Anyone would like to earn money without much effort. The dream of many is to wake up one morning and find a large amount of money in their account.
For everyone who is completely devoted to the search for opportunities to turn their dreams of passive income into reality, affiliate marketing is the right solution.
At the moment, there are many proven techniques for how to get the maximum benefit from such a partnership. If you are just starting your acquaintance with affiliate marketing and a lot of things seem unclear to you, you should not worry. This type of marketing is as easy as a pie.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
It is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. The two forms of marketing are differentiated, however, in how they drive sales, where affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations, while referral marketing relies more on trust and personal relationships.
Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies.
The added value of affiliate marketing is the fact that advertisers can collaborate with hundreds of partners, the affiliates, without engaging in direct communication with them. Therefore, the advertisers can increase their market position without a need to conduct time-consuming processes of recurring approvals and relationship building with partners. These tasks are performed by the affiliative system operator, who establishes contact with the advertisers and with the partners and enables advertisers to benefit from the advertising capacity of partners from all around the world. From advertisers’ perspective, advertising services are provided by the operator and not by each partner engaged within the affiliation system.
Analogically, the affiliates can provide advertising services without any interaction with advertisers since the affiliate panel gives partners access to all the necessary information needed to run an advertising campaign. Such information includes, for example, advertising materials for each advertised product and service category, geolocation data for individual advertising campaigns for each advertised product and service category, which can be advertised following its geolocation. Additionally, the affiliate panel includes information about rates per lead generated in a campaign per geolocation. From the perspective of the partners, their services are rendered to the operator and not the advertisers
Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the Internet, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business.
Here’s an example of Amazon affiliate marketing program.
Amazon’s Affiliate Marketing Program
Amazon’s program is called Amazon Associates.
It’s centered on
- recommending Amazon products
If someone buys a product following your recommendation, you receive commission income
- promoting Amazon services
If someone signs up for an Amazon service, you receive a bounty, which is a fixed fee.
A lot of affiliate marketing programs work with a commission fee schedule. Amazon uses flat commission rates for specific product categories. They’re called commission income. Unless specifically outlined, most Amazon categories are based around a 4.0% commission rate, with exceptions like gift cards or some alcohol brands.
After you’ve sold enough products to move to another advertising rate, the next round of sales you make will give you a commission of the new rate. This goes on over a series of commission tiers.
Affiliate marketing in other companies looks pretty much the same. These could be companies from various industries like IT, entertainment, sports, etc. So, it’s up to you what to choose and try.
Look for more ideas for your business in Marketing Ideas section of the website.