What you Need to Get started with Affiliate marketing

I have shared all important topics below to become a master of affiliate marketing, but first lets take those baby steps which will help you to get the basics right.

Promotion Channel:
I would have talked first about product, but realize it’s more important to talk about promotion channel first. You can promote any product on various platforms like Google, Facebook and etc. What I prefer is and suggest to other; User blog for affiliate marketing. Promoting a product on your own blog will help you to keep earning in longer run, and more over you can earn more money from your blog using various other methods. It’s a good idea to learn about other techniques as I mentioned above, but blog should definitely be a part of your promotion channel. I have shared a link at the end for you to understand how you can use for promoting an affiliate product.

Picking the right product and marketplace:
If you are one who likes to give value; I suggest you to pick a product that you personal use or want to use. If not, you can always be a good critic and try product to share your review and opinion. Most of the product in online market have affiliate link associated with it. It can be any eBook, cheap web hosting and more. Make sure you select the best product based on your niche. Else you might get 1000+ clicks but your conversion rates will be 0%. Here is a useful guide to learn how to pick good affiliate products for your blog.

Sales pitch
For selling any product, you need to create a sales pitch. The sales pitch can be in the form of a blog post or can be a static web page. Many companies provide you with a product-landing page. Creating a sales pitch in simple words, you need to make your readers aware of what are they getting with their investment. The things which you need to keep in mind before selecting your product is, who is
going to be your target audience, do you have any current target audience related to same product, or you have to start from scratch. In both the cases your strategy will be different.

A Glossary of Affiliate Marketing Terms

Affiliates: Publisher like you and me who are using affiliate program links to
promote and make the sale.

◉ Affiliate marketplace: There are many marketplaces like ShareASale, CJ (Commission Junction), Clickbank, which works as central database for affiliate programs in different niche.

◉ Affiliate software: Software's used by companies to create an affiliate program for their product. Ex: iDevaffiliate.

◉ Affiliate link: Special tracking link offered by your affiliate program to track the progress of your affiliate promotion.

◉ Affiliate ID: This is Similar to Affiliate link, but, in this case, many affiliate programs offer a unique ID, which you can add to any page of the product site with “XYZ” affiliate ID.

◉ Payment mode: Different affiliate program offers a different method of payment. For ex: Cheque, Wire transfer, PayPal and many more.

◉ Affiliate Manager: Many companies have dedicated affiliate manager to help publishers and make them earn more and give them optimization tips.

◉ Commission percentage/amount: The amount or percentage of sales amount you will be getting after every sale happened via your affiliate link.

◉ 2 Tier affiliate marketing: This is a great way of making money from an affiliate program. In this, you recommend others to join affiliate programs, and you will get a commission out of it, when sub-affiliate make sales. More like MLM (Multi-level) marketing. Also popularly known as Sub-affiliate Commission.

◉ Landing pages: A unique product sales or demo page to increase the sales. Most of the programs that you will be promoting, they have many landing pages, and you can run A/B testing to see which converts more for you.

What is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest form of marketing, where you refer someone to any online product. When a person buys the product based on your recommendation; you will get a commission out of the sale amount. This commission amount varies from $1 to $10000, depending on what product you are promoting and recommending.

The most common question is: How companies track the record of who is sending the traffic and who is making sales. The simple answer is tracking URL, which is a unique link given to you by the affiliate company or the product company. This unique tracking link is used to keep a track of all the traffic and sales you are making via your Website or other promotion techniques.

Tip: Many old fashioned Affiliate programs, let a buyer add the Email or referral details, which is also accounted for affiliate sales, but certainly not the best way to track progress.

So, in simple words:

Many online companies which sales product like Shoes, Webhosting space or any online service offers an affiliate program. You can go ahead and sign up for their affiliate program (It’s free to join) and get your unique tracking link. Now, whenever you are writing about the product, you can simply use special tracking affiliate link to recommend the company’s site, and if your readers buy anything, you will get a commission out of it.
 

Note: I have shared tricks to find these affiliate programs later in this eBook. Every affiliate programs have their set of Terms of Standards (TOS), for example, many of them offer 60 days cookie period, that means, if a visitor uses your special affiliate link to land on sales page of the site and instead of buying today, he buys the product within next 60 days on the same laptop, you will be earning the affiliate commission.
 

Another interesting thing to know is: You will get paid for the other products purchases. For example, if your reader go to Amazon.com using your affiliate link & he purchases some other product which you haven’t recommended, you will still get commission out of it. This is one major reason, that makes affiliate marketing so lucrative & beneficial.