So what is Affiliate Marketing all about?
Affiliate Marketing is a process of promoting or recommending someone else’s products and services in return for a certain % of commission or reward.
Surprisingly, many people have no idea what is affiliate marketing despite being surrounded all over by affiliates.
If you look on various companies, they all have some kind of budget. They all have to spend a lot of money on marketing and promotion. Those can be Facebook ADS, Google ADS, YouTube ADS, banners in newspapers, TV, radio, and so on. They have some kind of a marketing team who are creating promo videos, slogans, photos, designs, and all sort of stuff. In other words – they are spending huge money. A lot of them have to spend at least 30% – 40% of their entire budget on advertising.
So if they could get a client without doing all the extra work then it’s worth for them to pay out, let’s say, 30% or similar percentage of what that customer spends. Why? Because they won’t have to deal with all that extra marketing work.
So a company might say: “I spend 30% of my budget on marketing and advertising so if you find me someone that buys my products/services, without me having to do anything, I will gladly give you 30% of what that customer pays us.”
Good deal for them. Good deal for you.
One of my favourite affiliate programs is the one that ClickFunnels offers because they do a 40% recurring affiliate income. It’s awesome!
It’s a type of marketing that allows various of companies or merchants. It helps to reach a much wider audience spending less money on advertising. It also helps to increase sales and their customer base. Affiliate Marketing has few different forms but the results are always the same. The practices are often referred as affiliate offers or affiliate programs.
Who is an affiliate?
An affiliate is a person who owns a website. It can be me, you, or even your weird neighbour. I’m being serious right now. It’s easy to build a website these days and put it to work while you sleep soundly.
As an affiliate – your role is to take an offer or a product/service and promote/recommend it. Your role is to drive results by bringing interested people into paid customers. Most of the time people go directly to a company (for example ClickFunnels, Bluehost or Aweber).
And as an owner of a website you write details or reviews about certain products that are sold on the advertiser’s website. It also links to the advertiser’s product page through a special link which is often called an affiliate link.
Who is a merchant / an advertiser?
This can be any business that’s willing to share the profits from their sales & also they sell their products or services online. They can create their affiliate program or offer for people like you to promote products and earn a commission. That’s a great way for product owners to get more sales because they are only paying for results.
Affiliate marketing basically happens when you send traffic to a link (which is your custom link) and the potential customers go through that link to one of the companies you promote.
Two things that happen during this process.
One, you receive a commission which is a percentage of the companies sale.
Two, the company deals of everything else which is selling the product, supporting the customer, delivering the product, issues if any and so on. After the process you literally collect the money and the company deals with the rest and this is one of the main reasons I really like affiliate marketing.
All you need to do is to generate traffic, send it to your sales funnel or directly to the offer, and make money.
Pretty simple, isn’t it?
This is why this business model is great and many people earn a living from it. There’s not much of work involved after you get started with everything.
The main work is to get traffic to the offer.