Here’s how you can break into the $8 billion affiliate marketing system that’s full of opportunities to make passive income.
The affiliate marketing system is basically promoting a product or service for sale on behalf of an individual or business. Similar to how a real estate agent promotes a property for sale and acts on behalf of a seller.
An affiliate network platform connects sellers with an audience via various tools such as photos, banners, and digital links.
Gone are the days when you could basically use a keyword and a link to sell something online. Now days, affiliate marketing has become much more sophisticated in it’s approach to selling online.
Today such terms as creators, influencers and entrepreneurs have become the backbone of a post-modern affiliate marketing world; lucrative incomes are for those pursuing online business strategies and those who work from home and side hustle.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Often affiliate programs are free to join. The Affiliate marketer receives a unique tracking link (called an affiliate link) when joining a program.
These links are provided by the sellers of the product or services.
The affiliate marketer can promote sales through content, such as reviews, blogs and paid advertising. Some will use social media to post to their audiences.
When a visitor clicks a link the affiliate receives a commission.
The action of clicking a link does not cost the buyer anything extra. Commissions are paid by the seller.
This form of marketing increases sales by expanding reach through various platforms and individuals or other businesses. This is another way for businesses to promote products and services. This is beneficial to all parties and allows affiliates to earn additional income. Think Amazon! AirBnB, Hotel Combined, etc.
This Is How The Process Works
- Affiliate partners with business and receives affiliate link
- Affiliate promotes their affiliate link to visitors through, blog, paid ads or social networking.
- Audience member clicks the link and makes a purchase.
- Affiliate network records the transaction and pays the affiliate
Commission rates vary depending on the product, industry, and terms between the affiliate and the seller.
Some high volume products might pay a low percentage of sale price (for example 5%) while high-ticket affiliate programs can pay out 20-50% or more, depending on the product and market. Obviously High ticket products won’t sell as often as lower priced items.
If you know how to market successfully you may even be able to negotiate your own terms with partners.
3 Main Types of Affiliate Marketing – What Are They?
1. Involved Affiliate Marketing – This means endorsing products in line with your blog or website. Having a better connection with such products because you know them well and possibly use them. For example, your market might be about dogs and you could sell things like collars and toys directly from the manufacturer or from somewhere like Amazon.
2. Unattached Affiliate Marketing – means an affiliate has no connection to the product or brand being promoted. It’s a relationship without knowledge or experience and is usually based wholly on paid advertising to reach an audience
3. Related Affiliate Marketing – is endorsing products relevant to your specific audience built from a trusting relationship. Such affiliate use platforms such as, blogs, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. This can be a sustainable way to build long term passive affiliate income.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing
Despite Affiliate marketing being a multi-billion dollar industry, it’s growth is clearly set to continue. The good news is for anyone wanting to get in on it, it doesn’t have to be a difficult thing to start.
Advantages of Affiliate Marketing
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Easy to Start
Starting affiliate marketing is as easy as becoming a partner and getting your unique tracking link to place for your viewers to click on.
The main objective is to refer customers to your Product or service provider. By focusing on marketing you don’t have to worry about any of the other stuff – just focus on getting the orders.
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Low Start-up Cost and Low Risk
Typically there’s usually no joining fees or start-up costs involved. It’s just a matter of joining a program, collecting your tracking link and placing it strategically so your audience clicks and hopefully buys.
By doing this you can set yourself up for future passive income without a lot of up-front investment
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Ability to Scale-Up Earnings
Affiliate marketers have the ability to add extra income streams to increase their earnings without the need for employing extra people or purchasing and warehousing stock.
In some cases it becomes possible to negotiate higher commissions or reinvest to further audience reach.
Disadvantages of Affiliate marketing
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Time Consuming
Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme but it is a legitimate way to earn an income online. Having to grow an audience and gain influence can take time and dedication to build to a point where your audience trusts you and you see reasonable income.
While some may promote the fact it can take years to become successful the good news is, it’s possible to start small and slowly and continually build you market share to a satisfactory point But don’t expect great returns in a matter of weeks. You should be in it for the long term.
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Standing Out In A Crowded Marketplace
Sometimes it’s not so easy to have your voice heard in a crowded online market place. With many niches already overloaded to almost saturation point, it takes extra special effort to find a path through all the noise to make an audience see and hear you.
The continual bombardment of marketing through social media, blog posts, paid advertisements and YouTube can turn people away at times.
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Finding Good Products That Align With Your Audience
It’s one thing to build a solid and trusting audience over the long term. It’s totally another thing to find the best products and services that resonate with them and aligns with their pain points.
The last thing you want is to push low-quality or irrelevant products that result in higher bounce rates and fewer conversions. That will almost certainly diminishes your earning potential.
Tips to Succeed at Affiliate Marketing
Successful affiliate Marketers will have established a pattern of thing along their journey that will have become second nature to them. For those just starting out you’re going to need some tips to succeed at affiliate marketing.
Here Are My Best Three Tips:
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Prepared To Put In The Time
You’re going to need an audience, either on a website, social media site or on a blog and to get the audience you will have to build content that resonates with them. Build it and they will come – as the saying goes.
More importantly is you will need to build what people are looking for, that means choosing a niche and honing in on the sub niche, not the broad content.
There are ways how to find a good niche and there’s always help available.
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Become The Trusted Guru
When you have the platform and provide valuable content people will trust you more than the person who just provides a sales pitch. People love relationships and it’s no different online.
People want to be able to feel confident when looking to solve a problem or when they are looking to purchase something. If you have built an engaged following, you’re in a prime position to market relevant products as your audience will look to you for advice.
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Learn From Other Affiliate Marketers
There’s always things to learn through life and it’s no different with affiliate marketing. When you study your competitors you will start to see how they operate and you’ll pick up on things that will make your journey that little bit more easy and interesting.
Learn things like how they promote, the words they use to link, how they tell their story or how they pitch their promotion. You can even pick up on certain topics and keywords that will help in search engine results or with paid advertisement.
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Always Give Value
There’s nothing better than for someone looking for something specific to find what they’re looking for and then get a bonus on top. Discovering extra information on specific topics is always welcomed.
Going above and beyond will continue bringing your audience back for more. It will also be the source of recommendations and shared pages and topics because people find it worthy enough to pass on to friends.
How Much Money Do Affiliate Marketers Make?
There’s a lot of conjecture over how much people earn with affiliate marketing and there’s a lot of false claims that fly around the internet as well. Know and understand that It’s not uncommon for some people to be earning six or seven figure commission annually.
It’s not impossible to be earning five and even six figure within the first couple of years. The higher incomers are usually those professionals at the top of their game. Affiliate marketers who have done the hard yards. Putting the time and effort to establish themselves as the top affiliate marketers
There are various types of payment methods to be aware of also. Any or all of these may employed.
Various Type of Payment Methods
They include:
- Per sale – where affiliates earn a commission a sale being made
- Per click – generates commission every time a link is clicked on an affiliate link
- Per lead – also known as Lead Gen is where an affiliates are paid when a lead is generated.
- Per Action – this is a commission earned for a specific action such as a signup, a form submission or even a contact request
- Per install – These payments are made every time an app or software install is generated.
Generally speaking the big money belongs to those individuals and companies who have larger audiences. Some of the biggest name online like Forbes and Hubspot will be generating some of the biggest incomes from affiliate marketing but they will also have lots of out-goings because of the sheer size of their business and operations.
It’s also possible for smaller players and individuals to earn good affiliate income as well. There’s a plethora of peoples making good money, you just might not be hearing about them yet.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
The first step to affiliate marketing for beginners is choosing the channel or platform to use to reach your audience if you don’t already have one. You will also need to pick the type of content to create for your channel.
Being familiar with platforms such as blogs, Facebook, YouTube and others will definitely give you a head start.
Also pick the content formats you want to use. Will you blog using lifestyle content, make curated product recommendations, write product reviews or provide best of lists. Whichever way you choose it will be a learning curve that can have you occupied with plenty of scope.
Whatever direction you take just remember to keep it real. Authenticity is key when it comes to affiliate marketing. Converting an audience can prove challenging and at the same time can be financially rewarding also.
If you want to learn more about what is affiliate marketing for beginners look here.
Finding an Affiliate Program To Partner With
To earn revenue you will need to find good reputable networks to partner with. It’s recommended to have an existing website, blog and audience before applying. But the truth is, it’s not always compulsory.
Products you promote will need to be relevant to your audience and often those you partner with will want to see their product fits
You can apply to many of the popular affiliate networks and browse what they have to offer
Some of the most popular affiliate networks are:
- Semrush
- ClickFunnels
- Commission Junction (CJ)
- ClickBank
- ShareASale
- LinkConnector
- Rakuten
Another option is Wealthy Affiliate. If you’re struggling for ideas or don’t know exactly where to start Wealthy Affiliate can walk you through their free training process step by step making sure you get to fully comprehend the things you need to know.
Their approach is unique in that they teach organic content creation, meaning that you don’t have to pay for advertising. You get your traffic audience free by providing focused, up-to-date relevant content. It’s great for those who lack a solid budget but have time on their side. It’s also great you get to learn at your own pace and learn all the finer points of affiliate marketing.
You get to own and run your own website or blog, choose you product placements and even scale up as you make progress. Many people have found it a good place to start from and have built careers and six figure incomes from the lessons taught there.
Conclusion
Winding up I’m going to say that entrepreneurship is a journey that can very well be worth taking. It can elevate you out of wage slavery giving you a new lease on life. Putting you in a position to change lifestyles to something that you like and giving you time freedom to enjoy being with the ones you love most.
Whatever you choose the whole team here wish you the very best and much success
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