These brokers are often companies that create marketplaces populated with marketing campaigns for its network of advertisers. Publishers, often vetted and pre-approved by the affiliate network, then browse this extensive marketplace and pick up whatever marketing campaigns that suit their readership best (Oliver Christopher Gomez, 2018).
The publishers are entities ranging from top-of-the-line news portals, social media influencers, prominent bloggers, price comparison websites, e-commerce portals and even major messaging app personalities — then craft unique and highly targeted content around these marketing campaigns with a view of encouraging their readership to make purchases via the links embedded in the posts. Both the publisher and the affiliate network take a cut of the revenue from the products and services sold (Oliver Christopher Gomez, 2018).
The industry has four core players (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.):
a. the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand')
b. the affiliate network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments)
c. the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate')
d. the customer
Eighty percent of affiliate programs today use pay per sale (PPS) as a compensation method, nineteen percent use cost per action (CPA), and the remaining programs use other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM, cost per estimated 1,000 views) (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.).
Marketers become affiliates in a number of ways that include (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.):
a. Registering to become affiliate on retail or e-commerce sites.
b. Surveying existing customers to learn their favorite products or services and then contacting those companies to inquire about an affiliate program.
c. Searching online for products that are relevant to the marketer’s site and will appeal to the target audience. Most companies that offer affiliate programs indicate that with an “Affiliates” or “Partners” link at the bottom of their site home page.
d. Looking for potential affiliate products at affiliate program managers that include CJ Affiliate, Clickbank, and ShareASale.
1. Unattached Affiliate Marketing
These are your basic pay-per-click affiliate marketing campaigns where you have no presence and no authority in the niche of the product you’re promoting. There’s no connection between you and the end consumer, and all you’re doing is putting an affiliate link in front of someone via Google Adwords, Facebook ads, etc. in the hopes that they’ll click on your link, buy the product, and earn a commission (Pat Flynn, 2018).
2. Related Affiliate Marketing
Related affiliate marketing is where you have some sort of presence online, whether it’s through a blog, a podcast, videos, or on social media and you have affiliate links to products related to your niche, but they’re for products you don’t actually use (Pat Flynn, 2018).
3. Involved Affiliate Marketing
Involved affiliate marketing is where you’ve used a product or service, truly believe in it, and personally recommend it to your audience (Pat Flynn, 2018).
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing, and display advertising (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.).
Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. The two forms of marketing are differentiated, however, in how they drive sales, where affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations, while referral marketing relies more on trust and personal relationships (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.).
An e-commerce merchant that wants to be able to reach a wider base of internet users and shoppers may hire an affiliate. An affiliate could be the owner of multiple websites or email marketing lists; therefore, the more websites or email lists that an affiliate has, the wider his network. The affiliate that has been hired would then communicate and promote the products offered on the e-commerce platform to his network. The affiliate does this by implementing banner ads, text ads and/or links on their multiple owned websites or via email to their clientele. Advertisement could be in the form of articles, videos, images, etc., which are used to draw an audience’s attention to a service or product (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.).
A visitor who clicks on one of these links or ads on the affiliate’s site will be redirected to the e-commerce site. If s/he ends up purchasing the product or service, then the e-commerce merchant credits the affiliate’s account with the agreed commission, which could be 5% to 10% of the sale price of the product (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.). When commissions reach a pre-determined threshold, the affiliate is paid (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.).
Different affiliate programs can use different payment terms such as (Can You Make Money, 2016):
a. Pay per Sale: In this program a merchant pays you a percentage of the sale price when the purchase is completed.
b. Pay per Click: In this program you get paid based on the number of visitors you redirect to the Merchant’s website from your affiliate site, whether or not a sale is made.
c. Pay per Lead: You get paid once the referred visitors provide their contact information on the target site by filling out a simple contact form.
The goal of using an affiliate marketer is to increase sales – a win-win solution for the merchant and the affiliate (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.).
1. Only Recommend Products You Are Extremely Familiar With
Building trust with your audience is paramount in affiliate marketing, and the quickest way to lose trust is to recommend products either you haven’t used before or that aren’t a good fit for your audience. Also make sure you never tell anyone to directly buy a product, you are simply recommending the product. The more helpful you are and the more you make quality recommendations, the more likely your web visitors will come back for your expertise (Adam Enfroy, 2018).
2. Promote Products From Many Different Merchants
If you only promote one merchant’s products, you are stuck with their commissions, their landing pages, and ultimately, their conversion rates. It is important to work with many different merchants in your niche and promote a wide range of products. This affiliate marketing strategy will diversify the amount of commissions you make and create a steadier revenue stream for your website (Adam Enfroy, 2018).
3. Constantly Test and Optimize Your Conversion Rates
Let’s say you have a promotions page where you’re promoting a product via affiliate links. If you currently get 5,000 visits/month at a 2% conversion rate, you have 100 referrals. To get to 200 referrals, you can either focus on getting 5,000 more visitors, or simply increasing the conversion rate to 4%. Which sounds easier? Instead of spending months on blogging, SEO, and social media marketing to get more traffic, you just have to increase the conversion rate by 2%. This can include landing page optimization, testing your calls-to-action, and having a conversion rate optimization strategy in place. By testing and optimizing your site, you’ll get far better results with much less effort (Adam Enfroy, 2018).
4. Focus on Your Affiliate Traffic Sources
It’s important to know where your traffic is coming from and the demographics of your audience. This will allow you to customize your messaging so that you can provide the best affiliate product recommendations (Adam Enfroy, 2018).
Traffic sources may include organic, paid, social media, referral, display, email, or direct traffic. You can view traffic source data in Google Analytics to view things such as time on page, bounce rate, geo location, age, gender, time of day, devices (mobile vs. desktop), and more so that you can focus your effort on the highest converting traffic. This analytics data is crucial to making informed decisions, increasing your conversion rates, and making more affiliate sales (Adam Enfroy, 2018).
Merchants favor affiliate marketing because in most cases it uses a "pay for performance" model, meaning that the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are accrued (Affiliate Marketing, n.d.).
The merchant is having someone else do the grunt work on selling its product is another benefits (Grace Pinegar, 2018).
The merchants are not limited to one affiliate. For instance, a mid-sized company has 500 affiliates selling its lamps. This means 500 people, in 500 different locations across the world, are pushing this one merchant’s product and name (Grace Pinegar, 2018).
The merchant has the opportunity to join affiliate networks, which, again, do much of the grunt work for you. From finding affiliates, to tracking pay, to reporting on key metrics, these affiliate networks have a number of business-boosting features (Grace Pinegar, 2018).
Additionally, affiliate networks can even post advertisements for you that help locate affiliates who would make effective and professional brand ambassadors. So, not only are your products being advertised, but they’re being advertised by someone you can trust (Grace Pinegar, 2018).
The biggest benefit of affiliate marketing for the affiliate is that they’re getting paid. While the specific percentages vary, affiliate marketers profit a certain portion of every sale that goes through their channel or website (Grace Pinegar, 2018).
As an affiliate, you work out with the merchant exactly how you will determine profits. Whether you’re paid per sale, per click, per lead, or per call, you profit as the merchant does (Grace Pinegar, 2018).
An affiliate has the autonomy in what you’re selling. You get to choose which brands you work with and what products you push. You can sell products you’ve used, products you believe in, or products that simply seem interesting to you! (Grace Pinegar, 2018)
Most affiliate programs are free to join, so your costs are usually related to your referral/marketing methods (Randy Duermyer, 2018).
Lastly, affiliate marketing offers you a source of passive income. By investing an initial amount of time into a campaign, you will see continuous returns on that time as consumers purchase the product over the following days and weeks (Adam Enfroy, 2018).
Read more:
1. Referral Marketing
2. The Difference Between Affiliate Marketing and Referral Marketing
3. Why Word of Mouth Marketing Is Important ?
Edited by: 浪子
Bibliography
Affiliate Marketing. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
Rebecca Lake. (2018). Make Money With Affiliate Marketing. Retrieved from
https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/affiliate-marketing-can-you-really-make-money/
Affiliate Marketing. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/affiliate-marketing.asp
Affiliate Marketing. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.shopify.my/encyclopedia/affiliate-marketing
Pat Flynn. (2018). 3 Types of Affiliate Marketing Explained and the One I Profit From. Retrieved from https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/3-types-of-affiliate-marketing-explained-and-the-one-i-profit-from/
Oliver Christopher Gomez. (2018). Marketing: How Affiliate Marketing Is Changing the Game. Retrieved from http://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/marketing-how-affiliate-marketing-changing-game
Grace Pinegar. (2018). What is Affiliate Marketing in 2018: A Beginner's Guide. Retrieved from https://learn.g2crowd.com/affiliate-marketing
Can You Make Money from Affiliate Marketing? If so How? (2016). Retrieved from
https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/can-you-make-money-from-affiliate-marketing-if-so-how-2473
Randy Duermyer. (2018). Can You Really Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? Retrieved from https://www.thebalancesmb.com/can-you-really-make-money-with-affiliate-marketing-1794168
Adam Enfroy. (2018). Affiliate Marketing in 2018: What It Is and How You Can Get Started. Retrieved from https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/affiliate-marketing/#what-affiliate-marketing-strategies-should-you-employ-in-2018
What's Affiliate Marketing ?
Reviewed by 浪子
on
November 25, 2018
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Reviewed by 浪子
on
November 25, 2018
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