Affiliate marketing is how many people make money. I have been in this industry for a few years now and I want to explain to people what affiliate marketing is because some people think it is something that it is not.
Affiliate marketing is when you promote a product or service and you get paid for every lead or sale that is generated through your marketing. An affiliate marketer can get paid for sending a lead to a business or when a sale happens.
Further down we will discover the different ways you can make money online with affiliate marketing.
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These are the topics we will review further down:
- Different ways you can be an affiliate marketer
- What is affiliate marketing and how does it work for beginners?
- How to become an affiliate marketer?
- What is the average income for affiliate marketers?
- Is affiliate marketing hard or easy?
- How to start affiliate marketing?
Different ways you can be an affiliate marketer
With affiliate marketing, there are several different ways that you can be considered an affiliate marketer.
These are the two most common ways that you can do affiliate marketing:
- Promote an item and receive a commission when someone buys using your affiliate link.
- Promote an item or service and receive a commission for every lead generated.
Promoting an item as an affiliate marketer
This is the most common way people are doing affiliate marketing.
This is when you promote an item and get a commission for every item sold. For example, if you want to become an affiliate marketer for an item that is on Amazon you can apply to their affiliate program.
You can apply to Amazon’s affiliate program here.
Once approved you will be given a special link for any item that you want to promote.
This link is like a social security number between you and the affiliate network. No one else will be given this link to use. If someone else wants to use your link you will get paid for any sales that they do.
This link can be promoted in different ways. You need to figure out how you are going to get traffic to your link and then you can start to generate commissions.
Traffic is everything and without traffic, you will not make any money as an affiliate marketer.
The more traffic you get to your link the more people that see your link and the more chances you have of making conversions. Conversions are when someone buys using your link and you get credit for that sale.
With enough traffic, you can make a lot of money as an affiliate marketer. For more secrets about traffic for affiliate marketers click here. There a different marketing platforms and you can get conversions from them all but you need to match the traffic source with your offer.
Amazon is not the only affiliate network you can work with. There are many different companies that you can be an affiliate for.
Some of the biggest brands you know have affiliate programs.
Here are some business with affiliate networks:
- Best Buy
- HomeDepot
- Target
- Wallmart
To discover how to make money online with affiliate marketing click here.
Lead generation as an affiliate marketer
Lead generation for affiliate marketers is when you promote an item or service but you get paid for the lead and the person does not have to purchase for you to get a conversion. The conversion is registered when the person clicks on your affiliate link and submits there information.
The contact information of the lead is sent to the business that you are working with and your conversion is generated at that point.
Every lead generation offer will have a different conversion goal.
These are the most common ways conversion is registered with lead generation:
- Register conversion for the lead to fill out a form with their contact information.
- Register conversion when a lead submits credit card information for a free trial
- Register conversion when lead downloads software
- Register a conversion when the lead calls the business
Lead generation has a wide range of payouts. This is because of the different types of conversions that can be used.
For conversions that happen when the lead submits their credit card information will pay a lot more than an offer that converts for the lead to fill a form.
What is affiliate marketing and how does it work for beginners?
Affiliate marketing is when you get paid for marketing an item or service and for beginners this will be difficult to find success in. The affiliate marketing industry has a lot of competition and this is because of the money involved. For a beginner in affiliate marketing, they will have a large learning curve.
Affiliate marketing for beginners is difficult because gone are the days of posting your affiliate marketing link all over the internet and getting conversions.
People are wise to the fact that the link is an affiliate link. Now you have to honestly provide value and you have to be good at marketing.
As an affiliate marketing, you will have to have skills in:
- Ad creative creation
- Ad title writing
- Ad copy
- Sales funnel optimization
- Video sales letter
- Long and short-form advertorials
- Email capture and retargeting
- Marketing retargeting
- SEO
As an affiliate marketing beginner, it may seem overwhelming but with hard work and dedication, you can start making money online. It takes time to develop these marketing skills and most people are not going to put in the work to develop their marketing skills.
Most will give up and say that it is impossible to make money with affiliate marketing. The few that put in the work and sacrifice will be successful.
All the marketing skills that are listed are important. You can not ignore one over the other. You will lose the conversion at your weakest link in the sales funnel.
If you are good at ad creative creation but bad at ad copy you will not succeed.
All parts of the sales funnel are important and it will take time to learn all the parts.
I recommend figuring out what is going to be your best marketing strategy and your traffic source and find an affiliate marketing guru that specializes in your preferred method and join their affiliate course.
It can be dangerous picking a guru because there are some fake gurus out there but there are some really good ones.
For my write-up on what gurus have helped me and what are the best gurus in different affiliate marketing strategies click here.
How to become an affiliate marketer?
When starting in affiliate marketing you should consume free content on YouTube. This platform has many affiliate marketers that have found success and you can learn a lot from them. There are a few books that can help you learn the basics of affiliate marketing.
In my experience, the best way to become an affiliate marketer is to get on Youtube and watch hours of free content from the best affiliate marketers.
There are many fake gurus but you need to use your BS detector.
There are not many books that you can learn from but there are entrepreneurial books that are excellent.
When you become an affiliate marketer you are starting a business. It may not seem like it because you do not own a physical location but you are running a legitimate business. The money is as real as it gets and you may feel that it is not possible but keep learning and grinding and when you receive your first commission it will be as real as the air that you are breathing right now.
Once you have consumed as much free content as humanly possible you will have to decide what affiliate marketing strategy you want to implement.
Many gurus say to pick one and master it. I disagree with them!
I recommend testing them all out and choosing what fits your business and personality better.
You will not know the details of each strategy until you have tested as many as you can.
Search engine optimization may seem boring to you but you may love paid campaigns on Facebook.
The only way to know this for sure is by testing them all out and then you will have a first-hand look at each.
Choosing one marketing strategy or platform before trying them all out is a bad idea. Nothing will be worse for you to dedicate one year of your time to your business to find out that you hate how you have built it.
Find what you like best and then you can focus on that affiliate marketing strategy.
The reason why this is important is that it is going to take a lot of hard work on your part to build this successful business and if you are not enjoying the main part which is the marketing part, you will give up before you find success.
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