How to Make Money through Affiliate Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide
There might be a gazillion way for a business and its counterparts to seal the greens in their pockets, but the concept of earning money always remains constant.
Affiliate marketing is one such method that is on the moneymakers’ list for a long time now, but the fact that it has caught too much of a paparazzi in recent years is commendable. People often ask the question “how to make money with affiliate marketing” but it’s not as simple as a Google Search.
…or is really true? Can you make money with affiliate marketing by following all the steps of an eight-hundred word blog?
Affiliate marketing is indeed a game of ups and downs, and while making money from affiliate marketing sounds like an easy streak, it’s definitely not a one-step climb to greatness. If you are strategically sound, know how to operate a keyboard and you’ve got some brains, you can easily churn money in affiliate marketing.
So let’s talk about affiliate marketing, its expectations v/s its reality and how to establish a base so that you start making money from affiliate marketing. Read away!
Affiliate Marketing: Expectations v/s Reality
As one of the oldest marketing practices in the business environment, affiliate marketing doesn’t involve keeping stock of a product or service. It’s simple economics where affiliates earn a commission on every sale made on their recommendation.
You don’t have to buy, sell, or manufacture a product in order to market it to others, something that makes it one of the simplest and cheapest forms of business models in the current scenarios.
There’s more to affiliate marketing than crafting a website. Don’t just leave it in internet’s hands — work on your website and content till it’s perfect and tweak it if it isn’t working.
Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest marketing practices which gains affiliates a commission in the case of sale based on the affiliate’s recommendation. It is one of the cheapest and easiest ways of marketing as you don’t need to create and sell a product.
Expectation: Everyone believes that with affiliate marketing, they can turn out to become rich kingpins of the internet and earn a six-figure income while binging on NetFlix with a laptop by their side.
Reality: Who said dreams can’t transcend into reality? You can change your life if you know how to make money with affiliate marketing, but a successful venture doesn’t happen unless there’s enough grit in the eyes of the doer.
Only the tough ones break the bank and make money with affiliate marketing. If you feel that it’s as simple as making a website, then you’ve only dipped your toes into the ocean of affiliate marketing. Let’s talk about how affiliate marketing works.
How New-Age Affiliate Marketing Works
The affiliate marketing phenomena of today is all about shimmery and happening words like SEO, Social Media, CTRs, CPCs, Analytics and what not. But before we delve into the very deep dynamics of affiliate marketing, we have to talk about how the new age affiliate marketing works. Here’s a small explanation.
Step I: Describe a Product/Service
Affiliate Marketing is the cornerstone of digital sales as you become the salesman for a product or service. It doesn’t matter if you’ve made that website on a hosting network or if you’ve gifted your beloved one of the 50 best gifts for Valentine’s Day, but you’ve got to sell it.
How you convince the target market of yours is completely your ball game, however. Here are some common platforms on which affiliate marketing is proven to deliver lucrative results.
- Written Content, Blogs and Articles
This has to be one of the basic affiliate marketing methodologies used by content crafters throughout the web to earn money. The basic trick is simple: the marketers write about a product/service and explain all its pros and cons in order to convince the reader to buy that particular product/service.
Affiliate marketing through written content is still one of the biggest avenues and most of the affiliate marketers use SEO to their advantage to gather traffic on their website so that the readers get valuable information about the product/service.
- Video Affiliate Marketing
If you want to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing, remember that in order to sell something, you have to please their eyes. There have been countless researches on how video content is multiple times more effective than written content as it catches the target market’s attention like nothing else.
There are a lot of possibilities and choices to play around when it comes to video affiliate marketing. The better your content is, the more conversions you can salvage from marketing as an affiliate.
- Social Media Marketing
This has to be the hottest way to market a product or service at the moment. Social media is the present base of affiliate marketing and it shall stay the same unless something new comes up. The rise of influencer marketing has forced the biggest of corporations to skin the game with what’s trending when it comes to social media.
Basically every social media marketing venture has a set of followers that is on the receiving end of affiliate marketing. Every social media platform has a business account feature which allows affiliate link placement so as to promote affiliate marketing as a business operation.
There are plenty of avenues that you can take if you want to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing. We’ll keep you updated with the A to Z of affiliate marketing, performance marketing and everything beyond — have a look at our blogs.
Step II: Link it with a Unique Tracking Link
Affiliate marketing is nothing without lines of codes and they’re the ones that give originality to every click that goes from your website.
A unique tracking link allows you to track who clicked on your affiliate’s links, how many of them converted into leads and it also gives the affiliate network a clear record of what it has to pay you for.
This very tracking link provides you the information of your target audience — as specifics like IP address, web browser, and operating system details are very much visible, thanks to your special tracking link.
Step III: Bring in the Traffic
Prepping your affiliate marketing venture is one thing and bringing it to life is another. Any affiliate marketing venture works on a basic principal — there should be actual traffic there to look into your content for it to convert.
Every time a reader or visitor clicks on your unique link in the content, you get a commission if it fulfills the given criteria of conversion. More you have the traffic, more the clicks and ultimately more conversions.
To make money with affiliate marketing, it is very important for you to have an audience for it. The audience is generated through mixed channels like social media, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine ranking.
Organic traffic is the most lucrative way of getting an audience on your content and that’s actually the audience that clicks your unique affiliate links and converts into money. A very crucial thing in “how to make money with affiliate marketing” guide — bring it in front of the people’s eyes by bringing them to your website.
Congratulations, You Just Stepped into the Affiliate Marketing Ocean
Are you wondering whether that’s all in affiliate marketing? You’re in for a surprise. What you came across above was just an oversimplification of how affiliate marketing works and how to make money with affiliate marketing. There’s still a lot to be done if you’re in the game for a long haul.
We’ll provide you with more information about affiliate marketing and everything related to it. Good luck on your affiliate marketing adventure!
