Affiliate marketing is a business that generates around $17 billion in sales every year. In addition, 8 out of 10 brands have an affiliate program. This sector has been growing rapidly since the 2000s, and there's no end in sight. 📈
Behind these substantial revenues lie many companies, but also a huge number of independent publishers. In fact, many bloggers, youtubers and others manage to earn an income with this strategy.
The main reason why this type of marketing is so popular is that it's a win-win process. And we're going to explain in detail how to take advantage of affiliate marketing to earn money or increase your sales. 🤑
Affiliate marketing - What are we talking about??
Affiliate marketing is an advertising strategy in which the advertiser pays the publisher for each sale made. In concrete terms, an advertiser (company) gives a percentage of sales to publishers who bring in a customer.
Affiliate marketing is not to be confused with a salesperson who earns a commission on every sale. In this case, they work directly for a company and receive a bonus. Whereas the affiliate receives a commission every time he brings in a new customer, but doesn't work for the company in question.
Let's take a concrete example 📝
Imagine that an online store sells kitchen accessories. To promote its utensils, the brand creates an affiliate program. For each sale, it will offer a 5% commission on all sales made.
In this way, kitchen-themed bloggers will recommend the brand's accessories. 👨🍳
To do this, they'll place an affiliate link in an article, video or other. If a visitor clicks on this link and buys an accessory, they'll earn a commission, i.e. a percentage of the sales generated.
For example, if a visitor clicks on an affiliate link to the kitchen accessories store and buys €100 worth of accessories, the affiliate will earn €5 commission.
But in reality, you can affiliate with anything. As long as you're selling something and have a way of tracking affiliate sales, you're in business.
So you can affiliate training, coaching, construction, swimming pools, software and much more!
How does affiliate marketing work?
As you can see, affiliate marketing can be used in many different ways.
👉 On the one hand, you can promote products and services to earn commission.
👉 On the other, you can create an affiliate program to get publishers to promote your products/services.
Depending on the strategy, many things will change. We'll now explain in detail the difference between affiliate marketing for advertisers and publishers.
Affiliate marketing for advertisers
For a brand, affiliate marketing is purely a business strategy. Here, a company will seek out affiliates to promote its products/services without risking losing money. We'll explain:
When a brand wants to advertise on Google, for example, it will pay on a cost-per-click basis. In other words, when an Internet user clicks on a brand's site via an ad on the search engine, the company pays a certain amount.
The problem is that a prospect may very well click on an ad but not buy anything. In that case, the company loses money, even if it attracts many visitors.
Whereas affiliate marketing is a win-win process 🤝
In fact, an advertiser only has to pay a commission to the affiliate if a sale has been made. If a potential customer clicked on an affiliate link but didn't buy anything, the advertiser won't have to pay anything (unlike traditional advertising). So it's impossible to lose money with this strategy.
Affiliate marketing for publishers
For publishers, affiliate marketing is the best monetization strategy. In this case, a publisher will seek to earn commissions by recommending attractive offers.
To be an affiliate, you absolutely must have an audience. Otherwise, no one will click on your affiliate links and you won't earn any commission. This is actually the main disadvantage of affiliation.
However, it's also the simplest business model for monetizing your audience. And yes, with affiliation, there's no customer service, no problems with payment processors, parcel delivery or the like.
The advertiser takes care of everything. All you have to do is bring him customers, and he'll take care of delivery, VAT collection, after-sales service and so on.
So, from the moment you have an audience, affiliate marketing is a way to earn passive income. 💰
How to set up your own affiliate program
As soon as you start selling something on the Internet, you can set up an affiliate program. This allows publishers to bring you customers in exchange for a percentage of your sales. However, there are many ways to set up your own affiliate program.
You can develop your own affiliate program by hand. However, this is a fairly complex and costly process. So we won't go into that below. In fact, we're going to show you some easy ways to create an affiliate program, using third-party platforms.
Use an affiliation platform
This is the route that many companies recommend. Using an affiliate platform is undoubtedly the easiest way to create your own affiliate program.
There are many platforms that can help you create your own program easily, such as :
Awin
Effiliation
Affilae
Netaffiliation
Rakuten Advertising
If you use a platform, it will take care of tracking, calculating commissions and paying affiliates. All you have to do is set the conditions (commission rate, cookie duration, etc.) and give the platform a percentage.
If you sell infoproducts, you can use the marketplaces of the main tools dedicated to online training. For example, if you use LearnyBox or Systeme.io, you can easily create an affiliate program from the platform.
What are the requirements for your affiliate program?
The first thing an affiliate looks at is the commission rate. However, we don't recommend setting the commission percentage too high at the outset. The best thing to do is to analyze the rate applied by your competitors and increase it slightly.
You can also add extra remuneration and bonuses for the best affiliates (publishers love a challenge and will be willing to work even harder for your brand).
There are several types of compensation for affiliates. Most of the time, they'll be paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) or revenue-sharing basis. You may also see cost-per-click (CPC) as with advertising, but this is quite rare.
👉 With CPA, an affiliate earns a fixed percentage of a sale.
👉 With revenue sharing, an affiliate earns a fixed percentage of sales, for life.
Whichever commission method you choose, we encourage you to be as specific as possible about the terms and conditions of your program. If you don't spell out the compensation conditions on the presentation page of your program, most affiliates won't make the effort to sign up.
How do I find affiliates?
While many companies have an affiliate program, only some have reactive affiliates who work every day. So how do you become part of the programs that attract publishers? 🤔
Well, if your brand is well-known, you'll have no trouble finding affiliates. From the moment it's visible on your site, many publishers will sign up to your program every day. Unfortunately, having a popular brand isn't for everyone.
👉 To get the word out about your affiliate program, you'll need to canvass affiliates. So you're going to look for all the blogs, YouTube channels, Instagram accounts and so on that specialize in your niche. Then you need to contact them and present your affiliate program.
You'll quickly convince a few affiliates, and if they like your program, they may tell other publishers about it. The hardest part is recruiting the first affiliates, but after that, things take care of themselves!
How to make money with affiliate marketing
Now that you know a little more about affiliate marketing, we're going to show you how this business model can help you make money. Obviously, we're going to concentrate here on the publisher part. If you own a brand and want to set up an affiliate program, this part isn't for you.
We're going to show you different techniques that offer the possibility of attracting traffic and then generating commissions. 💰
Blogging
In the United States, more than 1 in 2 Amazon customers consult several websites before buying on the e-commerce site. In general, they'll be looking for information about a product, reviews from people who've already bought it, and so on. While researching, a future buyer will come across several types of websites:
Blogs, news and media sites
Comparison sites and reviews
Forums
Customer review platforms (TrustPilot, Avis Veriés, etc.)
Most of these sites will be affiliate sites. In other words, the webmaster will talk about the product in question while placing a link that redirects to a merchant site. This link will be an affiliation link. This means that if an Internet user clicks on this link and buys a product, the owner of the site in question will earn a commission.
Let's take a concrete example. 📝
Imagine you want to switch to an online bank. The problem is that there are dozens of them, and each one has a different use. So you go to Google and look for information.
Before you know it, you'll come across blogs specializing in online banking (yes, there really is such a thing!). In most cases, these sites will be affiliate blogs. In other words, they'll present each online bank in detail, and each time you'll see a link to sign up for that bank. 🏦
Blogging is certainly the most powerful lever for making money through affiliation. In fact, thanks to SEO, your pages will rank higher on Google and you'll be able to attract qualified visitors every day.
YouTube
YouTube is also an ideal platform for affiliate marketing. As with search engines, you can find all kinds of content on it. It's very easy to present several products in a YouTube video, then place an affiliate link in the description.
It's basically the same strategy as blogging, but in video format. 🎥
Affiliate marketing via YouTube offers very good conversion results. However, it's a little less accessible. You'll need video and audio equipment to shoot and record your videos.
TikTok
TikTok is the most popular social network today. And many brands have understood this, using it as a true communication channel. Most brands simply present their offers via short videos. 📱
However, many users are going to do the same thing, but for the affiliate part. In fact, they too will be presenting products via short videos, but doing affiliate. videos.
This affiliate marketing strategy is still little-known, and in our opinion has potential. However, the conversion rate will be lower than with YouTube or a blog.
In reality, very few people watch a TikTok in its entirety. And even fewer will ask for a sponsorship code or an affiliate link. But, given the substantial traffic that can be generated with TikTok, there's still a way to make money.
Email marketing
This is one of the most underestimated ways of making money with affiliate marketing. In this strategy, you'll need an e-mail list. You can collect e-mails in a variety of ways. Mainly via YouTube, a blog, advertising or other means.
Once you have a well-filled email list, you can start promoting affiliate offers. 📧
The best thing is to have a thematic e-mail list. In fact, if you have an email list of a million people that you've picked up from a news site, it won't be worth much. Conversely, a small email list of 1,000 people interested in cryptocurrency will be much more profitable.
Let's say you have a thematic email list. Let's see how you can affiliate it.
You can affiliate with "generic" products. If your leads are interested in crypto, you can simply promote Binance, FTX, Coinbase and others. Generally, they offer fairly low commission rates. 📉
If you want to recommend high-commission offers, you'll need to affiliate for infoproducts. On system.io, you can see a marketplace of digital products to recommend. In each case, you can see the commission rate and the offer in question.
For example, you can recommend a training course on crypto investing and earn 70% commission on every sale. We've mentioned System.io here because many vendors offer pre-signed emails. So all you have to do is copy the e-mails and add your affiliate link.
Email marketing is a strategy that can achieve a very good conversion rate. If you have an e-mail list, we clearly recommend affiliate marketing to monetize it! (You can even monetize a simple newsletter with this technique).
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