How is affiliate marketing done? Affiliate marketing is a business model where third parties sell other people’s products online. When an affiliate makes a sale through their unique affiliate code (affiliate link), they earn a commission based on the sale.
Initially to become an affiliate you will need to join an affiliate program. Once you’ve joined, you’ll usually get access to a back office where you can collect your affiliate link. Once you have it, you can start promoting your affiliate product. There’s many ways to promote affiliate links and some of the most popular methods are:
- Blogging or video blogging (V’logging).
- Email marketing – collect emails and promote link through email messages
- Paid advertising (Pay per click ad platforms such as Adwords, Bing, YouTube and Facebook for example).
- Social media marketing – you can use the many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc to post your links and find potential customers.
How Is Affiliate Marketing Done – Blogging/V’logging
With blogging or video blogging, affiliates create content and post on a website or video platform. They optimise their content as much as possible so that they can get found by the various search engines. The most popular search engine is of course Google, so most bloggers will aim to get their content ranking on Google to get free website traffic.
This is definitely not an easy task as there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet. In a very competitive niche, affiliates will be competing against other bloggers for the top spot on Google. But they can also promote their blog posts elsewhere too such as through using social media platforms.
With blogging it can take some time to start selling affiliate products consistently. But over time and with enough content, you can even sell affiliate products passively from the work you’ve done previously. The same can be said for other content generation strategies such as through using YouTube.
How Is Affiliate Marketing Done – Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most popular tools for affiliate marketers. It lets the affiliate collect email addresses of people and send them information on autopilot through email messages. With a large enough email list and an engaged audience, affiliates can sell thousands of affiliate products through sending out email messages and building a relationship with their list. This is usually done by offering a service of some kind through a newsletter subscription.
To collect email addresses affiliates place a form on a website or landing page. They then drive traffic to that page according to their target audience. This can be done through organic content creation or paid advertising.
Using PPC – Pay Per Click (paid advertising)
Many affiliates use PPC (pay per click advertising) to promote their affiliate products. They can either send people directly to a product sales page (through their affiliate link), or to a landing page as described above. Obviously with paid ads affiliates aim to promote a product and earn more in sales revenue than they do in advertising expenditure. Once they are in profit on a consistent basis, they can simply increase their advertising budget and make many more sales.
PPC ad platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc. allow affiliates to find likely customers for their products and place ads accordingly. For example, Adwords lets you place ads in front of people according to what they search for on Google. So you can show ads only to relevant online search traffic to maximise the potential to make a sale.
Social Media Marketing – Selling Through Social Media Platforms
While you can pay on certain platforms to show your ads, you can also use various unpaid social media marketing strategies too. One strategy is to place your links in your social media profile and then find other users who are likely to want your affiliate product.
On Facebook, for example, you can do this through the use of groups. Join groups and interact with members who are within the remit of your target audience. As they find your profile to interact with you they can see your offer. A common strategy used by affiliates is to offer some kind of giveaway product (such as an ebook/video course) through their social media bio.
Once on their email list, you’ll be shown their affiliate products. Some affiliates will link directly to their affiliate products on their social media bio, if they’re not using an email list.
Summary
Affiliates use many different strategies to sell affiliate products and earn commissions based on those sales. From blogging, to video marketing and PPC (pay per click advertising).
Email marketing is one of the best strategies which affiliates use and they can build email lists into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. When an email is sent out to a list like this, with an affiliate link in it, even a small percentage of purchases can means affiliates have a very nice pay day!
But of course it can take some time to build a list like this. If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate, access course here to learn more.