The Ultimate guide to Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is the most ideal approach to automate revenues i.e. passive income, which is totally based on revenue sharing. For most people, passive income is a dream, If you have a product or service and wish to sell more, you can offer promoters a financial incentive through an affiliate program. If you have no product or service and still wish to make money, then you can promote a product or a service that you feel holds value and earn an income from it. According to AM Navigator, about 40% of marketing professionals quote affiliate marketing as the most desired digital skill.

This is your go-to guide to master the art of affiliate marketing.

Let’s begin!

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the oldest form of marketing. When a person buys an online product based on your recommendation, you receive a fulfilling commission. It is often referred to as a “channel” for brands that partner with individuals or organizations. Every big company like Amazon, Apple, Google have an affiliate program, which is free to join by any individual across the globe. The commission varies from $1 to $10,000 depending on what product you are promoting for them.

How affiliate marketing works:

Affiliate marketing is referred to as a system that enables product creation and marketing crosswise different parties where each party shares the revenue as per their contribution.

There are four simple steps by which affiliate marketing works:

• Join an affiliate program
• Pick a product to promote
• Share the link via Social media, blogs, YouTube videos, Facebook ads, etc.
• When someone makes a purchase based on your recommendation, you earn a handsome affiliate commission.

Say for example –

An online shopper decides to buy an item.

He or she lands on an affiliate website.

Then he or she is redirected to the merchant’s website.

The shopper makes the final purchase and the merchant rewards the affiliate for the efforts.

How to Start Affiliate marketing (beginners) :

Here are a few ways you can pick from to start affiliate marketing as a beginner-

1. Start with a blog – You can use blogs to target the audience and promote a product. This is the most effective and cheapest method.
2. Buy traffic from PPC sites like Google, Facebook, Quora and drive this traffic to affiliate products or services. This is called PPC marketing.
3. Use a Youtube channel to promote products.
4. Start a podcast.
5. Create an email list through lead magnets.

The Players in the Affiliate Marketing Model:

Brands (Advertisers/ Merchants)

Companies that sell a product or service and industries include retail, B2C, subscription services, financial services, telecom, travel, broadband, gaming, e-commerce, marketplaces, B2B, etc.

Affiliates

Affiliates are also known as publishers, distributors. They can be bloggers, personal website owners, active social media posters, shopping websites, product review websites, mobile apps, mass media sites, app-to-app marketing platform, coupons and reward websites, etc

Affiliate Networks

In an affiliate program, the networks handle all the activities like tracking, reporting, and payment to affiliates. Along with tracking technology, some affiliate networks also provide full-service management or self-service management of a program. It gives brands access to a network of affiliates who apply to join. This also gives these affiliates access to hundreds, thousands, of affiliate programs.

Software as a Service (SaaS) Platforms

SaaS platforms help companies manage activities like performance tracking, reporting, and payment, but they do not manage affiliate programs or provide companies with access to the network. Their main goal is just on the technological aspects of an affiliate program.

Agencies

Agencies manage the day-to-day operations, and strategy of a program on behalf of brands, including partner relationships, partner recruiting, activation, and optimization. They work directly with affiliates and with the affiliate network or SaaS platform who looks after the technological needs of the program.

Customers

The audience that affiliates seek to influence to make a purchase or submit a lead form or sign up for a newsletter, test out a service, becomes a new customer.

How To Proceed with Affiliate Marketing:

To build your Affiliate Marketing Business, you have only two options-

1. Become an Affiliate Marketing Merchant

2. Become an Affiliate Marketer

How To Become An Affiliate Marketing Merchant?

Firstly, you need to have a product idea. To generate ideas, you need to take a look at what products and services are already out in the market and how you can improve upon them or think of a solution to the problems associated with those products.

Second, you will need to validate your product idea. You could just simply go ahead and fabricate your thoughts.

Third, you need to create the product as per your product idea. To start off it will be beneficial to go with digital products as creating physical products may need huge investments and risks. Since digital products just require your time and do not require heavy cash flow, they will be the best in ensuring a good Return On Investment.

Now in the fourth and final step, you have to find associates to advertise your product, and the affiliate network will help you in this process.

How To Become An Affiliate Marketer?

To begin with, you will have to keep checking and reviewing products in your specialty. Reviewing can be easily possible on a YouTube channel, or on blogs.

Second, you need to collect emails so that you can interface with your target audiences whenever you need them.

In the next step, you can utilize joint online courses or webinars to make a ton of offers in a brief time period and at the same time develop your email list and make new content.

In the last step, when your affiliate marketing business begins to give you profits, you can scale your development with pay per click advertising methods.

Conclusion

With effective Affiliate Marketing, you can discover a product you like, advertise it to others, and procure a bit of the profit for every deal that you convert.

You can either be an Affiliate Marketing Merchant or an Affiliate Marketer, based on your expertise and specific requirements.

When managed well, with the right knowledge affiliate marketing is one of the most efficient and cost-effective marketing models for driving revenue, new customers, highly qualified leads, and incremental sales. You can make use of external partners like a growth marketing agency for this purpose too.

How do you feel that affiliate marketing can work wonders for you? Tell us in the comments below.