It’s no secret that ‘word of mouth’ is the best way of advertising and marketing your product. The more people talking about your brand, the more visibility it receives. Hence, when it comes to marketing your business, it is nice to have friends who are talking about your product. In online marketing, friends mean ‘affiliates’.
Affiliate marketing is all the rage right now, with success stories flooding the latest marketing news. Being the pioneer for helping users make money online, generating a regular income from this type of marketing is the dream of many aspiring digital marketers.
However, despite the many success stories, conducting affiliate marketing right is often considered to be a difficult feat. The main reason for this is that many marketers have multiple ‘ideas’ about what affiliation is supposed to mean, but none of which is true.
We, at iTMunch, have created an extensive guide to help you get a general idea about the affiliation ecosystem, allowing you to make your road map to success through affiliate marketing!
What is Affiliate Marketing?
In the modern digital landscape, affiliate marketing refers to promoting other’s business or products, to earn commission as a reward. The amount for this commission-based sales process is pre-agreed between the seller and partner. This performance based marketing system generally involves 4 stakeholders:
Seller
Also known as the merchant or retailer, a seller can either be an individual or a company that sells a product or a service. The seller collaborates with the affiliate marketer to promote the products or services
Affiliate
The affiliate or marketer is generally an individual or a company who focuses on promoting products and services and receives a commission on each sale. Promotion is conducted via campaigns that use ads, links and banners to find buyers for the seller’s product and services.
Consumer
A consumer can be you, me and everyone, who ‘consumes’ and purchases goods or services from the internet to fulfil their requirements.
Network
A platform that acts as an intermediary between the seller and the affiliate is known as a network. A network’s main purpose is to help a seller easily find and partner with affiliates which are suitable for their business, simultaneously allowing affiliates reach a larger audience to promote products and services of their existing sellers.
SEE ALSO: How to Leverage Blockchain Technology in Affiliate Marketing
How Affiliate Marketing Can Help You
As an affiliate marketer, you can not only earn a substantial amount of money, but also offers a host of benefits, which include:
Easy Management
As a part of many affiliate marketing programs, the merchant provides all the marketing material. Thus, it saves the blogger time as they do not have to design banners or even create links. Their only responsibility is to publish the merchant-generated content on their marketing channels.
No Financial Risk
Affiliate marketing is said to be the most no financial-risk medium of business. In a lot of chances, bloggers do not have to invest a single penny in the merchant’s business.
Multiple Sources of Income
Depending on your convenience and time constraints, you could promote multiple services and products online and receive a commission for the sales and thus increase your income. Hence a blogger has the advantage of working with numerous affiliate marketing programs for generating multiple income streams.
Easy to Join
The best part about being an affiliate marketer is that you don’t need to be an expert in any field or even a business graduate. You only need to sign for an affiliate marketing program and promote products online. The typical cycle of affiliate marketing programs is: Join, Promote and Earn!
How To Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer?
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
The one thing that you should be most aware of is the kind of service or product to choose according to your audience’s preference as that will determine the success or failure of your career in the affiliate marketing field.
Revenue Share or Commission
The volume of sales of a product or service determines your commission. But, a high volume of sales does not necessarily mean a higher commission. Affiliate marketing programs usually offer an initial commission on every single signup and recurring commission on a monthly and yearly basis.
Quality Over Quantity
While it’s a good idea to join a network of affiliates, but it’s always important to choose quality over quantity. Having a few good, reliable affiliates to work with are much more valuable than a jumble of not-so-reliable affiliates. Hence, don’t focus on making a lot of “friends”. Instead, focus on making strong, long-lasting relationships.
You Must Stay in Your Niche
It may be tempting to go with affiliates that are out of your network. But, if you don’t focus on your niche, you’re going to miss out on the whole purpose of affiliate marketing. Make sure you choose to work with partners that share the same type of business, as it increases the chances of bringing in more leads.
Be Honest to Your Audience
Sometimes newbie bloggers commit the mistake of giving out too many details of the product or provide incorrect information for making a quick sale. You should always remember; it’s not possible for you to fool your visitors all the time. Keep it simple and honest!
Affiliate Marketing Website Samples
Hundreds of affiliate websites with different goals are launched every day. Some people will try to make a quick buck through any means possible. Other marketers will have a rough plan and spend time working on their site, only to let it lapse once success doesn’t immediately arrive.
Here are a few smaller websites that on the first impression, you may not realise are affiliate sites.
ECIGSUK
ECIGSUK was launched in 2014 and has quickly become the authority on e-cigarettes due to the quality of their articles, reviews and guides. Their electronic cigarette reviews provide useful and in-depth product information that aims to enlighten consumers with as much detailed information as possible about vaping.
WheresSharon.com
WheresSharon.com is a travel blog that eventually began monetizing through affiliate articles. By establishing an audience and authority within just a few years, Sharon now posts articles with targeted buyer keywords related to products in her niche (travel) whilst converting interested buyers into customers.
UAV Coach
UAV Coach is a site that took advantage of the increasing demand for drones. When the site first launched, the drone niche was already competitive but by simply being better than the competition, UAV Coach transformed their website into the number one resource for anything and everything related to drones.
SEE ALSO: 4 Websites Which Are Using Affiliate Marketing To Make Money
Ways to Carry Out Affiliate Marketing
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 have published several neutral reviews before asking your audience to purchase the product or service. 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.
Video Marketing
It is the ideal tool for marketing in a socially connected world. Video reviews give better satisfaction to the viewers by checking out the details and features of the product visually 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 uses Facebook and Twitter to broadcast their messages in real-time. The most ideal option for making affiliate marketing efforts fruitful is Social media as it allows your products to reach numerous people in one go. 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 is the most effective and profitable marketing technique that is beneficial for all stakeholders. Because the merchant is happy about getting more sales, the affiliate is happy as he’s earning profitable commission on each sale made and the consumers are satisfied with receiving the required products without any hassle.
For more updates on how to make the most out of affiliate marketing, keep reading iTMunch!
