What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing has now become one of the fastest ways to make money online, especially for beginners. It gives you the chance to target likely customers despite their location in the globe. 

What You Need To Know

What would you like to promote? Affiliate marketing is no stranger to the Internet. It is simply a revenue sharing agreement between a website owner and an online merchant. The ads have to be placed in a site that you own to either help sell the merchant’s products or to send potential customers to the merchant’s site, all in exchange for a share of the profits. 

This offers a phenomenal opportunity for people who do not have a lot of startup capital or a lot of time to put together a giant campaign. However, having a website is not a ‘must’ for affiliate marketing.

Explaining Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has proven to be one of the most successful business models for many Internet marketers, due to its low barriers for entry. How can we explain affiliate marketing? Before getting into that, we must first understand the term “internet marketing”. Internet marketing refers to marketing and advertising efforts which use the email and web to drive direct sales. Basically, using the Internet to sell your products/services. There are many branches of internet marketing.

Essentially, affiliate marketing is just one of those branches. It’s a form of marketing based upon performance in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.

In layman’s terms, an affiliate is just like a virtual salesperson. When someone buys something from a merchant as a result of his or her actions, they get paid a commission. 

Every affiliate is given a unique affiliate link. Whenever the affiliate receives visitors to click on their link to purchase something or take an action, a lead or sale signal will be triggered on the merchant’s end and the affiliate will be paid a percentage of the sale. Some good examples of affiliate networks are ClickFunnels and JvZoo.

Even if your visitor leaves your website, a cookie would have been placed in his/her browser during their visit and the sale/lead signal will be triggered if they buy/perform the action on subsequent visits.

Types Of Affiliate Marketing

There are basically three types of Affiliate Marketing compensation models.

Cost Per Click (CPC): The site owners sometimes target their advertising to a broad group of people. The policy here for payment is for the site visitors to click on the product advertising and this is called cost per click.

Cost Per Sale (CPA): If there is a visitor to the site who has been referred by the marketers to purchase goods/products, and the visitor purchases products, the advertiser then gets a percentage of the sale for referring them to the site and that is called cost per sale or cost per acquisition.

Cost Per Lead (CPL): Sometimes, a visitor referred by the marketer will fill out a form on the referred site. When the visitor fills out that form, the marketers get their commissions for the signup or the payment is also structured as cost per lead.

Making A Passive Income From Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative ways to earn passive income on the Internet, especially in 2019. It also requires the least amount of financial investment in order to get started. Even if you are flat broke, it is possible for you to make money online. 

The Internet has leveled the playing field for the aspiring entrepreneur. You no longer need to have the financial backing of a venture capitalist. You are no longer required to have deep pockets in order to finance or start an online business and start earning passive income on the Internet.

Once you set up your links and get your affiliate marketing campaigns out there on the Internet, your business can literally be run on autopilot and you can start making money passively, even in your sleep.

Start Your Own Affiliate Blog

One of the best and easiest way to make money through affiliate marketing is through blogs. All over the Internet, you’ll find affiliate marketing blogs that have been abandoned – not blogs about affiliate marketing, but blogs that would-be marketers had set up to promote affiliate opportunities. So why have these blogs been abandoned?

In some cases, the blog was set up to promote just one offer or one event – and after that’s finished, the marketer has no further use for the blog. In essence, they turned what could have been a great long-term tool into a resource that would benefit them in the short-term only. Far wiser to have a blog that covers one whole niche or popular sub-niche, so that additional offers could have been presented after the initial one ended, thereby further capitalizing the traffic flow built during that early push.

For affiliates, there are three common types of blog posts:

* Posts were written to drive traffic directly to the affiliate offer;

* Post giving reviews of software or services you’re promoting; and

* Posts giving information of interest to your target market.

While affiliate marketing blogs are just one aspect of successful affiliate strategies, they are the one area where you always have more to do and can always improve upon what’s there already. And handled properly, you’ll never need to abandon your blogs but instead will find them an ongoing source of affiliate commissions as your virtual empire grows!

Final Thoughts

Becoming successful at internet marketing is not just about finding out what is affiliate marketing and jumping in feet first. Having realistic expectations about the time investment that will be required, not falling prey to any of the get-rich-quick scams out there and taking the time to really educate yourself about affiliate programs and learning how to use the best tools available will save you a lot of headaches and help to ensure your success.