Affiliate Marketing is nothing new. It is simply referring people to buy a product or service in return for a commission from the product seller or service provider.
Financial services companies like insurance companies, banks, and asset managers have been using it for decades to build their businesses. They may call their affiliate marketers independent marketers and call the commission, performance bonuses, but take it from me it is affiliate marketing.
The internet also means that you are no-longer restricted to your region to make a sale, increasing potential sales volume. You can sit in Nigeria and sell products to people all over the world and receive your commissions all thanks to web technologies.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work
To do affiliate marketing, you need a merchant or a company that offers affiliate marketing opportunity or an affiliate marketing program. Just visit the website of the business and look for a link that says Affiliates, Associates or Make Money.
You can also do a Google search of the name of the business followed by the word Affiliate. For example “Amazon On Affiliate“.
You can also signup with an Affiliate Network like Commission Junction (now CJ Affiliate by Conversant) or ShareASale. These are services that offer a one-stop shop to different affiliate marketing programs. An Affiliate Network can have hundreds of programs to join, making it easy to find affiliate marketing opportunities.
When you signup to an affiliate program (whether directly from the merchant or through an affiliate network), you are provided with promotional material which includes a link and / or banner and links.
Your job as an affiliate marketer is to promote these links and banners using your blog, social media pages, or online advertising. These affiliate links lead to the merchant website and comes with a tracking code that monitors whether or not the lead buys a product from the merchant.
When a person clicks on your promoted link, a signal is sent to your affiliate program’s server notifying them of the referred visit and a small piece of code called a cookie is stored on the computer or mobile device of the user.
Types of Affiliate Marketers
However, for the benefit of beginners accessing affiliate marketing opportunities for the first time, I find it compelling to create this little distinction. This will enable you know where you are right now and what approach will help you get to success fastest.
Product Centric Affiliate Marketers
Content Centric Affiliate Marketers
Content Centric Affiliate Marketers
Content Centric Affiliate Marketers are people who have built an audience by creating regular content online and now use affiliate marketing as one of the ways of monetizing their content creation.
You may have a blog about pets or a YouTube channel where you talk beauty. You may even just be sharing your photos on Instagram or Facebook and have amassed loads of fans.
Your passion is to share your content and build your brand, affiliate marketing is just one way you make money from that passion.
When you wake up in the morning, you are thinking of what new content (text, photos, videos) to wow your audience and build your reputation online. Of course, as you go deeper into affiliate marketing what product that will sell best to your audience will have some impact on your content creation.
Product Centric Affiliate Marketers
You could build social media pages or groups around this product, Create a YouTube channel, buy ads on Facebook and Google, create email marketing, and sales funnel all to drive sale to this product and earn handsome commissions. You could be doing this for multiple products and services simultaneously.
As a product centric affiliate marketer, you are all about selling the product or service. You wake-up each morning researching products to sell or strategies to sell more of your current products.
You could build dozens of small niche websites each targeted at a product you sell. You may not even have a website at all. You can just buy ads from Social Networks, Search Engines, and other traffic sources to drive traffic to your affiliate products and services.
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