Affiliate marketing vs digital marketing – what’s the difference? With affiliate marketing there’s a third party involved who gets paid a commission for a product referral.
Digital marketing is a broader term used by both affiliates and product owners/businesses themselves to promote and sell products online.
There’s many forms of digital marketing including strategies such as blogging, paid advertising, email marketing and the like. While affiliates mostly use digital marketing to promote third party products and services, they are not limited to using digital forms of marketing, and they can use any sort of advertising.
Affiliates promote and sell other people’s products and services for a commission based on their sales. Digital marketing is simply an online form of advertising used by individuals and businesses for product/service promotion. Businesses can also use affiliates as part of their promotion strategies too. Since affiliates only get paid for successful sales made, this is a very cost effective form of advertising for businesses and product owners.
Affiliate Marketing Vs Digital Marketing: Types Of Digital Marketing
There’s many ways to market a product. Digital marketing refers to online strategies rather than traditional forms of advertising such as newspaper adverts, banners and flyers. Some forms of digital advertising (digital marketing) are:
- PPC – pay per click adverts (Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc).
- Email marketing – email marketing involves collecting email subscribers from a website and sending automated follow up email messages to subscribers
- Social media marketing – both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods can be used for advertising a product/business.
- SEO – search engine optimisation is typically used for website owners who want to rank their content on the search engines and get free traffic (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc)
- Niche websites – are built specifically to attract SEO traffic from the SERPS – search engine results pages.
These methods are used by both businesses for their own marketing purposes and by affiliate marketers to generate sales of other people’s products. Affiliates aren’t limited however to only using digital marketing and they can use whatever methods they like to promote and sell other people’s products. Providing they make a sale which goes through their unique identifying affiliate link, they will still earn a commission.
Using Affiliates In Your Marketing Strategy
If you own a business or a product yourself, you can use both digital marketing and affiliates to promote it.
The benefit of using affiliate marketing is that you only pay the affiliate for a successful sale. This means you’re not wasting money on learning advertising strategies if you don’t know what you’re doing!
Since digital marketing can take some time and effort to learn, many product/business owners join an affiliate network and use affiliates to help them make sales.
Some 40% of merchants cited affiliate programs as their top customer acquisition channel and, in a recent survey, nearly 90 percent of advertisers said affiliate programs were important to their overall marketing strategies.
You can see why affiliate marketing is important for product owners. The affiliates assume the risk of figuring out how to make sales using various marketing strategies. For this, they can earn an independent income online and work from anywhere. This is what makes affiliate marketing so appealing for the affiliates themselves.
If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate and earning an income online, access a video series to learn more here.
Popular Marketing Methods
One of the most popular marketing methods is to use an email marketing list. Email marketing is used both by businesses themselves, through an agency or independently, and also by affiliate marketers. The email list is one of the best online marketing methods because it gives the business/owner the ability to collect emails and build a large list of subscribers. This can then be used to deliver valuable content to the subscribers and promote products and services at the same time.
With a list, an affiliate or business can make sales by automating delivery of messages to an ever growing audience.
See the power of email marketing for more on this topic.