Eric is a data scientist with a background in computer science, Mathematics, and statistics. Specialize in data mining, machine learning..
The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing content for Beginners
Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
Affiliate marketing continues to grow larger every year despite millions of people joining the Network, the same are new products and businesses inventions around the globe every day.
This simple step-by-step, Complete Affiliate Marketing Content is a walkthrough designed for beginners at heart without any obligation.
At the end of this content, you will be able to easily understand What is, and Why, Affiliate Marketing is?
The History of affiliate marketing, and Who can become an affiliate?
And how to position yourself on the winning side if you choose to become an Affiliate yourself.
Online marketing such as Affiliate marketing can be an amazing resource, that can earn you a full-time or extra income when done well.
Mostly online and even brick-and-mortar businesses since they both go hand in hand, and I will explain further later on in this content.
Firstly, let's take a closer look at the two words, affiliate, and marketing when mentioned.
What are Affiliation and Marketing?
Affiliation in a nontechnical definition is the official connection, association, or involvement with a brand, company, third party, or group, with the intent to achieve a common purpose.
But this time making money together.
Whereas, Marketing in a simple definition is engaging with your potential customers directly or indirectly.
With this understanding, let’s combine the two words and see what we make out of it…
Therefore, Affiliate marketing is a commission-based type of income earned as a result of promoting, recommending, and, leading potential consumers to services of third-party companies or products.
With the affiliate’s strategic marketing, being content or just an ad placed on his website.
Remember: This can be product selling, forms filling, test drive and many more.
Then the affiliate receives a commission as a profit for each successful task or sale completed by the consumer in accordance to the type of affiliate contract agreement.
The Origin and History of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing History Infographic
Definition of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a system, whereby a business pays a commission to a third-party individual, or an entire Affiliate Network for promoting, increasing traffic, converting customers and, sales to their business, using their marketing efforts.
Here, you sell other people’s products, for a share of the profit.
Example: SFI has the pay-per-action program, PPA for short, where they pay you on average $10 for each new affiliate you bring on board.
This is a profit-sharing system, basically based on selling other people’s products to a consumer by promoting a link on your website.
Please be mindful, that the product link can be in the form of the Ad banner, Text, HTML code, image, video, trial games, SaaS, and many more like these:
This link redirects the affiliate audience from their website to the original third-party product or merchant’s website. Examples like Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Esty, etc.
Link Promotion on Website Pages: Everything You should know
As an Affiliate, you have to find products you like in your space, a.k.a niche.
Promote them to your audience via a personal website or a blog, social media platforms, or any marketing channel, you are comfortable with.
If someone utilizes these links and visits the resulting third-party site, a cookie or pixel may be set in their web browser that will make it traceable for the affiliates to receive compensation if the customer makes a purchase, all depending on the type of commission model.
Pro Tip: [bctt tweet=” Seriously, the best part of affiliate marketing is you don’t need your products or website before you start making money. Even though I recommend setting up your website, you can start selling anything as soon as you join any affiliate network.” username=”amohericblog “]
What are HTTP Cookie and HTML Pixel?
HTTP Cookie
Probably, if it is your first time hearing a cookie, you will be like, what?
Wait, what are my cookies doing here, especially when you reside in the US region?
In digital marketing, an HTTP Cookie is simply a tracking code that is stored on the customer’s internet device (laptop, phone, etc.) for clicking on an affiliate link being ads, banners, images, games, trial apps, and more.
HTML Pixel
Whilst, Pixel is an HTML code snippet that loads whilst a user visits a website or opens an electronic mail.
The pixel is a web beacon, very useful for tracking user conduct and conversions.
With a monitoring Pixel, advertisers can collect statistics for their internet marketing, e-mail campaigns, or analysis.
For instance: Google ads use cookies to track and improve on what type of ads you prefer, through your activities, your search, and websites you have visited in the past.
Cookies help webmasters to understand your preference.
Most importantly, when a customer makes a purchase utilizing an affiliate link, the pixel bots go through the customers’ browsers to check if there are any affiliate cookies.
With the cookie, the merchant or third-party Networks can trace the affiliate link, time, and type of browser a customer used and made a purchase or not.
Familiarizing with the Affiliate link
The link or Affiliate link has several names to it, to familiarize with it, it can also be called ref links, referral links, hop links, and aff-links.
These links are personalized for each affiliate when you join any affiliate network, a specific link is given ending mostly with numbers and some characters.
For example: If I want to promote the SFI network I sign up on their website here.
Then after successful registration, a personalized link looking like http://SFI4.com/11548272 is given to me to share and refer to my audience.
These links can vary in different forms, depending on the type of Network you join. It can look like this:
Awesome Infographic on How Affiliate Marketing Works
Let’s see some short examples:
Let’s assume you are the Merchant and have a chocolate-producing factory, which means you make chocolates for sale.
In order to make more sales and profits, you announce to the public thus: Affiliates also called Publishers or Marketers.
Whomever is ready to help sell your products “the Chocolates”, will be awarded a percentage of the profit.
That’s when an affiliate walks in to discuss your term of contract, remember the profit-sharing demands on the Merchant’s own terms, the affiliate just has to agree or leave. Companies helping to make this easier online are termed as the Affiliates marketing Programs also known as The Affiliates Network.
If the Affiliate agrees with your terms, then He will find his ways of promoting and selling more Chocolates your factory produces for his shared commissions.
In this age of Technology and Digital trends, it is easy and prudent to create a second or multiple sources of income, such as an online business that can make you tons of money even when you sleep.
Termed as Passive Income. I call it the lazy Mechanism, but a real system, that exists for real people that seek financial freedom.
A powerful marketing strategy that helps products or businesses market their services easier, faster, and smarter.
Luckily, some vendors, also known as the merchant, offer a free trial and other handy tools like ad video, reviews, and just 1 dollar for a try, to make it easier for the affiliates to sell.
Perhaps, you have seen and read a whole lot on your screens or by word of mouth, that you can make real money online!
Now, how will you feel if you wake up early in the morning, open your laptop and observe something like this every day?
Online Media Masters
But before you get there, make sure you know;
The 4 Main Structures of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is made up of the merchant, Publisher, and consumer.
Hence, the created Affiliate Networks, also make the system very easy and large at vast, full of stocks to promote from their website.
The Network has categorized the affiliate structure into four core foundations. Thus;
The Merchantis also known as Advertiser or vendor.
The Network contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments
The Publisher is also known as the Affiliate or Marketer
The Customer is also called Consumer
The Merchant
The Merchant Is The Owner Of The Product
A merchant is a person or company involved in wholesale trade, especially one dealing with foreign countries or supplying goods to a particular trade. (Source: Google)
The merchant is the owner of the product, also known as the Creator, Brand, Retailer, Vendor, Advertiser, Shopkeeper, Tradesman, Distributor, or agent.
This is the company in need of customers, examples of such companies can be Samsung, and Apple producing Gadgets. Simply put, in affiliate marketing, a merchant is selling a product or service either online or offline.
To increase his sales, a merchant is most likely to adopt an affiliate program on his website or via the Network.
Reminder: the product can vary being a physical product like a car, bag, softwares like SaaS, Semrush, or a digital product like E-book.
It can also be an individual who sells his or her expert services online like freelancers on fiver.
The Network is also known as Multi-Level Marketing (MLM)
The Affiliate Network serves as the coordinator between the merchant and the Publishers.
The merchant announces his deals to the network companies, who intend to recruit Publishers that are already visiting the network sites in search of product deals to promote.
Such network companies also take care of the payments or Commissions as its term, the technical issues, and provide a dedicated affiliate manager to answer all the questions an affiliate might need.
It is the network, that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from, and, also takes care of the payments and shipment.
The Publisher is the person who searches for products and services of others to promote and earn a percentage on the sale.
These commissions can range higher, some to the extreme of 80% – 90% commission, Or even a lifetime passive income.
With the help of the network companies, the affiliates find it easy to get products to sell at all times.
The affiliate has to choose the type of products in his niche, that they wish to promote, then takes the product link from the network or the merchant website directly, promotes it on his website or blog, and sometimes even on social media if he doesn’t own a personal website.
Affiliate Personal Website Benefits
Preferably, the affiliates have their websites,since it gives them more platforms to advertise their products.
Other than, the social media and free ad blogs that allow a short description of your products.
And besides, an affiliate can get penalized on others’ networks for a breach of the policy rule.
More beneficially, having your blog also boosts revenue and trust-worthy of your buyers, hence creating recurring customers.
The affiliates’ website is mainly a content marketing blog, a convincing platform on how a business model and valuable service are, reviews, and details of a product.
All advertisements on the affiliate’s website, are the links redirecting back to the website of the original product.
Deploying various marketing campaigns, and, channels to sell more of the merchant’s products is very important.
Most affiliates hide under the affiliate programs to promote products, but the recent FTC guidelines enforce affiliates to be transparent. Therefore, stating a disclaimer.
The Customer
This is the person who ends up buying a product from the advertiser’s website.
The customer clicks on an ad or a product link and it’s taken by the flow of the internet to the merchant’s website,
when a purchase is made, the affiliate who placed the link or ad to refer the customer gets a commission.
It is as a result of the consumer’s purchase or completed action, that the affiliates get paid.
The best part is, that the consumer doesn’t have to pay extra money for the product.
The same price applies when buying directly from the vendor.
Some affiliate links even give an advantage to customers when used, they’ll be able to purchase some of the services or products at a more discounted rate.
Nothing worthwhile comes easily…Work, continuous work, and hard work is the only way to accomplish results that last.
-Hamilton Holt
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