27/02/2024
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
A Step-by-Step Approach
INTRODUCTION
By offering the proportion of the margin of your product or service to a large number of affiliates, you
can greatly boost sales revenue at a lower overall cost. By sharing the profits of a sale with
other websites, it is possible for webmasters to generate higher sales volumes. By devising a profitable affiliate scheme and promoting and implementing that scheme in a professional manner,
it is possible to generate thousands of website visitors using an affiliate of channels online. Here Search
Engines become less relevant if affiliates are sending your website the bulk of its traffic. Amazon.com is
one of the pioneers of this business model, selling millions of books through tens of thousands of Amazon
affiliates. Today, Affiliate Marketing is a very well established method of selling online. The main
gain of affiliate marketing is high sales volume with little sales effort at an extremely low cost.
The major disadvantage is much lower margins, (as affiliates need paying commission to remain
motivated).
What is an Affiliate Program?
An affiliate program is a contract arrangement between the owner of a product or service (the
Merchant) and a separate âAffiliateâ Organization or 'Individual', to pay a commission, in exchange for promotion of its
goods and services. Typically, this entails an affiliate website adding advertisements (in the form of
banners buttons links and other text materials) banners, buttons links and other text materials)
promoting the Merchants products or Service offering. There are literally thousands of different affiliate programs in existence
on the Internet today. It is usually the responsibility of the affiliate to redirect visitors to their website to
the merchantâs website. At that point any customer service issues (such as ordering a product, dealing
with customers on telephone delivering issues) are dealt with by the Merchant. Affiliate schemes are normally automated and structured. Affiliates must pre-agree to abide by the merchantâs terms and conditions when signing up before entitled to promote anything. For example, Merchants make it a condition that affiliates do not alter the Merchant sales copy to avoid any potential
accidental or deliberate misrepresentation (and ultimately customer dissatisfaction). Affiliates
usually have a unique tracking ID No. associated to their registration or website. By adding this html code to
their site, Merchants can track where each individual sale came from. The tracking html is usually
combined with a cookie or CGI script to allow the Merchants Affiliate Tracking system to collate a
database of visitors and sales. It is normal that affiliates get paid one month in arrears and have an
access to a monthly report outlining leads, sales and conversions. Affiliates are primarily motivated by
money and so they are usually very interested in knowing the conversion rate of the Merchant.
Merchants benefit hugely from an Affiliate Marketing Model as there is a virtually unlimited supply of keen
entrepreneurs seeking out business opportunities to make money (in exchange for promoting an online
business idea). Most affiliate schemes operate in a commission scheme based on payments monthly in
arrears, payable from the merchant to the affiliate of either via PayPal or an alternative independent
escrow service, or check in the post. Some merchants exclude or reject applications from
prospective affiliates who do not meet their guidelines for type of website physical location or
guidelines for type of website, physical location or regulatory approvals (particularly in Financial
Services). The main Advantage of an electronic affiliate business model is that it is completely scalable â it
is possible to recruit an unlimited number of affiliates to promote your product and the cost of
doing so can be negligibleâŚ
Types of Commission Schemes â
There are various types of affiliate models in use today. Historically, affiliate models existed based on banner advertising
which were rewarded on a per impression basis.However, click through ratios were extremely poor
and banner exchange schemes gave the sector a bad name. In addition, fraud impacted confidence in
this method of marketing. The last nail in the coffin for banner advertising was that âin your faceâ flashy
moving images also tended to annoy users. Today, textual ads are the primary form of affiliate
marketing. These are highly customized to the userâs needs using context advertising (based on the
userâs individual search profile and IP geographic location) are the preferred means of advertisers to
reach their target markets.
Pay per sale
The merchant pays the affiliate an agreed sum of money each time a user visits the affiliateâs website,
clicking through to the merchant website, and buys something. Most merchants affiliate programs tend
to have a fixed commission schemes on a pay per sale basis. This could mean either a commission
value for sale or a commission based on a percentage of the sale. These tend to have certain
restrictions or caveats such as a minimum order a sale value, whether the client is a new business
customer or existing customer. In addition, there may be bonuses based on volume of sales over a
given period â all these types of factors are used as carrots and sticks to motivate affiliates to behave in
a certain way.
Pay-per-click
This affiliate commission scheme is based on the number of unique visitor clicks from an affiliate
website through to the merchantâs website. Unique clicks are identified using IP tracking to prevent click
fraud. The user clicks on a text link with an embedded affiliate code or perhaps clicks on a
search result or advert. The commission per click is obviously a lot lower than on a pay per sale basis.
The affiliate benefits from of an instant and reliable source of commission. If the number of click
thorough from an affiliateâs site is high and conversion rates of the merchant low, a pay per click
model is ideal to maximize commission.
Pay per lead
A pay per lead of commission based model is typically used by merchants in situations where the
product or service cannot be easily downloaded or purchased using your credit card, or where the sale
requires human call-back and has a long sales cycle. For instance, where the merchant is a mortgage
broker and requires the user to fill in a call back form with their contact details on. Each completed
contact form would count as a âleadâ and will be paid to the affiliates on a qualified âper leadâ basis.
Two Tier Affiliate Schemes â a two tier affiliate scheme is a multi-tiered program where affiliates in
the first level can also earn commission from the sale generated from affiliates that they recruit who
sit in the second level or âtierâ. Typically the first tier would earn 10% commission on sales indirectly
generates from Merchant sales. In addition, the affiliate may earn a much smaller percentage e.g. 2%
from sales from 2nd tier affiliates they recruited to the Merchant. A two tier scheme is aimed to
motivate affiliates to recruit like-minded people to also become affiliates. It requires additional sales
copy marketing material and a good quality affiliate manager software tool. This tool links affiliates
together and details of any sales, in order to calculate potentially vast commission sums. Key to
success is a higher margin product, where margin can be allocated two separate levels to the point
where affiliates remain motivated and enthusiastic.
Affiliate Networks
An affiliate network website is an independently run collection of affiliate schemes which allow members
of the network to join either one, some or all of the affiliate schemes registered with the affiliate
network. It is a club making recruit of affiliates a straight forward process. This is ideal for portal
websites where a range of different topics and schemes that can be advertised across a large
number of different pages. Affiliate networks charge the Merchant to be part of the network and may even
take a large slice of affiliateâs commission. In exchange, the affiliate network provides the
merchant with an instant access to hundreds or even thousands of potential affiliates who have already
joined the network in the past. In addition, it provides a central management console for affiliateâs to track
sales and leads. It is quite simply a middleman for a large and complex number of affiliate schemes all
promoting themselves alongside their competitors. An example of an affiliate network is Commission
Junction.
Critical success factors
There are usually a range of factors that are critical to the success of your affiliate marketing strategy:
High Commissions
Affiliates marketing efforts are directly proportional to the commission they receive (relative to your
competitors affiliate commission levels). A successful affiliate business model relies on a
sensible amount of available margin to be divided between the website owner and its affiliate on each
sale.
Offer a Differentiated or Unique Product or Service
Prospective affiliates will be attracted to have something a bit different with professional online
marketing literature. If your web site is very similar to dozens of other websites, all promoting their own
affiliate scheme, why should a prospective affiliate sign up to your affiliate scheme as opposed to your
competitors? Therefore, you must really try and sell to the prospective affiliate (via your website affiliate
signup page), in order to recruit them as an affiliate. It is critical to summarize your unique selling points
so they can clearly see there is an opportunity to make money together.
Quality Feedback & Reporting
Constant reassurance through online reporting and real time statistics help motivate affiliates. The more
management information you can provide to an affiliate, the more confidence they will have in your
ability have to close the sale. As an affiliate, it is a real confidence boost to see an email confirmation
every time a lead is generated or sale made that has come from the affiliateâs website. Consequently, the
more motivated they will be to send additional leads in the future.
Great Merchant Customer Service
By providing professional and service to your prospects, your sales conversion ratio obviously
improves. Prospective affiliates will be looking for affiliate schemes that provide good quality
conversion ratios and have a good market reputation. Affiliates need to know that that every
single visitor they send to your site has the greatest possible chance of making the money via your
selling effort. There is nothing more de-motivating for an affiliate than a lead that does not get followed
up quickly enough or is accidentally deleted or ignored by the merchant.
Merchant Affiliate Recruitment Efforts
Patience/ time to recruit the desired number of motivated affiliates are very important. Ask yourself
basic questions. If it takes 6 months to recruit 100 affiliates who generate 200 sales equivalent to
$100,000 profit in that time, could you have generated more than 200 sales in that time (and at
what profit) if you had concentrated on direct selling only.
Affiliate Management & Tracking Systems
As the merchant you must have a thorough understanding of online affiliate tracking software
and services to ensure affiliates are paid on time, sales are allocated fairly and automated new affiliate
recruitment can be initiated. If you have no systems in place there are many commercial affiliate services
available or software packages to provide an end to end service to manage and track affiliateâs leads and
sales. This is equally important for accounting purposes as the bigger your affiliate program
becomes, the more important it is to justify outgoing costs (affiliate commission payments).
What Affiliate Marketing is NOT
If you get an unsolicited email inviting you to join an affiliate network and itâs asking for an upfront
payment, then you definitely have to scrutinize them and find out whether or not theyâre scam or legit. Go
a d d out et e o ot t ey e sca o eg t. Go to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and find out
about the company, if you canât find any, then go to affiliate marketing forums and discussion boards.
They would know a lot about these scam sites as news spreads fast in social media and forums.
Another thing to look for is if these people are selling you unrelated products or something that you will
never be able to use, like the $3550 âSecrets to Affiliate Marketing Successâ book or some other
catchy titles; although a few are genuine but they donât charge you that high. The truth is you can learn basic affiliate marketing from top ranking websites and blogs. In fact, they can teach you more useful information than all those specialized books and DVDs that other people are selling. Becoming an affiliate is free when you sign up to affiliate marketing programs and the only thing that will really cost you money is web hosting, which is around $70 â $100 a year for your affiliate marketing blog. A few other expenses may include a unique website/blog logo (optional), your electric bill; hire a blog writer (optional because you can write the blogs yourself) and probably paid advertising to promote your website or blog (optional).
Types of Affiliate Marketing
Whatâs interesting about affiliate marketing is that you can earn commissions in more ways than most
people think. Allow me to explain the 3 different types of affiliate marketing and how you can earn through them.
1. Unattached Affiliate Marketing â This type of affiliate marketing will not require too much work
from you, you donât even have to setup an affiliate marketing blog like those for Amazon Affiliate
Programs. This is more like a PPC marketing (pay per- click) where you just show affiliate ads on sites
that allow this kind of marketing and then get a commission for each click through that web users make on the ads.
2. Related Affiliate Marketing â This type of marketing is where you are required to have some
level of involvement and this is where you create an affiliate marketing blog or website and always show
affiliate links on almost all of your website/blog pages. You also earn a commission for each time a web user clicks through the affiliate links.
3. Involved Affiliate Marketing â This kind of marketing may require you to actually use the
products/services before you write a review about them and you should be able to write a more
comprehensive and honest reviews. You can choose from these 3 types of affiliate
marketing methods, but most affiliate marketing programs uses the Type 2 affiliate marketing, which
has some level of involvement and online presence from your end.
Putting the Cogs and Wheels Together
Now that you have an idea of what affiliate marketing is all about and what its common pitfalls are, you are ready to start your journey to financial freedom and a wealthy lifestyle! Affiliate marketing is just like any other type of business and youâll have to plan a strategy months or even years ahead before you
begin, so I will give you the basic strategy of how to become an affiliate marketer, signing up for affiliate
programs, setting up your affiliate marketing blog and all the other important details about it.
Steps to become an affiliate marketer:
1. Decide what niche topic you want to use for your
blog or website: Itâs better to write reviews or general information about products/services that youâre
information about products/services that you re passionate about, because you will write better
articles for them compared to those that you donât like. For instance, if youâre mad about crochet or kidâs
bicycles, then that is the niche you should pick for your blog! Affiliate programs have a huge inventory
of items for sale and they do include crochets and bicycles for a fact. If youâre more of the businessminded individual and you think you can write just about on anything, then by all means pick the niche thatâs most profitable among the lot.
2. Create your website and purchase a cheap but
reliable web hosting: You donât need a web designer to build a website or a blog. You can use WordPress, Weebly, Web.com, Blogger, eHost and others to do that. Using their user-friendly âclick & dragâ features you can create your blog/website in 5 â 10 minutes!
3. Learn basic SEO and use it on your blog or
Website: Search engine optimization or SEO is a very good marketing strategy to allow your website to be known throughout the entire internet or at least the majority of it. If your website is easier to find in
search engines, then it is more convenient for people to visit it, and more visitorsâ means more money for
you.
4. Learn social media marketing to extend your
presence online: In reality social media marketing or SMM is also a part of the grand scheme of SEO and without it, your SEO campaign would not be as successful as youâd expect it to be. There are literally
billions of people hanging around the web on a daily basis and much of them are in social media sites. It
would be a logical choice to get visitors there for your website and increase your income potential.
5. Learn about paid advertising and consider it
deeply on whether you need to use it or not: Paid ads help because they target the right kind of people who are already looking for products that you promote. Meaning there is a good chance that they will buy. Wouldnât you want them to buy products through your affiliate links? I would!
6. Start filling up your website with content: In case you plan to write boring and unimpressive blogs and articles, then Iâd advise you to no longer continue in your pursuit of creating an affiliate marketing blog, because I promise you people will not want to read your blogs or visit your site. Write articles that will impress you first. This will let you know whether or not people will want to read about what you have to say. If you can find an extremely critical person to judge your writing, then that would be better as it will
help you greatly improve on your writing style. Reader engagement is absolute in affiliate marketing. It will determine your income capacity, so do your best in writing content for your site above all else.
How you earn in affiliate marketing:
⢠The manufacturer/seller signs a partnership deal with the affiliate network or program and in turn,
when you sign up with the affiliate network as an affiliate, the partner affiliate network will give you a
small percentage share on every item you helped sold.
⢠Youâll need to embed or display affiliate links on your website or affiliate marketing blog about the
products youâre promoting. The purpose of these links is to guide your blog readers to the sellerâs
webpage (which is usually in the affiliate networkâs site) so that they can make purchases of the items
they like.
⢠The percentage commission on each sale range from 1% â 10% (some give more than 10% but rarely)
and this is how you generate income. For example, a web user happens by your blog about coffee
machines and he/she read your blog review or informative article. The reader was impressed by
your blog and decided to click on the affiliate link, and then make a purchase of 1 coffee machine
worth $350. If the affiliate network allowed 7% of that amount to be your commission, therefore your
income for that sale alone will be $24.50.
⢠You may notice that $24.50 is a small amount and not enough to convince you to become an affiliate;
however, if you were able to bring 10,000 visitors to your blog in the span of 30 days and about 4,382
people bought coffee machines for themselves, then your income for that particular month should be
$107,359! If youâre able to bring as much visitors to your website on a regular basis, then you can bet
that your monthly income should be around these numbers. Now you can appreciate the value that SEO
and SMM can do for your affiliate marketing business.
Key Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
It is without doubt something that all people who are interested in starting an online business or those
who already have an online business, should investigate and take up. If you are undecided or have little knowledge about affiliate marketing then I hope that you find the below information helpful and that it will clear up any doubts that you have over what the key benefits of affiliate marketing are.
1. Commission basis
For the affiliate marketer this is a key advantage as every time that somebody makes a purchase, the
affiliate receives a set commission of the profit. For the affiliate merchant this is an advantage as
For the affiliate merchant this is an advantage as they only pay the marketer when they make a sale, so
no money is wasted on marketing spend.
2. Huge audience
For the affiliate marketer â having built up various marketing lists or websites, they can make use of
their huge audience base and ensure that the traffic they send over to the merchant is qualified and that
sales are made, making the affiliate more money. For the affiliate merchant â they receive access to a
wider audience base than they may have had before, creating more interest in their products, resulting in
more sales and all without investing any more money or time.
3. Ease
For the affiliate marketer â once they have set up their additional sites and links across to the
merchant, it is very simple to manage and often affiliates will continue to make money from sales
without having done anything for months. For the affiliate merchant â they do not have to
invest time and money writing content or creating expensive images in order to promote their services/
products. Instead affiliates will apply to be a part of their program and all the merchant need do is have
many affiliates all working towards promoting their products/ services and wait for the sales to flood in.
4. Steady cost
For the affiliate marketer â building on the last point, an affiliate can keep receiving commission from
sales of a product or service for years, despite not doing a lot of work to promote it. You do need to
invest time at the start but then you have a regular est t e at t e sta t but t e you a e a egu a
source of income coming in for the market life of the service/ product.
For the affiliate merchant â they set up all the costs so the chance to make a huge profit on sales without having spent much on marketing, is very likely. They do not have to pay their affiliates much per sale to make the business relationship worthwhile, as it tends to work best on a quantity basis so everyone is happy with the set amounts.
5. Brand Visibility
For the affiliate â there is a lot to be gained reputation wise from working with a range of brands
and you will find that you get a lot more work should you be able to prove that you have succeeded with
others in the past.
For the affiliate merchant â they receive free brand exposure on a continual basis, which is never a bad thing. If you have many affiliates working on promoting your brand, youâll soon see a boost in
search engine rankings and online sales;
Amazon.com is an excellent example of where this
has worked in the past.
6. Outsourced expertise
For the affiliate marketer â they get the continued
experience to improve and work on their methods of
online marketing, investing only their time, not
money.
For the affiliate merchant â they will be able to utilize all kinds of affiliates who are experts in SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization) without investing a lot of money, yet
still manage to get to the top of Google rankings.
7. Transparency
For the affiliate marketer â through the various affiliate programs, it is possible to see exactly when
sales are made and payment is automatic, so you do not have to worry about chasing merchants for
payments.
For the affiliate merchant â they can see and manage their R.O.I (return on investment) extremely
easily and do not have to worry about tracking the origin of each sale.
8. Online market
For the affiliate marketer â there are an endless number of affiliate programs out there and the
demand for online shopping is not going to decrease, so the earning potential for affiliates is huge. You can access any number of markets with your affiliate work, whether you choose jewelry, hygiene, pet
insurance or food. Use long tail pro to find targeted long tail keywords with low competition, ensuring maximum affiliate sale for you.
For the affiliate merchant â as previously mentioned, online demand is not going away any time soon, therefore merchants are able to continue to expand product ranges to meet a range of online markets with the knowledge that they have a number of affiliates on hand to promote quickly and at a low
cost.
9. Home-based work (aimed at affiliate marketer)
If you become successful in the world of affiliate marketing then it is entirely possible to create a long
term Passive Income from it and a huge bonus to this is that you can work cheaply from home and be
your own boss. You donât have to pay to sign up to affiliate programs and there are a huge number to
choose from, all from the comfort of your own home.
10. Overcoming tradition (aimed at affiliate
merchant)
Using affiliates to promote your products and services will guarantee that you receive a lot more
exposure than you would by using more pricey traditional marketing methods. Having a number of
affiliates promoting what you are selling and only being paid when a sale is made, is one of the most
cost effective marketing methods ever as well as being incredibly successful.
Resources for Getting Product Information
Whether you are researching a product to buy or write about, and possibly promote as an affiliate, it
helps a great deal to know where to look for accurate and up-to-date info. If you are writing reviews,
knowing as many resources as possible to gather information will really boost the quality of the
content in your articles. Below I list 5 of my favorite resources for finding product information, reviews and content for an article also.
1. The best place to get the most accurate information, specs and features on a product is the
official website. A simple Google search for the product should reveal the official site. You can also
enter into the search bar: product manufacturer, or product supplier.
2. One of the best resources to check out for product information is YouTube. There will usually be a video on YouTube or within the search engine results if the on YouTube or within the search engine results if the product is popular. Obviously, you can see and hear about the product by watching the video but you can also write down the info word for word without being penalized for duplicate content, in a product review or article of your own.
I always watch at least a few videos from different sources and take notes as I go through them. You
can also embed one (or part of one) of the videos into the article.
3. Another potentially great source of information that can and should be used is the Amazon. Learn more clicking this link below :
https://selar.co/receipt/S06885539?products=p61lzd
