what is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful ways to generate income online. Regardless of your niche, the upside with affiliate marketing is almost limitless if you go about it the right way! In this chapter, we'll look at exactly how affiliate marketing works with the pros and cons, are you a good fit for it, and how much you can earn from it.
Part of the beauty of affiliate marketing is that you won't have to spend time creating products that serve your audience - because, guess what? The possibility of those products already exists. Because of that, affiliate marketing is an opportunity that anyone can take advantage of, and it is easy to start.
But before we explore the many ways affiliate marketing can do wonders for you and your business, we must first understand what affiliate marketing is. By setting that foundation, you will take the right steps towards doing affiliate marketing the right way - in a way that truly serves your audience.
Affiliate marketing is all around us - and you've probably joined affiliate marketing without realizing it! If you ever click on a link to a product or service being offered on another website in a blog post, there is a good chance for the owner of the website where you originally clicked on the link from your purchase. A commission was received.
Yes, affiliate marketing is everywhere — but the point here is that very few people understand how to take full advantage of it. In fact, I believe that passive income is the world's most untrained source for generating passive income! It is a beautiful process that is outlined in full, and I am excited to share with you how it all works.
Ready? Lets get to do it . Here is What to do except in this chapter.
There are two ways to get involved in affiliate marketing - either as a product owner or as an affiliate marketer. In this series, we are going to focus on how to do affiliate marketing on behalf of the affiliate market.
If it describes you, the products exist right now that people in your target market are probably already buying, and if you can be the resource that recommends those products, you can generate a commission as a result .
If you are not ready to create your product or service, affiliate marketing can be a particularly good option, but you want to recommend products to your audience that may be useful to them.
Affiliate marketing can also be a good fit for a wide range of people because you can apply a bunch of different marketing methods to promote affiliate products and services. These include the same marketing methods you're already using - things like search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, content marketing, and display advertising. You can also take advantage of other nifty ways to market products like product reviews and unboxings.
Lastly, it is important to remember that affiliate marketing works best when you are honest and confident about the product you are promoting. If you know you can help people, and it is only with affiliate marketing that they sell their own products. If you go with an instant-rich mindset, you will not be impressed with your results.
Let us explain how affiliate marketing works. There are three main players in the affiliate marketing system:
You and your website - "affiliates".
Affiliate company (or network). In the simplest affiliate arrangement, you work directly with the same company to promote one or more products. There are more complex affiliate networks that offer the opportunity to earn affiliate revenue on a range of products such as Amazon, Rakuten, Clickbank and ShareAsale.
Customer. This is a member of your audience who uses your affiliate link to purchase products from an affiliate company or network.
A company offering an affiliate marketing program may call it by a different name - these programs are also commonly called partner programs or referral programs.
Here's how each party benefits from affiliate marketing:
With your recommendation, your audience learns about a product, course, or tool that may be useful to them;
By your recommendation, the company selling the product, course, or equipment gets new customers that they might not have otherwise found;
As a result of sales to your audience, the company pays you a commission.
When done properly, affiliate marketing can be a win-win. But there is one thing at its center: the trust of your audience. When your audience believes that you have their best interests at heart and trust your recommendations, then all three parties ultimately benefit in the affiliate marketing relationship.
Many of the links on this page are affiliate links, which means I get a commission if someone clicks on the link and buys the linked product or service.
If someone clicks on my affiliate link for the web hosting company Bluehost that I use, what they see and suggest is:
Screenshot of Bluehost affiliate landing page
My affiliate landing page on Bluehost's website. If a customer buys a web hosting plan from Bluehost after visiting this page, I receive a commission from Bluehost for referral.
And when they click on my affiliate link for ConvertKit, I'll see what the email service provider suggests to me:
The screenshot of the SPI affiliate landing page displays on ConvertKit how affiliate marketing works.
My affiliate landing page on ConvertKit's website.
As we discussed above, you can also earn affiliate commissions by signing up with an affiliate network. One of the most popular is the Amazon Associates Program, which you can read more about in Chapter 8.
You can easily find tons of other examples of affiliate marketing "in the wild". This is because affiliate marketing is essentially about sharing your affiliate links, so however you choose to share those links - whether it's on your website, on social media like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, or your list For via email - well, affiliate marketing is in action!
Of course, there is a whole lot more to successful affiliate marketing than affiliate link sharing! What we will talk about next will be to start with the important steps you need to follow to get started with affiliate marketing.
Now, these steps are certainly accurate - you can make money with affiliate marketing without having to find a product to promote in advance! But more importantly, you should not have affiliate marketing without establishing trust with your audience. Listener first, always.
This is why my method for successful affiliate marketing is as follows:
SPI-LeadPages link in podcast transcript
Another example of affiliate marketing in action, this time is the sharing of an affiliate link in the show notes of an episode of LeadPass founder Clay Collins's Smart Passive Income (SPI) podcast.
In this YouTube video, there was a panel discussion between me and several course creators, which is available for an online course creation platform that I am an affiliate of. Although I shared my Teaching Affiliate link in the show notes, the primary purpose of the video was to provide value to my audience, not to promote the link.
In the next chapter, we will move on from our methodology for successful affiliate marketing in more depth, but now let's talk a little more about the pros and cons of affiliate marketing.
Pros:
Low barrier to entry. Affiliate marketing is easy to start, and costs are low. Most affiliate programs are free to join, and you will not have to create products, stock or ship products, which also means less hassle / responsibility.
low risk. You are not the owner of the product, so if a customer does not buy you lose nothing.
Passive Income Capability. Affiliate marketing offers passive income potential.
More freedom. When you start earning a passive income, you can work from anywhere and anytime, as long as you have Internet access.
Opposition:
Not quick fix It can take time to generate the amount of traffic needed to get enough income.
Less control. You do not own or control the product / service you are recommending, so you cannot control the quality or customer experience.
Competition and audience fatigue. An attractive affiliate program means that you can compete with others for customers.
Get tired If they get too much promotion from you, then the listeners can also "offer fatigue".
Not all affiliate programs are created equal. While mostly vibration
Hey will Doing your homework is important
Danger of link hijacking. Unattached individuals can hijack your affiliate link, known as "linkjacking", possibly stealing your commission in the process.
That said, this is not the way to get rich quick. Like all passive income strategies, it takes time and effort to create a decent revenue stream. Although affiliate marketing has been my number one source of income for some time, it took me a while to get to where I am, including building close relationships with the companies to which I belong.
I have done a really good job with affiliate marketing over the last 10 years - but it has taken a lot of time and hard work to reach that point.
So, how much can you do after getting up and running with affiliate marketing? It mainly depends on how committed you are to making it work and how much time, energy and attention you want to put into it. It also rests on some other factors:
The commission percentage you get for each sale of an associated product or service.
Size of your audience.
How successful are you in promoting those products or services to your audience.
The specific commission percentage may vary depending on the company you associate with the partner, and the type of products or services you promote.
Digital products and services typically offer higher margins due to their lower cost of production and fulfillment - there are no raw materials, manufacturing, shelf space, shipping costs, etc. These margins can be up to 50 percent. On the other hand, due to all of the above costs, physical products offer low-digit margins, sometimes in single digits.
Thankfully, there is no real limit on how much you can make as an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing can be a great way to increase your existing income, or you can become your main source of income, if you are willing to make a commitment.
But in both cases, if you are looking for long term success with affiliate marketing, then you have to be prepared to do it correctly.
The biggest element of success with affiliate marketing? believe. First earn trust from your audience, and only recommend affiliate products that you have used yourself and know that your audience will benefit from it.
and you know what? Many people do it incorrectly by taking an income-first rather than service-first approach. These people push random products and promote them without providing true value to their audience. This has given affiliate marketing a very bad rap in some quarters, making many moralistic entrepreneurs wary of affiliate marketing.
But thankfully, you can do it right, maintaining the trust of your audience and thanking them for their recommendations. In the next chapter, we will talk about getting started as an affiliate marketer and make sure that you know things right from the beginning.
Part of the beauty of affiliate marketing is that you won't have to spend time creating products that serve your audience - because, guess what? The possibility of those products already exists. Because of that, affiliate marketing is an opportunity that anyone can take advantage of, and it is easy to start.
But before we explore the many ways affiliate marketing can do wonders for you and your business, we must first understand what affiliate marketing is. By setting that foundation, you will take the right steps towards doing affiliate marketing the right way - in a way that truly serves your audience.
Affiliate marketing is all around us - and you've probably joined affiliate marketing without realizing it! If you ever click on a link to a product or service being offered on another website in a blog post, there is a good chance for the owner of the website where you originally clicked on the link from your purchase. A commission was received.
Yes, affiliate marketing is everywhere — but the point here is that very few people understand how to take full advantage of it. In fact, I believe that passive income is the world's most untrained source for generating passive income! It is a beautiful process that is outlined in full, and I am excited to share with you how it all works.
Ready? Lets get to do it . Here is What to do except in this chapter.
- So What Is Affiliate Marketing, Exactly?
- Who Is a Good Fit for Affiliate Marketing?
- The Nuts & Bolts of Affiliate Marketing
- Examples of Affiliate Marketing
- The Steps to Becoming an Affiliate Marketer
- The Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing
- How Much You Can Earn Via Affiliate Marketing
- Doing Affiliate Marketing the Right Way
So what is affiliate marketing
As a brief refresher, affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting another person's (or company's) product. You get a product that you like, promote it to your audience, and earn a piece of profit for each sale that you make. This is similar to a commission-earning salesperson, except that you do not work for the company. Instead, it prefers to earn rewards for sending a new customer to the company.There are two ways to get involved in affiliate marketing - either as a product owner or as an affiliate marketer. In this series, we are going to focus on how to do affiliate marketing on behalf of the affiliate market.
Who is a good fit for affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing can be a great choice for online entrepreneurs, bloggers, and indeed anyone who has a website and is ready to create an audience they can serve authentically.If it describes you, the products exist right now that people in your target market are probably already buying, and if you can be the resource that recommends those products, you can generate a commission as a result .
If you are not ready to create your product or service, affiliate marketing can be a particularly good option, but you want to recommend products to your audience that may be useful to them.
Affiliate marketing can also be a good fit for a wide range of people because you can apply a bunch of different marketing methods to promote affiliate products and services. These include the same marketing methods you're already using - things like search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, content marketing, and display advertising. You can also take advantage of other nifty ways to market products like product reviews and unboxings.
Lastly, it is important to remember that affiliate marketing works best when you are honest and confident about the product you are promoting. If you know you can help people, and it is only with affiliate marketing that they sell their own products. If you go with an instant-rich mindset, you will not be impressed with your results.
The nuts and bolts of affiliate marketing
Let us explain how affiliate marketing works. There are three main players in the affiliate marketing system:
You and your website - "affiliates".
Affiliate company (or network). In the simplest affiliate arrangement, you work directly with the same company to promote one or more products. There are more complex affiliate networks that offer the opportunity to earn affiliate revenue on a range of products such as Amazon, Rakuten, Clickbank and ShareAsale.
Customer. This is a member of your audience who uses your affiliate link to purchase products from an affiliate company or network.
A company offering an affiliate marketing program may call it by a different name - these programs are also commonly called partner programs or referral programs.
Here's how each party benefits from affiliate marketing:
With your recommendation, your audience learns about a product, course, or tool that may be useful to them;
By your recommendation, the company selling the product, course, or equipment gets new customers that they might not have otherwise found;
As a result of sales to your audience, the company pays you a commission.
When done properly, affiliate marketing can be a win-win. But there is one thing at its center: the trust of your audience. When your audience believes that you have their best interests at heart and trust your recommendations, then all three parties ultimately benefit in the affiliate marketing relationship.
Examples of affiliate marketing
What does affiliate marketing look like? If you have seen my website, you can come to my resources page. This page has a list of recommended resources — products, services, apps, and more — to help my audience build their online businesses.Many of the links on this page are affiliate links, which means I get a commission if someone clicks on the link and buys the linked product or service.
If someone clicks on my affiliate link for the web hosting company Bluehost that I use, what they see and suggest is:
Screenshot of Bluehost affiliate landing page
My affiliate landing page on Bluehost's website. If a customer buys a web hosting plan from Bluehost after visiting this page, I receive a commission from Bluehost for referral.
And when they click on my affiliate link for ConvertKit, I'll see what the email service provider suggests to me:
The screenshot of the SPI affiliate landing page displays on ConvertKit how affiliate marketing works.
My affiliate landing page on ConvertKit's website.
As we discussed above, you can also earn affiliate commissions by signing up with an affiliate network. One of the most popular is the Amazon Associates Program, which you can read more about in Chapter 8.
You can easily find tons of other examples of affiliate marketing "in the wild". This is because affiliate marketing is essentially about sharing your affiliate links, so however you choose to share those links - whether it's on your website, on social media like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, or your list For via email - well, affiliate marketing is in action!
Of course, there is a whole lot more to successful affiliate marketing than affiliate link sharing! What we will talk about next will be to start with the important steps you need to follow to get started with affiliate marketing.
Steps to Becoming an Affiliate Marketer
In later chapters, we will cover Neat Gritry, beginning with affiliate marketing. For now, I want to give you a high-level overview of the steps involved. Several how-to guides for affiliate marketing suggest a series of similar steps:- Find the company and product you want to promote.
- Sign up as an affiliate.
- Get your unique affiliate link and add it to your site.
- A visitor to your website clicks on the link, which takes them to a third party page.
- If the visitor makes a purchase, you receive a commission based on the value of the item purchased.
Now, these steps are certainly accurate - you can make money with affiliate marketing without having to find a product to promote in advance! But more importantly, you should not have affiliate marketing without establishing trust with your audience. Listener first, always.
This is why my method for successful affiliate marketing is as follows:
- First, build a relationship with your audience.
- Then, identify a product that suits your audience's needs.
- Next, use and test the product to make sure it is recommended to your audience, so you don't risk taking advantage of their trust.
- Show your audience solid evidence that the product does what it promises through a blog post or case study on your website or YouTube channel.
- Then- and only then! You can start promoting the product to your audience and hopefully start earning some affiliate income when they buy it.
- This approach puts the needs of your audience front and center, setting you up for success with affiliate marketing.
SPI-LeadPages link in podcast transcript
Another example of affiliate marketing in action, this time is the sharing of an affiliate link in the show notes of an episode of LeadPass founder Clay Collins's Smart Passive Income (SPI) podcast.
In this YouTube video, there was a panel discussion between me and several course creators, which is available for an online course creation platform that I am an affiliate of. Although I shared my Teaching Affiliate link in the show notes, the primary purpose of the video was to provide value to my audience, not to promote the link.
In the next chapter, we will move on from our methodology for successful affiliate marketing in more depth, but now let's talk a little more about the pros and cons of affiliate marketing.
Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing
Like anything, affiliate marketing fluctuates. In this series, I give you the guidance that you need to go about affiliate marketing in a smart way so that you can make the most of the opportunity from there and avoid the potential downside. Here are the main pros and cons of affiliate marketing.Pros:
Low barrier to entry. Affiliate marketing is easy to start, and costs are low. Most affiliate programs are free to join, and you will not have to create products, stock or ship products, which also means less hassle / responsibility.
low risk. You are not the owner of the product, so if a customer does not buy you lose nothing.
Passive Income Capability. Affiliate marketing offers passive income potential.
More freedom. When you start earning a passive income, you can work from anywhere and anytime, as long as you have Internet access.
Opposition:
Not quick fix It can take time to generate the amount of traffic needed to get enough income.
Less control. You do not own or control the product / service you are recommending, so you cannot control the quality or customer experience.
Competition and audience fatigue. An attractive affiliate program means that you can compete with others for customers.
Get tired If they get too much promotion from you, then the listeners can also "offer fatigue".
Not all affiliate programs are created equal. While mostly vibration
Hey will Doing your homework is important
Danger of link hijacking. Unattached individuals can hijack your affiliate link, known as "linkjacking", possibly stealing your commission in the process.
How Much through Affiliate Marketing Can You Earn
The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you do not have to invest time and effort to create a product to sell. As soon as you have a platform to sell it, you can start selling something as an affiliate. In this way, affiliate marketing can be a great way to earn some extra income without any hassle or upfront costs.That said, this is not the way to get rich quick. Like all passive income strategies, it takes time and effort to create a decent revenue stream. Although affiliate marketing has been my number one source of income for some time, it took me a while to get to where I am, including building close relationships with the companies to which I belong.
I have done a really good job with affiliate marketing over the last 10 years - but it has taken a lot of time and hard work to reach that point.
So, how much can you do after getting up and running with affiliate marketing? It mainly depends on how committed you are to making it work and how much time, energy and attention you want to put into it. It also rests on some other factors:
The commission percentage you get for each sale of an associated product or service.
Size of your audience.
How successful are you in promoting those products or services to your audience.
The specific commission percentage may vary depending on the company you associate with the partner, and the type of products or services you promote.
Digital products and services typically offer higher margins due to their lower cost of production and fulfillment - there are no raw materials, manufacturing, shelf space, shipping costs, etc. These margins can be up to 50 percent. On the other hand, due to all of the above costs, physical products offer low-digit margins, sometimes in single digits.
Thankfully, there is no real limit on how much you can make as an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing can be a great way to increase your existing income, or you can become your main source of income, if you are willing to make a commitment.
But in both cases, if you are looking for long term success with affiliate marketing, then you have to be prepared to do it correctly.
Doing Affiliate Marketing the Right Way
Many people worry about engaging with affiliate marketing, as it can make them thin or sell a lot. That's why I made it part of my mission to teach people how to do affiliate marketing in a way that makes it a win for everyone.The biggest element of success with affiliate marketing? believe. First earn trust from your audience, and only recommend affiliate products that you have used yourself and know that your audience will benefit from it.
and you know what? Many people do it incorrectly by taking an income-first rather than service-first approach. These people push random products and promote them without providing true value to their audience. This has given affiliate marketing a very bad rap in some quarters, making many moralistic entrepreneurs wary of affiliate marketing.
But thankfully, you can do it right, maintaining the trust of your audience and thanking them for their recommendations. In the next chapter, we will talk about getting started as an affiliate marketer and make sure that you know things right from the beginning.
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