Affiliate marketing is an online practice wherein a publisher (referred to as an “affiliate”) makes money by helping a business or merchant gain buyers, clients or respondents for its product, service or campaign. It can be done with the use of various tools used in different marketing models, which will be discussed below.
Goals and objectives in this type of marketing campaign strategy vary depending on the merchant and the product or service being offered. The intentions for every link or ad could range from clicks and downloads to survey completion, email registrations and online sales.
How Do You Earn Money through Affiliate Marketing?
Simply put, affiliate marketing is a good money-making strategy for businesses because they can spend less and earn more. Businesses can get as many affiliates and affiliate networks as they want and still only pay the marketing cost of those whose campaigns actually translate into sales. In essence, you only pay for the marketing that works.
To start taking the path towards marketing success, here are a few marketing tips for affiliates and aspiring affiliates:
1. Pick an Effective Approach
There are different models that you can follow when it comes to affiliate marketing, some of which are:
- Pay Per Click (PPC) Affiliate Model – Makes use of PPC to acquire traffic to the site or landing page.
- Email Affiliate Model – Uses email marketing, sending mails to different niches based on a classified list of prospective customers.
- Content Affiliate Model – Involves distributing keyword-containing web content such as articles and videos to high ranking and niche-targeted sites and blogs.
- Social Media Affiliate Model – Employs content affiliate model strategies and supplements them with social bookmarking, forum marketing, community and group participation, social search and social media marketing, among others.
- SEO Affiliate Model – Utilizes search engine optimization (SEO) to get organic traffic from search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
You can combine these strategies depending on what you think would work best on your target customers (research your target market’s behavior and preferences to improve your chance of success).
2. Get a Good Niche
One of the keys to being a successful affiliate marketer is finding a unique niche that you can focus on. For the beginner, this will enable you to concentrate on one specific area where you can master the most effective techniques, get to know your target market, build your reputation among them and avoid scattering your efforts and their effectiveness.
3. Don’t Just Concentrate on One Merchant
Promote other merchants’ products, too, especially if they’re in the same niche. Investing all your time and effort on just one merchant or product both wastes your investments and puts you at risk. Should something go wrong, say, if the product doesn’t translate well, or if you have trouble collecting your commission from the merchant, you’ll be left with the full effect of spending time and effort on research and campaigns and failing, when you could have done them for several merchants and products at once and succeeded in some.
4. Do Your Research
Knowing your product and your audience is key to your promotion. Take the time to research on whatever you’re promoting to be able to give your audience real information. By becoming an authority on the product, you will build your credibility among prospective customers. Check out your metrics to understand your audience’s behavioral patterns and then base your strategies on them.
5. Keep at It
Don’t give up. Should one strategy or affiliate tool turn out to be less effective than expected, try another. Keep learning new strategies and don’t be scared to try something new.
Trying to be a successful affiliate marketer takes more than just knowledge and effort. There has to be patience, persistence and a thirst for knowledge, as they are the traits that have brought those affiliate marketing elites where they are now. Success in this field, like in many others, doesn’t come overnight. So just keep learning and experimenting until you get those five figures in your account just by being an affiliate who markets and promotes like no other.
You can check out Benchmark Email’s own Affiliate Program by clicking the link.
