Online platforms offer numerous opportunities for you to earn money in your specific niche. The best way to do so is affiliate marketing. Let’s learn about affiliate marketing in detail and how you can earn a substantial amount of money through it.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a clever method of receiving commission from companies by marketing their products and services. You can be an affiliate and make money through a commission by being both the marketer and salesman of the seller. As an affiliate, you must present the products that you personally love and promote them to your audience. And if the seller makes a sell through your promotion, you earn money from them.
The job of an affiliate is quite easy. All you have to do is promote the products or services through your blog, website, or social media pages. The sales can be tracked from one site to another through affiliate links. If the merchant makes a sale when someone clicks on one of these links, you make a commission. If you how to use it properly, you can make handsome money regularly.
Different times of affiliate marketing
There are hundreds of ways of affiliate marketing. Here are some of the most used and effective types:
Website owners
You can easily play the role of affiliate marketer if you have your own website. Popular websites are generally contacted by brands or advertisers to promote their products or services. So if you have a website with massive traffic, you will automatically gain the affiliate opportunity. Just make sure the product is relevant to your content.
Pay-per-click or SEO affiliate
This type of affiliate uses their PPC skills to omit the gap between the consumers and the advertisers’ platform through SEO techniques or social media sharing.
Coupon sites
People love to get a discount while they are shopping. With various simple and easy online shopping options, sites offering discount coupons have become quite popular. They experience vast traffic all throughout the year. You can have great potential to become an affiliate marketer if you own one of these popular sites.
Review sites
People these days go through reviews before buying anything online or offline. So review sites receive a great number of visitors and become successful affiliate marketers.
Content websites
The most popular affiliate markers are bloggers. They write blogs or reviews about a certain product or service and make their readers aware of them. You can promote the products you already like and earn money through affiliate marketing. As you already have a follower base, you will attract the advertiser who would like to get the attention of the traffic on your blogs. When the readers purchase some of the products by clicking the links on your site, you will definitely get a commission from the company.
Social media
If you have a significant number of followers on social media, you can also become an affiliate. That is why you will see influencers promoting different products on their posts or videos without presenting them as an actual ad.
Emails or newsletters
Publishers create a database with the email address of the customers. Then they send the news of different offers, sales, or special events directly to the customers. This helps customers to go to the designated page directly. With every purchase through the links in the mails, the publishers make a commission.
Shopping platforms
Online shopping sites also work as affiliate marketers. They promote a specific brand through their websites and boost sales by amplifying the demand for the product. That is how they make commissions from different brands.
Offering incentives
In this type of affiliate marketing, the seller offers some type of incentive like cash back or virtual currency to the affiliate when the visitors click on the particular link and buy something. You can make your own purchase by using those incentives later. You may not receive a monetary commission, but some kind of incentive in return.
Everything about the commission
There is no fixed commission that an affiliate receives. It is purely based on the company and the type of product or service they are selling. Generally, the minimum commission is at least 5% on every sale and the maximum can go up to 40% per sale. Some affiliate marketing programs give a flat amount of money as a commission rather than a certain percentage.
Cookies
Websites track their users to some extent in order to understand their behavior and browsing patterns. They do it to offer the visitors a more suitable navigation and buying experience. It is done by cookies. They can also determine which links prompted the website visit. Merchants use cookies to track the source of the click that created the traffic so they can give the commission to the right person.
Cookie duration
The lifespan of a cookie is also very important. It determines whether you will be rewarded for that certain purchase directed by the links you affiliated. Suppose an affiliate program has a 24 hours cookie lifespan. A visitor who has visited the website through your affiliate link needs to make the purchase within 24 hours. If they buy after 24 hours, you will not be credited for the sale. Hence you will not get a commission. So cookies with a longer lifespan are more profitable for affiliate marketers.
Click attributes
There are two ways the attribution of the clicks is measured.
First click
In this model, you as an affiliate get commissions when a buyers click on the link you provided, visits the website for the first time, and makes a purchase. The payout depends on the duration of the cookie. Suppose a buyer visits a certain website for the first time through your links. He then buys a product a year later after visiting the same site many more times rough other affiliate links, the sale is still credited to you.
Last click
This is the most used model. Here the last link that prompted the sale is rewarded with 100% credit of the purchase.
