Our goal in this article is to answer the question: What is Affiliate Marketing? When you are first getting started with affiliate marketing, there is a lot to learn. Our goal through our affiliate marketing course is to give you all the resources you need to get started on the right foot.
You can either earn a passive income or build a long-term business that allows you to quit your full-time job. However, it takes time and a lot of effort to be that successful.
What is Affiliate Marketing
Our video and article below will help answer all of your questions as you get started. There are so many different programs you can join, products you can market, and websites you can build to tackle a niche market. I recommend starting with the video and then reading the corresponding article.
In this article, we will explain affiliate marketing and show you some examples that can help you get started running your own program. We also have a corresponding video tutorial that provides strategies and best practices that should help you earn more money from your affiliate website. In todayâs day and age, it can be difficult to start a profitable business online with oversaturation, but affiliate marketing offers many benefits with a small, upfront investment with low risk.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing where you advertise other companiesâ products and/or services and earn a set commission for each item sold. The overall commission that you earn will depend upon the products you are advertising.
By creating a website, working to drive traffic, and building an audience, you then begin to advertise products via affiliate links â earning you money. Every click and sale you drive is recorded through an affiliate marketing network. Typically itâs a set commission, for example, if you earn 5 percent for every sale, you will earn $5 from a $100 purchase.
What is nice about this format is that you donât have to carry inventory. You will have to invest some time and a little money into creating your website and corresponding content; but the risk is low.
How to become an affiliate marketer
Becoming an affiliate marketer involves a few basic steps. To begin, you must create a website focused on a topic and write SEO-friendly content based on your keyword research. In essence, building targeted traffic to generate affiliate marketing sales. These sites are geared towards specific niches of products and services that people are interested in.
Successful affiliate sites have high volume traffic as a result of SEO-friendly content, social media promotion and email marketing.
Who is Involved with affiliate marketing?
There are four parties involved in the affiliate marketing process, including:
Merchant – The merchant is the company that sells the products or services and offers an affiliate program. Not all only merchants offer affiliate programs, but those that do allow you to promote their products or services for a commission.
Affiliate marketer, aka Publisher – The affiliate marketer (you) is responsible for promoting a product or service on their website, social media posts, email marketing or any channel where they have an audience.
Affiliate network – The affiliate network is the exchange system for the merchant and the affiliate marketer. The affiliate network tracks clicks and sales so merchants can pay commissions to the publisher.
Customer – The customer is the person who ends up buying the product or service from the merchant, via a link on your affiliate site.
For every affiliate marketing transaction, each of the four parties above are involved. While the merchant handles all of the sales and commissions, the publisher is responsible for driving clicks to the merchantâs site.
Some of the top affiliate marketing networks include Amazon Associates, ShareASale, Awin, CJ Affiliate, Rakuten Marketing, eBay Partner Network, MaxBounty, FlexOffers, Target, and more. If you are interested in marketing other companiesâ products, you will likely use their own network or one of these popular networks.
If you would like to find out if a specific company offers an affiliate program, you can typically locate a link at the bottom of their website or do a simple Google search. For example, Surfside PPC runs an affiliate program with Bluehost. If you were to type in âBluehost affiliateâ in Google, the link to the network would be at the top of your search results.
Getting accepted into an affiliate network can be difficult so growing your traffic with quality content is extremely important. When deciding which network to target, itâs always a good idea to learn a little bit about each one and the products and services they sell in their affiliate network. It also helps if you have some kind of passion for the product you are wanting to sell; as it becomes hard to remain motivated every day to promote a product that is of no interest to you.
How much can you earn from affiliate marketing?
We will point out that most affiliate marketers fail because they lack a long-term strategy. Successful affiliate marketers work tirelessly and stick to a strategy. While you can make a full-time living, you can only begin to earn a significant amount if you work on your website, content, and marketing every single day.
Examples
In our video tutorial, we go through different affiliate site examples, including the Beachfront DĂ©cor site, which has over 7,000 links to products on Amazon and Wayfair. Anytime a site visitor clicks on a link on the site and buys anything; Surfside PPC gets a commission. In addition to the product listings, the site also has a very active blog with over 170 posts. Each blog contains a decent amount of text which uses top keywords for SEO.
Affiliate marketing takes time and work. But if you work hard on your site every day, you will see positive results. If you would like more information, including access to our Affiliate Marketing Course, we invite you to subscribe to the Surfside PPC YouTube Channel.
