Have you ever heard about affiliate marketing? And What is affiliate marketing?

The term Affiliate Marketing refers to promoting other’s business or products and earn a commission as a reward.

Affiliate marketing connects a business that has a product to sell with a marketer who can sell it.

Affiliate marketing is performance based. Thus advertisers only pay when affiliates deliver a specified customer action. In the e-commerce context, this action is typically an online purchase, which makes affiliate marketing very cost effective.

How Affiliate Marketing Works?

If you want to become a successful affiliate marketer, you must understand the dynamics of affiliate marketing,

It is easy to understand that every business wishes to scale up its revenues by attracting more customers. Since affiliate marketing is all about bringing in more customers, businesses see it as an important revenue stream

Let’s try to understand the mechanism of affiliate marketing.

Consider an e-commerce store, named ABC Inc., that sells clothing in the US. It has a website and the infrastructure for selling its products through various channels (online and traditional stores). However, ABC thinks that the current customer base is not sufficient for it business targets.

Now, to increase access to new markets and to a new customer base, ABC Inc. starts a partnership program wherein they commit to paying a commission for a certain sales target achieved by independent vendors who join the program. These vendors (who could be bloggers and other digital marketing professionals)  build websites and marketing campaigns that sell the products of ABC Inc. to their customers.

Why should you be an Affiliate Marketer?

A lot of people enter the world of online earning through affiliate marketing as it is easy to start with. Here are some of the reasons why you should get into affiliate marketing:

You don’t have to store any inventory: Although you get your commissions from an e-commerce site, the onus of the product, packaging, and support is entirely upon the store and not on you.

Easy to start: The investment required to get into affiliate marketing is not much. Apart from the costs associated with buying a domain and hosting it, there is no other cost involved except for maybe a tool or two (such as benchmarking tools to test product performance, and the like) which would still not put a dent in your wallet. You can write the articles by yourself; if you think writing is not something up your alley, you can outsource the content to freelance writers.

Work from the comfort of home: You don’t need to have any special degree or skill set to do affiliate marketing, so you can work from anywhere. All you need is a laptop and the Internet.

Key Factors For A Successful Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is an apple of blogger’s eye but every blogger must know which factors he should place first in order to become a successful affiliate marketer.

Choose the Right Product

You should develop the ability to choose the right product or service for your audience because this determines the success or failure of your affiliate marketing venture in promoting the products.

Revenue Share or Commission

Your commission basically depends on the volume of sales. However, a high volume of sales might not necessarily result in the maximum commission. Most of the successful affiliate programs offer initial commission on each signup and recurring commission on a monthly and yearly basis.

Be Honest to Your Audience

Sometimes novice bloggers make a mistake of exaggerating the details of the product or provide incorrect information to make a quick sale. Certainly, You should keep one thing in mind; you cannot fool your visitors all the time. Keep it simple and honest!

Make Your Content Sticky

You should educate your viewer but remember to keep it entertaining. Remember that engaging content results in better sales. This is very important in the context of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Ads

Once an affiliate marketer understands how to get paid, then begin promoting the advertiser’s products. Within the bounds of the program, the affiliate may choose any number of advertising and marketing channels, including but not limited to:

• Pay-per-click ads placed on the merchant’s behalf,
• Digital banner ads on content sites,
• Video ads on YouTube or similar,
• Social media posts,
• Or promotional, “advertorial” content.

It is for this reason that some experts refer to affiliate as a model rather than an advertising channel, since a good affiliate may use many promotional channels to drive sales.

Build Relationships with Affiliates

One important thing about affiliate marketing – or doing any business on the Internet for that matter – is to have patience. This is why you need to be affiliated with other affiliate marketers as well on a personal basis as the journey can sometimes be lonely. Therefore, being a part of a community gives you courage and the confidence to face difficulties. Also, you can learn a lot when you interact with other marketers. Consequently, join forums like Digital Point and Warrior Forum where you get to interact with the best of the affiliate community.