AFFILIATE MARKETING EXPLAINED

Pros & Cons Of Affiliate Marketing

• Easy to get started.
• Very low-cost business.
• Unlimited earning potential.
• 1000s of different niches and industries.
• Work from anywhere in the world.
• The long term passive income.
• It requires patience and dedication to make it work (6 to 12 months).

How much can you make from affiliate programs?

You might be wondering, what are established affiliates earning?

A poll was held on the STM Forum on “How much do you earn in a year?”:

Almost 20% of established affiliates report making more than $1 million per year. While this seems like an unattainable figure, reporting on revenue is only one side of the story.

Making money from an affiliate program is more about the profits than the revenue you’re getting.

An affiliate making $5000/day might be worse off than another affiliate making $500/day with no cash outflow because the former might be spending most of his revenue on paid acquisition.

At the end of the day, before becoming an affiliate, you have to align your expectations to your earning potential. What kind of industry or niche you operate in, and what kind of work you do depends a lot on how much you want to make.

If you focus on ads like Adwords or Facebook to promote your affiliate products, how much money you invest is as important (if not more) as to how much you make.

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Affiliate Marketing FAQs

How Much Does It Cost To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing?

As mentioned above, one of the best things about affiliate marketing is the low start-up costs. To do affiliate marketing, you only need a website. This costs around $15 a year for a domain name and a $10 per month hosting fee. However, you can get free hosting as a premium member of Wealthy Affiliate.

Once you have your first sale, you not only know that yes; affiliate marketing does make money; but also what your numbers are:

• 100 visitors /
• 1 sale ($100 in earnings) =
• 1% conversion rate.

While that’s overly simplified and you can not create your business plan on just one sale; you at least know what to expect.

2,000 visitors? That’s 20 sales or $2,000 in earnings.

That’s not bad at all, considering how relatively easy it is to get 2,000 visitors a month.

Again, this is a simplified formula for the sake of this example; your actual results may vary but that’s how you got to look at this and remember; the more data you have, the more correct decisions you can make.

How Fast Can You Earn An Income?

I knew you were going to ask this – everyone does – and the truth is; nobody can tell you exactly how much time it will take.

I had projects that made me an income in a month, I have others that took two years.

I have niche sites that started off miserably and are now my best earners, and there are ones which I thought would be winners, but I have since closed them down.

It depends on a lot of things, most notably your work ethic and your niche.

It’s good to have a system or a roadmap that you can follow knowing well enough what to expect and what to do if it were to go slightly off course.

I have a great guide that explains how quickly you can make money so take a look at that if you’re genuinely curious about it.

(Or better yet simply go and get started. Time will pass anyway and it’s best to start today than tomorrow.

Can You Get Rich With Affiliate Marketing?

Sure you can. That’s my goal, and that’s what I am currently working towards.

The thing is; “rich” is different for everyone.

Do you mean you have the freedom to do anything you want? The freedom to be out of the 9-5 grind

If that’s the case, I’m already rich, and you can be soon as those things are quite easy to achieve.

My exact idea of rich is somewhere in the $1 to $5 million regions, and that is where I plan on taking this and yes; with all my online business (not only affiliate marketing) I think I can get that.

I plan on investing a lot of my affiliate income into other ventures too.

(You can see my plan and my tips on how to invest your affiliate marketing profits here.)

Do I Need To Be An Expert In My Niche?

Many people think they need to be a computer expert or a top-level marketer to get started. This is not true at all. Online readers looking for information on a certain topic/product would more often than not prefer an “average Joe” point of view rather than some expert.

What Kind of Products Make The Most Money With Affiliate Marketing?

While there are certainly niches and products that offer a higher percentage rate (such as online tools, software, etc..), your best bet at having an enjoyable long-term affiliate marketing business plan is to create your affiliate business in a topic you personally like and enjoy. No niche is too small when you have 4 billion people on the internet.

How Long Before I Can Make A Full-Time Income Online?

While there are exceptions to the norm, you are going to need at least 6 to 12 months before you make any life-changing money. This does not mean that you will not be earning money before that, but any “quit your job” level of income does require a few months upon a year to achieve.

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It’s free to get started with, over 1,400,000 affiliates have gone through the training and produced countless of successful affiliate marketers in its 10 years + history.

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Tools & Resources Needed For Affiliate Marketing

A niche (topic): It’s always best to focus on one specific niche (blog topic) when it comes to affiliate marketing, this is because the more “focused” you are on a topic, the higher the chance if being recognized as the go-to source for information. Before you attempt affiliate marketing, you really must have a niche in mind.

A WordPress Website: There are plenty of Done For You “DFY” website-builders out there however you can also Do It Yourself “DIY” on WordPress starting at very low web hosting prices.  It’s the most used platform and the power, efficiency and simplicity of a WordPress website is unmatched. You may also like to know that a WordPress website is free as well.

Many domain and hosting providers offer “one-click” installs with every domain purchase.

You can also get a 100% free WordPress website from SiteRubix.

An Affiliate Program: Of course, to do affiliate marketing, you are going to need to be part of an affiliate program that sells products in your niche. They are free to join and just about every online entirety has an affiliate program these days. I have published many “affiliate program round-up guides” in a wide variety of different niches if you’d like to see what options are there.

Who are the affiliates?

An affiliate, also known as a marketer, can be an individual or a company. Typically, these are other bloggers or content creators operating in the industry of the product they are creating.

They help promote the product or service by creating content like blog posts, videos or other media.

They can also promote their content to get transactions by putting up ads, capturing search traffic from SEO, or building an email list.

When one of their visitors creates a transaction, which could be a purchase or submitting a lead form, the affiliate gets a commission. How much commission is structured depends on the affiliate program terms.

Who are the merchants?

A merchant, also known as the product creator or advertiser, is typically the creator of the product or services. They offer revenue sharing and commissions to people or other companies (affiliates), which have a significant following on their brand.

The merchant can be a company like HubSpot, which offers a commission to every affiliate who’s able to get their visitors to make a purchase.

Or it can be an individual like Pat Flynn, who offers an affiliate program with his podcasts.

The merchants can be anyone from a solopreneur to a big company, as long as they are willing to pay their affiliates to help them gain a transaction.

The Dos and Don’ts of Affiliate Marketing

The fact that affiliate programs are easy to master doesn’t mean you can’t make a mistake.

There are some rules you need to follow and we divided them into two different groups. The first unit includes the dos of affiliate marketing:

• Stick to your niche: This advice goes for both the advertisers and the publishers. It’s not good to work outside of your niche and promote offers that have nothing to do with your everyday business.
• Publish quality content: Reliable affiliate partners know that content quality is much more important than quantity. If you are not sure about your content creation skills, make sure to hire professionals.
• Be patient: Both sides of the affiliate spectrum should be patient. You should not expect to drive tons of conversions instantly, but rather let the good content do the job in the long-term perspective.

Now that you’ve seen a few dos, it is time to highlight the don’ts of affiliate marketing:

• Don’t be spammy: A publisher’s dream is to generate a lot of leads quickly, but you don’t want to be spammy. Create relevant content only and don’t use click baits because it chases users away.
• Don’t push it: While your job is to sell the product, don’t expect to do it by publishing sales and pushy content. On the contrary, you must keep it informative and educational. Be subtle in your affiliate intentions and you will grow the number of conversions.
• Don’t break the rules: Internet Cyber Security analysts say that every affiliate program has a specific set of regulations, so you can’t afford to be careless.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is the business model that will allow you to sell products online (both physical and digital) that other people have created.

Your compensation for this would be an “affiliate commission”, which is usually a percentage on the “final sale”.

Affiliate commissions vary from one industry to another with affiliate commissions in the physical product industry ranging from 5 to 20% and for digital products being anywhere from 10% up to even 70% and more.

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing tactic in which a retailer, typically an online one, rewards a website with a commission for each customer referred via the website’s promotional activities. The website, often called an affiliate, will only get paid when their promotion results in a transaction.

 

As an affiliate, you are typically paid whenever your visitor creates a transaction. The transaction could be anything from a click, lead form submission, or a sale. In the majority of cases, affiliate marketing is performance-based, which means you only get paid as an affiliate if your visitor takes action.

Here are some common affiliate marketing models:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC): The affiliate gets paid for all clicks that were generated, regardless of whether a lead or sale happened. This is rare since all the risk is on the product creator.

Pay-Per-Lead (PPL): The affiliate gets paid for every lead they generated. This could be an online form submission, trial creation, or any pre-purchase. This is a shared risk on both the merchant and the affiliate.

Pay-Per-Sale (PPS): The affiliate gets paid for every sale they generated. This is the most common model since all the risk is on the affiliate.

There are typically four parties involved in affiliate marketing:

• The affiliates– the promoters of the product
• The product creators– the creators of the product
• The networks– the networks managing the affiliates
• The consumers– the end-users of the product

 

Affiliate marketing is not a new thing in the digital marketing universe, but it keeps getting bigger and more important year after year.

According to the report, affiliate marketing grows at a steady 60% rate since 2015, with the industry projected to climb up to almost $7 billion next year.

Such a tremendous increase is possible because over 80% of brands rely on affiliate programs when promoting their products and services.

If you are running some sort of online business, you should definitely join the game and learn the basics of affiliate marketing.