What is Affiliate Marketing
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. The industry has four core players : the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors. Source: Wikipedia
Some of the Most popular Affiliate marketing sources are CJ.com, Linkshare, Pepperjam, Amazon
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Knowing what ads to place and what revenue your Web site generates isn’t magic. Once you join an affiliate program you then are able to choose the products or banners you want to include on your Web site, and then receive the code you will need to insert on specific Web page or throughout your Web site. In joining the affiliate program, you will agree to their terms of service, called an affiliate agreement, which will tell you what requirements you must meet and how the click-through, lead generation or sales are tracked.
Compensation methods
Cost Per Action or CPA (sometimes known as Pay Per Action or PPA; also Cost Per Conversion) is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for each specified action – this could include (but not limited too): an impression, click, form submit (e.g, contact request, newsletter sign up, registration etc), double opt-in or sale.
In CPL campaigns, advertisers pay for an interested lead (hence, Cost Per Lead) — i.e. the contact information of a person interested in the advertiser’s product or service. CPL campaigns are suitable for brand marketers and direct response marketers looking to engage consumers at multiple touch points — by building a newsletter list, community site, reward program or member acquisition program.
Benefits
1. Cost-effective, Low Risk and High ROI
In comparison to other marketing tools like pay-per-click, Google Adwords and multi-media, etc, affiliate is ranked among the most cost effective marketing options as putting an advertisement on the website is much cheaper than placing a similar content on a website or advertising in search engines like Google / Bing while the results may get a far greater potential reach. Your marketing partners are responsible for promoting your site for free and get no money until they generate a sale for you.
2. Make money 24/7
Your advertisement is available every 24 hour and the wider your affiliate program is, the stronger the possibility that customers click on the links and purchase your products, you will have money in your account.
3. Actual customers reach
Customers who arrive at your site are already pre-qualified “kind” leads. They came because they are interested in what you have to provide.
4. A mutually beneficial marketing channel
As an affiliate merchant or retailer, you have got a number of options for running offers and making money. Joining an affiliate network is the most efficient way for you to launch an affiliate program which will expose you to a lot of affiliate publishers in a short time. More importantly, you can run several different offers simultaneously, then get one check at the end of every month.
In the position of an affiliate merchant, you will have your products or services promoted by publishers. And whenever a purchase is made through the links or banners exposed in their websites, you will make money.
6. Get more benefits than money
Even if visitors don’t purchase your products or services, there’s a good chance that they will subscribe to your newsletter system or bookmark your site. Remember that you only need to make payment when you earn money from the links. Until then, you are getting loads of traffic totally free!
7. Brand expansion & better SEO
Affiliate providers can secure high search engine listings and showcase your advertisements in their website. This seems to be a nice side benefit of affiliate marketing. If a consumer visits Google and multiple listings will ultimately link to you, then you’re going to have a much better chance of being found. Valuable links from affiliate publishers can boost your domain authority and improve your off page SEO.
Zahoor Bhat has over 10+ years of experience as an online editor and media manager. He has worked with major online news and content sites as a media manager. He is well versed with major content management systems and web platforms such as WordPress and social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google Business, Yelp, Instagram & Linkedin. He is an expert in content creation, proofreading and finally making it live. Being a social media expert, he is able to make relations with social media influencers and make sure to generate leads and grow business via different social media platforms.
