WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning money (commissions) every time you promote a company’s products or services and drive a sale. You only get paid every time you drive a sale, just like a commission-only sales representative.

In other words affiliate marketing is the process of spreading product creation and product marketing across different parties, where each party receives a share of the revenue according to their contribution.

It’s not just the promotion or just the product creation that defines who you are as an affiliate marketer.

You can be both the creator and the marketer and still profit from the underlying idea of sharing revenue.

Now let’s look at all of the parts of a successful affiliate marketing system.

The Merchant: Sometimes also known as the creator, the seller, the brand, the retailer, or the vendor. This is the party that creates the product. It can be a  company, like FnFcom, which is an online airtime distribution company. Or, it can be a single individual.

From solo entrepreneurs to startups to massive Fortune 500 companies, anyone could be the merchant behind an affiliate marketing program. They don’t even have to be actively involved. They just have to have a product to sell.

The Affiliate: This party is sometimes also known as the publisher. Affiliates can also range from single individuals to entire companies.  An affiliate marketing business can produce a few hundred dollars in commissions each month or tens of millions of dollars.

It’s where the marketing happens. An affiliate promotes one or multiple affiliate products and tries to attract and convince potential customers of the value of the merchant’s product so that they actually end up buying it.

This can be achieved by running a review blog of the merchant’s products. 

It could also be an entire site that’s dedicated to finding cool products related to certain topic and promoting those affiliate products.

The Consumer: The customer or consumer makes the affiliate system go ’round. Without sales, there aren’t any commissions to hand out and no revenue to be shared.

The affiliate will try to market to the consumer on whatever channel they see fit, whether that’s a social network, digital billboards or through a search engine using content marketing on a blog.

Whether the consumer knows that they are part of an affiliate marketing system or not is mostly up to the affiliate.

Some choose to let their consumers know and more and more affiliates tend to be transparent about their marketing being incentivized financially, but others don’t.

They let the tracking system work in the background, where the customer can follow the purchase process just as usual and the affiliate still ends up being paid a commission.

The consumer will not typically pay a higher price to the affiliate marketer, as the cost of the affiliate network is already included in the retail price.

The Network: Only some consider the network part of the affiliate marketing equation.  But, I believe that an affiliate marketing guide needs to include networks, because, in many cases, a network works as an intermediary between the affiliate and the merchant.

Sometimes, affiliates have to go through an affiliate network to even be able to promote the product.  For example, this happens if the merchant only manages their affiliate program on that network.

The affiliate network then also serves as a database of lots of products, out of which the affiliate marketer can choose which to promote.

Most companies that offer affiliate marketing  generate a custom affiliate link to products. If someone purchases through your link, you earn a small commission.

BEST WAYS TO BUILD YOUR AFFILIATE MARKETING BUSINESS

There are basically two sides of the affiliate marketing equation that you can choose from:

 1:You can become a merchant and have others promote your product, in exchange for giving them a commission from the sales that they make.

2:You can become an affiliate marketer for one or several products that you’d like to promote and market those to consumers, in order to make money.

Am going to share 4 steps on how to get started on both sides of the affiliate marketing industry.

How to become a merchant in 4 steps

If you want to become an affiliate program merchant and make money by having affiliates sell your product this are the steps that you can take.

Step 1: Coming up with a product idea.

You need to have a product idea. People always say it’s hard to come up with an idea. It’s not. Ideas are easy.

But, if you think that your idea has to be super original and born out of the pure genius of your brain, that’s hard.

If you want to make money with an affiliate marketing business, you can’t be romantically attached to your idea.

Instead, just look at what products and services are already out there.  Consider how you can improve upon them, by delivering something that solves the problems with those products.

An easier way to develop an idea is to do research on existing products and figure out ways to improve or produce a much better product or service..

The question is…will people pay for it?

Step 2: Validating your idea

Validating your idea gives you the confidence that in the long run you wont end up with an idea that doesn't give you revenue and a better way to do that is asking people if they are willing to pay for your product or service.

Make sure that you ask them whether or not they would buy your idea — not just if they like it. Anyone will say that they like something just to be nice. If they respond with a yes, you need to directly follow up with an ask to buy. Saying they will spend money is not the same as actually spending it.

Once you cross your threshold and make sure that people actually want it, you can start creating the product.

Step 3: Creating the product

There are a ton of steps to follow for creating a product and this isn’t an entrepreneurship guide, but I want to point out that creating digital products is a lot easier, since it just takes time and sometimes a little financial investment, but usually not more than a service fee or a one-time price for software.

Once you have the product created and delivered to your initial buyers, it’s time to open up the affiliate network.

Step 4: Finding affiliate program partners.

The tech part is the easy thing here, you can easily set up affiliate program partners and allow them to collect commissions. The tough part is finding partners who actually have an audience that is interested in what you have to sell. Contacting them and getting them to cooperate on a sale together would be an easy pitch because it’s a perfect fit. The more niche your product is, the easier it will be to pitch to fellow merchants.

You can simply send them an email, introduce yourself and your product and ask them if they want to partner on a sale together, where you’ll share revenue.

Just try finding one person to partner up with and start your first affiliate promotion. You can adjust commissions and details later, the important part is to get started. Or if you need help, you can always work with an affiliate marketing agency that can help you kick start things.

You could also start the journey on the other side of the fence and just become an affiliate yourself.

4 steps to becoming an online affiliate marketer

There are  4 steps that you can take to start your journey as an affiliate marketer.

Step 1: Review products in your niche

It’s easier to get started as an affiliate because you’re skipping the ‘have an idea’  and ‘creating an idea’ parts of becoming a merchant. You already use and like plenty of products, so all that you have to do get started is to publicly talk about them.

Start by looking at the partners in step 4 for becoming a merchant, because that’s what you’re trying to start in this step. Any product works: Books, Cars, Houses, Tools, Beauty products e.t.c.

Affiliate marketing guide points out that involved affiliate marketing is by far the most profitable, because you can actually relate to the product, instead of just promoting something that might make you a lot of cash. When you don’t even know the product, how can you credibly promote it?

Note: This is a little different for consumer products than it is for online courses or books created by individuals. If you’ve known a person for a long time and trust them and know their work is great, then that’s a different thing.

When you write reviews on your blog, you can use an affiliate link to link to the products that you promote. You can recognize them on other blogs by the long “/ref…” tail, at the end of the regular link.

This is usually the first step to start making commissions. Just go to the product page and click on “Short link to this page.”  You’ll get a link that’ll give you a commission if people purchase through it.

However, if you only rely on people using the affiliate links in your reviews, that means that you need lots of traffic to actually start making serious money. But, if you find a way to contact your audience directly, you can market to them whenever you like, not just when they come to your website.

Step 2: Build an email list with your prospects on it

Email is still one of the best marketing channels today, so don’t miss out on it.

3 super easy ways to collect email addresses from your website visitors;

Number 1: Hello Bar

Hello Bar puts a call to action on top of your website. Whenever someone visits your website, they’ll see this bar at the top. You can offer them an ebook  or a special review video. Once they click on your Hello Bar, you can redirect people to the page where they can enter their email in exchange for the content.

Number 2: Exit Gate

You can also use Hello Bar to create an exit gate. This is a popup that will lay over the screen when visitors are about to leave your website.It is triggered by their mouse moving to the top area of the browser. You can also redirect people to your lead magnet and get their email address this way.

Number 3: Sidebar Widget

Many blogs completely clutter their sidebar. If you give your visitors 20 things to do, it’s unlikely that they’ll do anything at all. Just have one call to action in your sidebar.  Again, it should offer people something in exchange for their email address.

Since you’re collecting email addresses around a very specific topic you don’t need a lot of them to make the email list worth your time. Even with less than 500 people on your list, you can create significant sales. Just make sure that you keep your audience engaged, by sending them regular updates, ideally once a week. Don’t make it all sales.  Just let them know when you have a new review up.

Every now and then, send them a specific call to action to buy a product.  Perhaps you just found a new favorite in the latest review and think it’s really great. You can update your audience on your change of mind, the reasons why and recommend that they switch to that product also.

Step 3: Educate your audience with live webinars

Webinars are awesome. 

Promote your webinar on social media for a week in advance and get people to sign up. Then, you can very easily host a Google hangout that is completely free, to stream your webinar live to your audience. Webinars are great to engage with your audience one on one, show them the product that you’re promoting live and answer any questions that they might have.

You can:

• present the product’s features
• show different use cases of the product
• talk about its benefits and drawbacks
• tell people your personal history with the product
• help your audience get the most out of it

and much more. Imagine how fired up your audience will get when they see all of the cool things that your product will enable them to do. Pointing to your affiliate link and sharing it at the end of the webinar is a soft sell and comes naturally since you just spent an hour talking about the product. It won’t feel forced and your consumers can still take all of the time that they want to make up their mind on whether they’ll actually purchase.

Step 4: Grow your business with PPC advertising

Once your affiliate marketing business starts to picks up steam, you can start thinking about paid advertising. Remember: only do this once you have a way of making back your money.

Conversions are all that matters here. You can use PPC advertising to:

• get people to sign up for your webinar
• grow your email list
• make more sales

So, keywords related to learning about your product or topic would be a good start.

You can also target your competition. Now, while you could try to target people who are just trying to find a review of your product, you’d probably be better off improving your SEO. The percentage of people who buy straight through your link after reading a review is naturally low, so imagine paying for these reads. Depending on the product price, you only get a few dollars or even cents per sale, so the margin you can spend on ads is not very big.  In most cases, your best off promoting sign-ups to your email list. As a matter of fact, getting people to sign up for a webinar with ads is the best way to go.

You will win in 3 ways:

1. They’ll be on your email list and you can contact them again at any time
2. There’s a chance that they’ll attend your live webinar and buy the product
3. You can put them on an autoresponder email sequence that encourages them to buy.

In conclusion ;

The 4 steps of becoming a merchant are:

1. Coming up with a valid product idea.
2. Validating that idea by getting people to pre-pay you for the product.
3. Creating that product.
4. Finding affiliates, likely through an affiliate network, to partner with who will promote your product.

The more common and slightly easier route is becoming an affiliate;

 There are also 4 steps that you can follow:

1. Starting to review products in your niche
2. Building an email list
3. Using live webinars to educate your audience and make sales
4. Growing your affiliate business with PPC advertising

Affiliate marketing is a good way to get started with online marketing.

The only question is, which side are you going to pick?

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Written by: Boaz Bett