WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING
WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING AND INTERNET MARKETING EXACTLY?
Almost half of link click to a purchase items online are as a result of affiliate links.
If you want to take piece from the fastest growing online business model, then you are in the right place. in this guide i will be sharing with you how affiliate marketing business model work.
Learning affiliate marketing on your own when you first started might look confusing to you when the right strategy are not in place.
The freedom you get doing affiliate marketing business is you will have a passive income stream and that’s goal of every business owner. It gives you the opportunity to make money while you sleep.
For 99% of people in the internet marketing space, affiliate marketing is how they get started.
The idea behind this to promote other people’s product through an affiliate program, you get a percentage commission eachtime someone bought an item you are promoting using your unique link from the merchant website.
It’s a business mode that’s based on revenue sharing. If you have a product to sell online then you can consider starting your own affiliate program to recruit other affiliate marketer to promote your product which will gives it more awareness.
But if you don’t have any products yet, affiliate marketing could be your best option becuase you won’t be handling shipping and fulfilment. You role is to get them purchase the product you’re promoting using your link.
But before we dive into learning affiliate marketing, This part of our Free Affiliate Marketing Guide will teach you what affiliate marketing is all about. You see affiliate marketing have a lots of things to be learn, depending on the factors.
WHAT IS INTERNET MARKETING
Internet marketing has now been use for mostly everything in todays day-to-day activities either in communication, learning, shopping and entertainment.
In addition more and more people do come online everyday.
Marketers always go online in the midst of where their target market is in other to market to them.
These could never happen before where we would reach so amount of people. The meaning of internet marketing is presenting your product or services in front of your target market. There 7 main ways to market your products or services online, which i have stated below.
- Content Marketing
- Social media marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Email marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Paid advertising
- Search engine optimization
As you can see above those are they 7 main types of internet marketing we have, but for the purpose of this guide we would be focusing on the affiliate marketing online business model, before we start below are the recap of what this guide entails.
FREE GUIDE: CONTENTS
- What is Affiliate Marketing?
- Affiliate Marketing Vs Multi-level Marketing
- Introduction to Sales Funnel
- What is Lead Funnels
- Helpful tools and resources for Affiliate Marketing
- Email Marketing Fundamentals
- What is Solo ads
WHAT DOES “AFFILIATE MARKETING” MEAN EXACTLY?
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
According to Wikipedia, states that their are 4 contract parties involves in affiliate marketing business model.
But other view on the business mode says it involve only 3.
(Image source: Ecommerce Guider)
As i said earlier, the affiliate marketing mode is grouped into 4 parties, but when it truely come down to actual marketing there’s only two involved…Which are the product creator and vendor and the affiliate marketer.
So, affiliate marketing can be seen as process of “marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.”
That does not limit an affiliate marketer to product promotion for commission alone, as an affiliate marketer you can also be a product creator where you can recruit other affiliates to promote your product, for them to earn commission as well.
Now, let take a look at how affiliate marketing business model look like:
The Merchant: According to wikipedia, merchant is a person who trades in commodities produced by other people. Historically, a merchant is anyone who is involved in business or trade. Merchants have operated for as long as industry, commerce, and trade have existed.
A merchant can also be operated by a single individual or business behind an affiliate marketing program, so far have something to sell.
The Affiliate: This brought us to second party in this business model, the role of an affiliate in this type of business is to get traffic to their merchant website and receive a percentage commission set by the merchant inside the program.
This is where everything get interesting, how to send traffic to the merchant website?. An affiliate can promote the products using varies means of traffic source which includes free traffic and paid traffic. An example of free traffic is writing a reveiw about a product by ranking it for search engine while paid traffic source is spending money to drive traffic to your affiliate offer.
This could be achieved by running a review blog or preselling of the merchant products. An example of these below:
A whole website can be categories about a particular niche whereby every product of the blog will be specific and niche focus or products ralated to a certain topic.
The consumer: Any individual who purchases products or services for his personal use and not for manufacturing or resale is called a consumer. A consumer is one who is the decision maker whether or not to buy an item at the store, or someone who is influenced by advertisement and marketing.
It now left to the affiliate to bring consumer to the merchant website and they be the one to determine if they would like to continue with the purchase. The affiliate will determine which market best fit to present the product either through social media marketing, search engine marketing or content marketing on your blog.
The Network: A channel between publishers (affiliate marketers) who sell products and services and the merchants who create those products and services offered through their affiliate program. … Affiliate networks usually charge an initial setup fee for each merchant and often a recurring membership fee.
While the affiliate network serve as the intermidiary between a merchant and afiliate in network such as JVzoo, WarriorPlus or Clickbank handle the payment and product delivery to the consumer in the business model.
Affiliate network are in charge of managing the affiliate to be recruit by the merchant for a product launches. Most networks make it compulsory to undergo approval by the merchant before affiliate can promote those products to their audience.
The affiliate network make a lot of products available to be promoted by the affiliates from different niches:
(JVzoo is an example of a network)
Inside JVzoo, you can promote lots of products from different niches like weight loss, software, entertainment etc.
That said, that all the parties involve in the affiliate marketing business model.
OVERVIEW
Affiliate marketing is an online business model that require you to promote others people products in return for a percentage commision specify by the merchant. You can either follow the route of joining an affiliate netwok like Commission Junction, JVzoo or WarriorPlus or join an affiliate program.
You can become an affiliate to promote other people’s product, in a reward for a commision share given by the product creator usually merchant.
Better still you can decided to create your own product for others to sell and share percentage commission on each product sold.
Most people find affiliate marketing a fast means of starting an online business, it’s an easy path to starting bulding enough traffic at same time building your list when do in a proper way.
HOW TO GET STARTED IN AFFILIATE MARKETING? WHY ARE ONLINE BUSINESS IN SUCH HIGH DEMAND?
But what makes affiliate marketing business model most lucrative way to start right now in the internet marketing space.
The main reason most people do affiliate marketing is because it give you the ability to earn a geniune passive and side income online.
Aside given you the opportunity to earn passive income, it also gives you a freedom: meaning you get to work at your own luisure time. Good thing about affiliate marketing is that, it can easily be automated using tool like an autoresponder for communicating with your customers and a well structure sales funnel that help you sell your affiliate product compare to the offfline approaching of selling a products or services.
Also, the sweetest part about this business is that you can start with little as $100 to cover for both your domain name and web hosting that power the visibility of your website on the world wide web. below are the tools required to start your affiliate marketing business right now even if you don’t have any experience:
- Domain name and Web hosting
- Lead Magnet
- Autoresponder
- Sales funnel
- CMS Platform (WordPress)
- Landing Page Builder
Let me show you how each of these tools can help you kisk-start your own affiliate marketing business right away
- Domain name and Web hosting: A domain name and web hosting are the backbone of every website online. Think a domain name as a brand name that uniquely identify your website online. The domain of this website is register in my own name “waleadetona.com” but you can choose a niche base domain name. For example let say you are writing about weightloss diet on your blog, your domain could be something like weightlossdiet.com. While a web hosting is a storage where all your website resources are kept like images, links, content etc so your audience could have access to them from anywhere in the world, also you can have access to this content on my website because i have it hosted with bluehost.
- Lead Magnet: This is free gift (bait) you to your prospects coming to your website, in exchange for their email to you can market your affiliate offer to them on the backend. More on this later in part 4 of this guide keep reading.
- Autoresponder: These service handle the sending and delivery of your lead magnet to your prospects after they have signup to receive your gift via their email address.
- Sales Funnel: With sales funnel you can convert your prospects optin to your lead magnet to a customer that keep buying from your affiliate offer or your own products or services.
- CMS Platform (WordPress): Now that you got the above tools ready, the next thing is to lauch your website online by installing wordpress on your own web hosting platform. On the wordpress dashboard is where you’re going to be sharing your content with your audience.
- Landing Page Builder: With landing page builder, you can build an optin or squeeze pages in secs and starting collecting leads on the page. Tools like clickfunnels, thrive leads or element are recommended tool for achieving this task.
THE BIG PICTURE OF AFFILIATE MARKETING
Above resources are tool that will get you started as an affiliate right away but to come to to proper way to really make affiliate marketing work for and not by guessing require solid plan and strategy, i’m going to show you proper to kickstart your affiliate marketing business without making mistake from your day 1. So let get started
- Step 1: Choose a Niche
- Step 2: Market Research
- Step 3: Create a capture page/Landing Page
- Step 4: Set Up a Thank You Page
- Step 5: Create Email Autoresponder Series
- Step 6: Choose a Target Source (Method)
STEP 1: Choose a Niche
To succed in affiliate marketing you have ti choose a niche that you’re passionate about and focus on it, because it’s going to help you on the long run.
So let look what are niche exactly:
- Cooking
- Fitness
- Book
- Software
- Health
- Make Money Online (MMO)
- Music
- Personal Development
- Sport
- Teaching etc.
All niche listed above are highly profitable and scalable than one another, so you have to discover what more interest to you, then start with that.
Most mistakes everyone coming into affiliate marketing game do is they make things complicated by jumping from one niche to another, My advice to you is don’t be like them.
Also, in your niche research always go to promote products that are high in demand and low supply. Choosing this type of niche will help you dominate any affiliate program as well help you to scale your business.
The most profitable niche currently on the internet right now is business opportunity, simply because most everyone are interested in making money online and that’s the power the internet gives to us. Most of product you’re going to be promoting in this affiliate marketing business would be MMO niche type of a thing.
You can make more money online by also teaching people on how to make money online.
STEP 2: Market Research
Now that you have decided your niche and know what you’re more of interested in, next is doing your market research.
To do a market research means you’re searching for a product that exist in your choosen niche, the product demand, are people already buying it and what demographic is performing etc.
Making this research will help you to know your target audience and what type of product to recommend to them.
Starting by analysing what type of products/services require to start in any of those niche.
For instance, anyone that want to start an online business and make money from them will actually require to purchase:
In any online business that you wish to start and succed in it, you will definitely need all of this service provider in other to thrive in your business. The big picture of this blog post is to get your started as affiliate marketing and fasten your journey as an affiliate marketer.
The next big challenge in afiliate marketing is knowing where to go to apply for product to promote after you have done your market research thoroughly.
Affiliate network is start of an advertiser affiliate programs, where affiliate marketer goto to promote a product interest to in that market research.