According to the Oxford dictionary, the term affiliate marketing is defined as “A marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals”. Have you ever asked yourself that What is Affiliate Marketing?

In fact affiliate marketing is one of the most traditional and popular ways to make money when you are online. Today we are going to tell you all about it so that you can make the best use of this knowledge and apply the principles to gain  steady passive income.

By using a well-crafted Affiliate Marketing strategy a blogger can become an affiliate of any company he selects and all he has to do is to place a link or a button in a blog post which when clicked will lead his/her audience to that specific web page displaying that product or service.

This can be a wonderful strategy for bloggers who would want to make additional income through their blog or for people who want to become full time affiliate marketers. To be really successful in this, you need to have a great deal of patience and apply certain well planned strategies.

Procedure

Do you want to make money as an Affiliate Marketer? If your answer is a “yes” the good news is that as an affiliate you can make money by earning a commission from the company you are an affiliate of. The technical part is that all the banners or links which your viewers are supposed to click basically contain a unique user ID when the HTML code is embedded in your blog.

When your viewer clicks that link your company gets notified through the unique user Id which helps them to locate your identity. This is the way you will get a certain commission from them for being able to play your part in driving traffic to their website and getting them customers who purchased their products.

How do Affiliate Markets Get Paid?

Pay Per Sale

Usually this one is the standard way an affiliate gets paid by companies. In this procedure the company or seller pays the affiliate a certain percentage of the selling price of a product which is also called commission. The affiliate needs to get the consumer buy the product and that is a requisite for getting his commission.

Pay Per Click

This program involves getting the consumer to click on the affiliate link so that he gets redirected to the seller’s website. The affiliate marketer then gets paid on the basis of each click produced by the visitors which led them to the merchant’s website

Pay Per Lead

In this system of affiliate marketing, an affiliate is paid on the basis of the number of leads converered. This involves getting the consumer to land on the seller’s website and ultimately complete the required action which is usually subscribing to a newsletter, download a software or filling a contact form and so forth.

What are the parties involved?

Affiliate Marketing basically involves three parties for carrying out this process. They are –

Seller

The seller is an organization, an entrepreneur or a retailer who has a product which needs to be marketed and sold. As someone involved in this process, it is not necessary that the seller should be involved in the marketing and they usually make money from the profit sharing involved in the affiliate marketing process. This person is also known as vendor, creator, brand or the merchant.

Publisher

Besides being known as the publisher, this person is also known as the affiliate who markets the product to the consumers in an appealing way. Therefore his role is to persuade customers to purchase the seller’s product. If in the end the consumer or the customer ends up buying the product the affiliate gets a specific percentage or portion of the revenue made out of the sale.

Customer

The customers are the ones for which the company manufactures its products and in fact they are the major drivers of this entire affiliate marketing process. Affiliates promote and share these products on various social media platforms and websites with the consumers. If the consumer buys the product, both the affiliate and the seller makes a product.

The purchasing process is completed and the product is purchased. Ultimately customers do not pay more for the products which are purchased through the process of affiliate marketing and they remain unaffected by the entire affiliate marketing system of which they are the backbone.

Will it cost me anything to join an affiliate program?

If you want be an affiliate and join a affiliate program to sell various products or services, you don’t need to spend anything and it is usually FREE to join any of the affiliate program networks available out there. However, if you are using various marketing methods to promote your link such as Google Adwords, Facebook ads or other techniques, in that case it will cost you whatever you spend on promoting it.

How can you become a successful Affiliate Marketer?

Affiliate marketing, just like all skill involve a lot of patience and application of effective strategies before you can call yourself as a successful affiliate marketer. The following features make up the key to become a super successful affiliate marketer. They are as follows:

     1.   Research

Researching the right products as per your niche and interest. For this, you can visit high rated review websites and spend a good deal of time in researching your product which forms the cornerstone.

    2.  Select the right merchant

Selecting a well reputed and popular company which can be trusted to do business with is crucial for the success of any affiliate marketer. Exceptional customer service is significant so do check out the company you are referring to your audience.

    3.  Engaging your Readers

Keep your readers engaged with producing relevant and interesting content with attractive pics.

   4.  Use Various Traffic Sources

A majority of affiliates promote the products on their website. However you can promote it with more sources such as guest blogging, pay-per click advertising and so forth.

   5. Testing & Measuring Results

It is always advisable to continue with the iterative process of testing, keeping a track of your results and measuring your results so that you are able to improvise on your existing affiliate programs.

Amazon Marketplaces

 1. Amazon Affiliate Program

 

It is a fact that Amazon led the way for online affiliate programs in the beginning with its launch way back in 1998.  Amazon’s Affiliate Program has been around since long and is one of the most popular ones among people. There are no gimmicks and no hidden fee involved in this popular program.  

As with the Amazon platform, it is an intricate network with millions of products for advertising to your customers.  It is simple to join and Amazon has made available convenient linking tools for helping bloggers and website owners in monetizing their website.

Like other affiliate programs, the key to being successful in this program is to do an in-depth research and applying effective marketing techniques. It is Free to join and has a simple procedure. Since the brand name gets brownie points for being highly credible, therefore it boasts of a mammoth customer base and has excellent customer service for its buyers. The payment system also is quite reliable as you can receive direct deposit payments to your bank account.

 2. Clickbank

Clickbank has been in the market for ages and is one of the most popular marketplace affiliate programs out there. For more than twenty years it has multiple lifestyle products which are primarily for bringing about improvement in the lives of people all over the world.

They claim to feature all such products which provide digital marketers and entrepreneurs all those tools or resources they need to publish and promote/market products in order to grow the business. The best part about this network is that you will be able to find a product or service related to your niche as it has a vast choice available.

 3. ShareaSale

ShareASale is one of the largest affiliate networks in the market as of now. It has about 5000 sellers listed and this network publishes an enormous amount of data on all offers being run such as the average commission, average sale amount and earnings per click earned.

Some of their advantages include running easier and more attractive offers so that you can decide upon the best one you think works for you and it has a quick payment cycle – ShareaSale pays its affiliates on the 20^th of each month if and only if the balance is more than $50.

 4. CJ Affiliate (Formely Commission Junction)

CJ Affiliate is also considered one of the largest affiliate platforms available online. Most of the retailers have their affiliate programs on this giant platform and they offer varying/multiple ad sizes for their affiliates.

The entire process of placing the code on your blog and running various ads or promotions is also quite straightforward and easy. Once approved it takes very less time to run all the promotions in a matter of few hours. The payment system is also quite prompt made in quite a timely and reliable manner.

All in all, Affiliate Marketing is a great opportunity for people who want to make extra income right from the comfort of their home or are looking to make this a full time occupation while acing their performance.

The success up to a great extent depends upon the effective marketing skills of an affiliate. This is being utilized by millions of people worldwide which enables the merchants to increase audience engagement and convert their visitors into long time faithful customers.

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