Affiliate Marketing Explained Simply
More and more people are buying products and services over the internet and affiliate marketing provides a quick and simple way to start an online business that taps into these internet transactions.
Here’s the concept of affiliate marketing explained in simple terms. You sign up to become an affiliate for a product or service. It can be a physical product that has to be shipped, or it can be a digital product that can be downloaded instantly. You then promote that product and when you make a sale, you get a commission.
Let’s look at little more into how to get started with affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Explained
Many business provide affiliate programs for their products and services. It makes sense for them. After all, as an affiliate marketer you’re offering to promote their products and only receive payment if you sell anything. In fact, Amazon.com is the largest affiliate marketing company. It’s become the world’s most successful and powerful global retailer by using the affiliate marketing model. You can sign-up to become an Amazon affiliate and sell anything that is on the Amazon website.
When you become an affiliate for a company they will give you an unique affiliate website URL link to their product sales pages. This is the the link that you need your potential customers to click. That URL will include a code that is specific to you so that when someone makes a purchase from the website, it will be tracked back to you, and you’ll receive a commission.
The commission you receive is usually based on a percentage of the total sale value. It’s always important to check how much commission you will earn before starting to promote any products.
FREE Checklist: Affiliate Marketing For BeginnersWhat Is An Affiliate Campaign?
The biggest challenge is getting a steady stream potential customers to click on your affiliate links. There are many methods you can use to get customers, many of them are completely free and easy to learn, while others can be quite expensive and have a pretty steep learning curve.
A great way to generate interest in your chosen niche is to develop your own affiliate marketing website. This isn’t as complicated as it might sound. There are many step-by-step website building platforms that can get you online in no time at all. On your website you can provide information about your chosen niche and the products or services that you have chosen to sell. This can be in the form on written articles, videos, images, infographics, audio files and more.
The objective is to provide provide valuable information. It’s not one long sales pitch. Your website is something that contains truly helpful information. You can then share this information on social media for people to click on and read. Within your website content you include your unique affiliate links that will direct people to the product sales pages.
When someone does a search on the internet using the keywords you used for your content, they will see your article. If they like the content, they’ll be motivated to click on your affiliate links to discover more about the products you are promoting.
Affiliate Advertising Campaign
Another way of generating traffic to your website is with Pay Per Click advertising or PPC. With PPC you submit ads to a search engine and target a keyword specific to your website. When someone clicks on your ad you have to pay. You can also use the PPC advertising model very effectively on social media networks. Platforms like Facebook for example, enable to direct target people who are interested in your chosen niche.
Affiliate Marketing Companies
There are many affiliate networks and businesses to work with. ClickBank is a digital retailer that sells virtual, information products. These are items that a customer can download immediately after purchase. There are many affiliates who make quite a good living promoting just ClickBank products.
Amazon sells physical and digital goods. Amazon starts you off with a 4% commission rate, which gets larger when you sell more products. On ClickBank you can earn commissions of 25%, 50% and even 75%. There are other affiliate marketing programs which offer a wide variety of commissions, products and services, so you need to review more than one to see which is the perfect fit for you.
Free Checklist: Affiliate Marketing Explained For Beginners
The key to making reliable, repeatable money as an affiliate is to find a product that is in high demand, pays a good commission to you, and is backed by a company that takes care of their customers. That means finding the perfect affiliate products to promote. You also want to work with companies that have good reputations, and that work very diligently marketing to your prospects, so that they do a lot of the hard sales work for you.
The best time to become an affiliate marketer was years ago. The second best time to benefit from this business model is today. To find out more, download my free checklist: How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners.