Many people are interested in making money with internet-based “side businesses” to supplement their regular income or even starting an online business to replace their income entirely. While there are many ways to make money on the internet, one of the fastest and easiest ways to make money online is to make money online. by starting an affiliate marketing business.
Even if you already have a business, affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to add an existing revenue stream to your business.
Table Of Content
1 What is an Affiliate Business?
2 Tips Before Starting an Affiliate Business
2.1 1. Choose the Right Affiliate Network
2.2 2. Research and Choose the Right Affiliate Products
2.3 3. Consider Buying a Product Before Promoting It
2.4 4. Leverage Social Media Marketing to Get More Traffic
2.5 5. Consider Using Good and Short Redirects/Links
What is an Affiliate Business?
Affiliate, in common business terms, is a “legal attachment” of one business entity to another. The official attachment implies a contract or agreement in some form and a public announcement of the relationship between the two businesses.
The term “affiliate” has two more specific uses in a business context:
In corporate and tax law, an affiliate is a company related to another company, usually with a member position or a subordinate role, a subsidiary.
According to Investopedia, a subsidiary is a company whose “parent is the majority shareholder”. (That means the parent owns 51 percent or more of the other company’s shares.
Affiliates, similar to subsidiaries, but affiliates are “less than 50% owned by the parent company.” Two companies can be affiliated if one company has control over the other or if both are controlled by a third company.
One company may be affiliated with another company through share ownership, by holding a minority interest (less than the 50% stated above), or one company may be a subsidiary of another.
In online retail, affiliate business is common in marketing and sales where one company can affiliate with another to sell products or services.
The seller has a website where affiliates can sell products. The seller has control of the site and pays the affiliate a commission. This relationship is sometimes called “affiliate marketing”.
An example is an Amazon Affiliate called “ Amazon Associates ”. Associates sell on Amazon’s website, and Amazon takes a percentage of the sale price to pay in return for each product sold from their associates.
Tips Before Starting an Affiliate Business
While it’s not as easy as making money with ads on your website, it’s still relatively easy to do and has a lot more potential for profit than simply running ads on your website.
Affiliate marketing allows you to make money online, even if you don’t have a blog, website or any products of your own.
Following a few simple steps can get you up and running within hours and earning your first commission right away. Affiliate business is truly one of the fastest and easiest ways to make money online and should be a part of every online business owner’s portfolio.
The formula for affiliate marketing remains relatively constant no matter what your market or consumer segment is. Your primary task will always be generating traffic (i.e. directing prospects to the merchant’s website via your unique “affiliate” link).
If you don’t have the money, you can start by looking for ways to get free traffic to your website, including blogging, guest posting on other websites, and posting to social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc.
If you’re on a budget, you can drive traffic faster with paid advertising methods, such as paid advertising on Facebook, running banner ads on other websites, and using Google Adwords.
Writing good ad sales copy (copywriting) is another important skill for online marketers. The good news is that when it comes to affiliate marketing, many vendors will provide you with ad copy to use for your blog posts, website ads, etc.
They’ll give you emails to send, banner ads to show, and even posts you can use on social media (like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.). The more material vendors provide their affiliates with, the better change the affiliate will have to make a sale for them – it’s a win/win situation.
Therefore, what are the essential steps for affiliate marketing success? Here, we focus on five essential steps to quickly and easily launch your own profitable affiliate marketing business.
1. Choose the Right Affiliate Network
The match must be right between you and the seller who will benefit from your promotional efforts or will not succeed.
The easiest way to get started with affiliate marketing is to choose an affiliate network. There are many affiliate networks, some of which are associated with well-known companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, while others specialize in certain types of products and services.
You may have heard of ClickBank, one of the oldest and most popular affiliate networks. A billion-dollar company, ClickBank specializes in digital products such as e-books and software, as well as membership sites.
If you have not considered selling a digital information product, then you should seriously consider doing so considering all the benefits.
Digital information products offer much higher commissions (ranging from 10 to 75%+) than physical products which typically only offer under 5% commissions.
Also digital information products and can be more easily sold in most cases because people can get instant access and immediate satisfaction when buying digital information products.
Another network you should consider when it comes to promoting products as an affiliate is Amazon.com.
As you probably already know, almost any physical product can be sold on Amazon.com. While products on Amazon generally offer lower commissions than digital products, selling products on Amazon as an affiliate can be a much higher volume business and most people trust Amazon as a merchant, making it easier to sell products as an affiliate.
Finally, in some cases, you may work with companies or individuals directly as an affiliate; rather than over the network.
Entrepreneurs or companies can run their own affiliate business programs and you can sign up directly with them to promote their products and services. In Indonesia, the most well-known affiliate programs are hosting service providers Niagahoster and Jd.id
If you see a product that you really want to promote as an affiliate and the company doesn’t offer a formal affiliate program, you can always contact them to make a personal deal as well.
2. Research and Choose the Right Affiliate Products
A good product strategy is a must for new affiliate marketers. Ideally, you should choose a segment where you can make money online and have multiple product vendors.
This will give you a wide selection of products to offer your online community. However, when you’re just starting out, you should limit yourself to two or three products at a time.
This will allow you to really become an expert on the product you are promoting which can help with marketing the product (such as writing product reviews).
Once you are comfortable with the affiliate marketing process, you can consider specific markets that have a broad market segmentation, for example the automotive world.
Don’t forget to track your marketing metrics! They are usually provided by your merchant and/or affiliate network. Tracking your metrics will allow you to see what is working and generating sales and what isn’t, causing you to waste time and/or money.
This way you will be able to find out which products your audience responds to and which are not making a profit for your business.
This is especially important if you invest in paid advertising to drive traffic and promote products as an affiliate, you need to know which campaigns are profitable and which are losing.
You’ll want to keep monitoring the market for new products, reviewing and testing promoting those products to your audience to see which ones resonate and lead to conversions or sales.
3. Consider Buying The Product Before Promoting It
As a new affiliate marketer, you don’t have to buy every product you want to promote. However, it goes without saying that actually owning and using a product is very useful for building credibility and trust.
In-depth knowledge of a product can mean the difference between making a sale and getting a prospect to move elsewhere.
Writing product reviews is a great way to increase your credibility as an affiliate marketer. This is very easy to do with information products such as e-books which are relatively inexpensive.
After earning a steady income, it may be worth buying high-end products at high prices, make sure you contact the product makers to put together a strategic marketing plan that takes you to the next level of affiliate business success.
If you are actually using the product and getting results, sharing a case study or your personal experience can be one of the most effective ways to sell the product to your audience.
When you build a more responsive list of subscribers and e-mail buyers and your reputation, merchants can offer you “free” samples of e-books or other products.
Note: in most cases, merchants will be happy to offer you a free copy/sample of the product even if you don’t have an established business, so it doesn’t hurt to ask!
4. Leverage Social Media Marketing to Get More Traffic
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and other social media marketing methods are great tools for “word of mouth” marketing or getting the product viral.
Video marketing, in particular, is a great way to showcase your skills through comments, screenshots, and live demonstrations if necessary.
Currently doing videos on Facebook and Facebook Live is very effective and leveraging YouTube for a long-term approach to video marketing.
While you may initially focus on using social media as a free way to get traffic, keep in mind that there are powerful ways to use paid advertising on social media to reach your targeted audience and drive that traffic back to your site or your affiliates.
5. Consider Using Good and Short Redirects / Links
Cloaking or using links is a controversial issue in internet marketing circles, with some affiliates doing it and some not.
On the one hand, a long and complex affiliate link is a direct message to people that you want to sell them a product and may make people feel uncomfortable clicking on it.
Therefore, making your links shorter and looking “nicer” will give them a more professional look. One of my favorite plugins for making links look “pretty” is the Pretty Links WordPress plugin.
This makes links much shorter, friendlier, and easier to type in case they can’t click the link for some reason and want to type it into their browser.