What is affiliate marketing and how does it work? Affiliate marketing is an online referal based marketing tactic in which affiliates are rewarded for sales. By linking to various products and services on the internet, an ‘affiliate’ can earn commissions based on the products they link to.
What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?
Let’s say you recommended a restaurant to a friend. The restaurant benefits from having impressed you with their service. However, you don’t receive a financial reward for this kind of recommendation. Affiliate marketing is a similar concept where the recommendation is rewarded with a commission. Your online referrals are ‘tracked’ back to you through an ‘affiliate link’. If your link results in a sale, you receive a commission. You are paid by the ‘vendor’ – the company offering the service.
Amazon, for example is the largest affiliate company on the internet. You can join Amazon’s associate program and earn commissions on any sales you generate through your links. Links are posted on blogs, websites and around the internet. Affiliates also pay for advertising to send customers directly to products and services online. Affiliate marketers have several different ways to generate website traffic.
Generating ‘Traffic’ For Online Sales
‘Traffic’ is a term for people who are browsing the internet. Website traffic is the amount of visitors any given website or blog can generate. As a bloggers traffic grows, they can generate sales by referring their visitors to other people’s products and services. Traffic can be found by generating useful content, blogging, creating video content or some similar activity. Affiliate marketers generate website traffic and then direct that traffic to affiliate offers. Whether this is through paid advertisng, content generation or some other activity is up to the affiliate.
Blogging
Blogging is a low cost method of generating traffic. Affiliates who blog build a following and get found by sharing their content on social media and other similar blogs. As their popularity grows, they gain more attention and can generate an income from their blog. They do this by finding and partnering with a suitable affiliate company.
Video Creation
Some affilaite marketers concentrate on creating videos and posting them to YouTube. If they become popular, they can earn an income both from YouTube itself, Google Adsense or affiliate marketing. YouTube is Google’s ‘younger brother’ and gets millions of visits every day. It is also a great platform to use to generate traffic and interest in your affilaite products.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a fast method of generating traffic to send to an affiliate offer. If you don’t have much time, paid traffic is the best method to build an affilaite business quickly. YouTube, Facebook and Google all offer very targeted advertising which you can use to specify the kind of audience suitable for the products you choose to promote. For example, you can target people by age, their search criteria, their interests and the kind of videos they watch. This can be very powerful if you match your target audience well to your affiliate products well.
Affiliate Products To Choose From
What is affiliate marketing and how does it work? There are literally thousands of affilaite products to choose from on the internet. By choosing good products to sell, and then finding a good audience to sell to, you can generate sales without needing to ever talk to a customer yourself. This has a number of benefits and is useful for more reasons than to just be anti-social! It means you can automated your sales an scale up to a gloabal audience. Your adverts and websites can do the selling and run 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
Choosing Good Affiliate Products
There are all kinds of products on the internet which you can sell. Physcial products, digital products, expensive products and cheap products. What kind of products you choose is a major factor in how successful you will be as an affiliate marketer. Plus, your products need to be a good match for your chosen audience. Different affilaites approach affiliate marketing is different ways. Some build content, other pay for advertising. Some write about their passions, and others treat it purely as a business and focus on making the sales.
The affiliate products you choose, and the way you go about promoting them, will determine how successful you become as an affilaite marketer.
Digital Products
Digital products can work well for affiliates if they manage to sell them. They typically pay out more than physcial products. The low costs involved in digital products makes them perfect for affilaites. You can sell them anywhere globally because they can be accessed over the internet at zero cost. They don’t need any postage or storage so the savings can be passed on to the affiliates who promote them.
Subscription Products
Subscription products also offer a greater level of income for affiliate marketers. They pay the affiliate on a regular basis for each sale they make. This is far better than selling a ‘one off’ product which will only make a single commission. Choosing subscription products to sell online can therefore be much more lucrative.
High Ticket Products
High ticket products offer higher levels of commission than smaller value items. This means you can earn moe per sale and also scale up into the larger earning brackets more quickly. If you sell a $1000 product, you can earn $400 at 40%. Compare this to a lower ticket item of $100 which only gives you a commission of $40.
To make $10,000 from your online business, you need to make 25 of the high ticket sales or 250 of the lower value sales. Even if the high ticket item is more difficult to sell, it’s not going to be 10 times as difficult. In fact much of the work of affilaite marketers is the same, regardless of what they are selling.
What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?
What is affilaite marketing and how does it work? Affiliate marketing is a business model which can have many forms. Affiliates can have different business models too. Not all affiliates blog and not all affiliates use paid advertising. Many affiliates build lists and then sell affiliate products through their list.
This is arguably one of the best ways to build an online business. As your list of subscribers grows, so does your opportunity to earn money by selling to your list. Top affiliates have email lists which number into the tens of thousands. This means they can send a single email and make hundreds or even thousands of sales at once. Email marketing is known as the ‘killer app’ of online marketing because it is so powerful.
Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Anyone can become an affilaite marketer and it is easy to access and start. Because of this there is also a large drop out rate. Tha doesn’t mean affiliate marketing doesn’t work, just that most people don’t know how to make it work for them. See why affiliate marketing does not work. Affiliate marketing does work, if you know how to use it correctly. It takes time and effort like any business.
Summary
What is affilaite marketing and how does it work? Affiliate marketing is referral marketing. You can generate online sales for almost any product you can think of on the internet by sending qualified website traffic to it. The key is getting the right knowledge and education to do affilaite marketing correctly.
Access this training platform to learn affiliate marketing and get started.