So how does affiliate marketing work step by step? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties get paid for referring customers to products online. When someone buys an affiliate product through the affiliate’s link, the sale is tracked back to them and they earn a commission based on the sale.
So how does this process work, what do affiliates do to make sales and how can you do it too? Here’s a bit more about this process from start to finish.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work Step By Step – Joining An Affiliate Program
Before you can earn from promoting affiliate products online, you need to join an affiliate program. There’s many affiliate programs available online and many affiliates get their start by joining Amazon’s partner program. Amazon is a popular platform because so many people are comfortable buying from the website, even though Amazon’s commission structure is pretty low.
Once you have signed up to an affiliate program, you’ll be able to promote products through a unique link known as the affiliate link. The affiliate link tracks back sales you have made and rewards you with a percentage of the sale. Amazon affiliates can link to any product from the vast array of items on the site. Click on the site stripe to collect your unique affiliate link (pointing to any given product).
Once you have that link, you can paste it anywhere online in order to get people to click on it with the intention of buying a specific product. This works the same with any affiliate program. You’ll be able to access a dashboard in the associates program and collect links which point to specific products.
Affiliates need to learn how to promote those links in order to make sales. No sales equals no commissions. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. As such, you need to make these sales if you are to make any money!
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work Step By Step – Product Promotion
There’s many ways in which you can promote your affiliate link as an affiliate marketer. Here’s a few of the most popular methods of product promotion:
- Blogging
- Video Blogging
- PPC – pay per click advertising
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing – both paid and unpaid.
The huge variety of promotion methods means you can get creative with how you promote affiliate products. Many affiliates will stick with a specific strategy until they are successful, rather than spread themselves too thin by jumping from one to another.
This gives them time to learn a strategy really well. Some strategies are faster than others and more easily scalable. Paid marketing methods, for example, can be set up and going within a matter of hours. Whereas blogging can take much longer in order to gain traction and is less easily scalable. Let’s have a look at some of these marketing strategies in a little more detail. Since I’m a fan of blogging, we’ll start there!
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work Step By Step – Your Target Audience
When it comes to blogging you’ll need to be pretty patient because it can take some time before your blog gets the notice needed to sell your products on a regular basis. Before you set about building a blog, you need to choose a topic. Your choice of topic is pretty important, especially if you’re going to be creating content on a blog. Ideally choose a topic you’re familiar with or want to learn about. That way, you can continue blogging for a long period of time.
You also need to align your affiliate products with your blog topic. If you don’t get this right, your visitors won’t be interested in your products. For example, if your blog is about cars, don’t try and sell dishwashers from it! You would want a car related product which appeals to your audience.
Your target audience is the section of the online marketplace who are most likely to be interested in your affiliate product. So when they land on your content, they are likely to buy. A good example of a well targeting piece of content is a review for some kind of product. A review website works well for affiliates because it attracts the very people who are interested in a specific product. So when they land on your site, they can easily click on your affiliate link and buy it! Read more about target audience and customer avatar here.
Video Blogging
Video blogging works in a similar way to blogging. You can create and upload multiple videos which somehow relate to your affiliate product. Then link to your product (with your affiliate link) in each video in the description. With a large volume of videos on YouTube, for example, you will start to attract some passive visitors who are looking for your particular type of content.
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet after Google. But even so, it’s hugely competitive, especially for free traffic. So you’ll need to create a lot of content to start getting your videos found.
This is of course similar for bloggers. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet, so plenty of competition. You can of course run paid advertising on Google, or on YouTube too, but this will incur greater expenditure than content creation. Paid advertising is a much faster way to drive traffic though, so if you don’t have the patience for content creation, this could be the way to go for you.
PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising
With pay per click, you can target your potential customers with any given advertising platform:
- YouTube (Adwords)
- Google Adwords
- Bing
- etc.
Many affiliates will start with Bing.com because it offers cheap search advertising where affiliates can specify the keywords which are triggering their ads.
Bing also tends to be easier to get going with than Adwords, which has more checks and balances for affiliates, which can make it more difficult to access if you’re new. If you’re interested in learning more about using paid marketing as an affiliate, you can join a mentorship program here which offers products, training and support.
It’s a good idea to send paid traffic to a landing page, rather than a blog, for example. This is because on a blog, your visitors can look around and click through your content. This means your advertising budget won’t get very far and most of your visitors will eventually click away, having not taken any action on your blog. Send them to a landing page instead and you can collect their email address. This allows you to follow up with them over a much longer timescale via email marketing.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best ways to make affiliate marketing profitable. With email marketing, you collect emails from a landing page and follow up with your subscribers by sending email messages – helping them with a specific problem.
You can then promote your affiliate products via email, by using your affiliate links in the text. With email marketing, affiliates build up an email data base of hundreds of thousands of subscribers which they can promote products and services to.
Social Media Marketing
Many affiliates will promote their affiliate links through their social media profiles. To do this effectively, you need to place a clear call to action on your profile page with some offer or giveaway.
Then you need to find people who are likely to want what you have on offer. You can do this in various ways. On Facebook, for example, you can join various groups and interact with people who have certain interests. Over time, and if you make a habit out of this, people will come and look at your profile.
Learn more about unpaid social media marketing strategies here.
Summary
Ideally as an affiliate you should work at a particular strategy until you have mastered it! When you can make affiliate sales consistently, you’ve probably spent a good deal of time learning a particular strategy. However, initially there’s a lot of learning to be done.
This initial phase of being an affiliate can be quite frustrating because you’ve yet to make a sale online. This is perhaps why so many affiliates drop out. But if you can stick at it long enough to break through and make your first sale, you can make many more. You can ultimately learn how to make sales in your sleep!
Here’s the quick version of how affiliates make sales step by step:
- Join an affiliate program – choose products carefully according to your promotion method
- Promote your affiliate link by studying a promotion method for at least a few months
- Once you make a sale, continue with that strategy until sales come in more regularly.
- Scale up if you can – if using PPC (paid ads), this is much easier, if blogging, create more content
