Newbies’ Guide to Affiliate Marketing: The What, The How And the Terms

Well, this article is for all the beginners out there to tap into one of the most profitable industries on the internet.

With businesses transferring to e-commerce and focusing more on digital reality providing exclusive offerings only for digital shoppers, marketers had to take advantage of this transformation, and their method is Affiliate Marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is simply the model where marketers -affiliates- choose a product they enjoy and start earning money through promoting it all over the search engines. They get money based on a previously agreed commission with every action they drive (sales, install, views, etc.).  

The best thing about Affiliate Marketing is that you don’t have to stick with one product or even a bunch of them; you have unlimited products and services to choose from because you’re not an in-house marketer with a fixed monthly salary; you have the whole internet as a broad market for you to promote whatever you desire. The next best thing is the worst thing that could happen is nothing happens. It means that you have nothing to lose because it’s a risk-free job with zero costings, and if you want to start big, you can invest dozens of dollars on your landing page or in paid ads (Don’t worry we will explain all of this later, just stay patient).

How Much Money Can I Earn As An Affiliate Marketer?

The answer to this question is up to you in a $12 billion industry. You can make a few dollars or thousands of dollars; it depends on the digital effort you make. however, we can provide you with the average salaries for the affiliates: 

• Beginners can earn +$300 per week.
• High-Performers usually earn +$10K per week.
• Super Affiliates’ earnings could easily reach more than $25K per week.

How Do Affiliate Marketers Earn Money?

Straightforwardly, affiliates get their commission whenever a customer clicks, fills a form, installs, or buys a product/service through their affiliate links.

Before diving deeper into the affiliate ocean, you should learn some glossaries and terms that you will face a lot in your journey; that’s why it’s crucial to understand this language because it reflects the different commission models you’re about to use.

ADVERTISER

The business or the brand that offers products/services to the affiliates to promote through their platforms in order to increase their e-commerce sales and ROI. 

AFFILIATE

The marketer whose aim is to promote the advertisers’ products and services for a commission guaranteed when a customer makes a purchase through their affiliate links.

PAYOUT/COMMISSION 

The amount of money that the advertisers pay the affiliates whenever they secure a sale or an action (click, install. etc.).

TRACKING LINK

It’s the mechanism that tracks your affiliate’s efforts throughout the internet (number of clicks, sales, views, etc.) to determine your results. 

CR

Stands for the conversion rate, which means the percentage of the people who were converted through your ad or link.

CPA

It’s the cost per action or cost per acquisition, the big umbrella where every model falls under. It means that you get paid whenever a customer takes action. In affiliate, this model means the advertiser will pay if the conversion happens.

CPS 

It’s the cost per sale, the most popular and profitable model because you as an affiliate will get your commission upon every sale that has been secured through your link. So the bigger the deal, the bigger your piece of the pie.

CPL 

The cost per lead means collecting leads and forms of potential clients. This model is so popular in leads generated campaigns in multiple industries such as real estate and sales inquiry.

CPI 

It’s the cost per install; this model is specified in app installing, meaning that the app advertisers will pay whenever a customer uses your affiliate link to install their application on their mobile devices.

CPC 

It’s the cost per click. This model is also popular but the least profitable one among them all due to the lower commission rate you get for each click; you need to collect a massive number of clicks to earn good cash.

CPM 

It’s the cost per mile or cost per thousand Impressions, where you usually work on the views of banners and native ads, similar to the CPC.

EPC  

It’s the earning per click, the scale that determines your success as an affiliate marketer, according to the number of clicks used until a customer makes a purchase or takes action through your affiliate link. The fewer the number of clicks, the higher your EPC rate.

CTR 

It’s the click-through rate, the metric that measures the number of customers who click on the affiliate links. We can divide the CTR into two different schemes.

Total CTR

The total number of clicks, even when the customer clicks more than once.

Unique CTR 

The total number of people who responded to your ad or affiliate link.

AFFILIATE MANAGER

The affiliate network’s playmaker. Whose responsibility is to manage, direct, and oversee the affiliate programs by guiding and recruiting affiliates to their right niches. 

LANDING PAGE

In the affiliate industry, a landing page is a standalone web page created by the affiliates to display their ads and offers to collect data to help secure sales and retarget potential customers.

LEAD

In the affiliate marketing context, leads stand for potential customers.

ROI

It is defined as return on investment, a term used to measure the net profits of any business. 

Scale Up Your Revenue.. Start Earning Now

You can level up your earnings by posting your affiliate links to your website and business accounts, yet, you don’t become a super affiliate who earns thousands of dollars by posting links and running away! That’s why we gathered some essential tips for you in order to get started:

• Build a trusted platform, focus on your content

Not just a platform, build a trusted one as there are hundreds of blogs and bloggers that go around the same topic. Still, there are only a few that people actually follow and love. Building a platform, whether it’s a website or a social media account, could take a while, but with unique content, you will stand out in no time!

• Define your niche market, know your client 

Hare’s a fact if you started a blog about “fashion,” it would be hard to stand out nowadays, as it’s too general, but if you specified in “jeans,” it could be an excellent chance to grow a focused group and a loyal community. Remember that defining your niche includes understanding your target audience, the customers you know about their preferences and interests to promote any product among them efficiently.

• Choose an affiliate program to join

It’s time to choose the product/service that you would be confident to promote through your platform to your customers. This will answer a fundamental question: Where do affiliates find products to promote?

There are many pathways to choose from. Our advice is to try them all to determine your most profitable destination!

1- Get The Link Directly From The Brand

Open Google and search with the name of any brand you like following with the words “Affiliate Program,” and here’s an example.

Read carefully and follow the steps.

Sign-up as a new affiliate and get your customized link to start promoting.

2- Amazon Associates

Where it all started, Amazon was the first corporation to use affiliate marketing in 1996, and it remains the biggest with the most extensive stock of offerings. The program is used by all sorts of affiliates that include content creators, bloggers, influencers, and marketers worldwide. Joining the program is as easy as it can be.

Search for Amazon Associate Affiliate, create your account, discover the offers and the commission for each category.

3- Affiliate Networks

An affiliate network acts as a mediator that connects advertisers and affiliates to facilitate the selling/promoting process. By collecting and displaying niche products where you -as an affiliate- select your most preferable offer to promote, through running your campaigns to reach the niche market to earn your commissions on scheduled payments.

Why do mega-affiliates prefer to work with Affiliate Networks?

Because a powerful affiliate network will collaborate with mega-brands exclusively with a higher commission rate. For instance, AFFSQUARE Affiliate Network offers commission percentages up to 22% and 25$ according to the agreed model + 10$ upon registration. Remember it’s important to work with a trusted network where you get your payment every month without delay.

How do affiliate marketers guarantee sales?

Are you familiar with the cookies? Who doesn’t! It’s all over the internet. Cookies are small pieces of data stored by the web browser while browsing a website. They are designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember information (such as personal preferences, information & items added in the shopping cart in an online store) along with helping the merchant refer the sale back to the right affiliate. In a nutshell, you will get a customized link backed by a tracking system to guarantee the outcome by registering yourself as an affiliate.

For further explanation, we will give you an example of how it works by imagining the process of a girl showing her interest in a promoted offer on your blog.

• She sees your promotion for a super smartphone with a fantastic discount.
• Then, she clicks on your affiliate link to discover more.
• She calls her friend, who confirms that’s a good offer.
• She’s convinced but still wants to make sure, so she searches for the brand on Facebook community groups to check others’ opinions regarding this set.
• Finally, she decides to purchase the set after this journey. 

But after surfing many websites and tabbing many pages, how can you know that is sale is yours? Well, that’s the beauty of Affiliate Marketing; the cookies would track that is client came through your affiliate link even hours later than the first click. To cut a long story short, clients can be indecisive as they want, but the commission is still yours!

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is real and worthy, and your willingness to learn this industry is apparently inevitable if you want to take advantage of billions of users surfing the internet every second and thousand of advertisers offering their products/services for you to promote and have the piece of the revenues.