What Is Affiliate Marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing?

The easiest way to explain affiliate marketing is this – It’s a way of making money online. Essentially you become what is called a “publisher” or “webmaster” and are rewarded by external businesses for promoting their products. At a basic level:

1. You find a product to promote
2. You promote the product
3. The product sells
4. You get commission.

Simple!

Essentially you’ll get paid for selling their products for them. Somewhere along the line you will have to generate clicks through trackable links to their products – this is what ensures you are accredited for your hard work, but more on this later.

Another way of becoming an affiliate is simply sending traffic to their products – Some companies will pay you cash to do this. Others will pay more if they’re then able to collect their email address, postal address, telephone number etc – Usually they’ll collect this by getting them to complete an online survey of some sort.

Usually these companies pay a set percentage of the price of the product as commission; however, others can offer set fees too.

As mentioned above, sales are usually tracked through a unique link that enables the vendor to distinguish you from all other publishers. They will usually have a system in place to do all of this for you, all you have to do is collect your link to use. They monitor the traffic that you’ve sent to them by keeping track of the users cookies (a digital stamp on a user throughout their journey online). Alternative methods can include “electronic vouchers or codes etc.

Why do companies prefer affiliate marketing to online advertising?

They usually prefer affiliate marketing because it’s more lucrative for them. They only pay you when you make a sale or complete a particular action where as normal advertising is completely speculative.

With normal advertising you’re limited to how large your budget is – With affiliate marketing you can have as many affiliates as you like.

So is becoming an affiliate just easy money?

There is no question about it – Affiliate marketing can be incredibly lucrative. That said, it’s not really “easy money”. You are going to have to put a certain level of work into producing results and generating sales. Making a lot of money through affiliate marketing is reliant on a number of different factors:

• How much traffic you can generate to your websites
• Finding the right products to sell with the right commissions
• Finding good quality products that provide re-bills
• Building your site up as a reliable source of information
• Finding users who are willing to “buy”
• Your ability to write sales copy and create websites
• Your time – you will need to dedicate time to building sales. It’s not something that you will be able to generate over night.

It’s worth highlighting that you can become an affiliate within any niche; however, some simply don’t work. Do your research into your niche first before conducting too much work up front. It’s important to pick niches where there is a lot of demand, traffic or the product is highly desired – This will increase your sales.

For more information on affiliate marketing visit our other posts here.