In this “all about affiliate marketing pdf“, I’m going to share some of the best insights I’ve come to understand in the last 10 plus years as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing is a business first and foremost. Understanding that it’s a business, and not some magic bullet or get rich quick scheme is one of the best things to know first! When you understand this, you’re less likely to kid yourself and you’re not going to expect more in return that you’re putting out in effort!
Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties share their affiliate links online in some way (generally online). When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you earn a commission based on the sale. In many ways it’s like recommending a restaurant to a friend. Except with affiliate marketing you get paid when your friend shows up and pays for a meal.
There’s many ways affiliates can promote their products online and there’s many products to choose from. Your choice of product and your ability to promote it are the two main reasons for success or failure as an affiliate. With a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing it’s reasonable to say that most people won’t become successful affiliates. When you understand why there’s a 95% drop out rate in the industry, you’re far better prepared than most for success.
All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Products
Before you set out on your affiliate marketing journey, you need to choose a product to sell. There’s thousands of affiliate programs out there, so which products do you choose to sell? Some people say choose products you have already bought yourself. That way you can genuinely talk about them and promote them authentically. If you haven’t bought a product yourself, how could you genuinely recommend them?
Many affiliates start out with a program they know about, such as Amazon. Amazon is one of the best known and most widely used affiliate programs out there and there’s a huge amount of products you can promote from the site. But Amazon’s commission rates are some of the lowest in the industry varying from just 1% commission on some of its products. See Amazon affiliate commission rates.
Clickbank.com is another favourite affiliate resource for new affiliates. With digital products there’s a better commission structure typically. Digital products often pay out from 20-50% commission in some cases. This is much higher than most physical products you can choose from. There’s also high ticket affiliate products you can promote. These pay out much larger commissions than average. Subscription affiliate programs too are worth knowing about. With a subscription product you can earn ongoing commissions from previous sales you’ve made. This can make a dramatic difference in your bottom line as an affiliate quite quickly.
All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Promotion Methods
There’s many different ways to promote affiliate products and you can use both online and offline methods. Most affiliates will concentrate on the online methods but you can use any form of advertising available to you. One of the best forms of online advertising is one which can be quickly scaled up to a larger audience.
It’s easy to get into trouble as a new affiliate, believing you can throw some content out there and get some fast results (with a strategy such as blogging, for example). But with over 600 million blogs on the internet today, and growing fast, it’s incredibly difficult to compete. So it’s well worth educating yourself before you jump right in because otherwise it’s very easy to waste time and get nowhere – even with a lot of activity.
Promotion
Here’s a few of the most popular promotion methods which affiliates use to put their products in front of an audience:
- PPC – pay per click marketing or direct marketing. Platforms such as Facebook, Google Adwords or YouTube let marketers pay to place their ads in front of a targeted audience who are most likely to want their products.
- Organic traffic through SEO (e.g. blogging/Video blogging)- methods such as content creation, blogging or video content can be used to attract search traffic from Google, Bing , YouTube and other search and social media platforms.
- Social media – some affiliates focus solely on social media accounts to find potential customers for their affiliate products
- Email marketing – most top affiliates will build an email list of subscribers and communicate their marketing message to their list. See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Promotion Methods & Timescale
Many new affiliates choose a promotion method and run into problems when nothing happens! For example, blogging is a popular method of building an affiliate business but it takes a long time to reap the benefits from it. A blog might take several months or even years to come to fruition and start generating regular sales. But blogging is super cheap and even free to do, so it suits a lot of people who are trying to make money online. Because of this there’s a huge amount of competition for blogging. See also how long does it take to make money blogging.
PPC Vs Organic Marketing
PPC or pay per click advertising is much, much faster. You can see the results of a pay per click campaign the same day as starting it! However, it costs money to run paid advertising campaigns with PPC, so it doesn’t suit everyone. Plus, many of your campaigns won’t work immediately either, so you can spend a lot of money just finding a winning advert. Many new affiliates will test multiple ads and give up before they find a winning one which returns a regular profit!
The good thing about running paid ad campaigns is that when you find a profitable campaign, you can keep running it and even scale it up, adding more funds to find more buyers. See also how to scale affiliate marketing. This is the fastest way to build an affiliate business but it also comes with some inherent potential problems. If your affiliate product is a low valued one, it’s much harder to profit while running paid ads. The margin for error is much smaller than if you have a high ticket sales funnel with multiple high value products in it. Using the highest paying affiliate programs with recurring commission will give you a much higher return on investment when running paid ads. So it’s advisable to do that instead of choosing low value physical products which can hardly recover your ad spend!
All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Understanding Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience as an affiliate is one of the most important factors for success. Unless you can consistently place your products and services in front of buying customers, you won’t make it as an affiliate. The best way to do this is to learn about your audience. The customer avatar is your “perfect” customer. They are those people who will not only buy from you, but love what you do, what you stand for and become life long customers who buy again and again.
To determine who your customer avatar is, you can look at your existing customers and the people who you can help the most with your products/services. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf. These are some of the things you should know about your customers before running a marketing campaign:
- How old they are
- Where do they hang out online
- What are their values
- Where do they live
- What are their needs
- How can you serve them
The better you understand your customer avatar, the better able you are to place your marketing in front of them, but also communicate in a way that is meaningful to them; talking directly to their needs, pains, desires and aspirations. Understanding their audience is one of the most overlooked factors for beginner affiliates so this is worth spending some time on if you’re serious about being successful.
All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Customer Journey
The “customer journey” is another important element of understanding affiliate marketing. After you place your advertising material in front of your customer avatar, you want to encourage them to take a specific action, (on your website, for example).
For many affiliates this action is to sign up to their email marketing list. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to buy something which the affiliate is promoting. After that time the visitor leaves the site, usually never to return. But if you can capture the email address of a website visitor, you can follow up with an email marketing campaign over many more days, weeks and even months and years.
Research shows that most online visitors don’t become customers on their first visit to a website. In fact a visitor needs multiple “touch points” before they become a customer and makes a purchase. This is difficult to achieve from a website (or an advert) alone, and so most affiliates will build an email list to help with this.
“The Flow”
The “flow” from one piece of marketing material to another should keep your visitor engaged with a congruent theme. Too much disparity between your information will result in a disconnect where the visitor feels like the messages don’t match up. They click away and you’ve lost a subscriber, or a customer! Maintaining a congruent theme or idea allows the customer journey to follow through from one piece of marketing to another. The flow from an advert, to a landing page to your email follow up messages to the product is known as the customer journey; it’s the journey the customer takes to arrive at the end product. When you get this nice and smooth, you can consistently attract the right customers to your products.
Should one piece not fit with another, you may find your conversion rates are suffering. This might be because of a disconnect which needs to be fixed before you can maximise your marketing efficiency. See also affiliate marketing journey.
Email Marketing
It’s well worth using email marketing, whatever you decide to promote as an affiliate. With a website most of your visitors will leave without taking any action at all. But an email list can help you build a long term relationship with your website visitors if you can get them to sign up to your email list.
To build an email list you need an email autoresponder. Email autoresponders allow you to collect emails from a website and send automated messages to your subscribers. From a list, you can deliver value to your subscribers and help them with a specific problem. Over time (and after having helped your subscribers with a problem), you can build trust. Once people trust you online, you’ll have a much easier time trying to sell them products and services (if you’re genuinely helping them)!
Attraction Marketing
There’s tens of thousands of affiliate marketers online, many of whom are competing for the same space as you. To shine out you need to be better than most of them. You can do this by being of value and focusing on genuinely helping people rather than simply trying to sell them!
Many new affiliate marketers just try and sell and nobody wants to be sold! People are much more likely not to buy from pushy sales people, especially when they can find out more information for free from the internet.
To shine out online you need to be an affiliate who is value driven. By offering value you can build trust, instead of pushing people to products they don’t necessarily want or need.
Find products which offer the best value and which genuinely help people with their needs. A favourite example of a value driven affiliate website is the site Moneysavingexpert.com which was created by Martin Lewis. The site is an affiliate website, but you wouldn’t know it. It’s focused on providing huge value to its visitors and genuinely helps them with problems of finance, mortgages, bills, energy use, credit cards and debt.
Everything changed for me as an affiliate when I switched from trying to “get” to genuinely helping my readers/audience.
Access a free video series here to learn more about affiliate marketing.
