Beginners Guide to Affiliate Marketing

One of the best ways to make money online through your blogs is by Affiliate Marketing. It is one of the popular forms of monetizing blogs or content online. In this Beginners Guide, we will take you through how Affiliate Marketing works? and how to get everything right!

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Digital World has numerous ways to market and sell products. One of those popular methods is Affiliate Marketing. It is a referral agreement between an online seller or e-commerce website and a content creator who generates sales leads for through referral links by which referrer gets a commission on the purchase.

You might be aware of other forms of digital Advertising platforms like Google AdSense which pays you as Pay-per-click (PPC) or Pay-per-View. Unlike these platforms, Affiliate Marketing works on Cost-per-Acquisition(CPA) or Cost-per-Lead(CPL) basis. To put it straight, you get paid only when someone buys a product or signs up for a trial.

Affiliate Marketing works based on your user’s trust in you. It requires your hands on experience with respect to a product or a digital service which you believe will help your user’s needs. After which you need to strategically insert your referral links in your content like article or blog so that your users could be directed to the external sites through your reference. Unlike low paying ads platform like Google AdSense, Affiliate Marketing commissions are high for publishers.

Getting started with Affiliate Marketing

Before starting, make sure that your blogging platform allows you to carry out Affiliate Marketing. For example, if you are using wordpress.com, there are restrictions related to product and service you can refer to.

If you are a self-hosted website, you can directly start affiliate links you wish to be within your content and manage them efficiently. On a safer note, let your user’s know what you do with your website and how it is monitored by adding a disclosure, Terms and Conditions and Privacy policy in your website. They are your must-have pages in your website which builds trust with your audience and can also save you from legal issues.

Finding Products and Services to Promote

You can partner up as an affiliate to many companies and products online. Some of the ways to find the right product to promote are

• Products you already use

On the first try, try to promote products or services you already use. This gives you a hands-on experience on the product or service. This will enable you to provide prompt review of the same as you would be well aware of the pros and cons.

Further, go to the product website and search for pages like ‘Partner’, ‘Affiliate Partner’ or ‘Affiliate’. Nowadays, a lot of companies are trying to employ affiliate marketing to increase their sales and service base. Most of the times, you can find their Affiliate page links in their website’s footer.

• Look for what others are recommending

Another popular way of finding Affiliate connections is by surfing through what the similar blogging platforms like yours are promoting as affiliates to make money online. You can easily find if they are promoting by observing common banners ads placed on website and pages.

Another way to find the advertiser resources is by reading through content and blogs in the website and click a few referral links which will redirect you to the advertiser site. In the product URL, you’ll find the Marketer’s affiliate ID within the link. Affiliate ID helps Advertisers or Merchants track which Affiliate is bring them traffic and sales. You can find a lot of similar links to the websites.

• Affiliate Networks

Join affiliate networks that act as a middleman between Merchants and the Publishers. These networks help in simultaneously market different merchant’s e-commerce platforms. These networks help you find a lot of products and services to promote quickly.

• Reach Out Directly

You won’t lose anything by asking! Drop a mail directly to companies to inquire if they are offering an affiliate marketing program. If they do so, they could add you in their network.

Track your Contribution

First, find a product or a service you wish to promote. Select products that you find relevant to your blog concept and your audience. The product or the company you select is called merchant. Next, partner with the company or the product. This will make you their affiliate. Some might call you partners or associates.

You will get the unique affiliate ID on successful registration into the affiliate program. You how to use this affiliate ID in all the links that you place in your website and keep a track on all the traffic and leads that you create to the merchant.

You can promote the product by adding in-depth reviews, banner ads, placing links within your content for blogs, newsletters, etc. All traffic you create to the merchant website will be tracked through this ID.  You’ll get payouts on reaching the threshold earnings limit.

What are Affiliate Networks? How they work?

Affiliate Networks acts as middlemen between Publishers and Companies that want their products or services to be marketed.

For merchants, they provide their platform as a service to list their products, track affiliate traffic, manage affiliates, and send payments.

For affiliate marketers, they offer an easy to use the platform to search for products, sign up as an affiliate, track your campaign performance and earnings.

Following are some of the affiliate networks that you can partner with

• Amazon Associates

Amazon is the world’s biggest online marketplace with millions of products. You can sign up on their Amazon associate site and become an affiliate partner and promote their products and their listings and start earning by sending them to the website they always used to shop.

• Clickbank

It is a large affiliate network promoting digital products from different vendors. Apart from affiliate links, it offers loads of learning resources for new affiliate marketers.

And many more affiliate networks are available depending upon your country.

Tips to increase earnings

It is never too much. Let’s see how you can increase your earnings.

• Good Products and Companies

As an affiliate marketer, you will not have any control over the product that you are promoting. That is why it is best to consider products that promote have a promising future. The best way to do so is by recommending the products you have already used and found it useful to your audience.

• Offer Useful and Valuable Content

Within Affiliate Marketing, there are different types of ads such as banners, links, etc. However, simply adding referral links to your website won’t convince your audience to click them. Offer them content that is useful and valuable regarding the product such as in-depth reviews, video review, product information, pros and cons

• Know your Audience

While choosing a product to promote, keep in mind your audience and their interests. For example, if you run a smartphone review website and post a blog and affiliate links related to a clothing brand, it will result in the disappointed for your audience and shall result in a dip in your own traffic.

If a user buys a product based on your recommendations and it doesn’t turn useful, he’ll never trust your recommendations again which is you need to focus on your audience the most.

We hope that this Beginners Guide on Affiliate Marketing has helped you learn about Affiliate Marketing and start about it. You may also understand how Website Speed affects your Traffic to avoid losing your audience. If you like this information, kindly like our Facebook Page and Follow us on Instagram to receive regular updates on how to build your Website.