. The affiliate link is embedded with a special tracking code that allows the company or advertiser, to track any and all sales, leads, or foot traffic that you bring in to them through your affiliate network.Affiliate, or Associate Program: This is the two-way street where you, as the affiliate, earn a commission for affiliate promotion of a company’s products and services, and the company benefits from the referrals and foot traffic that is a direct result of your marketing efforts and you promoting their business.Commission: A commission is money you get paid as a result of the sales you generated for the company you are an affiliate for.Conversion Rates: A conversion rate is a percentage that an affiliate gets paid after dividing the total number of sales that came as a result of promoting the company’s affiliate products, by the number of impressions that your affiliate link has multiplied by 100. Basically, the conversion rates show how often an affiliate link has generated sales versus how often the link has been viewed, and the company’s various websites have been accessed by your followers and viewers.Impression: An impression means the number of times that an ad is shown on your page.Niche: A niche is a focused or specific topic that addresses the need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream companies. It is a narrow group of potential customers with very specific needs that only you can address and help. For example, if you have a site about yoga, then your niche is yoga. On a larger scale, your niche is health and well-being. The best way to make money as an affiliate marketer is to choose a profitable niche. Often, people will start with a broader niche as part of their marketing strategy and then narrow it down, which creates more affiliate marketing success.
How Do I Become An Affiliate Marketer?
Really, any individual or company can create an affiliate relationship or become a promoter for someone else. Affiliate marketing campaigns are for anyone that has a passion for a product or service and wants to tell others all about it. However, most often, affiliate marketers are bloggers or other people with social media platforms with similar content to the niche sites of the company’s products you want to promote. If your blog or social media account, like Instagram or Facebook, is tailored towards beauty and makeup tutorials, you may want to team up with an affiliate partner like e.l.f. Cosmetics or Ulta or Avon and promote their products in your posts or videos, with an affiliate link for the company attached.To become an affiliate marketer, you find a product that you want to promote that fits your niche and will be relevant and important and of value to your audience. Then, search for “insert product’s name here” affiliate program. You can sign up for their affiliate program, which will then send you a special affiliate link that allows the company to track anyone that clicks on your unique link. Then you can begin earning a commission off of your audience buying the other company’s products. It sounds like a dream, right?Because you have already built a rapport with your audience and they trust you, you now have a built-in network to promote other businesses’ products and drive your traffic to buy from them. You can write a blog post or a social media post or do a video to encourage your viewers to check out a new product. It is a lot easier to guide your audience to affiliate websites or products and services and turn the potential customer into a buying customer based on your marketing recommendation, than if they were just to randomly see an ad for the product that popped up in their search engines. When your consumers click on your unique link and either fill out a lead form for more information or actually buy the product, then you can earn commissions based on the sales you brought in. And, a bonus is, you also get paid for doing something that you love and are already doing, you just are now doing it with a little more purpose and with an affiliate marketing angle.You can promote the company you are a partner affiliate with through posts, videos, ads via banner ads, search boxes, or a share link. Depending on the marketing program you are an affiliate for, the commission rates will vary. Your commission is usually a percentage of the amount that was bought, anywhere from 5% to 30% of the company profit and revenue brought in by you through affiliate marketing.Innovation Exchange has an excellent list of affiliate marketing campaigns you can join to jump-start you building your affiliate marketing network and earning a hefty sum of money through passive income.In summary, to become an affiliate marketer, you first need to sign up for an affiliate or associate program. Then they will send you an affiliate link with a unique code that you can share with your audience. When your followers click on the affiliate link or buy something from the company, your affiliate partner gets notified. After that, you will be paid your commission, anywhere from 5% to 30% of the revenue that the company gained as a result of your promoting their business and product. Commission payouts are usually given to you on a monthly basis, but this can vary and depends on the affiliate program you are with.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
As affiliate marketers, you are paid based on your performance. There are several different marketing strategies that you can make money from and be earning a commission, all while doing something you love.Pay Per Click or PPC: is where affiliate partners get paid for any click on the affiliate link, regardless of the conversion rates of the clicks turning into sales or leads.Pay Per Lead or PPL: is when your affiliate company gives you a commission based off of every qualifying action that your marketing generated. This could be people buying the company’s products, an online form submission, signing up for a free trial, completing a survey, etc.. The customer has to complete an action or agree to some form of commitment to the company you are recommending for you to get paid from an affiliate account set up like so. They are basically like pay-for-performance programs.Pay Per Sale or PPS: is when the affiliate company pays you a percentage of all sales as a result of your having affiliate links with them. The most common PPS affiliate marketing program is Amazon Associates, where a successful affiliate can earn commissions of up to 10%, depending on the product you are promoting.As you can see, there are multiple ways that you can earn money and be paid as a result of your efforts to drive traffic to an affiliate partner. The different ways that you can earn commission really depends on the type of product you are promoting and the affiliate marketing program you are with and their parameters for you to earn an affiliate commission. Make sure you understand how you can get paid for each company you team up with as an affiliate, so you can have a better expectation of the kind of passive income you can generate from product to product.
Is Affiliate Marketing For Me?
At the end of the day, we all want to be happy and satisfied with our work and the amount of income we are bringing in. If making posts and videos about things you love and are passionate about, while earning a commission on the side at the same time is something that excites you, then don’t wait any longer. Take that first leap, and get started with affiliate marketing. The results of how easy and fun it really is may surprise you.