What is the work of affiliate marketing? Many people are hearing about affiliate marketing but don’t know what’s involved. What do affiliate marketers do exactly?
Affiliate marketing is an online business model in which third parties promote and sell other people’s products online. There’s thousands of affiliate products which you can sell, and many ways to sell them. Different affiliates have different approaches to selling too. Some of the most common ways to sell affiliate products online are:
- Content marketing and SEO – search engine optimisation. This might be strategies such as blogging or video blogging also know as “v’logging”
- PPC – pay per click advertising. There’s a variety of advertising platforms which affiliates use such as YouTube, Adwords, Bing etc. They run ads and send traffic to affiliate products
- Email marketing – most top affiliates will have an email list of subscribers. They send regular messages to their subscribers helping them with a specific problem and selling their products to their list at the same time.
- Social media – many affiliates use their social media accounts in one way or another, either with paid marketing or organic methods of finding customers for their products.
What Is The Work Of Affiliate Marketing? Join A Program
The first step for affiliates is to join an affiliate program. One of the most popular affiliate programs is Amazon’s and anyone can join providing they meet Amazon’s partner program criteria.
Joining a program is usually just a matter to filling out a form. Although some programs will require you to already have a website and a number of email subscribers. Once you have joined a program you can choose a product to promote and get your unique affiliate link. An affiliate link is a unique identifying code which allows programs to credit referrers when they make a sale.
To make sales, affiliates need to learn some kind of marketing strategy where they can attract paying customers through their links. This is the most difficult part of affiliate marketing and as such the part which requires the most amount of focus in order for an affiliate to become successful. To summarise the work of affiliate marketing, it is the “marketing” part of the business. Most affiliates will need to learn some kind of digital marketing strategy, in order to make sales.
What Is The Work Of Affiliate Marketing? Running Ads/Creating Content
How you sell your affiliate products will determine a number of things for affiliates:
- How successful they are
- The time period it takes
- The amount of work they need to do
- The scalability in their business and the ability to automate it
Many affiliates, for example will start by blogging and although blogging is a method of affiliate marketing which can work well, it’s a long term strategy. A faster strategy to use is paid marketing. With paid marketing platforms, you can experience almost instant traffic, for example. But with blogging and SEO (search engine optimisation), results can be much, much slower.
Bloggers create content on their website and optimise it for the search engines. If successful, their content will get traction and they will make sales organically. Over time, if they stick with it for long enough, they can generate passive income from blogging. Depending on the topic of their blog and the relative competitiveness, this can take weeks, months or even years!
With paid marketing, affiliates use targeted advertising to place their marketing message in front of prospective customers. For example, Google Adwords lets marketers target adverts based on Google search traffic. By finding specific keywords which relate to their affiliate products, affiliates place ads in front of people who are likely to buy. The target audience for affiliate marketing is the specific section of online visitors who would be most likely to buy your particular product/service.
Data Analysis
Whatever method of marketing an affiliate uses, some of their work will involve analysing their data. With paid advertising, over time affiliates will gather data on their ads and their sales. By compiling data over various different ads, targeting and sales pages, they can determine very accurately which ads are performing the best. Once they know this they can cut off ads which aren’t performing and scale up ads which do!
Ultimately the aim is to be running advertising/marketing which is generating sales and profit for the affiliate. In the first instance this can be a tough journey, especially if ads aren’t performing. A lot of affiliates will quit during this time and assume that their business just doesn’t work! But this is a mistake, and although learning advertising techniques can be tough, in the long run, affiliates who stick the course can earn an automated income through running ads and selling affiliate products.
Email Marketing
Most long term affiliate marketers have an email marketing list. They build a large list of subscribers who opt in to receiving messages about a particular topic or interest. The affiliate then automates a number of email messages which are sent on a regular basis to follow up with each subscriber. Over time, as your email list grows you should find more and more of your subscribers are buying affiliate products from you.
Anyone can build an email list in a number of ways and first you should get access to an email autoresponder. Get one free here.
Once they have an autoresponder, affiliates build their lists in a few main ways:
- They create an opt in offer on a website, and build traffic through blogging
- They create specific landing pages and send traffic there with paid or organic marketing methods.
- They offer a free giveaway such as an ebook, pdf download or some information giveaway
Keyword Research
Bloggers and video content creators often use keyword research in order to find the keywords which are likely to perform the best. With blogging, many keywords are too competitive to rank on the search results pages in Google, for example. So many bloggers will look for the long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. These are the keywords which are much more likely to show up in the search results if they create content for them.
Keyword research can be done with many free and paid for tools one of which is Google’s keyword planner. By using the planner to find keywords which relate to your particular topic, you can be much more targeted when it comes to creating content.
If you target content specifically, you can make your work as an affiliate go further than by simply writing/creating content about random topics in your niche.
Training & Education
The most important step to consider if you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate marketing is training and education. It’s pretty easy to join an affiliate program but much more difficult to effectively sell affiliate products. Around 95% of affiliates will quit and most assume it’s far easier than it really is to become successful as an affiliate.
If you get the proper training and stick with it over the longer term, your chances of success are far higher than most.
Access a free video series and learn more about affiliate marketing products, strategies and methods.
