What is an affiliate program and how does it work? An affiliate program is a partnership program between a product owner (vendor) and the referral partner (affiliate). Amazon, for example has a partner program or affiliate program.
To join Amazon’s affiliate program you need to sign up on the website. If your application is approved it means you can access specific sales materials to promote products from Amazon’s website. Once you’re approved you can promote any of the thousands of products available on Amazon and earn commissions based on sales you make.
There’s other programs available too for affiliates and Amazon isn’t the only one. Many products which you can find online have affiliate programs attached. This means you can find a product you would like to promote and join the affiliate program for that product. Once you join an affiliate program you will get a unique identifying link called an affiliate link. Affiliates use their links to send customers to products. When someone purchases through your unique affiliate link, you earn a commission based on the sale.
Affiliate marketing is a popular online earning methods which anyone can learn. You don’t need any of your own products and there’s many ways to generate sales and income.
What Is An Affiliate Program And How Does It Work?
Affiliate programs work both for affiliates (who generate an income from product promotion) and for product owners. The product owner only needs to pay their affiliates when they actually generate a sale. So it’s a very cost effective form of advertising from the viewpoint of the product owner. Affiliates take the risk of either paying for marketing costs or generating content which takes either time or money, or both!
However if successful as an affiliate, you can work from anywhere and generate an income from your laptop! This is a pretty enticing prize and often people become affiliates to escape working in a job. The main strategies of affiliates involve any of many different marketing methods which are usually online:
- Blogging – this article is an example of a blog post
- Paid marketing – many affiliates run paid campaigns and send traffic to affiliate offers or landing pages
- Email marketing – affiliates build huge email lists and promote products to their subscribers.
- Social media marketing – social media platforms can be used for both paid marketing and other free methods. (See also unpaid social media marketing)
Joining An Affiliate Program
Once you join an affiliate program you will usually get access to a members section of the website where you join. This section will give you tools and resources for product promotion. It will often include multiple affiliate links to different sales pages and landing pages.
Just joining an affiliate program is no guarantee of success and affiliate marketers must learn how to promote their affiliate links in order to make sales. This is probably the hardest part of becoming an affiliate – learning how to promote your products and successfully selling them.
Your first online sale should be considered a massive achievement and if you manage it you can repeat what you have done to create it many times. Long term affiliate marketers have done this and can successfully replicate it many times over, eventually being able to replace their existing income from their affiliate sales.
Types Of Affiliate Program
Most affiliate programs are free to join and you can get access pretty quickly. Some however will require you to be an active marketer already and you may need to prove you have an existing method of marketing their products and services. This might be in the form of a website you own, or they may ask about your marketing email list and how many subscribers you have.
If you’re brand new to affiliate marketing it is worth paying for training while you learn the ropes of affiliate marketing strategies. Going it alone as an affiliate can be tough if you are unsure what marketing strategy to follow. Some programs will also offer products for you to sell and training and educational tools too. Access an all in one affiliate program here.
There’s different types of affiliate program too in terms of products. Amazon for example is a physical products website. They sell mostly physical products but also you can promote digital downloads too on the site. Commission levels vary from 1% to 20% for different items on the site. So according to the item/s you choose to promote, you can make more money for each sale you make.
Clickbank is a different program again and offers a range of digital products. Digital products will pay more in commissions per sale than most physical products. However there are high ticket items both in physical and digital products which pay much more.
Some of the best programs to promote are those which offer recurring commissions. A recurring commission affiliate program might be a software product or a membership product which offers ongoing value to the customer.
Summary
So, what is an affiliate program and how does it work? Hopefully you have a better idea of the answer to this now. Affiliate programs connect product owners with those who wish to earn income from product referrals. Affiliates can earn an income from selling other people’s products online even without any products of their own! They do this through a variety of marketing strategies such as blogging, paid marketing, email marketing and social media marketing.