What is an Affiliate Marketing? How one can earn money through affiliate marketing?

There is no particular definition for affiliate marketing. We know that marketing means promoting that may be anything, a product or service may be, through any means or mode i.e., digitally or through word of mouth. Now comes the word ‘Affiliate’.

Affiliate is nothing but a product manufactured by or a service offered by a company that is none related to you in any sense. Companies usually manufacture products and sell them in the market for profits. Simply bringing the products to the market doesn’t increase the sales of the products, now the companies decide for marketing of the products launched in the market.

These companies pay for advertisements of their products to digital media agencies. These companies also introduce affiliate marketing programs to promote their products. Now you have got what is affiliate marketing by now. These companies will arrange a percentage commission upon the successful sale of their product through affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is another type of advertising program where digital advertising agencies don’t play the role, only people like you will make use of it. Companies only focus on sales of their products, they never mind how the traffic is generated to their products. Thus, an increase in sales of the products not only raises the profits of the company but also it will raise your income too in the way of commission percentage.

The same concept of affiliate marketing applies to digital products too. Many companies provide digital products and want everyone to promote their digital products for a commission. So these companies arrange affiliate marketing programs for the promotion of their digital products. Examples of such companies include web-hosting providers, domain registrars, etc.

The same scenario occurs in the cases of companies offering services such as SEO optimization, websites malware cleaning, etc. These companies also provide affiliate marketing programs for promoting their digital services. Simply applying for these affiliate marketing programs and working for them brings you a great income that is long-lasting and recurrent.

Now, we have got a brief idea about affiliate marketing and how we get income from that. There is still a major question here that I didn’t answer yet. How one can carry out successful affiliate marketing and get awesome income?

There are some pre-requisites for successful affiliate marketing, they are –

• You should have a wide range of social network accounts with a huge fan following (Difficult to achieve yet not impossible).
• You should have a blog or website with a lot of visitors (Easy way but should be updated regularly to stand at the top of your competitors).
• You should have minimum knowledge of the product or service that you are trying to promote. Your words must be descriptive and attractive as much as they can.

One of the best ways to promote the sales of the products is through social networks. There are many social networks available that don’t charge you for creating an account in it. Simply move forward by signing up with as many social networks as you can.

Creating an account in each and every social network is not enough, now you have to build the audience i.e., you have to increase your fan following. Now you got a question in your mind, how to build a huge fan following on social networks?

Fan following is not a day or a week process, it takes time, however, it completely depends on you. I will provide you with tips for increasing the number of followers of any social network.

Follow the below tips so as to increase the number of followers on social networks:

• Login to social network websites every day. Post whatever you have in your mind. If you have any tips in your mind related to daily activities then share them on the social network platform.
• Share your daily activities and sweet moments on social networks. This will attract more people to your social network. Whatever you post on social networks should be polite and authentic.
• Meanwhile, try to send friend requests to your friends. If you already have them on your friend list then it is a plus point. Ask them to re-share some useful posts of yours to their friends too.
• Build social network trust and then send a friend request to unknown persons too. If they found you a useful guy/girl then they will definitely accept your friend request.
• Find time to visit social network platforms regularly.

In this way, your fan following or we can say audience count will rise enormously.

Now, it’s time for an attack, simply post about the product which you want to promote on your social networks with an affiliate link attached with it. As soon as the audience clicks on the link they will be directed to the website where the product is being sold. The audience will purchase it and you will get your commission.

We will discuss this topic of Affiliate Marketing using Social Networks in detail in our next article.

A Blog is a place where one can write his own content, edit it, update it whenever required, and finally publish the article. There is a small difference between a blog and a website. Websites usually represent brands or companies whereas blogs are personal portfolios. Websites have special pages like privacy policy, terms & conditions, disclaimer, contact us, etc as it is mandatory for websites to have them whereas blogs don’t need such pages.

A website can be a blog, but a blog is never a website. However, we are not here to discuss the differences between blogs and websites.

Let’s see how can one can perform successful affiliate marketing with his own blog or website.

There are plenty of services that provide a platform for blogging. The top services among them are:

• Blogger (owned by Google)
• WordPress
• Wix
• Weebly

and many more.

Selecting any service among them and signing up their form will create an account on blogging providing service. Simply creating an account on Blogger or WordPress isn’t enough for affiliate marketing. The same concept applies here, you need a huge audience or visitors or followers to your blog or website. This is the case when you selected a blog.

What if you want to run your own website i.e., a self-managed content management system. This is again a new process, if you want to publish articles on your own website then you require:

• A good Domain Name (Website Name and URL).
• A good Web-Hosting Account (A place where you host your website).
• A good Content Management System (CMS).
• A good Content Delivery Network (CDN). (This is optional)
• A good Firewall or Security. (This is optional)

We will discuss all these in our future posts or articles.

Here, I will provide you with tips for increasing the number of visitors or audience, or followers to your blog/website:

• Login and update the blog/website daily.
• Try to publish unique content regularly. Search engines will give priority to those blogs or websites that have unique content published and place them at the top in the search results. This is a major concern you have to think about. Your blog or website should be at the top to attract more visitors and to gain followers.
• Follow search engine optimization guidelines during publishing the articles. This is quite necessary as the visitors come to your site through search engines only. We will discuss Search Engine Optimization in our future posts.
• Share the articles which you published on your blog/website on your social networks too. This will add traffic and followers to your blog or website. If you follow this step keenly then you can carry out successful affiliate marketing through your blog/website and social networks.
• Speak out about your website/blog with your friends, family members, and near & dear ones.

In this way, you will get a lot of traffic to your blog or a website.

Now again, it’s time for publishing about the product on our blog or a website and attaching the affiliate link to it. The visitors will finally reach the sales page of the product and buy it which brings you the allotted commission on the sale of that product.

More number of visitors to your blog or website then more number of sales of products/services = More Affiliate Commission.

Prior to ending this topic, I would to like suggest you few things which you should keep in your mind.

• At the first, select the product which you are familiar with, I mean to say is you should have used the product in the past. Don’t write about the products which you didn’t see ever at the very start of affiliate marketing. Try to build the trust of the audience. As time goes then you can write anything and they will listen to you.
• Write the self-review of the product which you selected for affiliate marketing.
• Don’t create a separate article for product affiliate marketing. The affiliate link should be mixed with the original article. Suppose you are writing about “Hand Sanitization Methods” then you place a picture of a hand sanitizer in the middle of the article to which an affiliate link is attached.
• Please do note that search engines will blacklist the websites or blogs which are only meant for advertisements and affiliate marketing. Providing worthy content which is useful to search engine users is quite important and necessary.

Hope you get all my points. Best of luck with your affiliate marketing program.

For knowing more about all the possible methods of successful affiliate marketing, read our article ‘Effective Ways For Successful Affiliate Marketing Promotion‘, and to learn about all the other methods of earning money online, read our article ‘How To Earn Money Online?‘.