What is Affiliate Marketing: The Easiest Way to Get Started

Every day, many people depart from the corporate life of a 9 to 5 to venture into new fields of business in which they create and control their timelines. Survey shows that dissatisfaction with corporate life has resulted in a 25% increase of entrepreneurs and affiliate marketers, with many realizing the market potential of passive income.

Affiliate marketing is now a prominent business model. More than 81% of advertisers utilize it, but that begs the question: is affiliate marketing worth it, and how can one get in on it?

What is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based model which allows third-party marketers (often known as affiliates) to earn a percentage or commission on another person or company’s products.

The business model works with the affiliate marketer promoting products on their platform (social media, website, etc.) and earning a percentage of the profit whenever a sale is made. Thus, it can be a source that provides passive income for marketers, with minimal effort once you have a large enough platform.

Functional Parts in Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, multiple pieces come together to make a successful sale. These pieces are:

1. Seller and product creators

A seller can be an entrepreneur or enterprise that wants to sell a product or service in affiliate marketing. The seller is often in possession of the physical product but is often detached from the marketing process unless they dabble in marketing themselves. In the end, profit from each sale is shared with the affiliate marketer based on the commission structure in place.

2. Affiliate or Advertiser

Affiliate or advertiser is the second piece to the entire puzzle of who is responsible for the marketing of the product.  Affiliates create product marketing profiles directed at a particular target audience. In most instances, the products promoted by affiliate marketers already resonate with the consumers and thus make it easier for sales to occur. Once you complete a sale, the affiliate marketer earns a profit from the referral.

3. The consumer

The consumer in affiliate marketing is the one who parts with money in exchange for a product, after which the seller and advertiser receive a profit for the sold product. Thus, the consumer is often the driving force of affiliate marketing as their product purchase results in a sale for the other parties.

Payment Pattern of Affiliate Marketers

The job of an affiliate marketer is to promote products and earn money for them, but if the purchase goes through the seller, how does an affiliate marketer get paid?

1. Pay Per Sale: This is the most common arrangement in affiliate marketing, where the marketer receives compensation when the sale is completed. The consumer cannot merely click on the referral link but needs to purchase the product before the marketer gets paid. The amount received is often a pre-agreed percentage of the product’s price.

1. Pay Per Lead: A lead-in affiliate marketing refers to an action made by a visitor (i.e., consumer). In this payment system, the marketer receives a cut if they can persuade a consumer to visit the seller's website and carry out the required action. For example, this action can be to sign up for newsletters or fill out a contact form.

1. Pay per click: for every consumer who clicks or visits the seller's website, the affiliate marketer gets a cut, depending on the amount of web traffic received from the referral.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has several perks for both marketers and sellers alike, with the entire digital marketing sphere revolving around it, but the key one(s) are:

1. Passive Income: Affiliate marketers can earn an income even while they sleep. Once the product promotion is up, one earns so long as those who are the recipients of the ads make a sale.

1. Convenience: Earlier, we mentioned how many people are leaving the 9 to 5 life. Affiliate marketing makes the average Joe become their own boss. They are free to create their work schedule and work with all forms of flexibility. On the part of sellers, marketing through affiliates gives them the freedom to channel their creative energies to other aspects that can grow the brand in both the long and short term.

1. Performance-based rewards: This business model pays both parties for the work they do. As a marketer, you get paid a full buck for your sweat. For brands/sellers, they can say goodbye to ineffective employees that do not offer value to their start-up by only rewarding those responsible for conversion.

Affiliate marketing channels

Acknowledging and establishing several touchpoints, whether your target audience is in the physical or digital space, is critical to be an affiliate marketer. Some of the channels of affiliate marketing include:

1. Influencers

Influencer marketing has taken the advertising world by storm as influencers hold a captivated target audience. Influencers stand to benefit the most from affiliate marketing as their followers already trust their words and recommendations. Influencers mostly utilize social media, with Instagram being the popular channel.

2. Bloggers

Bloggers are key marketers when it comes to increasing seller conversions. They utilize affiliate marketing by creating product reviews, how-to posts, and likes, which are often laced with affiliate links.

3. The paid search focused microsites

Microsites offer focused content targeted at a specific audience to increase product awareness. The objective of microsites is to persuade consumers to complete the call to action on a seller's website.

4. Email lists

Even with the rise of social media sites, email marketing is still a viable field. Affiliate marketers build large email lists and send out newsletters that contain product hyperlinks and earn a commission if a sale is completed via the link.

5. Large media websites

The main objective of these large websites is to build a large audience to promote products via onsite ads and banners. As a result, the exposure rate on these sites is often significant and offers more conversions than any of the channels listed above.

Tips for successful affiliate marketing

Although there might not be a generally accepted blueprint on how to succeed in affiliate marketing due to the nuances that exist in each niche, aggressively pursuing these fundamentals puts one in the right direction.

1. Develop your niche

An essential factor to consider to be a successful affiliate marketer is carving out space to engage people with similar interests. Still, that niche should be capable of attracting an audience. Some popular niches are fashion, beauty, healthcare, fitness, and food. Products associated with these niches will always result in sales due to the popular demand.

2. Choose affiliate products to promote

Having a popular niche might not bring in the cool cash in most cases. It all boils down to promote the right products. When choosing products to promote, consider if:

• The products have high affiliate commissions
• A proven track record of sale
• Products that stand the test of time
• Products that you will use yourself.

3. Create content that generates affiliate revenue

Affiliate marketers have the arduous job of convincing consumers to purchase a product. Therefore, it is not enough to create ordinary content that consumers can see anywhere. Instead, the content created must be compelling enough to capture the consumer's attention and convince them to make a purchase.

4. Promote your affiliate products in the content

Keyword research plays a huge role when it comes to creating content for affiliate marketing. Once you create content that addresses the questions of your target audience, the next step is to include the affiliate links in the content. Once a consumer sees that their questions are being answered, converting that to a sale becomes easy. It is worth noticing that one should ensure that the links are placed strategically without overwhelming the consumer.

5. Follow the trends

The competition in the affiliate marketing world is fierce, making it hard to remain relevant as each quarter goes along. Therefore, affiliate marketers follow trends. Marketing trends provide new techniques that affiliate marketers can use to increase conversions, create sales, and thus increase profit. Trends that should be followed to increase conversions in 2021 are:

• Multi-channel strategy: Affiliate marketers utilize this strategy by spreading their content/ promotion skills across various platforms. These can be email, social media, blogsites, etc.
• Blocking third-party cookies: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Chrome recently blocked third-party cookies, making it harder to discover keywords that ones' target audience uses.
• Video content marketing: humans are visual learners, and videos get shared 12 more times than text and images combined. An affiliate marketer’s attention should generate more video-based content to draw in a target audience.
• Automation tools: Staying ahead of the curve involves being efficient in all spheres of affiliate marketing, and adopting automation makes it more realizable. From scheduling your post for maximum engagement to using relevant link shorteners, these smaller details could be the deciding factors in being successful.

If carried out properly, affiliate marketing is worth it. As we have seen, various people venture into this field and are currently earning millions because they were willing to dedicate time and effort to affiliate marketing.

But how about an easier way that does not involve long nights and sweat? AllValue was created to enable affiliate marketers to grow their brand in no time.

AllValue is an eCommerce performance software created to help grow your brand into the million-dollar brand it is meant to be. From website creation to the customer and logistic support, AllValue will be there every step of the way.

AllValue’s entire services are geared towards results with a high processing speed and large customer base that can connect your eCommerce store to customers from all over the world. The eCommerce world is continuously changing, making it hard to develop brand growth strategies, but with AllValue, the work becomes easy.