A Learner's Guide to Affiliate Marketing

Technically, it was the year 1996 when affiliate marketing was first introduced in Amazon and now it has become one of the widely used forms of marketing. Affiliate marketing is nothing but the method of earning money in the form of commission while promoting a brand, business, company, organization, product or services through different ways. Becoming an affiliate marketer is possible for anyone anytime all one need is some knowledge of online marketing. This is one of the ways you can effectively make earnings for a long time. Though it sounds but isn’t wonder if one earns more than $1,000,000 as an Affiliate Marketer. Why don’t you take the example of ‘Mark Ling’ who happens to be the best Affiliate Marketer in the world? He himself has made $1,000,000 in a year. As you move ahead and learn more about affiliate marketing you will come across a number of people earning big as an Affiliate Marketer. Affiliate marketing not just benefits the affiliates but also the merchants and happens to be a win-win for both the parties. In affiliate marketing there is a company dealing in some product or service that want to boost their without increasing the cost of expenses so they take help of the affiliates who promote their product for them and are given with incentives, which is a small percentage of each sale. Now, you as a learner may or may not be well acquainted with the terms affiliate and the merchant here. Let’s have a look to the main terminologies involved in affiliate marketing and what they mean. Merchant: The company or brands with a product or service to sell! Affiliate: The one who promotes the merchant’s products or services and earns commission after sales! Network: The link that connects the affiliate & the merchant, enabling affiliates to get into into the affiliate programs, and watch over the tools used to track & monitor the sales & performance; generate the reports, process the payments & so on! Customer: Obviously, the one who finally purchases the product! 🙂

Please Note:

Before you step into the affiliate marketing, you must conduct a deep study of your merchant’s target market to get well acquainted with the needs, issues, likes, dislikes and other crucial information about its customers. I mean a market research must be done by the affiliate for identifying and engaging the merchant’s potential customers better. It will help you in creating content that is relevant enough to appeal the target audience helping them with a solution for what they were looking for.

The Affiliate Marketing Mechanism: How It Works?

Coming straight to the point, let me tell you how the stuff works. A link to the merchant’s product or service is usually given to the affiliate who owns a website or a blog. In most of the cases, it is direct link that they can place on the website or blog relevantly. Now, when the readers embark upon the affiliates website or blog they might click on these affiliate links that move them o the web to land upon the merchant’s website where one can buy the product. Here lies the point, these affiliate links place a cookie on the visitor’s computer that is valid for some considerable number of days and if the visitor makes any purchase on the merchant’s website then the commission is paid to the affiliate. It’s simple, bigger the number of readers flocking your blog or website, chances are bigger will be the figure of your commission. In an affiliate program, commission is paid to the affiliates on the basis of sales. Even companies like Amazon are using the same method i.e. PPS (pay-per-sale model). However, there are few other compensation methods as well that include cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-mille/cost-per-thousand views (CPM) or a cost-per-action (CPA) based payment mechanism for compensating the affiliates. However, the PPS based method happens to be quite popular among the marketers in which the sales are counted at the end of the process and the commission is paid to the affiliate. One thing that must be kept in mind that these are internet cookies that helps in tracking the movements of buyers for sales to be attributed to each affiliate and so play a very crucial in affiliate marketing.

Afterword

Though affiliate marketing helps you earn big but always keep in mind it’s not easy to make big bucks and earn big fortune right at the start in any business. In the beginning, it needs considerable amount of time, determination, right knowledge along with the right set of tools, business understanding and a bit of entrepreneurial skills. Affiliate Marketing is just one of the sub-components of Digital Marketing Certificate Course (DMCC)@Digiperform.