What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing involves earning a commission by promoting a product or service made by another retailer or advertiser. It is a monetization model where an affiliate partner is rewarded a payout for providing a specific result to the retailer or advertiser.
Typically, the result is a sale. But some programs can reward you for leads, free-trial users, clicks to a website. Or getting downloads for an app.
Is affiliate marketing worth it?
There’s no doubt affiliate marketing is worth it, given its growth in popularity. Statista estimates the affiliate marketing industry will reach $8.2 billion by 2022, up from $5.4 billion in 2017. It’s also a low- to no-cost business venture you can profit from immensely.
While industry growth is a good indication of success, entrepreneurs also take this referral marketing route for a few other reasons.
Here are two reasons why you should consider doing affiliate marketing:
1. Low-cost and low-risk
Starting a business means incurring upfront costs for products, employees, equipment, rent, and so on. This makes it risky and expensive. With affiliate marketing, all you need is a website. Even if it doesn’t work out, all you’ve wasted is time and a little bit of money.
2. Easy to scale
A typical salesperson only sells products from one company. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote products from many different companies and earn commissions from all of them.
How does affiliate marketing work?
- You show an ad or a link for Store Z on your website, blog, or social network.
- A customer clicks your unique link.
- The customer makes a purchase in Store Z.
- The affiliate network records the transaction.
- The purchase is confirmed by Store Z.
- You get paid a commission.
In fact, commission rates vary depending on the company and the offer. On the low end, you’ll earn about 5% of the sale but, with some arrangements. Also you can earn as much as 50%, usually when promoting a class or event. There are also affiliate marketing programs that provide a flat rate per sale instead of a percentage.
How to get started with Affiliate Marketing
Decide on a platform
Theoretically, you can do affiliate marketing on any platform. Even Instagram works.However, it’s much easier to build an audience and increase your affiliate sales via one of two channels: a blog or YouTube channel.
Once your site is up, optimize it for search engines so that you have a better chance of ranking. From there, you’re free to add affiliate links in your content. (There is an art to doing this, which we’ll cover later in this guide).
Choose your niche
If you’re starting a blog today, you’re facing a ton of competition. Statista estimates that the number of bloggers in the U.S will reach 31.7 million by 2020.
Choose a topic that focuses on a specific category. For example, the topic of “food” is an enormous category. Rather than tackling that, try something more specific, like grilling food.
Keeping your topics tight can help you build a more focused audience and potentially help you rank higher in search engines.
Create great content
In fact, if you want your affiliate site to succeed, you need to create high-quality content where your affiliate links fit naturally.
Convert clicks to sales
In affiliate marketing, two conversions need to take place for you to make money.
The first conversion is the click to the product page,
You’re 100% in control of this action. Use the tactics above to improve your chances of getting that click.
The second conversion is the visitor purchasing the product. In the case of affiliate marketing, the merchant controls the checkout, and their conversion rates are out of your control.