What Is Affiliate Marketing?
This article is about affiliate marketing. It will also give you tips to grow your audience to get results.
Definition of Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a business model in which business owners partner with people like you and me to sell their products. Each time you sell a product, you have a commission. For example, let’s say you have a blog that recommends a particular laptop and you included a link to Amazon.
Jonh Doe is looking so bad to buy a powerful laptop. Then he decided to do a quick google search. After reading your blog, Jonh clicks on your link and buy the laptop. Amazon will not only ship the computer to the customer, but they will also give you a commission.
Affiliate marketers are the middle man between a company and a customer. I have answered a question on quora on the same matter. You can also scan the QR code on the picture to accept an affiliate marketing challenge.
Different Affiliate Network
An affiliate network is, by definition, the company that manages the process of finding potential customers, providing them with information on products, and paying commissions to affiliates. Affiliate Networks include Clickbank, Digistore 24, JVZOO, and Warrior plus.
Clickbank and Digistore 24 are easy to get in. You get your affiliate links very fast. Affiliate Networks like Impacts, Shareasale, Jvzoo, and warrior plus need you to complete an application process.
Finding Your Affiliate Marketing Niche
Finding your niche is one of the most critical elements to consider when having a successful online business. There is a time when your business will be complicated when you feel like you are not progressing. You feel like giving up. But do not give up; keep going.
Therefore, if you choose your niche because you are genuinely passionate about this area, it will fuel you up to move forward. One of the best places to find all types of niches is Clickbank Marketplace.
According to the book Expert secret, on page 17, people buy from these three core areas of desire wealth, health and relationship.
Inside each niche, there are microniches; for example, inside Health and Fitness, we have Diet and weight loss.
The following section will talk about types of affiliate marketing and traffic.
Types of Affiliate Marketing
We have two types of affiliate marketing models to earn commissions.
CPA Affiliate Marketing
CPA or cost per acquisition is an exciting affiliate marketing model. You get a commission whenever there is an action on your offer: downloading an app or filling up a survey. In this model, the customer takes action toward the product, like submitting his email.
Therefore, you don’t need to sell a product to get commissions. Examples of CPA networks are CPA leads, Offervault, and Maxbounty. Most CPA Networks need pre-approval, which means you need to go through the application process, which sometimes takes time.
One of the advantages of CPA marketing is that there is no refund when you get your commission, which is fantastic.
Earning Commission Per Sale Model
The classic affiliate marketing model is already defined earlier where it states that whenever somebody buys a product or service, you will earn money.
How to get started with affiliate marketing?
Based on the previous knowledge, all you need to do is to follow the steps below:
- Choose your niche of interest
- Choose a product
- Chose one way to promote for at least 6 to 12 months
- Choose one way to capture your audience’s email address.
- One way to follow up with your audience
- Give your audience a product to solve their problem
- Track and Evaluate your Progress
You can grab the free book called the Iceberg effect for more detail. It is designed for people who are still looking to get results in affiliate marketing. Just a quick disclaimer, you will only take care of a small shipping fee
Click here for the Iceberg effect book
On the other hand, I have released a Youtube video on the Iceberg effect in Affiliate marketing.
Types of products
There are four types of products you can promote in affiliate marketing.
Digital Products
In the digital products area, we have online courses, e-books, software, videos…
Physical products
Examples of physical products are electronics and books. Amazon is a great place to find them.
Online services
We have so many online services that usually come with recurring commissions, for instance,
Clickfunel, Canva, GetResponse, Convertkit have an affiliate program with a good retention rate.
Email/Zip Submit Products
Refer to the chapter precedent on the CPA model of affiliate marketing.
Type of Traffic
Traffic is, by definition, the ability to have your affiliate offers seen by many people.
More visitors saw your offer and higher your chances of getting sales.
However, it is not an exact science because sometimes a few visitors can lead to excellent results.
In that case, we talk about quality visitors, which leads to sales.
The bottom line is if you want to increase your chance to get sales, you need to create a system that captures and follow up with your audience.
How To Follow Up With Your Audience
To follow up with your audience, you need to create engaging content and use a landing page to capture email addresses. It is essential to note that your audience will follow three sequences before buying from you.
In the beginning, they are cold; they do not know you, and they don’t trust you. Your contents are designed to warm them up. So, this is the second stage. When they buy from you, your audience becomes hot. This is the third stage.
Your hot audience will keep buying from you, and become returning customers. On the other hand, an autoresponder will be welcome to stay in touch with your audience. Creating a community such as a private Facebook group will allow you to easily follow up with your audience. The idea is to hang out where your audience is.
What is a Landing page?
A landing page or opt-in page is a mini-website with little information where usually people gives their email address in exchange for a free valuable gift.
This free gift is called a lead magnet.
What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet is a free gift that we give as an incentive to people in exchange for their email addresses.
This lead magnet or ethical bribe can be a free video training, a free valuable pdf information etc…
Free traffic
Free traffic means you are paying with your time to promote your affiliate products.
There are so many free traffic methods you can use to promote your business.
Examples of free traffic are Youtube videos, Forum marketing, Creating articles on Medium,
answering questions on Quora, Slideshare presentations, and Facebook organic.
Let’s examine very quickly Quora and Facebook organic.
Quora
According to Similiarweb, Quora has had 618.68 M of visits in the past six months, which is enormous.
Therefore, it is worth your time to answer a few questions on Quora daily.
It is also interesting to use spyfu services to find the hottest questions on quora to have maximum traffic. Do not worry about cost, and you can use spyfu for free.
Facebook Organic Method
Facebook organic is an exciting strategy where you created some daily posts designed to make people reach out to you for help. This method is called Facebook attraction marketing. You can quickly check out my blog post on the subject.
How to promote affiliate links on Facebook New Method
Pay Traffic
Pay traffic buys time because you use your money to advertise your business. For a starter in affiliate marketing, it is advisable to stick to free traffic until you master the fundamentals. Otherwise, it is easy to lose a lot of money, yet pay traffic is powerful.
An excellent step to pay traffic is to take a program like internet profits that hire the best to teach people.
The Benefit of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing does not require any overhead. Therefore, you do not have to stock the products at home. You can start with low cost, especially if you decide to go free traffic. You can have good results; however, it requires learning the fundamentals and being consistent.
Affiliate marketing is also flexible so that you can decide when to work or not. You have complete control of your time.
It is advisable to buy speed and knowledge in your early-stage by hiring a mentor to grow faster.
How to grow your audience for affiliate Marketing
Definition of Audience
An audience is your group of followers. In other words, it is your community or clubhouse. To grow your audience, you need to publish content to help people as much as you can. It does not matter if you do not have enough knowledge to help people. What is essential is to be one chapter ahead of the people you want to help.
Similarly, it is also essential to create a landing page and do giveaway gifts as an incentive to grow your audience.
I have released a podcast recording on the subject; check it out below.
Do you not know where to start? Click below to access a Free book on affiliate marketing.
Conclusion
Thanks so much for dropping by and reading my latest post.
Have you tried affiliate marketing or a similar business model? Let us know how you liked it in the comment section!
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This is such a complete post about affiliate marketing! Very thorough! Great value there Aziz!
Thanks, Sophie, I really hope that it will help a lot of people to take action.