What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to earn passive income online for many. If you’ve ever dreamt of making money while you have to do nothing, then affiliate marketing is the thing for you. The popularity of affiliate marketing isn’t hidden from anyone. It is not only becoming a popular thing to do, but also a preferred choice among almost every brand there is on the Internet. To estimate its popularity, let’s take a look at the statistics from the experts. In the US alone, some estimates suggest that the industry generated a revenue of almost $8.2 billion in 2022. Similarly, in the UK, affiliate marketing generates around 1% of the country’s entire GDP! That’s more than some countries’ entire GDP. If we look at the world as a whole, then the entire market of affiliate marketing right now is worth over $12 billion. 

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Affiliate marketing has immeasurable advantages. Small, medium and large business brands are trying to exploit these advantages. Affiliate marketing is an online tactic that the brands exploit to increase their product sale by allowing others who are targeting the same audience to advertise their products. Those advertisers are known as the “affiliates”. Affiliates recommend the brand product on their platform and earn a commission for it. We will go into details later. So without wasting time, let us get started with all the information you need to know about the billion-dollar affiliate marketing industry.

Importance of Affiliate Marketing

Beginners who are new to the concept of affiliate marketing might be wondering why this industry is so important? Can we make the same amount of money by doing something simpler? The plain answer would be NO; what you can make through affiliate marketing depends just on how much you are willing to make. You can earn as much as you want, if you have the required skills for it. Now why is it so important? We have listed a few advantages for you to understand this easily. 

Saves you from wasting your advertising budget

Budget can be a significant issue for a small brand looking for ways to promote its products or services. Affiliate marketing can help them out, because it is a performance-based marketing strategy that requires less money than traditional ways. It is no secret that marketing is all about increasing ROI for prospective customers. Affiliate marketing is no different from others in this aspect, but since the amount of money spent on affiliate marketing is smaller, tha also makes the risk of ROI low as well.

Easy to keep track

Affiliate marketing can be easily tracked. This is a great benefit of affiliate marketing which gives access to you to view things such as click-through rates or site views. Affiliate programs give full authorization to the affiliate and the brand to keep track of the traffic they are receiving and sending to the target page. 

Increase in SEO

Affiliate marketing will help your site’s SEO. Affiliate marketing will provide you with various quality backlinks via your affiliate websites, blogs, and social media pages. Increasing SEO can be much easier if the partner you are working with has a strong audience base on several social platforms. 

Growing brand awareness

While shopping, online customers will always want to buy something from the online sellers whom they trust and have been buying from for a long time. They will never look at a brand or product no one knows about. This is why brand awareness is very important for every brand. Affiliate marketing will solve this problem, no matter how big or small the brand is. Affiliates will promote your products on their respective platforms which will cost you very little compared to other means of advertisement. 

Access to foreign markets

Do you want your product or services to spread worldwide and become an international product? Well, then affiliate marketing is the thing for you. A product can be marketed worldwide by using affiliate marketing, it has the ability to tap into the global marketplace using professional affiliates abroad. If you are unsure about your product sales in the international market, then with the help of affiliate marketing, you can test that for a very cheap price compared to traditional methods.

Working Model of Affiliate Marketing

It all starts with the brand contacting an affiliate, or vice versa. Then the brand gives each affiliate a unique link that has the ability to track down who was responsible for a sale. The unique link looks something like this: 

http://example.com/?rfsn:3163063.9f87v3

If you, as a customer, click on that link, then a small file called ‘’a cookie’’ gets stored on your device. This is called an affiliate cookie. There are two roles that an affiliate cookie has to fulfill, and they are the following ones:

1. It helps the brand attribute the sale back to the right person. 
2. It also has an expiration date, so the affiliate will get paid even if you delay your purchase.

Payment Model of Affiliate Marketing 

Payment in affiliate marketing comes from the small commission which brand pays to the affiliate who recommends their products to others. There are three essential components in the entire process: 

1. The brand
2. The affiliate
3. The consumer

Now a certain question may arise, which is: How much can you earn by affiliate marketing? To answer this in simple words, let’s just say that there is NO limit to how much you can earn. There is no limit to your income, it all depends on the amount of work and energy you put into it. 

This is why many people (affiliates) choose this line of business as their primary source of income. Let’s look at a few examples of earnings from affiliate marketing around the world. In 2017, Mr. Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income made over $100,000 in affiliate commissions. Another good example is the affiliate website The Wirecutter, which made an astonishing amount of $10 million. 

After looking at these big figures, you must be thinking that you can also make the same amount of money, which is true. But you must keep in mind that these people have done an excellent job building their brand, but it was not done overnight. It has taken them years of hard work to earn the big bucks.

If we go deeper, we can divide affiliates according to their monthly income: 

1. Total beginners: low-level affiliates, who earn up to $200 per day or less.
2. Intermediate-level affiliates: who can earn from the range of $200 a day, up to $2,000 per day.
3. High-level affiliates: those who can make more than $2,000 per day.
4. Super-class affiliates: these are the affiliate marketing sharks, who can make more than $10,000 per day. 

If you are a beginner and you earn $100 per day, that is surely a good start. But also, be sure that you can’t assume that your profit will always remain the same, it will go higher. In this case, you must not lose hope, because, as we have already mentioned above, there is no upper limit to what you can earn from affiliate marketing, it only depends on how much work you can do to earn money. 

Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing 

Anyone can start earning from affiliate marketing, you just need to know a few things. We have prepared a list of steps for you to follow. By the time you finish reading it, you will be ready to take the first steps in the affiliate marketing industry. In addition to this, you will also learn how to get clicks on your affiliate links and to convert those clicks to sales. The steps are as follows:

Pick a Platform

This is the very first step to start your career in affiliate marketing. You will need to choose a platform for you to promote the brand you are affiliated with. The platform can be anything from a blog to an Instagram post. However, experts suggest you use either blogs or youtube as a platform to promote the affiliated brand. This is because these two platforms have the highest chance of getting clicks on your affiliate link due to their humongous user base.

Let us focus on what the experts suggest. To start a blog at this time is so simple that you can post your first article with SEO content within a few hours.

The best thing about blogs is that they will only cost you a few bucks per month or annually (depending on the package you buy). 

The other option was the platform Youtube. You might be familiar with YouTube. It is a free platform where you will not be asked for any money to create your account. It’s totally free to post your video content there, something which you can use to earn from affiliate marketing. But no matter how much money or time you spend on these platforms, you will not earn a dime if the content is not appealing to the customers.

To get them to click on your link you can do these: 

*For Blogs, add an affiliate like this to your footer:

*For Youtube, add affiliate like this in the description box:

Decide on Your Niche 

Deciding on your niche is a crucial step to clarify the topic you wish to pursue. This is important because we are all witnessing how the numbers of bloggers and YouTubers are increasing day by day. It is not easy to compete with this growing population of bloggers and YouTubers, unless you decide your niche. 

After deciding your niche, you will be able to target a selected audience. Then you will be able to compel them to click on your affiliate links by creating extraordinary content. 

With a specific niche, e.g. Travel, you will be able to grow more and attract more traffic. If your content is informative and is helping people, then you will be able to grow your own organic customer base who will trust you and will click on the product links you post. 

Look For Affiliate Programs to Join 

Now that you have completed all the preparations you need, in order to start your affiliate marketing business, it is time you look for brands that allow affiliations. Essentially there are three types of affiliate programs to choose from, these are as follows:

1. Low volume and high paying programs:

This kind of affiliate program requires you to send a low volume of customers to their product or service for a high payment. Before you think that this is easy money, let us tell you this, these kinds of brands have a very small pool of customers. You will have to work much harder than the other affiliate programs to attract even a few customers. 

2. High volume but low paying programs:

These kinds of brands expect you to send a vast number of potential customers to them for a low payment. These brands usually have an infinite customer pool. If you choose this program line, then you will have to work the minimum to get maximum results. Let us take an example, if your work is to redirect customers from your blog to Amazon, then you will only need to present a product to the potential customers who might want to buy it, and they will definitely click on your affiliate link. 

3. High volume plus high paying programs:

Yes, you have guessed it right, these brands expect you to send a massive crowd for a big payment. In this program, you will be rewarded for the amount of work you put in to send those potential customers. 

Now that you know what are the kinds of affiliate programs different brands offer, you should choose one of them. Experts suggest you choose the program according to your niche and level of expertise. 

Show Creativity in Your Content

This is actually the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Because, without this, no matter how much you pay for the advertisement of your content, you will never get a penny for your link clicks. 

Content creation depends on the platform you are using. For example, let us take YouTube. When you get your niche fixed, e.g. Travel, you will need to upload travel blogs, Q&A for travel enthusiasts, share your experience from a certain destination, tell your viewers what they should take with them to visit a certain place for easy travel, etc. If you engage your viewers this way, then you are sure to receive loyal organic followers who will trust you enough to click on the links you provide in the description box.

Drive traffic to your affiliate website

To drive traffic to your affiliate website, you will have these three options to choose from, and they are as follows:

1. Paid and organic traffic: This is when you pay for traffic on your website/youtube videos/any other platform. Paid traffic ensures a minimum of views on your content. But there is no guarantee that users will click on your affiliate link. 

Now comes the organic traffic, if your content is good enough for the users, then some of the viewers will convert into loyal organic traffic. This gives some guarantee that they will click on the links that you provide. 

2. SEO: By doing SEO to your blogs and website pages, you are sure to get viewers organically. These viewers are mostly those who are interested in the product you are talking about in the blog and they are more likely to click on your affiliate links. 

3. Email list: Building your own email list is very fruitful. It allows you to communicate with your readers at any time. You can use this list to mail your fans about new content and keep them coming back to your website. This leads to more affiliate link clicks.

Get Clicks on Your Affiliate Links

Clicks cannot be accumulated by themselves. What is necessary is a list of things that need to be accounted for, in order to register an increase in traffic and for your brand to become successful. 

You will need these to make sure your readers and viewers are clicking on affiliate links.

1. Placement of links:  If you put your link at the top of your blog, then the content might get flagged as spam. On the other hand, if you put the link at the bottom, it becomes less probable that the reader will go to the bottom of the page and click on it. So, you have to manage the link position accordingly.

2. Context: You should always put links that are relevant to your context. For example, you should not put a link to buy a toaster in an article about SEO. Furthermore, you should put affiliate links in a manner that looks natural and appropriate to the readers. 

3. Using callouts: You should use callouts like table, buttons, boxes, etc. to compel your viewers to click on them. For example, take a look at the image below:

Conclusion

These affiliate tips and strategies are not the only weapons you can possess on the battlefield of affiliate marketing, but these are definitely the ones you need to start your affiliate business the right way. 

Our goal in this blog was to give a brief introduction about the concept of affiliate marketing, as well as to motivate some of you to immerse yourselves into this promising and very lucrative industry. With the expansion of the online environment, the importance of marketing is becoming bigger, as well. 

Having this in mind, becoming an affiliate in this industry will surely pave the way for a successful career, stable future, and many skills which can be acquired. You surely have our thumbs up for the start of a successful career in the affiliate  marketing business, so give it a go!

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