What does an affiliate marketer do? Affiliate marketers promote other people’s products and services online. When someone makes a purchase through an affiliate link, that affiliate earns a commission from the sale. Affiliates do all kinds of things to bring people to their affiliate links where they can make a purchase. An affiliate is a third party referrer who only makes money when they bring a customer to a business, product or service.
So whether an affiliate is successful or not is determined by their ability to connect people with products over the internet. This can be done in several different ways.
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do? Blogging
One simple strategy affiliates use is to build a blog and create content which connects people to a product. This article, for example, can bring customers to the products I promote on this site. Blogging is a cheap but slow strategy whereby affiliates can build a passive stream of customers through their content.
Depending on the product you choose to promote, you will create content around a specific topic. Since this website is built around affiliate marketing, I write posts which connect visitors to products which can help them learn affiliate marketing.
Bloggers do more than write content. They also connect with other bloggers and build links to help them with their SEO – search engine optimisation. SEO is what search engines use to determine which pieces of content (and which websites) to rank on their search listings. When someone does a Google search for example, the results that come up will show the most relevant content. Bloggers aim to get their content ranked on the search engines so they can get free traffic and make affiliate sales through their affiliate links.
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do? List Building
Affiliates build email lists so that they can promote affiliate products to their subscribers. This is done through using an autoresponder. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing for one. Lists are built in a variety of ways including:
- Blogging – through using a lead magnet
- Paid advertising – using a platform such as Google Adwords, YouTube, Facebook etc.
- Creating free ebooks – to offer as lead magnets – see ebook lead magnet
A list of email subscribers is one of the best things an affiliate can do for their business. With a large list, a single email can be sent out promoting a product which can sell multiple times.
Subscribers are more likely to purchase affiliate products from people they trust. So a large part of email marketing is building trust with subscribers by offering value and being trustworthy! See also the power of email marketing.
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do? Paid Advertising
Many affiliates run paid advertising, although not all of them. With paid advertising, affiliates either send customers directly to products and services, or to a landing page. From a landing page they collect email subscribers and follow up with a series of email messages (see email marketing above).
Paid advertising is the fastest way to build an affiliate business. With a paid advert, affiliates can test and measure their ad campaigns to see what works the best. Some adverts will work and be profitable, but others won’t. The job of an affiliate is to determine which of their activities is most profitable and focus more on that! The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule say that 80% of results comes from only 20% of actions. So affiliates need to focus on the 20% of activities which produce the greatest outcomes.
With paid advertising, an affiliate can scale up their business quite quickly once they are profitable. Organic marketing, such as blogging is a slower process and can’t be as easily scaled. Paid advertising is also good for affiliates because they can see results quite quickly. Once you turn on an paid campaign, you can see within a few days whether it’s working. With organic strategies like blogging, it can take a lot longer.
Paid advertising platforms:
- YouTube
- Google Adwords
- Bing
- Yahoo
- etc
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do – eBook Creation
Many affiliates create their own ebooks to either sell directly from their websites or use as a lead generation tool. Ebooks are great lead generators because you can give them away for free to encourage website visitors to subscribe to your email list. Here’s another of my ebooks which I use as a lead generator.
Ebooks can be created through writing on a simple online (Word) document and converting into a pdf. You don’t need to even create your own book cover; although you can do this yourself, many affiliates will outsource this task to online services. Fiverr.com is a good source for affiliates which offers multiple outsourcing services such as:
- Article writing
- Video creation
- Back linking
- Ebook covers
- etc.
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do? Testing & Measuring
Affiliates use tools to test and measure their marketing strategies. One of these is tracking. If an affiliate gets good at tracking their sales, they will get to know exactly where they have come from and which marketing methods to focus on for the best outcomes.
Initially, as a beginner affiliate, you won’t have any data, so you’ll try lots of things until you start making sales. Over time, you’ll know how to focus on the best money producing actions which generate the most profit. This is done through testing and measuring of different strategies and using sales tracking.
An example of testing and measuring is use split testing. This is where two adverts are run side by side. After both adverts have received 1000 views, you’ll likely see a difference in the amount who have taken some action on a website. One advert will perform better than the other. Split testing can be done by affiliates to determine the best performing:
- Paid advert
- Marketing video
- Landing page
- Email marketing series
- Images
- Text adverts
- Video adverts
- Headings
- Sales pages
- etc.
Training and Mentoring
A large part of an affiliate’s journey is training and mentoring. Affiliates need help and support to build their online businesses, especially if they have no experience. Initially an affiliate will spend a large proportion of their time learning by watching training videos and attending live events. Once this period has given them some action steps, they should shift gears and start focusing on money producing activities.
Even affiliates who have been at it for some time need help and support with their mindsets and the various mental blocks which will stand in their way. Often, limited thinking and poor habits can hold affiliates back. This is where mentorship and accountability groups can help.
Affiliate marketing isn’t easy so it’s well worth getting the help and support you need from the get go. Once you have created some success as an affiliate, it’s much easier to keep going, knowing how you have made it happen. But before this point, it can be frustrating, especially if you haven’t made any money from it.
Having help and support, and joining a community is pretty important here to keep you motivated and positive. Many affiliates will quit after only a short period simply because they didn’t keep going when things got tough! See why affiliate marketing does not work.
Summary
Affiliates promote products and services online to earn commissions from their sale. They do this in a variety of ways including things like:
- Email marketing – building an email list
- Running paid advertising – sending people to products or to their email list
- Blogging and video blogging – creating content
- Ebooks – using ebooks as lead generation tools, or selling them online
- Link building – and other SEO (search engine optimisation) activities
- Outsourcing – using online services to help them build their online businesses.
- Social media – using social media accounts to find potential customers for their affiliate products
The goal of an affiliate is to build an income from their online activities. Some affiliates achieve this and are able to replace existing income from employment. If successful, this gives them huge freedom in terms of time, geographical location and financial independence.