What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing functions on the idea of promoting other people’s products or services, most of the times using an affiliate network to earn a commission if online audiences indeed buy/hire a particular brand’s products on the basis of your marketing.

Affiliate marketing is based on the concept of revenue sharing.

If you want to increase the sales of your product, promoters can be hired on the basis of a financial incentive to endorse your brands among their online communities & drive sales conversions.

If you have no products or services to sell, you can promote products or services that you deem valuables and earn an incentive as an Affiliate Marketer or Affiliate (plural: Affiliates).

Dive into DAB of India’s complete guide to affiliate marketing where we are answering 4 Big Questions that will help you explore how your brand can benefit from the most popular mode of digital marketing today.

Why Go for Affiliate Marketing?

• 81% of brands and 84% of publishers in the United States of America benefits from affiliate marketing
• Each year, the United States of America’s shows a hike of 10.1% in affiliate marketing spends. The totals spend on affiliate marketing were estimated to reach $6.8 billion by 2020.
• 16% of all online orders in 2018 can be attributed to the influence of affiliate marketing.
• Affiliate Marketer Jason Stone contributed $7 million in retail sales in the month of June & July of the year 2017.
  (Source: BigCommerce.com)

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

As the name suggests, Affiliating Marketing distributes product marketing responsibility among parties to obtain the benefit of the abilities & skills of various individuals with separate expertise. For affiliate marketing to work, there must be three parties:

The Brand

The seller or product creator, regardless of whether an independent business visionary or a solo entrepreneur is a seller, vendor, product maker, or retailer with a product to advertise. The item can be a physical article, similar to homemade merchandise, or service, similar to piano tutorials.

The brand doesn’t need to actively participate in marketing but it definitely does benefit from the profit growth because of the affiliate marketing done by the advertiser or affiliate.

The Affiliates

Also known as a publisher, an advertiser, being an affiliate can be a company or an individual that advertises the brand’s products to potential consumer audiences.

The affiliate is not only responsible to promote products but also to endorse the, & persuade the netizens within the scope of their reach into buying these products.

Affiliates can also choose a specific audience that adheres to their interest so that they can advertise the products and services that they actually find worth talking about.

Alliance marketing offers a great opportunity for exploring one’s interests and scopes as an individual & connecting to audiences that one would want to engage with.

Therefore, the Affiliates often times grow to become a personal brand themselves, tending to a niche online community that suits their interests.

The Buyers

Regardless of whether the buyer knows it or not, their purchases are the driving forces of affiliate marketing. Advertises endorses these products with them via web-based networking media, online journals, and sites.

When consumers buy the product, the seller and the affiliate share the profits. Sometimes the affiliate will choose to be upfront with the consumer by disclosing that they are receiving commission for the sales they make. Other times the consumer may be completely oblivious to the affiliate marketing infrastructure behind their purchase.

At the point when customers purchase the item, the dealer and the affiliate share the revenues.

How To Get Started?

Starting an affiliate marketing project I can be narrowed down to seven simple steps, let’s get started:

Decide on a Platform

Affiliate marketing can be performed on any platform. Having said that, it’s much more convenient to build a relevant community and boost sales through your affiliate services through a blog or a YouTube channel.

Blogging is easier and more economical as compared to a YouTube and there is a multitude of blogging tutorials online that can help you on how to get started right away at reasonable rates.

Once your blog site is up and running, optics it for search engines for a better ranking in their search results.

If you are considering creating a YouTube channel, you can also optimise your video uploaded on YouTube for free, which makes it ideal for people, and include affiliate links in the description.

Choose your niche

Many affiliate sites die due to a lack of consistency. It is much easier to press on & be consistent when the odds get tougher if you choose a topic that you are passionate about.

Even honest documentation of your experience & findings of a brand can help you create great content that attracts audiences & assure your growth. Finding your niche is crucial as brands often look for suitable & seasoned affiliates who can help their brand create quality content and ensure trustworthy marketing for increasing traffic and engagement.

Find affiliate programs to join

• High-paying, low-volume affiliate programs – These are affiliate programs for niche products with high revenue.
• Low-paying, high-volume affiliate programs – These are affiliate programs for products with low payouts but audience appeal.
• High-paying, high-volume affiliate programs – These are affiliate programs for products with audience appeal, which also pay high incentives.

Deciding on a suitable affiliate program depends on your niche and scope of expertise.

Create great content

Creating super good content when affiliate links and relationships fit in organically is mandatory in order to make sure your affiliate site succeeds.

Curating content that goes an extra mile to solve the reader’s problems & offer a reliable solution adds great value to a brand.

Drive traffic to your affiliate site

Now that you have created amazing content, positioning it in the right way so that people read it for you to get more clicks is the task at hand.

For striving traffic to your affiliate site, you can consider the
following options :

– Paid traffic
– Search Engine Optimisation
– Build an email list

Get clicks on your affiliate links

In order to get clicks on your curated content, it is important to consider factors like link placement, the context of the products and services, and call our buttons to drive the consumer to take an action.

Convert clicks to sales

Two conversions must occur in order for your affiliate marketing to help you earn money, they are :

1. Click to visit the product page
2. Product purchase

The key is to identify merchants & programs that convert well and conduct affiliate marketing based on the premise of public income reports, collective & individual and most importantly market status.

Affiliate Marketing in a Nutshell

That is practically everything to know about the nuts and bolts of affiliate marketing. Although this is a huge industry today and there’s always more to learn and apply, we are sure that we have prepared you to get started with Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate marketing is no cakewalk, you can’t earn a great revenue overnight but with time, care, and consideration, you may simply have the option to manufacture a blog that will generate decent income with just a pinch of reinvention & creativity.

Are you interested in starting an Affiliate Marketing for your business?

Are you considering to advertise products and take up the role of an Affiliate Marketer?

Either way, find an affiliate program that suits your niche and start today!

Send in your experiences, opinions & thoughts to us in the comments section below.