What is Affiliate Marketing and How You Can Do It?
What if you wake up in the morning, just turn on your laptop and see something like this!
Passive Income
That’s the prettiest dream to make money while sleep.
Am I Right?
But the question is how to do affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is simple!
You join affiliate networks, like Godaddy Affiliate Program to promote their products and if people end up buying, you earn a reasonable commission.
If you own a product and want to increase your sale then you can hire promoters by offering them financial incentives through an affiliate program. If you have no product and still want to earn money then you can promote other products that you feel have to value in the consumer market and earn income as an affiliate marketer. Even you can start your own blog and make money by promoting products on a blog.
Today, we will discuss what affiliate marketing actually is and how to get started to generate successful sales. So let’s dive into my affiliate marketing guide.
Ready?
Pat Flynn’s Definition
Here’s how Pat Flynn defines affiliate marketing in his Smart Passive Income
“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.”
Entrepreneur’s Definition
Here’s the Entrepreneur’s definition of affiliate marketing
A way for a company to sell its products by signing up individuals or companies (“affiliates”) who market the company’s products for a commission
While CJ defines affiliate marketing as:
https://www.cj.com/what-is-affiliate-marketing
Wikipedia’s 4 Key Players in Affiliate Marketing
However, Wikipedia says that there are 4 core players involved in affiliate marketing
- The Merchant
- Network
- Publisher
- Customer
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The Merchant
The main key player is known as the creator, retailer, brand or vendor. The merchant can be a small as well as a big company who produces the actual product like Hewlett Packard manufactures the laptops/computers and other accessories. It can also be an individual like Syed Bulkhi who sells WordPress plugins, for example, Wp forms, Seed Prod and OptinMonster
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Network
This is the intermediary medium between the affiliate and the merchant. It offers incentives for the affiliate on selling products and take care of payments.
You can arrange a direct revenue sharing with the merchants and let the Commission Junction and the ClickBank handle product delivery and the payments.
But most of the time, the merchants have joined the affiliate networks and want some affiliates to promote their products. In that case, as an affiliate marketer, you also have to join that affiliate network and promote that merchant’s products who is committed to giving a definite revenue share on the sale of the product.
So, you can find a huge database of lots of products by various merchants on an affiliate network. You have a choice to choose the product to promote which you think has a value in your audience.
If you are going to promote the consumer products then Amazon is the best affiliate network among all. You can join their Amazon Associate affiliate program (launched in 1996) absolutely free and start promoting products.
It’s totally free and anyone can join this program. After joining create custom affiliate links of amazon products and if anyone buys any of these then you earn a commission.
(Clickbank is an example of a network)
But most of the time, the merchants have joined the affiliate networks and want some affiliates to promote their products. In that case, as an affiliate marketer, you also have to join that affiliate network and promote that merchant’s products who are committed to giving a definite revenue share on the sale of the product.
So, you can find a huge database of lots of products by various merchants on an affiliate network. You have a choice to choose the product to promote which you think has a value in your audience.
If you are going to promote the consumer products then Amazon is the best affiliate network among all. You can join their Amazon Associate affiliate program (launched in 1996) absolutely free and start promoting products.
It’s totally free and anyone can join this program. After joining create custom affiliate links of amazon products and if anyone buys any of these then you earn a commission.
-
Publisher
Commonly known as an affiliate who publishes the merchant’s product on its various channels e.g. on blogs, Vlogs or social media. The publisher can also be an individual or an entire company that makes a few thousand dollars or tens of millions of dollars as commission each year.
Actually, it is the marketing phase where a publisher promotes single or multiple affiliate products and tries to convince potential customers of the value of the merchant’s product and they actually end up buying it.
For example, it can be a review of the merchant’s product on a blog:
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Customer:
This is the part where an affiliated product is used. Yes! It’s the consumer who just ends up buying. He is not involved in any commission in the affiliate system and no revenue is shared with him.
The affiliate will market the customer through various channels like a social network, YouTube Channel, content marketing using an SEO optimized blog.
Whether it totally depends on the affiliate whether he is revealing his identity to his audience or not. Some of the affiliates let their consumer know that they are marketing the product and some don’t.
Anyhow, every affiliate network provides a unique tracking ID to every affiliate which efficiently runs in the background, when the consumer follow the product and end up in buying the associated tracking ID tells the affiliate network system to whom (affiliate) the commission should be paid.
So, you can be a merchant or you may become an affiliate marketer. In the next article, we will emphasize on how to do affiliate marketing and start making money.
