How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing [Beginners Guide]
So you have probably heard of Affiliate Marketing and people making money from it.
But what exactly is affiliate marketing and how you can too make money online via affiliate marketing right from the comfort of your own home.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is basically a commission based system in which you promote other people’s products and they pay you commission.
To put it simple terms:
- You find a product you think is interesting.
- You get a custom link to promote on your blog or youtube channel.
- Now every sale that is generated through that link will earn you commission.
There are 4 main components in Affiliate Marketing:
1. The Merchant/Vendor
This is the person who has created the product or the one who is the owner of the product.
The product can be of any type SAAS product like software, physical or digital product.
So to increase his sales a vendor can start affiliate program and ask people to promote his products in a return of a commission.
The commission can range from 1% to 75% or even more.
It depends on the type of product you are promoting.
But from what I have seen digital and saas products have much higher commission rates than physical products.
2. The Affiliate
This is the person who joins an affiliate program of the person who already has and product.
He gets his custom links to promote and when someone buys through that link, he then earns a commission.
Straight forward, right?
3. Affiliate Network
Affiliate network is a platform where you can find both vendors and affiliates.
Vendors sign up for the network to list their products and affiliate sign up to find products to promote.
If you do not want to setup your own payment system and manage affiliates then this network manages all your affiliates and payments too for a small fee.
4. The Customer or Buyer
This the person who buys the products that you promote.
The buyer does not know whether he is buying directly or buying via an affiliate.
But I recommend publishers or affiliates to disclose that they will be purchasing via an affiliate link and you will make commission.
If you add a disclaimer like this in your blog then it will only build trust and increase conversions.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Suppose you have a blog and you are driving traffic to your blog via organic traffic, paid advertising, etc.
Now there will come a time when you are not being able to generate any more traffic or you have hit the limit.
So what to do in such situation?
This is when website owners make use of affiliate program and affiliates to drive more traffic to their website or product.
Wondering how affiliate links look?
They do not look much different all they have is a bit of code or variable in them to identify and track the links.
Say www.example.com is the wesite.
So affiliate no A will get a link something like this www.example.com?affiliate=A
Affiliate no B will get a link something like this www.example.com?affiliate=B
and the order goes on.
If you take a close look at the URL, you will find ‘?’ this symbol.
This is use to track the affiliates, which helps the product owners to know which affiliate actually made the sale.
For ex:
Both the affiliates A and B send traffic to the same website www.example.com
The website owner will know which affiliate made the sale using this tag
www.example.com?affiliate=B
How To Become an Affiliate?
There are 4 main ways to become and affiliate of a product or a program:
1. Check for Affiliate Links on Pages
If you are using any SAAS product then go to the website and checkout either header or footer links, I am pretty sure there will be an link to their affiliate program.
If there is then you can apply for their affiliate program directly.
2. Join Affiliate Networks
As I mentioned earlier you can join an affiliate network and there you can literally find thousands of product that you can promote.
I personally like affiliate networks because you get all you data and payments overview in just one place.
You can manage all the products you are promoting and tracking links and id’s in one dashboard.
3. Outreach For Companies
There are certain companies which do not have a referral program in public, but they take affiliate registrations if you can ensure that you will bring quality leads and if you are really established in that niche.
All you can do is reach out to their support and inquire about the affiliate program, if they are interested they will respond you.
4. Let People Reach Out To You
If you have a well established blog in a particular niche and you are getting good amount of traffic to your blog, then product owners will personally contact you with affiliate deals.
This way you can charge per lead or a fixed commission per purchase or even get paid to write a review.
So make sure you start a blog and works towards growing it.
Top Affiliate Networks You Can Join
As time goes by new affiliate marketplaces come and go but if I have to suggest a few then I would suggest already established affiliate networks out there.
I am currently on 4 affiliate networks out of these.
Each affiliate network has its pros and cons.
Amazon Associates affiliate program has the least commission pay but the highest conversion rate and revenue generation.
So if you are creating a niche specific blog then you can checkout Amazon associates blog.
I have even heard people making over $25000 per month in commissions from Amazon Affiliate Program.
So what are you waiting for, get started today.
