Affiliate Marketing Made Simple. The Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Marketing

Marketing as a niche is a vast area which consists of a lot of areas in itself that you could catch your eye and make you want to learn more of. One such type of marketing strategies is Affiliate Marketing. With a growth in the niche, Affiliate Marketing is one type which has caught attention to many of the youth and people around the world to gain an income out of.

However, Affiliate Marketing is not a role that you would want to count on if you are looking at to earn in millions from overnight. Here, you would need to have all the necessary skills and knowledge to function to your fullest potential as well as earn the income you desire over time and consider it as one of the careers if it suits you. Here is a mini-guide to help you through the process of Affiliate Marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Before jumping on to interesting areas, it would be a better idea to answer what Affiliate Marketing actually is. In simple words, it is a performance-based marketing process where the merchant you are associated with would pay you or an external website a commission (that is usually pre-determined) for traffic or sales on the merchant’s platform made by your referrals.

One major idea behind Affiliate Marketing is to help businesses by endorsing their products/services through an Affiliate network and having commission in return for every sale that happens. So, only if the person you have suggested the product ends up buying the product will you get your commission for the product they brought.

As a business, if you have a product that you would and want to increase the number in terms of sales, you could run an Affiliate Program and offer for a commission that you think suits your budget. As an individual who particularly do not have a product/service, if you are looking at an alternative to earn money, or considering a career to switch,  you could consider being an Affiliate Marketer and promote the product(s) you feel would have the value for the price, you could recommend and earn an income through a commission from every buy.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy:

With that being established, we can certainly say that Affiliate Marketing depends on the principal and agent relationship where the Business or the Merchant is considered as a Principal and the Affiliate Marketer is the Agent. 

Affiliate Marketer is the individual who receives the commission for every referral (that turns to a converted lead) that he makes which is the task delegated by the Business/Merchant. However, the task could be anything relating to the promotion of the product like sales successfully completed which includes the whole process from signup to clicking on the merchant link to purchase. 

The way income is provided varies and majorly depends on the task that has been assigned to Affiliate Marketer. Where the risk of non-payment is higher would be paid off in commission which would be higher in amount, like getting sales done. However, for tasks like getting to visit the merchant link carries lower risk and commission paid for this task would be lesser.

Mostly, Affiliate Marketing is known to be a commission payment on the number of sales that you would invariably get at a certain time-frame. It is one of the internet monetization strategies for Affiliate Marketers where they could earn an additional income alongside getting the growth of businesses.

The Purpose of Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate Marketing is one area of marketing that is cost-effective for businesses as well as a bonus for Affiliate Marketers because of how low investment it has and in certain scenarios it could be as low as zero investments. For Affiliate Marketers, they would not have to bear payment processing charges as it is borne by the Merchant you would be working for. Considering you have created your own products, chances are that you may not be attracting consumers or generate the revenue that you are invariably expecting.

However, in Affiliate Marketing, you have an option of choosing from a pool of products in the market and even if the product does not generate revenue that you had thought it would, you have an option of switching to another product that is potentially doing well in the market without having to lose your earnings.

And hence, invariably, creating your own product would take research time as well as resources and Affiliate Marketing would help you with an instant product.

Key Players of Affiliate Marketing:

There are four key players that are involved in a smooth process of Affiliate Marketing:

1. Merchant (they look to ensure that sales for the products are maximized through Affiliate Marketers through Affiliate campaigns)
2. Affiliate Marketer (they promote the products and services and monetize through their website traffic)
3. Consumer (they browse through the catalogue of products through the Merchant’s product and purchase the product that they buy)
4. Affiliate network (they are a common platform that may provide services where the Merchant and Affiliate Marketer can connect
   effectively)

How to Start With Affiliate Marketing:

Since we have already established what Affiliate Marketing is, you can earn an income by promoting products on different channels and having a share of profits by each of the conversions. While you can easily earn your commission through this platform, you can easily use these four steps to make your Affiliate Marketing process easier:

1. Find the right product from the promotion that you strongly believe in
2. Go ahead and sign up for the Affiliate Marketing program that is available on their website
3. You would receive a link or your own code for reference to calculate the sales and commission that you deserve
4. Collect your commission for every successful sale

Get Started in Affiliate Marketing Step by Step:

Here are four steps in a nutshell that you could follow to get started and get a better understanding of what has been explained in brief. With these four steps, you would be able to understand much better on the steps that you can for a smooth transition to the niche.

Step 01: Select the right product according to what you believe in

This an important step as it is important for you to have product knowledge on what you want to promote. It ideally should be a product that is closer to your occupation or a product that interests you more. By choosing a product that you know more about would help you to figure out your ideal audience, approach them with regards to subscribing to the product that you believe in.

Step 02: Start the website to know more about their Affiliate Program

While you have selected the right product that you strongly believe in and endorse, this is one part that would be essential to know more about wherein you would have to invariably ensure that you promote the product through various channels like through email marketing, through social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), however, it is easiest to earn through the website that you could easily create by your own through WordPress. This will not only make your tasks easier but also help in ensuring you build a trustworthy relationship for future potential customers as well. This would create your explanation process easier by putting out information in the format of blogs and videos to make the product seem better and interesting to learn more about.

Step 03: Research about their Affiliate Programs

With that, the next important step would be regarding Affiliate networks available in the market and how it would be beneficial for you in the long run. Choosing and having researched about the affiliate programs that resonate with you better and as well as choosing the one that would be better and the best for your website or blog is an aspect that you need to ponder more upon. A few of the programs that could pay you high and would want to consider are:

1. Click Bank
2. Rakuten
3. CJ Affiliate by Conversant
4. Amazon Associates
5. Share Sale
6. eBay
7. Avangate
8. Flex offers
9. Avantlink
10. Revenue
11. Wire

This would be the best way to choose an affiliate program that would invariably help you grow and earn more. However, there are more recent and known affiliate programs that have come out in recent times and you may want to consider.

Step 04: Join the Affiliate Program that has caught your attention

As mentioned earlier, affiliate programs are a way you could join if you want to learn more as well as ensure you have maximum benefits and grow monetarily. Most of the affiliate programs are ones that would allow you to join for free of cost which ensures a benefit of costs if you are an individual who is just starting out in this niche. You would have to provide the details of the mode of payment like PayPal etc by which you may want to receive your payments through and mention the details of your blog/website alongside.

Step 05: Choosing preferable models of Ads

Choosing a way in which you could advertise your product in a way that people trust what you are saying as well as going ahead with purchasing the product is a win-win situation for you. Choosing the right online Ad model for affiliate marketing is therefore very important and there are about six models that you could choose from and also decide which suits you better.
The Ad models that you could consider are:

1. CPA (Cost per Acquisition)
2. CPS (Cost per Scale)
3. CPL (Cost per Lead)
4. CPC (Cost per Click)
5. CPI (Cost per Install)
6. CPI (Cost per 1000 Impressions)

That being the basic steps you could follow with regards to starting your career or side hustle in Affiliate marketing, you could also follow a few more steps that would make you better, but that comes in with experience and techniques that you would invariably use. Those were the steps that would help you start out with starting your career in the niche.

Conclusion:

With having a brief guide on what Affiliate Marketing is and how to approach the niche step by step, I hope that you have had all the necessary information that you could possibly have for you to start out in the niche. 

This would be a field that you can get into by just promoting the product(S) that you believe in on different channels and platforms and have your share of commissions from the profits that the product earns which would provide a decent income as a full-time job as well as a side hustle if you are considering.

In return, you would also have an advantage of being able to use a website, blog, newsletters, ads, emails and more while the popular form is through the website. While this is a growing niche, I hope you are now being able to make an informed decision for yourself, and if not I would really hope this article gave you a brief input on what this field of marketing is all about.