What is Affiliate Marketing? - Online Income Journal

Have you ever had a product you just cant stop raving about? You want anyone and everyone to know? Since, you have such influence and people value your opinion. As a result, you are able to turn them to customers.

On an average, a person is exposed to thousands of advertisements on a daily. However, no matter how flashy the ads are its still difficult to make sales. People are more receptive to information from a trusted source. They prefer to hear or read reviews from those who have experience with the product.

Okay, so how does affiliate marketing fit into this?

The basic premise of affiliate marketing is to have influencers, also known as affiliates, promote their brands. The affiliates sends website traffic that converts to purchases. In turn the affiliates earn a percentage of the profit for each sale.

You, who already enjoys the product, could potentially earn commissions as well. All these just by introducing the product.

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
Source: Wikipedia

How Does Affiliate Marketing Works?

Simply put, affiliate marketing involves a seller and product creators paying some type of bonus. The affiliate has the responsibility to do the product marketing and effective customer engagement. That is, to promote the product to a variety of individuals to become a customer.

At the most basic level, there are generally three parties involved in an affiliate marketing program:

The merchant – the seller and product creators selling something
The affiliate or advertiser – the person promoting and marketing the product
The customers – the person purchasing the product or services based on interaction with the affiliate

The affiliate is basically a customer telling his/her friends information about a company, product, or service. As this promotions turn into sales, the company then rewards the affiliate with perks such as commissions or other types of compensations.

What is An Affiliate Program?

An affiliate program, also call associate program, is the chain of the affiliate marketing. It is an arrangement which online merchants/ advertisers pays an affiliate a commission to send them traffic or as per a particular agreement

These agreements could be by the number of leads the affiliate sends to the merchant’s site or the sales the traffic turns to or to perform some type of action.

The affiliate receives a unique link, commonly known affiliate links. Affiliates help in spreading the affiliate links of the merchant website through different platforms. The more people come and buy products with those links, the more profit an affiliate program will make.

Why be an Affiliate Marketer?

Due to the demand for this marketing strategy, affiliate marketing benefits are higher than what you expect. It costs you nothing for becoming an affiliate marketer.

The process is fairly simple – the learning curve at the very basic level is relatively low and it’s scalable. You can grow as you learn and make money eventually, as a result, creating a higher source of income.

Some of these benefits are:

Low startup cost. Most business requires startup fees whilst most of the affiliate programs let you join for free. Startup can be done at low cost to no fee at all (just pass the link to anyone and everyone you know).
You don’t have to make your own product or service. There’s no need to worry creating “the winning product”. You don’t even need to have the inventory like a traditional business. Essentially, your leveraging on other peoples product and just market it.
No customer support. With the affiliate marketing flow and structure, customer support solely falls as the merchant’s responsibility. The seller will deal with the consumer on the entirety of their transaction.
Work from home, work anywhere that has WiFi connection. An affiliate marketer is a freelancer, and as a freelancer you ultimately have the independence in setting up your goals. You have the freedom to build your portfolio. You’ll be able to choose either to launch an elaborate campaign or focus on simple and straightforward. All these at the comfort of your own home or wherever you feel like working at.
Passive Income. If done correctly, affiliate marketing can make money while you sleep or even when you’re away from your computer. However, like most passive income schemes, the initial work is significant. The amount of time to build a foundation for the campaign will need most of your focus. If you want to reap benefits of a steady flow of income you have to invest your time.

How much commission rate an affiliate earns?

The amount of money is not standard in the affiliate marketing industry. The rate depends upon the influence of an affiliate marketer. Hence, commission rates depend upon the mutual understanding between an affiliate and the recruiter. Sometimes it can be as low as 5% to as high as 50%. But there is no promise that you will start earning the highest amount possible because that depends upon your influence as an affiliate marketer.

How to Become an Affiliate Marketer?

You can pick just about any product that you can buy online, and most likely that merchant offers an affiliate program that will pay you for referring a sale. It’ll depend on your chosen niche and level of expertise.

The easiest would be to sign up with an affiliate marketing network. These networks works as an intermediary that connects marketers with merchants offering affiliate program opportunities for their products or services. Through this single portal you have access to numerous affiliate programs in their network. In this portal they also provide the tracking software where they handle the transaction tracking and payments.

Some of these affiliate network are:

Most affiliate marketing programs are free to join so it’s all really comes down to your preference and choice.

In Conclusion

Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative and ideal solution to take control your your income. As this is a performance-base revenue and ideally a passive income. Although, success on this relatively depends on the amount of work you put in and your marketing skills it can still be an effective way to meet your income goals.

If your really interested in making it in affiliate marketing start with by signing up with the affiliate network or check the company of your favorite product if they offer affiliate program.

If you put in the work, put in the time, put in the effort, you’re going to reap the benefits.
Richard Sherman

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