Affiliate Marketing
Somedays back I ordered a pair of running shoes from an online site, and it was branded as Asics. After I made my payment, I got a message that my omgomgomg zerkalo order will be delivered in 2 days. And, how wonderful it was, that, my order was actually delivered after 2days.
But, since then, I wondered, how it happened to be? What was the process which was followed?
Again, the race of my mind’s horses ended when I did Digital Marketing course. Because I got the answer, that, this is all about Affiliate Marketing.
Can you even imagine; what marketers do when they first get up in the morning?
I am sure, they definitely look at something like this:
OR
Here is a guide to Affiliate Marketing.
We always look for income, whether you are asleep or not. But, Passive Income, is what you can earn while you are sleeping.
Morning hustle and bustle, don’t affect your income. I think, today, about 50% of people in India, Affiliate Marketing is how they get started.
There is a saying in Hindi “hing lage na fitkari, rang chokha hi chokha”.
The idea behind affiliate marketing is that you can promote your product, through an affiliate program and you can get a commission.
Which is basically based on Sharing of Revenue. Which completely means that If you are having a product you can sell it online and earn commission on that basis or if you don’t have any product of your own, you can promote some other product that has a value of its own and make money off it.
All digital marketers know about Affiliate Marketing, but we would like to dive deep into it.
Affiliate Marketing Definition:
A very simple definition given by Investopedia about Passive Income:
“Affiliate marketing is an advertising model where a company pays compensation to third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services. The third party publishers are referred to as affiliates and the commission fee incentivizes them to find ways to promote the company”.
In simple language, it is all about Marketing an Affiliate Program.
We basically admit that there are three to four parties involved in Affiliate Marketing.
Wikipedia talks about 4 parties that are involved in Affiliate Marketing i.e., Merchant, Network, Publisher and even the Customer itself.
But, we believe that three parties are involved in Affiliate Marketing. These may be:
Advertiser, Publisher, Customer
But, when it comes to actual marketing, there are two sides of Affiliate Marketing:
Seller and the affiliate marketer
So, I just wanted to say that, affiliate marketing is not just promotion of products but you can also become a merchant and a creator, and you can still profit from the revenue.
So, now let’s have a look at all the parties involved in Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliate marketing is basically a co-operation between a Merchant and an Affiliate. The Affiliate agrees or approves to promote the product of the Merchant on its website and this is all done by linking with the merchant’s website.
Following the sale-purchase commission rule, the merchant pays a commission to the affiliate in exchange. In most of the cases, the merchant pays to the affiliate on the basis of the clicks made on the product, and when the actual purchase takes place.
But, at times some of the merchants chose to pay commission on the basis of clicks merely.
A merchant can be a company, like The Merchants Company, which is a wholesale food distributor and restaurant supplier that offers food and beverages and ingredients etc.
Or, it can be an individual, like Maria Coz, who actually sells online courses to the women entrepreneurs etc.
The Affiliates or they are called as Affiliate Marketing Publishers also. People often wonder that what are affiliates?
Affiliates are basically those persons who are ready to promote the products linked by the merchant. They send the coded link to the people of an offering, so that, new customers visit and take a look at the product.
If then, they buy the product, the affiliate makes a percentage of the sale.
According to the sources of the marketing world, around 25% to 75% of the sale value is the affiliate payout range. But, an average commission rate should be somewhere between 5%-30%. If we talk about ClickBank, that offers products, offers commission rate that ranges between 50-70%.
Likewise, every company or industry vary in their commission rates. It completely depends on company to company that what commission they are offering to their affiliates.
There are companies who value their affiliates offer higher commission and take charge if their affiliates are happy.
Now, an affiliate promotes one or multiple products and try to attract and persuade the potential customers to value the merchant’s product and convince them to end up with buying it.
We can understand this with the help of an example:
We can see, Bloomberg is promoting The Merchants Company blog, persuading customers to take their Food Services.
A very known example I would like to give you is of Flipkart Affiliate Program, that entire site is dedicated to searching for the myriad of products online and promoting the affiliate products. It is one of the Internet-based retailers.
I would like to tell you top 10 Affiliate programs and Network in India.
Flipkart Affiliate
Amazon Associates
vCommission
Optimise
BIGROCK Affiliate
GoDaddy Affiliate
Admitad
MakeMyTrip Affiliate
HostGator Affiliate
eBay Affiliate
Affiliate marketing is a powerful customer acquisition for online retailers. The Customer or Consumer helps in making the affiliate system go round. If there will be no consumer, there will be no sales, so the commission will also be zero and then no revenue to be shared.
The affiliate will market or promote the product to the customer in whatever channel they feel fit to it. They try to promote the product or services anywhere be it Social Media, SEO or by way of content writing or blogs.
Some affiliates let their customers know that they are part of an affiliate marketing system and try to be more and more transparent but others don’t.
The price which is already quoted on the site as an offer for the customers, they will pay that only, they are not going to pay a higher price of the affiliate network, as its cost is already included in the retail price.
The Networks serves as a guide to affiliate marketing. It works as an intermediary between the affiliate and the merchant.
Just think about, you are promoting a product which belongs to someone else, and sharing a revenue with them is always a good idea. We always see sites like Flipkart or Amazon, plays a serious role, as they handle the payment and delivery of the products themselves, which adds to the affiliate marketing network.
Even the affiliate sometimes has to go through the affiliate networks, to promote the products. It can only happen when the merchants maintain an affiliate program on the network.
Then the affiliate network serves as a database of lots of product, which the affiliate marketer can decide which product to promote.
Or Amazon Associates, which is the biggest affiliate network program.
On these websites, you can sign up for free, and then generate a custom affiliate link to Amazon products and if there occurs any kind of purchases, you can earn commission on that basis.
Let us discuss on to the next big question that usually jumps in the mind of every marketer.
How can we become an Affiliate Program Merchant?
So, guys, there are just 4 simple steps to become an Affiliate Program Merchant and then you can make money by linking with affiliates for selling your product.
First and foremost, is that you should have An idea of a product. I completely agree with the fact that, when people say they don’t have an idea or it is difficult to have an idea of a product. There are myriad of products available and which one to choose.
But, to your knowledge, if you want to make money with the help of an affiliate marketing program, it will be hard to love to a single product or idea.
You should be creative enough to understand which product or service you need to deliver to the actual customer so that you can solve their problems with those products.
It can be understood with the help of a simple example.
Suppose, you are a housewife, and you are looking for electric product say an Air Conditioner which consumes less electricity, and you are finding so many options available.
But the problem which is arising with all of them, according to the reviews is that they are not relevant for electricity cut-out. For that stabilizer is a must.
Now, you can get an idea, that the problem of customers is that, these ACs need a stabilizer so that there is no loss. So, you can go with the idea of selling or providing stabilizers online.
Secondly, you should Validate your idea. You should confront and build your idea.
But the question is “what if people don’t like your idea?” Remember, you will be successful if somebody would like to purchase your product.
No problem, if you can validate your idea or product, by searching on sites or links, whether people are searching for the product or not or whether they are interested in buying online or not. What are the reviews for the product you are selling?
Just go online and search for the product and search for rating en reviews of the product.
Thirdly, you need to Create your product. But, we are talking about the digital world, so, everything is online. I will tell you how to do this and with little time and actually no money.
I can only suggest you some sources through which you will be able to create your own product online, that will not waste your time and money.
How to launch a product on Amazon
How to launch a free digital marketing course online
Podcasting For Beginners: The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Podcasts
These are just a few examples of it.
Let’s move on to the fourth step and that is to find Affiliate Marketing Partner. This is basically referring to finding those affiliate marketing partners who already have a great audience, who are completely interested in buying those things, that you have to sell.
Let’s take an example of it. Suppose you are interested in selling your free digital marketing course for online learning. What do you think, you will find one partner?
I bet, Yes!
If you will Google “learn digital marketing course”, on search engines, there you will find numerous sites, which offer for learning of digital marketing course and sells books on the same.
There you will find your way. You can contact them and try to convince them of a sale deed, would be a good fit for it.
Just mind my words “The more relevant your product is, the more you will be able to pitch to the fellow merchants”.
These were just four simple steps to become an Affiliate Marketing Merchants. Now let us discuss something which will give you an idea of how to become an online Affiliate Marketer.
Again, we suggest 4 simple steps to become an Online Affiliate Marketer. These may be discussed below:
Review your products:
First and foremost is to start a Review of products in your niche. Well, I must say that it is really easy to become an affiliate marketer, as the most dangerous step of choosing a product or creating a product is skipped off.
As there are so many sites which sell numerous of products online. You have ordered any one of these in your lifetime and used it also, so now what you have to do is, you have to talk about it publicly by way of Youtube videos or on a blog etc.
As in, you want to sell some product say hot wheels online. You can talk about it online. For example:
This guy is reviewing Hot Wheels Stunt Street Play.
In this way, you can also set a review on a product.
E-mail Marketing:
E-mail marketing affiliate programs are considered as one of the best marketing channels of online marketing. So, while doing online marketing don’t miss it truly.
You can collect emails in many ways. Either you are a customer or client of some company, you can get emails.
There are a lot of E-mail marketing agents available in the market who does E-mail marketing for their clients. They will run a campaign for you and earn from it and on the other hand, you will get customers for your product.
There are other digital ways also. We can always discuss them.
You can collect E-mails through Hello Bar.
You are offering them to read unlimited books or audiobooks, magazines or even more free for 30 days. And again giving an option to cancel it out as well, anytime you feel free.
The second way is Exit Gate. Which completely means that you can pop up your advertisement or banner, which will lay over your screen when you exit from a site.
It will pop up, and you can get E-mails from this way as well.
You can use Follow Me On Facebook or Twitter And Get Free Advice On Digital Marketing!
The third way you can collect emails is through Side Bar Widgets as well.
I am sure you are aware of the sidebar widgets that people use on the websites
This is just for your concern, I have posted. But don’t use too much information, as your customers will not fill if would like to fill also, even then.
As we have asked you to just fill a form and that’s it.
Hosting Live Webinars:
Live webinars are an awesome source of collecting e-mails to reach the customers.
Ok, let me explain you with the help of an example.
Let, you have to buy a sofa set. You will go online, now think, what will convince you to buy that sofa set, you have chosen
- Review on a blog OR
- Watching a presentation, which is going on Live.
Of course, option (b) is the best one.
You can use Wix.com or any other free tools available online to create your own landing page, where people can sign up easily, to attend your live webinar.
You then have to promote your webinar a week ago, so that maximum people can sign up to attend your webinar.
Then you can host a Google Hangout, to streamline your webinar, which is actually a free service.
Webinars have their own benefits:
You will be able to give product’s features in detail.
And also you can show different uses of the product.
Tell about the benefits and drawbacks of the product to the people watching you live.
Just tell people your experience with the product and what is your viewpoint about it.
And much more…..
PPC Advertising:
As soon as you settle yourself for affiliate marketing business, you will start earning.
Basically, here conversions matter a lot.
Through PPC advertising affiliate programs you will be able to not only provoke people to sign up for the live webinars but you can collect a bunch of emails and create an email list also for the promotion of the product. You can even make more and more sales.
You can use Keywords related to your product, so that, you can earn well from it.
Now, you can target those people who are trying to find a review of your product, you should or have to improve your SEO part also. As we have discussed earlier that On-page SEO and Off-page SEO will benefit you in maximizing your traffic.
You can even, let people sign up your live webinar with ads, which is the best way.
Through this, you can gain in two ways:
- You will be able to create an email list
- They may buy your product as they are registering for the live webinars and attend it.
We have detailed you the best we could tell you about webinars.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is all about A Merchant and An Affiliate.
We have discussed how to become a merchant and/or an affiliate marketer.
Both are having 4 simple and easy steps. We have come to the conclusion that it is easy to become an affiliate marketer rather than a merchant.
But, it completely depends upon you that, which side you want to choose?
Please reply me with your comments the answer to this question.
For your information, we are running a free offline Digital Marketing Course. We welcome you on board.
For more information please contact us or you can email us at digitaldhairya@gmail.com.
Let me know if you are facing any problem just fill this form and I will get back to you soon.
In your service,
Dhairya Singh Chauhan
