Making Some Extra Cash With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate programs and affiliate direct marketing are part of a continually booming digital market. They involve arrangements in which an organization, also known as the merchant, pays affiliate websites a commission to send them web traffic and consumers. Will one link make you rich? No, it won’t. However, if you have multiple links to products and services that are popular and relevant to viewers, you could be set to change your work life and social life for the better. How does being out of an office environment sound? Or having no boss?

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

So what is affiliate marketing? Well, it’s a money-spinning phenomenon that rose out of the massive e-commerce bubble of the mid-to-late 1990s alongside the likes of eBay. It’s a bubble that has yet to burst and shows no signs of doing so for the foreseeable future. In other words, it’s a fantastic market to invest in. Within an affiliate marketing program, there are three key relationships at work: the advertiser, the publisher, and the consumer. The advertiser is a business that is selling a product (electronics, cars, etc.) or services (insurance, etc.). Essentially, it’s someone who wants to pay others to promote their business.

Then you have the publisher – also known as the ‘affiliate’. This person, or company, will promote the advertiser’s products or services on a commission-based basis. The advertiser will provide the publisher with links, banners or texts ads that are to be posted on the publisher’s website. Finally, there’s the consumer. They are the ones who click the ads and make an action either by buying something or submitting personal information on the advertiser’s website. This is called a ‘conversion’. But how do you guarantee that the advertiser will pay you?

How do they know that person made an action because of you? Simple – cookies. No, not the ones that go well with milk; a ‘cookie’ is web-browser technology that stores information such as user preferences, login details, and shopping cart contents. Ever wondered how websites remember your username or password? Or when you see something advertised that you had just recently searched for? A cookie can store information that tells the advertiser that the consumer came via a certain affiliate’s link.

So What’s The Best Affiliate Marketing Program?

It’s hard to make a judgment call on what the best affiliate marketing program is when every single person is different. Choose something you are passionate about or can relate to, for example, students or ex-students may want to sell the SMARTY student SIM. However, we can point out one with a big earning potential. However, let’s strip it back to the basics of affiliate program marketing. We have three primary practical means of running affiliate programs: unattached, related or involved affiliate marketing. Unattached is the more old-fashioned and out-dated method. It involves using a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign that you get through the likes of Facebook Ads and Google AdWords.

The quality is hard to measure, and advertisers may end up paying for no sales. Related is when you have some sort of presence online, perhaps a YouTube channel or a popular blog, and you have affiliate links to products or services related to your channel or blog’s contents. However, they may not be products you use – just related. If you haven’t used the products, how do you know you’re not misleading your subscribers with a bad product or service? That brings us, finally, to involved affiliate marketing. Involved is when you provide links to products and services that you recommend to your audience because you truly believe in the quality they provide. This isn’t just about advertising for money, it’s something that is a part of your life. As you can see, involved can be, by far, part of the most effective and personalized affiliate programs.

How to Find the Best Affiliate Marketing Programs

To find the best training program in the affiliate marketing niche, you first need to pick a product that you find interesting. The greater your interest in the product, the more motivation you will have to market it. Of course, other people need to be interested in the product too – otherwise, it will be difficult for you to market it. Secondly, you should check the websites maintained by the training facility and the merchant of the affiliate program you would like to join. It should be easy to navigate and user-friendly. The calls to action and messages contained within should also be user-friendly.

Third, select a trainer and a direct marketing program that has a high conversion rate. This is typically calculated according to the total number of people who completed the desired actions on the website. Fourth, only enroll for training programs on affiliate marketing with generous payouts and commissions. Needless to say, you should couple the pay-outs/commissions with the conversion rates to uncover those programs that have a likelihood of getting you the highest income. Fifth, enroll for affiliate training programs that use high-quality creative tools that you will be counting on when you get into the affiliate program. Tools should include search boxes, data feeds, coupons, videos, widgets, banners and text links. This way, you will have an easier time driving the targeted traffic from your websites/blogs to theirs.