Affiliate marketing, also known as Performance Marketing, looks simple on the surface. Brands offer you, an Affiliate Marketer, a commission for every sale or conversion via the link they provide you through your promotional activity.
You don’t have to hold inventory and don’t need to hire any employees. Instead, you’re setting up a business network online where all you need is a computer.
According to Statista, net spending on Affiliate marketing will increase to over $8.2 billion by 2022 in the US alone. Certainly, Affiliate marketing is a booming business.
As much as Affiliate Marketing has distinct advantages over traditional business models, there are certain complications and know-how that you need to keep in mind as an Affiliate Marketer.
In this article, we will answer all your questions about Affiliate Marketing and how you can become an Affiliate Marketer.
Why Affiliate Marketing?
You might be wondering why you should choose affiliate marketing? There are other business models as well which can generate higher profits. You can check out our blog on Affiliate Marketing v/s DropShipping.
There are two main reasons why you must choose Affiliate Marketing over any other business model.
- Less investment Cost and Low risk
Contrary to most businesses, Affiliate marketing only requires a platform where you engage with your audience. It can be a website, blog, or even a Youtube Channel. The risk is negligible as you don’t have additional resources to depend on, like employees, inventory, etc. If it doesn’t work out, you only lose a small amount of money and some of your time.
- Easy to scale and expand.
Unlike a salesperson working for a single brand, being an Affiliate Marketer allows you to promote products from multiple companies and earn commissions from all of them. It enables you to scale your affiliate marketing business quickly and easily.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
When you sign up for an Affiliate Program, the merchant/brand gives each affiliate a unique link to track who was responsible for a sale. A cookie file is created whenever someone uses this link.
A cookie, in this case, allows the merchant to attribute the sale back to you. The cookie file also has an expiration date, so if the customer delays the purchase for a few days, you still get a commission for it.
How to Get Started and earn more as an Affiliate Marketer?
Finding merchant partners, high commission affiliate programs, or affiliate marketing jobs that pay well and are consistent requires a great deal of up-front work before you’re ever in touch with a merchant.
Research and pick a Niche
Picking a niche is the most crucial step in the whole process of becoming an Affiliate. It determines your focus audience, your competition, and how much you can scale your business.
Many niches have higher traffic, but the competition is too high for you to make a decent payout.
The right niche will allow you to build your audience and sell products effortlessly. To choose a niche, you need to ask yourself these questions:
- What are you passionate about, and is there a niche for it?
- Is the niche popularly searched on the internet
- Are there others who work within your chosen niche?
- Can you find affiliate programs for your niche?
Answering these questions will surely help you find the right niche for your business.
Remember, it is not about how unique your idea is. It is about how you implement it.
Evaluate demand and Analyze the Competition
Once you have chosen your niche, you need to analyze demand and competition.
You can find information such as how often Google users search for a particular topic or a niche on a 0-100 scale by visiting Google Trends.
You can also use a keyword research tool such as Ubersuggest to help you see how competitive topics perform based on Google searches.
These tools allow you to know what your competitors write about and how much traffic is created by these keywords.
Start a Blog and Create High-quality Content
This is the only part you need to invest in your entire affiliate marketing journey. After choosing your niche and analyzing the demands and competitions, you need to start your work by making a website and writing blogs.
How should your content be? Well optimized. An SEO or Search Engine Optimized content will enable you to rank higher in search results and fetch you organic traffic directly.
Your content should address your audiences’ problems and should bring in solutions. You are inherently helping people by offering them choices.
You can write product reviews and product comparison blogs to widen your scope of products and services.
We know that affiliate marketing does not need a website. Still, we recommend you to have a blogging website that will be an organic source of your search traffic and be the core strategy of your business.
Build an audience and generate traffic
Once you have set up your website, you need to build an audience around it. Here, you can make your Youtube channel, Instagram accounts, Facebook page, Twitter, etc.
Now, you might wonder why you should set up a website and blog be so important when you can use social media to do the work easily with less effort?
The answer is simple, social media is just a platform, but your website and blogs are the foundation of your business. It is where the traffic lands, and it implies a solid base of your business to your audience.
How to Get Affiliate Links? Look-out for Affiliate Programs
A simple google search will open a plethora of Affiliate Marketing Programs for you. The question is, how will you find the right affiliate program for your business?
Typically, there are three types of affiliate marketing programs that you can choose:
- Low-volume affiliate programs with High-payouts
These types of affiliate programs are for niches with low volume, where the product doesn’t have a mass appeal and has low traffic, but they have high payouts because of the value of the product or service.
Your competitors here will be very skilled marketers who have a lot of experience in selling such products.
- High-volume affiliate programs with Low-paying
These programs are for the niches with high traffic volume, but offer low commissions as the product’s value is less but in high demand.
It is easier to sign up for such affiliate programs, but you need high traffic to make a decent payout.
- High-volume affiliate programs with High-payouts
Such affiliate marketing programs are for niches with high traffic volume and have high payouts. However, such programs are not available for everyone and are generally eyed by skilled and experienced marketers.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is affiliate marketing easy?
Affiliate marketing is a reasonably easy way to make a good income online. However, it depends on how much effort you put into this business, the niche you are working on, and the relationship you build with affiliate networks.
- What are the best affiliate marketing programs?
Some of the best affiliate programs are :
- Impact
- Amazon Associates
- ShareASale
- Skimlinks
- FlexOffers
- How to do affiliate marketing?
- Research and pick a Niche
- Evaluate demand and Analyze the Competition
- Start a Blog and Create High-quality Content
- Build an audience
- Look-out for Affiliate Programs
- How to Do Affiliate Marketing for Free?
You can post your content on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Youtube and upload product page links in the description of your posts.
- How much does it cost to start affiliate marketing?
The cost of hosting a blogging website is the only expense you’ll bear at the beginning as an affiliate marketer. After you have expanded, you can become an ads affiliate as well, where you need platforms like Google Ads to promote your link and increase traffic.
- How Do You Track Affiliate Links?
Affiliate Marketing technology has developed to the extent that you can put a clause as to when the conversion is registered. There are times when tracking becomes difficult as users tend to visit your landing page using multiple devices.
Trackier offers such Performance Marketing Solutions for brands and Ad Networks, where you can track every conversion according to your needs and your business.
- How Much Money Can you Make As an Affiliate Marketer?
The possibilities are limitless. It completely depends on your niche, the competition in your chosen niche, and the amount of work you put into it.
You will hear about people making a six-figure income a month, and a few go beyond a million dollars. Yes, most of these stories are true. Affiliate Marketing can make you rich in no time.
However, it is all about your hard work, finding the right affiliate program, and expanding your network.
- How Do Affiliate Marketers Get Paid?
An affiliate marketer gets paid when a predefined event has occurred, such as a sale or a conversion.
- Cost Per Action, or CPA: When there is a purchase or conversion.
- Cost per Lead, or CPL: email address, phone number, address, etc.
- Cost Per Click or CPC: when someone clicks on the link or the ad banner attached with a link.
- Impression or Cost per Thousand, or CPM: Some ads are also by this method.
- How to Do Affiliate Marketing Without a Website?
You don’t necessarily need a website to start Affiliate Marketing. You can either be an affiliate marketer using just social media platforms to endorse affiliate links on your content OR use paid ads to send traffic to the seller’s page directly with platforms such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
