In modern digital marketing landscape, the term Affiliate Marketing refers to promoting other’s business or products and earn commission as the reward.
Affiliate Marketing is a sales platform with multiple stakeholders. The sales process is commission-based and the amount of commission is pre-agreed between the seller and partner.
“Affiliate marketing is the best option out there because you don’t need to handle any orders, hold inventory or even deal with the end customer. For marketers, this is great — as you can focus solely on marketing and how to get offers in front of the right audience.”
— Zac Johnson, Entrepreneur & Affiliate Marketer
Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based marketing system that basically involves four distinct elements: the merchant, the affiliate, the consumer and the network.
The merchant, also known as a seller or retailer, is an individual or a business that sells a product or provides a service. The merchant and affiliate marketer collaborates to promote the products and services.
The affiliate is (or can be) an individual who promotes products and services and gets commission on each sale. The affiliate works with the merchant to promote the merchant’s products and services. The affiliate creates marketing campaigns that use ads, links and banners to find buyers for the merchant’s products and services.
The consumer, can be all of us. In affiliate marketing, the consumer is a person who uses goods or services to satisfy his or her needs.
The network, also called program or platform, acts as an intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate. The network is completely digital and requires varying levels of involvement from both the merchant and affiliate.
Affiliate marketing has now become one the most popular ways of making money online. However, many people still have questions about how an affiliate program works and how they could get started in affiliate marketing?
How Affiliate Marketing Works?
If you want to become a successful affiliate marketer, you must understand the dynamics of affiliate marketing,
It is easy to understand that every business wishes to scale up its revenues by attracting more customers. Since affiliate marketing is all about bringing in more customers, businesses see it as an important revenue stream
Let’s try to understand the mechanism of affiliate marketing.
Consider an ecommerce store, named ABC Inc., that sells clothing in the US. It has a website and the infrastructure for selling its products through various channels (online and traditional stores). However, ABC thinks that the current customer base is not sufficient for it business targets.
Now, to increase access to new markets and to new customer base, ABC Inc. starts a partnership program wherein they commit to paying a commission for a certain sales target achieved by independent vendors who join the program. These vendors (who could be bloggers and other digital marketing professionals) build websites and marketing campaigns that sell the products of ABC Inc. to their customers.
Benefits of Affiliate Programs for Bloggers
Affiliate programs for bloggers offer a host of benefits for users including:
Easy Management
In the case of many affiliate marketing programs, all the marketing material is provided by the merchant. Thus, the blogger does not have to design banners or create links. They just use the merchant-generated content on their marketing channels.
No Financial Risk
What is interesting for the blogger is that affiliate marketing has almost no financial risk. In many cases, the blogger does not have to invest a single penny in the merchant’s business.
Multiple Sources of Income
If you have free time, you could promote online products and services and increase your income by receiving a commission for the sales. The good thing is that a blogger could work with several affiliate marketing programs to generate multiple income streams.
Easy to Join
You do not need to be a business graduate or expert in order to be a success in affiliate marketing. All you have to do is sign up for an affiliate program and start promoting the products. So the cycle of an affiliate marketing program is: Join, Promote and Earn!
Key Factors For A Successful Affiliate Program
Affiliate marketing is an apple of blogger’s eye but every blogger must know which factors he should placed first in order to become a successful affiliate marketer.
Choose the Right Product
You should develop the ability of choosing the right product or service for your audience because this determines the success or failure of your affiliate marketing venture. in promoting the products.
Revenue Share or Commission
Your commission basically depends on the volume of sales. However, high volume of sales might not necessarily result in maximum commission. Most of the successful affiliate programs offer initial commission on each signup and recurring commission on monthly and yearly basis.
Be Honest to Your Audience
Sometimes novice bloggers make mistake of exaggerating the details of the product or provide incorrect information to make a quick sale. You should keep one thing in mind; you cannot fool your visitors all the time. Keep it simple and honest!
Make Your Content Sticky
You should educate your viewer but remember to keep it entertaining. Remember that engaging content results in better sales. This is very important in the context of affiliate marketing.
How Bloggers Can Market An Affiliated Product?
There are several ways to promote the business of the merchant. Here is a list of techniques that affiliate marketers frequently use with great success.
Engaging Reviews
In order to keep your audience interested, you should come up with new and interesting ways of reviewing the products. Make sure that you publish several (neutral ) reviews before asking them to make the purchase. This ingenious strategy increases brand awareness and attracts new customers to your affiliate marketing activities.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a tried-and tested way of marketing your products. It is possible that there are hundreds of viewers subscribed to your blog.
Are You A Youtube Content Creator? Earn Through Cloudways Now!
Video Marketing
It is the ideal tool for affiliate marketing in the socially connected world. Video reviews allow the viewer to see the details of the product and check out the features to their satisfaction. Consider making videos and upload them to Youtube.
Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms are built for communities. From individuals to businesses and government organizations, everyone use Facebook and Twitter to broadcast their messages in real-time. Social media channels are ideal for affiliate marketing efforts because they present your products to a large number of people. This is why it is essential that affiliate marketing professionals should work on expanding their social media footprint so that they could pitch their products to the world!
Affiliate Marketing In A Nutshell
Affiliate marketing is the most effective and profitable marketing technique that is beneficial for all stakeholders. The merchant is happy because he’s getting more sales, the affiliate is happy because he’s earning commission on each sale, and the consumers are happy because they get products without any hassle.
If you enjoyed this post you might like to check out our post on: Best Affiliate Marketing Hacks To Increase Your Earnings
Mansoor Ahmed Khan
Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].
