In this article, we are going to go over what affiliate marketing is and how to become an affiliate marketer.

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What Is Affiliate Marketing, Exactly?

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting another person’s (or company’s) product.

You find a product you like, promote it to your audience, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make. It’s similar to a salesperson earning a commission, except you don’t work for the company. Instead, it’s like earning a reward for sending a new customer to the company.

How Affiliate Marketing Works?

There are three main players in an affiliate marketing arrangement:

1. You and your website/Hub—the “affiliate.”The affiliate company (or network). In the simplest affiliate arrangements, you work directly with a single company to promote one or more of their products. There are more complex affiliate networks that provide an opportunity to earn affiliate revenue on a range of products, such as ShareASale, Clickbank, Amazon.
2. The customer. This is a member of your audience who uses your affiliate link to purchase a product from the affiliate company or network.
3.   Vendor. A company that offers an affiliate marketing program may call it by a different name—these programs are also commonly called partner programs or referral programs and are somewhere at the bottom of the website usually.

Examples of Affiliate Marketing

In simple terms affiliate marketing is like being a sales agent for a company and you are paid on commission. All major companies have some kind of affiliate program.  Apple, Disney, Uber, TripAdvisor, Airbnb.

So you can go to a company like Apple and sign up with their affiliate program and start promoting their products with the affiliate links they give you.

When people click on your links, it will take them to Apple’s website and if they buy something, you will earn a commission!

Let’s use Airbnb to illustrate this. Airbnb is an online marketplace which lets people rent out their properties or spare rooms to guests. Airbnb takes 3% commission of every booking from hosts.

If you have ever referred to any of your friends a movie, book, or even a restaurant. You acted as an affiliate except that in that case you were not paid.

On that premise, this forms the basis of a very lucrative business model online.

What does affiliate marketing look like online?

If you’ve visited my website or any other website, you may have come across links to different products, apps, services recommended to you and that you would find helpful. If you clicked on the link and bought the owner of that website probably made money.

If this is done right, it’s always a win for you, for the vendor and for the user of the product. So how do you become an affiliate?

The Steps to Becoming an Affiliate Marketer

1. Find a company and product you want to promote.
2.  Sign up as an affiliate.
3. Get your unique affiliate link and add it to your site.
4. A visitor to your website clicks the link, which takes them to a third-party page.
5. If the visitor makes a purchase, you receive a commission based on the value of the item purchased.

Now, these steps are definitely accurate—you can’t earn money with affiliate marketing without first finding a product to promote! But more importantly, you shouldn’t be affiliate marketing without first establishing trust with your audience. The audience first, always.

That’s why my methodology for successful affiliate marketing goes like this:

1.  First, build a relationship with your audience.
2.  Then, identify a product that might fit your audience’s needs.
3.  Next, use and test the product yourself, to ensure it’s truly something worth recommending to your audience, so you don’t risk taking advantage of their trust.
4.   Show your audience tangible proof that the product does what it promises via a blog post or case study on your website or YouTube channel.
5. Then—and only then! —you can start to promote the product to your audience and hopefully start earning some affiliate revenue when they purchase it.

This approach puts your audience’s needs front and centre, setting you up for success with affiliate marketing.

How Much You Can Earn Via Affiliate Marketing

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to invest the time and effort to create a product to sell. You can begin selling something as an affiliate as soon as you have a platform to sell it on. In this way, affiliate marketing can be a great way to earn some extra income without a lot of hassle or upfront cost.

That said, it’s not a way to get rich quick. Like all passive income strategies, it takes time and effort to create a decent revenue stream.

 

1. The commission percentage you receive for each sale of an affiliate product or service.
2. The size of your audience.
3. How successful you are at promoting those products or services to your audience.

Typical commission percentages vary depending on the affiliate company you partner with, and the types of products or services you’re promoting.

Digital products and services typically offer higher margins due to their lower costs of production and fulfilment—there are no raw materials, manufacturing, shelf space, shipping costs, etc. These margins can be as high as 50 percent.

On the other hand, because of all the aforementioned costs, physical products tend to offer lower percentage margins, sometimes in the single digits.

Rules of Affiliate Marketing

To make any substantial Income online, you must follow the rules below biblically. If violated, you may not make any income as you will fall in the category of spammers and lose trust with your audience.

1. I only recommend products that I’m very familiar with. Preferably, these are products I’ve used before and that have helped me achieve something. If I’m not confident in the product and I don’t feel it will help people, I will not promote it.
2.  I never directly tell anyone to buy a product. I always recommend products based on my experience and in the context of what I’ve done or what I’m doing with it.

What does following these two rules achieve? Trust. By doing these two things, my audience knows that I only want them to buy the tools that they need, at the time they need them. They know that I’ve used and believe in the products I recommend. And they know there’s no pressure because I’m only looking out for their best interests.

Many affiliate marketers choose not to follow these rules—and I think that’s why affiliate marketing has turned out to be a frustrating business model.

Every affiliate marketer needs to understand the importance of establishing and maintaining trust with their audience before they get started with affiliate marketing. Thankfully, my system for getting started has trust baked into the entire process.

There’s no Need to SELL in Affiliate Marketing

Using the process, I just described above, you never have to really “sell” any product.

The best way to use affiliate marketing is recommending products to other people what you think it’s best to use to help them fix a problem or find a solution to something that they’ve been searching for.

I hate selling and I’m not very good at it at all so this business model is perfect for me because I can talk about things I love to do which are making money online and helping other people to do the same.

The key to being an affiliate marketer is not so much selling, it’s more about helping others because this will create trust. If you can create trust with your audience, then you will have created a great brand for yourself and you will reap the benefits of this trust as people will click on your affiliate links and buy your recommended products or services.

If you can concentrate on helping others versus selling to others, then you will master this affiliate marketing thing in no time!

Why This Method Works So Well?

Just imagine, there are over 3.75 billion (and growing each year) people searching on the internet for answers all day long, 24/7, do you think there are more than one person searching for let’s say how to make money online?

Let’s also know some more information Over 53 Million people do freelance work, that about 44% of the working population of USA. This is focused to It is forecast to increase to 60% by  end of this year.

 

We talking about an industry of 189 Billion in online Marketing industry and is expected to increase by 70% by end 2020 according to FORBES

Do you See the Income Potential?

The more helpful you are in your niche, the better you will rank on search engines, the more visitors you’ll get, the more money you’ll make. This is assuming you doing it organically, whoever there are ways to increase the traffic to your blog.

You can make money over and over again from that one article you wrote, which then creates passive income because you’ll be earning on that one post or article for months and years to come!

So could you imagine if you had a bunch of these articles working for you, helping lots of people on the internet, and earning over and over again?