AFFILIATE MARKETING – WHAT IS IT?

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing where others promote your product/service for commission. You get paid when they do, and you get to keep track of your earnings on your own site. Affiliate marketing is a sales strategy on the Internet that allows the product owner to drive more sales by allowing others who are targeting the same audience – affiliates – to earn commissions from recommending products to others.   There are many ways to make money through affiliate marketing, including:

  • Selling physical products (like books)
  • Promoting services (like web design)
  • Advertising other people’s products and services
  • Creating your own product and selling it
  • Becoming an affiliate marketer

WHY AFFILIATE MARKETING?

Affiliate marketing is one of the cheapest ways of making a lot of money without having to go through all of the trouble of creating the product and selling it yourself. All you need is sign up for free with a company’s affiliate program (eg. amazon, flipkart) or a network (a network is a company that houses several offers from different businesses eg. Impact, ClickBank, etc.) to sell their products or services. Then you start sharing or shopping links so that people click on them and start buying the products. You also have the liberty of working from anywhere and anytime.

EARNING FROM AFFILIATE MARKETING?

There are two basic ways to earn from affiliate marketing:

  • Pay per click (PPC): In PPC, advertisers bid on keywords related to their business. When someone clicks on those links, they go to the advertiser’s website. If the visitor buys something, the advertiser pays you based on how much time he spent on your page.
  • Cost per action (CPA): In CPA, advertisers pay only if someone actually takes some desired action after clicking on their link. These actions could be anything from signing up for email newsletters to downloading apps.

HOW TO START AN AFFILIATE MARKETING?

Following are the steps to start an Affiliate Marketing:

SIGN UP:

Affiliate marketing is when you sign up with a company’s affiliate program (eg. amazon, flipkart) or a network (a network is a company that houses several offers from different businesses eg. impactradius, ClickBank, etc.) to sell their products or services. Select a company or a network and the sign up to create and account where you will be sharing your basic details and payment details to receive the payments.

CHANNEL:

Affiliate marketing can be carried out using various channels. Some of the most common channels are:

  • Personnel Websites
  • Social Media posts and ads like facebook, instagram, etc
  • Youtube Videos
  • Blogs
  • Bulk Messaging
  • Instant Messaging/Chats
  • etc.

PRODUCT SELECTION:

One of the biggest challenge for the affiliate marketers is the selection of products. The companies or networks offering affiliate marketing has a range of products to sell. An affiliate marketer selects the products wisely keeping in mind the following:

  • Products having the best % return or conversion
  • Products with good reviews and quality
  • Relevance of the product with your channel of marketing
  • The location and the psychology of the audience where the marketing will be executed

TRAFFIC:

An affiliate marketer should have enough traffic to attract audiences so that visitors click on the marketing link or banner. For websites, a good SEO is a must. For social media and Youtube, focus should be given to increasing the views and subscribers. The more the traffic, the greater the chance of the click on the marketing link.

FAMOUS AFFILIATE COMPANIES AND NETWORKS

Here are some of the famous affiliate companies and networks:

  • Amazon Associates
  • Walmart Affiliates
  • eBay Partner Network
  • Flipkart Affiliate
  • ClickBank
  • Impact
  • ShareASale
  • Awin
  • CJ Affiliate

WHICH AFFILIATE COMPANY OR NETWORK SHOULD YOU USE?

There is no restriction on which affiliate company or network to choose from. One may choose and sign up any number of affiliates. the only limitation would be:

  • the pain in maintaining and managing multiple accounts and dashboards
  • the distribution of traffic and payouts across multiple platforms