There are many job opportunities that have sprung up for people to make good money by working online, and one of these jobs is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing that typically involves three groups of people: the advertiser, the publisher, and the consumer.
The advertiser is the company or organisation or person that has a product or service to sell. The publisher is usually an individual or company that promotes the advertiser’s products or services on their website, using links, text ads, phone numbers or banners to do the promotion. For every sale made, the publisher gets a commission, which could be a fixed amount or a percentage of each sale. The consumer is the person who sees the promotion and clicks on the link provided or calls the phone number on the website, which leads them from the publisher’s page to the advertiser’s website to complete the sale (this is called conversion).
Affiliate marketing is a business that rewards people for each customer brought in by their marketing efforts on their website. In essence, the publishers are the affiliate marketers.
Becoming an affiliate marketer is not as easy as it may seem. Some succeed, some don’t. This doesn’t mean that affiliate marketing can’t or shouldn’t be done. There are many paths that lead to becoming an affiliate marketer. One can try out a few of these avenues and stick with what works best for them, making passive incomes or truckloads of money.
Paths To Becoming An Affiliate Marketer
Blogs
Blogs are a good (and popular) way to get into affiliate marketing. Basically, a large percentage of bloggers make money from their blogs by being affiliate marketers. If you already have a blog, and also have a strong following, getting into affiliate marketing would be easier for you. If not, you have your work cut out for you.
As a blogger, you have a niche you specialise in. You can find advertisers who have products or services they want to advertise that are related to your niche, and affiliate with them. They provide links embedded with a special code for you, and all views or clicks get you some money.
SEO
Using SEO as a way to make money as an affiliate marketer works in two ways: the first way is to look up keywords, use them to create ads, get a listing, and when the keywords are searched, your ad gets seen first. Once they are clicked, you make money.
This way is not very successful, as thousands of other people will be using that same keyword to create listings, and it is the first listing that gets the most clicks.
The second way, which is more helpful for affiliate marketers, is to create a unique keyword that is linked to the product or service you are advertising. When that keyword is searched, your listing will always be the first, getting you more clicks, and more money.
Coupons
If you didn’t know it before, coupon companies do exist. They partner with businesses to promote discounts straight to customers on products or services sold by these businesses. The businesses get loads of customer traffic due to these sales and discounts, and the customers save a lot on products and services.
How do the coupon companies make a profit? One of the ways is by working with affiliate marketers. Coupon companies can meet the affiliate marketer to place ads on your website. Once an ad is viewed or clicked, you make a profit, while the coupon company gets all the traffic it needs to drive advertising income.
Affiliate marketing with your email list has to be handled delicately to prevent spam and overloading your mailing list with ads and promotions. As an affiliate marketer, you can make money with your mailing list by placing ads and promotions of complementary products or services of other businesses in your emails that you will send out to your mailing list.
Lead Generation
Lead generation may be differentiated from affiliate marketing, but they are similar enough, and they are both ways to make money online by convincing people to get something from you.
With lead generation, it works like this: you have a website in a niche related to writing and publishing. An online writing company is searching for people of a certain demographic to sign up for a writing course, and they approach you, the affiliate, to get these ‘leads’ for them. Using an opt-in form, you get information from your visitors and give them to the writing company. The company pays you per every lead you get.
Pay-per-click
Pay-per-click (PPC) is literally as the name implies: you get paid per each click your link gets. This is usually how affiliate marketers get paid on their websites or blogs: for every link embedded with their unique code that visitors click on, the affiliate marketer gets paid. You get paid whether you make a sale or not, as long as visitors click and are redirected to the advertiser’s website. That is what differentiates it from pay-per-sale, where you only get paid after the purchase has been completed between advertiser and customer.
Affiliate marketing a great way to make an income. It allows flexible hours and flexible working environment (meaning you can work from home), it is cost-effective, and you don’t have to pay any fees to join an affiliate program. To make money as an affiliate marketer, you need to pick several traffic sources to place ads. This means that, apart from your website, you could also use Google AdWords to drive traffic to the desired sales pages.
Register with specific affiliate programs and choose a few, good products to market. Don’t try to do everything at once just to get a good footing. Do research on the available market for what you want to help to sell, get the appropriate advertisers, and have the right tools. Making money in affiliate marketing becomes easy when you prepare yourself.
