What do affiliate marketers do? If you’ve heard of affiliate marketing you’ll already know that it’s a way to earn an income by promoting other people’s products on the internet.
Affiliates recommend products and if they make a sale they earn a commission based on that sale. There’s many ways affiliate marketers can actually do this and not every affiliate uses the same strategies. Some will create niche websites, others will use paid marketing strategies. Some affiliates earn a part time income and others earn huge six and even seven figure incomes.
What Do Affiliate Marketers Do?
To make sales, and earn commissions affiliate marketers must put products in front of the the right people. Since people are buying products from the internet all the time, the job of affiliate is to become the person in between the customer and the product.
They can do this in many different way, the mains ones being:
- Create written content – many affiliates create content by writing a blog or building website, just like this one. If someone purchases a product from my website, or signs up to my email list and purchases a product, I make a commission.
- Create videos – a lot of affiliates don’t blog but create videos and upload them to YouTube. As their subscriber base and following grows they make more money from their recommendations over time.
- Run paid marketing campaigns – many affiliates don’t want to spend heaps of time building content and opt for the paid marketing route instead. This can be a much faster way to build an online business.
- Find suitable people for customers on Social Media platforms – another strategy affiliates might use is to connect with others through social media channels in order to build relationships and promote their products.
- Affiliates build email lists – most successful affiliate marketers have an email list. They can send out useful content to their subscribers to help them with a topic which relates to their products.
What Do Affiliate Marketers Do?
As a beginner affiliate, you’ll be wearing your “student” cap for a while. This stage of the affiliate journey is spent researching affiliate programs and looking for training courses. You can sign up to the website and get a free video series to checkout my recommended mentors.
It’s well worth spending some time in this stage because the deeper your learning is, the better chance that you’ll take the right action steps later on. If you rush into affiliate marketing, as I did, you’ll find lots of problems.
Much like starting a new restaurant business, you wouldn’t buy the nearest building and just cook the food you already have in your kitchen. Your business would be doomed if you went about a new business this way. But many newbie affiliates do exactly this with affiliate marketing. They rush in and have problems because they don’t have the ground work in place.
So, it’s important for new affiliates to get the right training and educate themselves about affiliate marketing business models and strategies for marketing their products. This takes time and many drop out far to easily.
What Affiliate Marketers Do
Initially there’s some set up you’ll need to do in order to build a sales funnel. While some affiliates do everything by themselves, this is a much more difficult route. With the right program, you’ll get a fully stocked out sales funnel which contains products you can sell straight away. The SFM digital business system, you’ll be walked through the set up process in 7 step by step modules.
Once your sales funnel is set up and ready to go, you’ll need to turn your attention to the marketing side of things.
With the right business system, affiliate marketers can focus solely on marketing and allow an automated sales funnel to do the selling and promotion for them.
The Difficult Bit
In the first instance affiliates will set up a sales funnel, an autoresponder and a website and landing pages. This can be done through the SFM back office once you become a member.
Once this is all set up, and this can be done within a few days, you’ll need to learn marketing. Marketing your sales funnel involves targeting an audience and sending them to a landing page or website where they can sign up and enter your sales funnel.
This is the stage where many affiliates simply give up! But don’t! Marketing is the key to affiliate marketing. Without a marketing campaign affiliates will never make any sales or earn any money. So even with the best sales funnel in the world, it will just sit there collecting (digital) dust if you don’t send people into it.
Marketing can consist of many things. Any time someone clicks on a link of yours and goes into the sales funnel (by entering their email and name), you can consider it a form of marketing. Or they can also click on an affiliate link and directly purchase a product too.
Marketing at first can be very difficult because the affiliate will be learning what works and what doesn’t work. As a beginner this can be a frustrating time because most of what you do won’t work. Only after a lot of trial and effort can you determine which actions produce the best outcome. Once you get to this point, if you don’t give up before you reach it, you’re in a great position to focus on what works!
Why Affiliates Build Email Lists
From a website you can also directly link to many affiliate products from around the internet. However, the lifespan of a website visitor is much shorter than that of an email subscriber.
Once you get someone to subscribe to your email list, you can keep in touch with them for months or even years. On a website, someone only has a few minutes before they click away and are gone forever.
So with an email list, you have a lot more opportunity for building a relationship with your subscribers and making a sale. Some people will purchase from your email list even years after signing up to it.
Once Your Affiliate Business Shifts Gears
In the initial start up process affiliate marketing seems very difficult. There’s a lot to be done for little in return. But as you start making sales and seeing what works, you can focus on the actions which produce the largest results. This is the 80/20 principle or Pareto’s principle. It states that 80% of the outcome/consequences comes from only 20% of the causes.
Within affiliate marketing this is very important and once you determine which results produce the outcomes you want, you can place your attention there. As a beginner, you won’t know which actions give you the results you’re looking for, so it can seem like a difficult business.
But stick with it long enough and you can see some fantastic results for work you’ve done previously. Affiliate marketing can give you a passive income over time, which is pretty amazing when it happens.
What Do Affiliate Marketers Do – Keyword Research
Whether an affiliate marketer uses organic content to reach their audience or paid marketing, many affiliates will do keyword research. For this article, for example, I looked up this keyword “what do affiliate marketers do” to get an idea of how many people searched this exact phrase every month. As you can see in the image below, there’s only 30 searches per month for this keyword. But since my site is about affiliate marketing, I’ve been on the lookout for related keywords to write content about.
Once I’ve found a keyword which I like, I look on Google with a phrase search to see how likely I am to rank my article for this particular keyword.
The I do a open search too to see the number of results. This phrase comes in at just over 11 million which breaks my rule of less than 10million. However, I wanted to write on this topic for my email campaign to give some more information to my subscribers. So I thought I’d give it a go and see if I could rank! I might not make it onto Google but we shall see!
Affiliate Marketing Goals
It’s worth mentioning why affiliate marketers do all this too. Without that context this seems like an awful lot of work! Ultimately an affiliate business can give you complete time and financial freedom. But many affiliates work very hard to escape their jobs and be financially independent or self employed.
I like writing so blogging suits me and I enjoy the benefits of achieving a listing on Google, getting free leads and making sales from my content. Unless you enjoy the process of learning and implementing the skills though, affiliate marketing can be a lot of hard work. So it’s important to go into it with your eyes open.
Blogging isn’t the only way to do affiliate marketing and there’s much faster and easier ways if you have the money. When I became an affiliate, I was time rich and money poor, so I developed a habit for writing a blog.
What Else Do Affiliate Marketers Do – Tracking
Affiliate marketers track all their sales and leads. That way they can focus on the areas which are working for them once they get the data.
Initially though you’ll be doing a lot of things, testing and measuring what works and what doesn’t work. Once you start getting website traffic and leads (email subscribers), you’ll have some data to base your actions on. When you make sales you’ll want to track them back to an action you performed previously. Without doing so means you won’t know which tasks brought in the sale.
Tracking in the basic form simply means knowing where your sales came from. When you understand how you’ve made a sale, you’ll be able to repeat it again and again by focusing on the acton/s which brought it in.
Training & Webinars
If you’re lucky enough to find an online community of affiliates, you’ll be able to join trainings and webinars and mastermind with other business owners.
Ongoing training and development is key to any business venture. Your business can’t outgrow the level of thinking you bring to it. So if you’re stuck in your business in some way, changing your approach is key to breaking through to the next level. Limiting beliefs and underlying attitudes of limitation, lack or poverty can severely hamper your business growth.
So it’s useful to connect with other people who challenge your thinking and behaviour. If you’re going to build an affiliate business it’s well worth joining an online community who can help you do so.
Access an online business mentorship program here.
