Affiliate marketing is a buzzword in the internet market. There is a massive amount of information about “Every, Single, Thing” to do with affiliate marketing.
It is very difficult to know if that is true or just hype because you can find many myths and rumors. There are no end advice, hacks, success stories, fails, case studies, or promises of making money while you sleep, and/or making money from any time and anywhere.
That is why this blog post is presented to you. In this blog post, you will get answers to all your burning questions about affiliate marketing. The core, the fundamentals of affiliate programs, and the difference between fantasy and reality about affiliate marketing. You will learn:
What does it mean to join this billion-dollar marketing industry?
How do you make money out of it?
What are the core principles of this marketing business?
Table of Contents
The Core Principle of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a profit/revenue share marketing model or a win-win marketing model. The business or company i.e., products or services creators needs sales to make a profit from their products and services. For that they need marketing. Affiliate marketing is a model which shares responsibilities of marketing with different parties and when businesses make a sale, they share the profits with those marketing parties.
You can define affiliate marketing in your way of understanding the basics of this marketing. It is performance-based marketing. You get a commission promoting other’s products and services on the internet. You will get a commission based on your performance and association.
In this marketing model, the business or company saves the advertising budget. You as an affiliate will do all the homework for advertising using different channels and mediums (such as banner ads, writeups with links, images, videos, websites, social media, forums, networks, communities, emails, podcasts, messengers, and more). Whereas the business or company does all the other hard work for you including products and services creation/development/manufacturing, shipping and handling, online payment, and more. That’s why it’s a win-win marketing model for both you and the company. You and Company will fulfill the ultimate goal of sales and making a profit from the products and services.
Learning up to now, you may already figure out that there are mainly three core parties in this marketing. They all are interconnected to form this marketing. Thus, affiliate marketing leverages the abilities and responsibilities of a variety of individuals for a more effective marketing strategy.
The Three Core Parties in Affiliate marketing
The Seller / Products or Services Creator: The seller or creator of products and services is an advertiser. It wants to advertise its products and services both online including affiliate marketing and offline. The seller whether a solo entrepreneur or a large company is a vendor, merchant, brand, or retailer with products and services to the market.
The affiliate or publisher: It’s you as an individual or company that markets the products or services in an appealing way to potential customers. You as an affiliate promote the seller’s products or services to persuade consumers that it is valuable and beneficial to them. You convince the customers to purchase the products. When the transaction or conversion happens, you will receive a portion of the revenue made.
The consumer: The most vital and important party to work the affiliate marketing. If the company has the products or services along with the affiliates, Until and unless the transaction or conversion, or sales happens, the marketing will not be complete. And the consumer is the one that make happen and fulfill the company’s and yours as an affiliate the ultimate goal of a sale.
The Connector – Affiliate Networks
This is another part of the affiliate marketing system. You can directly contact the seller or company or brand to be an affiliate. Because the company also has the ability to avoid the affiliate network and create an in-house affiliate program.
In the modern way of affiliate marketing, affiliate networks play a huge role. The middleman or intermediary role between an advertiser and an affiliate makes both the company and the affiliate beneficial.
The company or seller benefits from the networks by increasing outbound sales, saving the advertising budget, and reaching a new audience. Whereas for you as an affiliate, it is the easiest way to start affiliate marketing because the network provides a way to find appropriate programs and organize affiliate commission payout.
When you join the affiliate program directly with the company or seller, it relates to a single brand or single product or service. But at the affiliate networks, there are thousands of such affiliate programs brands. Once you sign up for the affiliate network, you can browse tons of different affiliate programs. When you find a product or service per your niche or expertise that you want to promote. You can join the program in a few clicks.
Some of the best affiliate networks you can sign up for starting your affiliate marketing business are:
- ShareAsale
- Amazon Associates
- Partner Stack
- Awin
- CJ Affiliate
- Rakuten Advertising
- Click Bank
- Impact
- Flex offers
- Avangate Affiliate Network
Affiliate marketing perspective from the right angle
Information overload on the internet about affiliate marketing is one of the biggest challenges to being an affiliate marketer. There are lots of misconceptions, myths, and misunderstanding information on the topic of affiliate marketing. Like:
- It is easy to become an affiliate marketer
- You can earn money while you sleep
- Anyone can do and be an affiliate marketer
- Affiliate marketing can make you rich
- It is a very good career to get started
- You don’t need much investment in affiliate marketing
- Affiliate marketing is all about SEO
- And many more…….
If it is so easy to get started and to be an affiliate marketer, why do only a few affiliate marketers (you can count on your finger) make a living from affiliate marketing?
The affiliate marketing statistics show:
- Nearly half of the affiliate marketers make less than $20,000 a year
- 35% of affiliate markets make more than $20,000 a year
- Only 9% of affiliate marketers make more than $50,000 in 2016
Another Survey by one of the successful affiliate marketers Vick Strizheus from fourpersent.com shows similar results. He asked around 2730 affiliate marketers about their income. The result was:
- 20% of them made less than $100 per month
- 7% made $1000 -$2000 per month
- 2%-3% of them made $5000 per month
- And only 1% of them earned $10,000 and more per month
Only getting the bright part or pros of affiliate marketing and thinking of making money while you sleep is not the right perspective.
You have to know the truth, the cons, and the dark plus the hard part of affiliate marketing. This doesn’t mean to discourage and discomfort you starting and being an affiliate marketing. But by knowing the reality and the truth about this business, you will get a clear path to success in this business.
The Challenges in Affiliate marketing
Sales don’t happen when you put your affiliate products or services in Infront of customers. Research shows that a sale is usually closed around the seventh contact with a particular prospect. Those affiliate marketers who found success on the first attempt just got lucky to join the right moving train. Most of the others 92% only got success after attempting more than 5 times in this business.
It is not easy to execute and easy to scale business. Don’t take this business lightly. Don’t think there is no risk in this business. As you know there is no such business without risk.
Running after the shiny object will not get you success. If the advantages of affiliate marketing will give you permission to go ahead with this business, the disadvantages or challenges give you the path how to go ahead. There are lots of challenges in this business, you should know to get success. For that, you need loads of determination and patience.
The statistic found by Vick Strizheus from four percent in the same survey mentioned above that most affiliate marketers have these common challenges:
- Building a website was a challenge for some
- Finding hot products was the next challenge
- List building was next (Creating their information products is not the big challenge)
- Driving the traffic and converting that traffic into sales was the biggest challenge
Sales are the highest-paying job in the world. Building salesmanship will be one of your greatest assets on the internet. For sales, you need marketing and marketing needs creatives, channels, and mediums. You will find many challenges within them too. Such as:
Multiple creatives
Like you need a different approach to different channels or mediums for marketing, the creativity also differs. There are specific dimensions, lines, and copies for promoting your affiliate products and services according to the channels and mediums. What works on Facebook, won’t work on LinkedIn or on your website.
Customer acquisition
In a competitive marketplace, it is hard to retain customers as well as to find new customers. The customers’ purchasing experience depends upon your brand, reputation, interaction, reviews, and deals or discounts you provide. If you miss any one aspect of customer acquisition, your competitor will take your customer.
Product Showcase
Unlike an in-store experience where customers can touch and feel the products, online shopping is all about how you showcase them. If you present your products or services showcase with loosely designed, the photographs are amateurish, the website or blog user experience is poor, your customers feel and suspect the legitimacy of your affiliate products or services no matter how best quality of your products and services.
Calculation of commission
The money from the commission is the reason your affiliate marketing business exits. When you promote multiple affiliate products and services, it will be difficult for you to calculate the commission. If so, there will be no sense to dedicate your time and effort to promoting your products or services. Numbers are a very important part of any business whether it’s online or offline.
Qualities of a Successful affiliate marketer
You should have certain traits or characteristics in yourself to qualify for affiliate marketing. Then only you can visualize the marketing from the right angle that 1% of successful affiliate marketers see this marketing.
Successful affiliate marketer knows that they are just a means of lead generation to the businesses they are associating with in this marketing business. They portray trust, authenticity, and transparency in this business because they are aware that these are the keys to building a genuinely sustainable affiliate marketing business.
Now, look at the traits/qualities you should have to become a successful affiliate marketer.
- Affiliate marketers have their business ethics
- They provide value to customers more than what they get
- They solve the problems in the market by giving a solution being compliant in all ways of doing businesses
- They bring out their unique positioning in the market and do not do things like a herd of sheep
- They know they need to be impossible to replace in the market
- They have the ability to fulfill that need in the market with their skills and knowledge and also the ability to serve them
- They do what the market needs because they know that what they are doing if there is no need in the market, they are not going to make any money
- They have the skillset of website building/graphics/SEO/PPC/analytics and more
- They have internet, consumer research skills, networking skills, patience, strategic skills, etc.
- They have interests or expertise in a certain niche, and they are organized and methodical.
A successful marketer does the same thing differently
As already mentioned, only a few percent of affiliate marketers are successful. Because they have the angle to run the affiliate marketing. They see the way to become successful in this field that others may not see. Successful people established themselves as impossible to replace with their unique flavor in this field. They are successful because they do things differently. They don’t go after the shiny object and information overload; they go for their unique positioning in the market.
Successful marketers know the pillars and essentials of affiliate marketing. In modern marketing, the core of affiliate marketing is authenticity, trust, relationship, and networking. That is why successful affiliate marketer follows the fundamentals of this marketing and gain trust and authority.
The basic fundamentals of affiliate marketing are:
- Become an authority in the selected niche
- Know your target audience/Market
- Write the timeless contents
- Be reliable and helpful
- Work only with reliable partners
- Recognize trends by looking at your statistics
- Do not depend on one source of traffic
- Do not depend on one source of Earning
How to start affiliate marketing
The process of starting affiliate marketing is the same for everyone. Whether you are an amateur or pro in the marketing field. The simple process of starting affiliate marketing is:
- Choose your platform
- Choose your niche
- Join an affiliate program
- Promote products & offers
- Track & optimize conversions
- Receive Commissions
You see, these are simple steps anyone can jump in. That’s why you are hearing everywhere affiliate marketing is an easy way of making passive income. But successful people don’t follow incomplete information. They listen, watch and learn the process in their first step. Understanding the core of marketing, they jump in and become successful.
They know the core or heart of any business is the customer. In an affiliate marketing business, it’s traffic or audience. So, they make a plan, step by step small goals to reach their vision. They find out their ideal customer/customer avatar first for their affiliate marketing business. Because they know that Affiliate marketing businesses rely on reputation and trust with a target audience online. Your focus should be on building community and providing value around a particular niche, selling and making money should be second. If you cannot authentically connect with your audience, chances are you won’t have success in converting them into affiliate sales. It is important you know your audience so well, that you understand why they follow you in the first place.
Then they will choose the platform (website, blog, brand, YouTube, etc.) In which they are going to build their digital assets. Digital assets are…….
- Blog/website
- Landing pages
- Email list
- Followers
- Funnels
- Email Sequence
- Content
- YouTube Channel
- Products
- Connection
………the center of your affiliate marketing business. Everything comes around it. Thus, they are more focused on building digital assets before jumping into the actual affiliate marketing business. They build the ecosystem for the affiliate marketing success on that digital asset.
The rules of success in affiliate marketing
Niche selection is an as important part as product selection (Which we will discuss) in affiliate marketing. The successful marketer knows that you cannot be everywhere means you cannot promote everything and anything for the sake of money. You will get nothing following this path. Successful people only promote the product either they use themselves for digital marketing or they belief the products or services solve the problems of their audience. Some of the popular niches among affiliate marketers are:
- Medicine and Health
- Mental health
- Online learning
- Digital Accessories
- Entertainment
Product selection is another factor in getting success in affiliate marketing. As we have discussed, you are going to promote only those products which are related to your niche and that solve the problems of your target audience. When you choose the favorable products and services related to your niche and brand, you can get an impressive conversion rate while establishing the reliability of your brand simultaneously.
There is no shortage of products and services online to promote affiliate marketing. But while choosing the products and services you should consider many things as the wrong selection of products or services can hinder your success and diminish your credibility as well as your audience.
Understanding the law of money is another rule to get success in affiliate marketing. There must be a need in the market for what you do. And you must have the ability to fulfill that market need with your skills and knowledge. When you add so much value to the transformation of your audience’s life, you become impossible to replace in the market.
Don’t only rely on the one product or service promotion that makes you only one option for income. A successful marketer knows the laws of money so the money will come to them. They don’t rely on one stream of income. Successful marketers build multiple income sources of income around their brand together with affiliate marketing. They build the ecosystem, a hub of the community that follows their brands with trust and belief. They know the big secret about money that’s why they come into successful affiliate marketer categories.
Successful people approach this type of affiliate marketing and this is the secret to their success. Again, come the same saying, those are the successful affiliate marketer, who does the same thing differently. Because for all affiliate marketers, the methods of earning money or commission are the same. That is:
The process of earning a commission
- Pay Per Sale (PPS): The merchant pays the affiliate a percentage of the sale price of the product or services after the consumer purchases the product.
- Pay Per Lead (PPL): Affiliate program compensates the affiliate based on the conversion of leads
- Pay Per Click (PPC): PPC focus on incentivizing the affiliate to redirect consumers from their marketing platform to the merchant website. The affiliate is paid for the increase in web traffic. There are two common concepts in PPC:
>> CPA (Cost per acquisition): The affiliate gets paid each time the seller or retailer acquires a lead.
>> EPC (Earning per click): This is the measure of the average earnings per 100 clicks for all affiliates in a retailer’s affiliate program.
- Per Par Install (PPI): The affiliate gets paid each time they direct a user to the merchant’s website and installs a product, generally a mobile app or software.
The core or essentials of affiliate marketing
Building a sufficient digital asset, developing a rapport with the audience i.e., community, using several campaign sources, getting into the ecosystem, and building authenticity and trust with transparency are the main keys for successful affiliate marketers to get success in this marketing business.
The successful marketer knows the essentials to get success in affiliate marketing. That is:
- The marketplace (The typical marketplace and private or direct marketplace)
- The lead capture system
- A link-tracking system
- An email marketing system to capture the leads
They are aware of the challenges we have discussed above and have also solutions for them. Because they took the challenges as opportunities and faced them that’s why they are successful. They faced challenges with genuine customer reviews and feedback, installing the tracking mechanism for calculation, comparing the features, specifications, prices, and more, and making better buying choices for their customers.
They don’t stop there. Facing the challenges with the solution they will continue prioritizing their task so that the recurring passive income continuously comes into their bank account. And live a free lifestyle through affiliate marketing and digital marketing.
They will continue focusing on these things even though they are successful:
- Getting new customers
- Nurturing the existing customers
- Creating fresh content every single day
- Managing the only systems (email marketing, lead generation, webinar, website/blog management system, etc.)
- Analyzing the business (such as traffic sources, conversions, lead generations, sales, commissions, expenses, and more)
The Future of Affiliate Marketing
Statistics show that affiliate marketing is the second-fastest growing industry worth 12 billion US Dollars. And it’s growing every year. It is going to stay here like the on-demand economy.
Since we are in the age of digitalization, everything is going online so as the sale of products and services. Development in technologies, Virtual Online shopping trends, and emerging AI technologies makes clear that affiliate marketing has a very sound and promising future.
81% of brands and 84% of publishers leverage affiliate marketing. Companies use this method of marketing to reduce their costs and increase their customer base. There are unlimited opportunities everywhere for all affiliates and companies. People continue to spend money on their favorite products and services after reviewing them through trustworthy channels or videos.
Affiliate marketing is expanding in developing countries now. There is already increasement every year in developed countries like the US. Data shows that the number of searches for the term “affiliate marketing” is constantly increasing over the last 5 years. Almost 40% of marketers mention affiliate marketing as their preferred method to acquire new customers means for products and services sales.
Do you know that 15% of the digital marketing industry’s revenue comes from affiliate marketing? The statistics show that the percentage of affiliate marketing growth rate is incredibly high. The global market size of affiliate marketing in US Dollars millions by 2025 will be 15,920 is almost 16 billion. That shows there is room for everyone’s affiliates and companies, brands, etc.
The mobile-first trends in the world indicate that voice search and Pay-Per-Call affiliate marketing will be the hottest trends in the future. Mobile phone searchers use their phones immediately to call a business from the search result pages. And according to the Delhi School of Internet marketing stats, more than 30% of affiliates generate their sales originated from a mobile device.
Final Words
When you are on right track to understanding the core and foundations of affiliate marketing, there will be no obstacle in your way to success in this business.
You have to understand your niche, know your audience, and focus on trust, authenticity, integrity, community, and transparency building. These are the keys to success in your affiliate marketing business. The keys to living a life of freedom through affiliate marketing and digital marketing.
How do you like this post from a different angle to understand affiliate marketing?
Did you find the core of affiliate marketing?
How do you like the reality of this marketing business?
Let me know in the comment section. Your comments show us how much you have understood from this blog post and how much you are committed to learning affiliate marketing.
