What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing Definition

In simple words affiliate marketing is when you promote other companies’ products, if someone buys through your promotional efforts, you will Get a percent of the sale, in another words a Commission. You essentially become a salesperson for the company by helping them make sales and as a result you get a reward based on the company’s Commission structure.

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

You ever done a search online and the first few results are either Ads or promotional pages but not the actual company page? For example go into Google and search for best mattress. Within the top three results you will start seeing pages that identify themselves as top reviewers of mattress. Furthermore, if you click on any of the links to the mattress products, you will see a long link with campaign announcements and products. These are unique Affiliate links Assigned to you by the company that you are promoting so the company can keep track of where the sale is coming from. If someone clicks that link a tracking cookie stored on the user’s device which helps the merchant track the sale to you. A typical affiliate link will look like this:

 

How to Start Affiliate Marketing

The idea in concept is pretty straightforward however there is a lot of information that you can get online and you can get caught up in buying courses and trying to launch blogs, Facebook pages and endless amounts of money that you could spend on getting products to launch your affiliate marketing business. The way I learned about it Is by doing a simple search for E Commerce or affiliate marketing On YouTube. I would recommend That you listen to a few voices and understand what they went through so that you get an idea on the details of what it takes to start and continue with your business.  If you listen to the right people you don’t need to spend a lot of money to do this business. You need the desire, the time and effort to learn the processes that will help you to make money online.

You will need a website that you use to market products and provide links to those products. You can even Use free sites such as WIX or Google sites however it’s highly recommended that you have your own domain and a fully functioning website because in the end when you have a lot of visitors, you will be bringing value to the site in which case it’s having real estate online. The other aspect to affiliate Marketing is to grow your email list so that you can tell your audience when you launch new blogs or products that you are promoting. You will also need to disclose in your promotional materials that you are an affiliate marketer according to the FTC.

These are FTC’s guidelines to reflect truth in advertising principles.

Affiliate Marketing companies

Virtually any company that is selling a product online has an affiliate program, all you have to do is identify what product you want to promote and if the company has an affiliate program. For example, I use QuickBooks in my everyday business life and if I search for QuickBooks Affiliate program online, I can find the information fairly easily and sign up for promoting their products. The best thing to do is identify what niche you want to be in, think about your hobbies, what you buy for your house, your family members, your dog and subscriptions you have. From there, find out If those companies have affiliate programs. From my research, I noticed some affiliate marketers have four to five blogs and promote over 100 products on their various blogs.

There are also affiliate marketplaces you can join. These websites have multiple products that you can promote by applying to promote products through their platform. Here are A few affiliate marketplaces that you can get started with:

ClickBank

Amazon Associates

ShareASale

CJ Affiliate

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