What is Affiliate Marketing?
Definition by Pat Flynn’s
“Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.”
Affiliate marketing is the process to earn a commission for marketing the business of another person. Affiliate marketing is among the oldest forms of digital marketing. Here the affiliate refers someone to buy online product and when the person buys it affiliate receives a commission. The sales of these kind of marketing are gained via affiliate links from one website to another. Most of the big companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Google have different affiliate programs, which are free to join by any individual.
The Concept
Affiliate marketing is a strategy to drive sales and generate significant revenue online. This type of marketing is highly advantageous to both brands and affiliate marketers. Here are some facts related to affiliate marketing.
- Most of brands and the publishers leverage the super power of affiliate marketing.
- There has been seen an increase in affiliate marketing spending every year.
- All orders that are made online can be attributed to the effect of affiliate marketing.
- Opportunity for affiliates has changed dramatically and there has been a gain their passive income based on the vertical they’re selling on.
How does affiliate marketing work?
The merchant of the website gives a unique link to each affiliate so that they can track who was made the sale for them. Whenever someone clicks the link, cookies gets stored on their device. An affiliate cookie does two things. Firstly, it helps the merchant attribute the sale back to the right person and it holds an expiration date, so that you get paid even if the buyer delays their purchase. Affiliate marketing works by distributing the responsibilities of product marketing of an assortment of people for a more efficient marketing strategy. However, to make the affiliate marketing work, three diverse parties must be involved:
- The affiliate
- The consumer
- Seller
Let’s look the complex relationship of these three parties:
- Seller and product creators: The seller could be a product creator, vendor, merchant, or retailer. The product could be anything from a household goods, to a service, like tutorials.
- The affiliate or publisher: An affiliate can be either be an individual or a company. He is responsible to market the product of seller in an attractive way to possible customers. In other words, affiliate is the one who has to promote the product to persuade consumers to purchase the product.
- The consumer: Whether as a consumer you know it or not, you are the driving force of affiliate marketing. Affiliates share the products on various channels to convince you to buy them.
How to become an online affiliate marketer?
There are 4 steps that you are involved in to start a journey as an affiliate marketer.
Step 1: Start reviewing products in your niche
This is one of the easiest ways to get started as an affiliate. This way you will be ‘having an idea’ and ‘creating an idea’ on parts of becoming a merchant. You may have already used and liked plenty of products, so it is the best way to get start to talk publicly about them. For an example, write a blog reviews on flat irons for straightening hair. Write a specific blog about that product and people who are using the flat irons can relate to it, as they need to straighten her own hair. And, if someone is researching the same product, the blog which have written will not only rank higher in the search engines results but will also actually help the people to find the best tool for the job.
Step 2: Email list of prospects
Emails are among the best marketing channels today present in the market, so don’t miss out on it. There are 3 super easy ways to get the email addresses from your visitors on the website.
Exit Gate
Same like welcoming, you can also use at an exit gate. This is a popup which will come on the screen when visitors are about to leave the website. This particular thing is triggered by the mouse moving to the top area of the browser.
Hello Bar
Hello Bar let you put a call to action on top of your website. So, whenever a person comes at your website, they will see this hello bar at the top of the website. You can offer them a special review video or a giveaway. So, once they click on the Hello Bar they will be redirected to the page where they have to enter their email ID in exchange for the content.
Number 3: Sidebar Widget
You must have noticed a widget popping from the side bar with a call to action button and sharing options. That’s it. Many blogs completely clutter their sidebar. Don’t clutter. Just have one call to action in your sidebar and it should offer something to the visitors in exchange for their email address.
Step 3: Educate your audience
Webinars are awesome and can be used to educate your audience.
Let’s take an example. Imagine that somebody wants to buy a new washing machine, so what is the thing that wants you to buy a washing machine more?
- Reading about the functionality of the product in a review
- Seeing a live presentation about its working
Moreover, you can make use of tools to make a simple landing page where people can come and sign up for the webinar. Webinars are an amazing way to engage with your customers and show them the product that you’re promoting live.
What you can do with webinar:
- tell people your personal history with the product
- present the product’s features
- talk about its benefits and drawbacks
- show different use cases of the product
- help your audience get the most out of it
Step 4: PPC advertising
So after trying all those things, your affiliate marketing business will start to picks up and this is the time when you can start thinking of paid advertising. What matters here is the conversion.
You can use PPC advertising for various things such as:
- to grow your email list
- make more sales
- to get visitors to sign up for your webinar
Now that you have understood what Affiliate Marketing is and how it is done, you might be keen to know where you can learn from. Let’s delve into some of the best Affiliate Marketing Blogs that you should subscribe this year. Here you go!
1. Smart Passive Income, Pat Flynn
The Smart Passive income blog run by Pat Flynn is something which he creates by sharing his own journey and experience on how he made huge money by selling an eBook. Pat Flynn is among the best affiliate marketers in the Internet marketing industry. The reason why you should read his blog is that if you entering the affiliate marketing industry and you want to turn your clicks into sales, nothing can define it perfectly other than Pat Flynn.
Below mentioned are some of the major reasons to subscribe to Pat Flynn’s blog:
- He’s a genuine marketing guru
- His blog has full of highly informative articles
- Spend 1 hour reading his blog every day, within a month, you will know most of the in’s and out’s of affiliate marketing.
- He never spam your email inbox with lots of sales pitches
- He shares all his affiliate marketing tips and secrets
- He shares secrets to run a successful online business
- He runs a YouTube channel and a Podcast series
- Learn a lot how he sells by spending some time on analyzing his blog, design, content etc
- The blog is a goldmine for all the affiliate marketer beginners
- He generally makes around 100,000 dollars every single month
- He does this without selling hard
2. Charles Ngo
If you are among the people who are just starting out a new venture, Charles Ngo blogs is the key. Starting out in a new undertaking can overwhelm your senses quickly. At the beginning we all are excited about the new idea, but as soon as we enter into it we get bombarded with info and start floundering around. So, to shape up you can go with Charles Ngo’s blog that is entirely focused on building systems and atomizing the processes that are involved in affiliate marketing. The blog is perfect thing to read as it will help up to clear things and allows you to build some structure. This you can follow in your everyday actions so you don’t lose sight of the end goal. Moreover, you can subscribe to his email that he sends weekly is full of business advice and affiliate marketing tips. You can get a good perspective of what it’s like being an affiliate marketer.
3. Shawn Collins (Affiliate Marketing Blog)
When it comes to list blogs of Affiliate Marketing, Shawn Collins is a popular name. He has been around since 1997 and he is among the co-founders of Affiliate Summit, a staple industry conference. Shawn is also the host of a podcast, This Is Affiliate Marketing and writes blog that will keep you up to date on what’s happening in the affiliate marketing industry. Moreover, his blog has notes on sessions from Affiliate Summit. In his blog, you will find the information about what is going and how you can improve. And, even if you prefer visual content, you can check out his affiliate tip TV channel on YouTube.
4. ShoutMeLoud, Harsh Agrawal
Harsh Agrawal is the founder of the blog ShoutMeloud. He started this blog back in 2008 and covers various topics such as blogging, technology, WordPress, SEO and many more. The good thing about his blog is that he often shares real case studies. He tells how to get more traffic on the website and, how to make money online etc. The income that he earns comes from different sources. The sources are consulting, AdSense, and affiliate marketing. Not only this, he also started to spread awareness about the importance of blogging. He does that by frequently conducting the blogging camps across the nation.
The reason to try ShoutMeLoud is that Harsh Agrawal is in the affiliate marketing game for a long time now. Harsh knows what he’s talking about ad what he is doing. In most of the blogs he gives valuable information to its visitors. And, even if you are a beginner to SEO, blogging, or affiliate marketing, it is advisable to go and check out his blog and should definitely subscribe to his blog.
The income of Harsh lies anywhere around $30000 to $50,000 every single month. Also, Harsh made $52,434 in the month of July 2017 from his blogs.
Conclusion
Under this blog, we have explained what Affiliate Marketing is and how it is beneficial for you. And, even if you are new to the business, you must keep in mind that the names which we have shared above, who are making thousands of dollars, were also newbies at some point. But this doesn’t mean you can just blindly go and do anything that you’re doing. You should be doing things correctly to expect money to fall on your lap.
Moving forward in the field of Affiliate Marketing is to move forward with a lot of patience, hard work, and consistency. Affiliate Marketing may sound easy but could be tricky at times as the competition is really high at this time. Most of the newbies fail because they lack these qualities. So, don’t be discouraged even when things become difficult. It is just another industry type for which you need to gain understanding.
We hope through this blog, we have made your way easier to study about the affiliate marketing and we also have shared top blogs to let you know how it works in real life.
So, what’s your take on affiliate marketing? Share with us!