This is a guest post courtesy of Alan. He dives pretty comprehensively into the nuts and bolts of something called affiliate marketing.
If you’re a blogger or have any experience with the online realms, you may have heard of it and perhaps even dabble in it yourself.
I know many a fellow blogger that makes a tidy little side income from affiliate sales. If you’ve never heard of it before, well then… welcome. Happy reading and I hope you find it useful. If you do, I’d love for you to share it with someone.
If you’re thinking about going into affiliate marketing, you must have the right mindset.
You have to be positive otherwise you will fail.
There are no two ways about that.
Be optimistic and banish all negative thoughts even if you start off badly. Don’t get frustrated if no sales or even traffic is coming your way (yet).
If you remain positive, you’ll get over the hurdles and begin to see results, though it may take some time.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Simply put, it’s a business in which you promote other business people’s services or products that you believe in, and earn a commission (or percentage) on every sale.
Various Affiliate Selling Programs
PPC (Pay per click) and CPC (Cost per click)
PPC is the most-liked affiliate marketing method with regard to both small and big websites. It could possibly be the easiest way to earn good money online.
In this kind of affiliate marketing, the seller will pay his/her affiliate each time a user refers to her/his site, i.e., when someone clicks on the seller’s text ad or banner.
The affiliate will be paid a fixed amount — a small amount of cash, normally– even if the referred visitor does not buy anything.
PPC affiliate fees are small and don’t normally go above one dollar per click.
This payment is based on the niche and the number of people who are paying for Cost per click.
PPS (Pay per sale) and CPS (Cost per sale)
In PPS the seller pays a percentage of the price of the product as commission to the affiliate for a sale of the product.
The seller is sure of a sale before it generates any sort of commission. This method makes it very simple for the seller to calculate the product’s income.
On his/her part, the affiliate has to ensure that the sale is completed before thinking about the commission.
You don’t just have to bring persons to the seller’s site; you have to make them buy.
PPA & CPA (Pay per & Cost per action)
PPA and CPA are kinds of affiliate marketing in which the affiliate is paid each time a visitor accomplishes a kind of offer or action.
This usually means filling an online offer or a survey. An action could also refer to a paid or free sign up on a site or any other kind of customer action.
The best way to earn money through PPA is to create a download file and enable people to also download it after they finish a survey.
You will normally get paid some $1-$30 per completed survey.
Note:
It’s not that easy to talk people into completing a survey; most of them will shut the site as soon as they see a survey pop up.
Advantages of Affiliate Marketing
You are the boss:
You work when you feel like working; you need not worry about having a boss who will yell at you; you do things the way in which you want to; you choose your hours of work and how much you wish to earn; you go on holidays when you feel you need them; you spend extra time with family and friends; if you want to, you can work extra hours if you need extra cash. This kind of freedom has its responsibility, but most affiliate marketers benefit more than they suffer.
It doesn’t cost to start:
To open a store on the street will most likely require at least $20,000. You will need just $20 if you wish to start an online affiliate marketing business. You will only require $10 to start. That’s what it costs to pay to get a hosting server. $10 more will get you a domain name. Themes come free; there are thousands to choose from and you can convert it to a paid one once you begin to earn some money. You don’t have to pay for SEO services, or link building tolls, or traffic.
Anybody can do this business:
It matters little if you are a teenager or an old person; you need not be an expert in graphic or web design, SEO or blogging. All that’s required is a Web connection to begin earning money in affiliate marketing.
You have many choices:
I will recommend ClickBank from the many websites that are available to avail of thousands of products in affiliate marketing. You can also use CJ or ClickSure which also have products in any niche you prefer. If you can’t find the right product, do some research and digging to discover what you want to promote.
You don’t need a product of your own:
Affiliate marketing has many advantages. One of them is that you don’t have to own your product or spend money to produce one. You only have to select your product, grasp your affiliate connection and start product promotion. There’s no risk involved in the product promotion; if something adverse happens and the product’s owners are forced to close all sales, the fault’s not yours. Your job is to just promote.
Payment or delivery is not your concern:
Creating an ideal sales page is not child’s play. Fortunately, you need not worry about this. It’s the sellers’ problem; it need not be your concern. All you have to do is attract people to that page in order to make money.
It’s a truly profitable business:
Do you know just how much money the most efficient affiliate marketers make? Take the salary of a teacher and multiply it by 10. That’s $40,000 x 10! And it’s what a few of the best affiliate marketers make in a month. Some rake in even more than that. As you can see, this kind of marketing is very profitable. It has existed since people started figuring out that there was good money to be made on the net and it won’t go away anytime soon.
Plenty of time to spare:
Affiliate marketers have plenty of freedom. They don’t need to work the entire day. And since they can earn good money, they often wind up traveling around the world, location independent.
How to Promote Your Business
You can promote your affiliate business through:
- Blogs which can be used to promote your products. The simplest way is to place banners in a visible area so that readers can see them clearly. Write articles and place the affiliate link in the content.
- Reviews about the service/product/ is a great way to get plenty of sales. In your reviews you must target a precise group that requires your product but needs additional information on it.
- A squeeze page refers to a landing page that requires visitors to perform an action. That action could ask for the sell, or ask the visitors for their email address.
- E-mails lists will help you keep in touch with people who also wish to stay in contact with you. They need emails that keep them updated about the services or products in your chosen niche. Experience has shown that people from this list are more likely to purchase than first-time visitors.
- Social media has become a killer resource for traffic as well as income. But you may eventually have to spend some money to purchase ads and jump-start a campaign.
- Be active on well-known niche forums. They can be a terrific way to establish associations with other internet marketers and bloggers. Through forums you can also drive traffic to your blog’s pages and establish quality back links.
- You can also apply various offline selling methods. You can print flyers and paste them on shop windows and/or bus stops, or pay people to distribute them. You can even give some public speeches about your affiliate marketing if you are not shy.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Once you sign up for an affiliate marketing program you can select the banners or products you wish to incorporate on your website and then get the code you will require to install on precise web pages or all through your website.
This alters when you choose an ad revenue tie-up like Google Adsense, where you have very little or absolutely no control at all over the ads displayed.
When you join the affiliate program you will need to comply with their service terms.
This is known as an affiliate agreement.
It will tell you the needs you have to meet and how sales or lead generation is tracked.
Mostly, affiliate programs use a mix of an exclusive user ID along with cookies to follow your leads and ensuing revenue.
Most programs will give you an exclusive affiliate division on their website where you will get your HTML code and where you will be able to check the status of your affiliate account and information.
Browser cookies will enable a person who makes use of your link to take the required action in a fixed time that adds to your revenue.
Tips to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing
These 3 Crucial Factors will help you to get success in your affiliate marketing program, let’s consider it.
Traffic/Visitors
If you want to make more money in this business, you have to convert visitors coming to your site into paying customers for your seller.
Simply put, more visitors mean more referrals and more income for you.
Number of Clicks
You must ensure that your visitors view your affiliate offers and links on your website.
You can’t just toss them into the sidebar on the right and expect visitors to see and click on them. It’s in your hands to raise the chances of your visitors clicking on the links viewing the affiliate proposals.
Rate of Conversion
Conversion rate means completing the sale. It’s not something that’s out of your hands.
One way to ensure this is to promote quality stuff and not rubbish. Your visitors should be satisfied enough to buy the product when they see it.
Conversion % versus commission $
Consider this: One product gives you $100 commission and another $25. So the first product is better for you, right?
Not necessarily.
If the conversion rates for the two are, respectively, 1% and 5%, then the $25 commission is obviously more profitable. In short, don’t let commissions blind you.
Summing Up
To succeed in affiliate marketing you need to focus on all areas related to it. All must be optimized to gain real success and good revenue.
For example, if your affiliate offerings are not right, it will be fruitless to build a huge traffic base. In the same way, great marketing and offerings for a tiny traffic base will not fetch you much income.
So focus on all aspects of affiliate marketing; give all of them equal importance and then be ready to reap the rewards.
It will need hard work, no doubt, but then nothing worthwhile comes easy in life.
Over to You
This article will help you start developing your ideas for this special kind of marketing. If you have any concepts ideas about it, please share them in the comments section below this post.