How Affiliate Marketing was born.

How Affiliate Marketing was born.

Affiliate marketing was born by the ever-increasing cost of advertising.

It can be frustrating for a business to pay thousands of dollars for conventional advertising as well as for clicks or impressions on social media only to gain a handful of customers.

Many brands have been burned by such endeavors, so as online advertising costs have risen, they’ve turned to innovative ways that minimize their advertising costs while still growing their customer base.

What is Affiliate Marketing and how it works.

Affiliate marketing is an advertising method used by brands to attempt to halt wasteful spending in their marketing budget. While most businesses realize that spending money on advertising is necessary, the ideal situation is to keep their costs low but still gain new customers.

That’s where the idea for marketing with affiliates was born.

Affiliates and businesses now work together

As a performance-based marketing method, affiliates and businesses can work together in a revenue sharing relationship between product and marketer.

For companies that have a product they want promote and sell more of, but want to keep advertising costs low, they can offer a financial incentive through an affiliate program.

For people with no product that want to make money, they can find a product that has value and earn income or commissions as an affiliate marketer.

Now this is where Wealthy Affiliate comes in.

This program offers the basics of affiliate marketing for beginners as well as experts. You’ll learn what affiliate marketing is, how it works, and most importantly, how you can make money doing it.

The first question that most people ask when inquiring about affiliate marketing is, “What is Affiliate Marketing?

I have dedicated an entire post that answers this question in a bit of detail. To see the post, click here.

But in short:

Affiliate marketing is a way for you to earn money by selling a brand’s products. As strictly a marketer, you have no inventory and work for commission. Generally, affiliate marketers receive payment when a consumer they referred buys a product or service or completes a specific task.

For the Company

So, it’s similar to a company taking on commission only salespeople in a controlled environment. It’s a way that businesses can outsource their marketing to someone else in a way that’s strictly performance-based. This offers businesses a 100% return on their investment, which makes it unique among online marketing methods.

What's in it for the Affiliate

It also means that the affiliate has the opportunity to make a good living and a great deal of money by selling a product that isn’t theirs. The more they market and sell, the more money they earn.

What's in it for the affiliate it is the bonus in that they don’t have to worry about shipping, overhead costs, or customer service. Their input is as small as they want it to be.

The three Parties Involved.

Now as an affiliate marketer, you must understand who all the parties involved are and what they stand to get out of the relationship. Understanding each role and how they can potentially help you make money is an essential first step when starting out as an affiliate.

Advertiser:

The first party is normally referred to as the advertiser or merchant. They create or manufacture the actual product or service. The company usually has an established affiliate program, and leave it to you the publisher to carve out a space on the web and sell their product.

The product or service could be a physical product like phones or laptops, or even tangible items like training courses.

Affiliate:

The second party is the publisher, more commonly referred to as the affiliate marketer.

This is you, the person working with the advertiser to sell their product in exchange for a commission. You’ll normally have a contract of sorts in place, and you’ll advertise and promote the product in the form of links, posts, ads and blogs that you incorporate on your site.

Consumer:

Finally, you have the consumer or customer that will be buying the product. Thus, the relationship between the affiliate and the consumer should be one of trust.

The consumer is the third link to the relationship triangle. They interact with your marketing efforts normally by clicking a tracked URL or ad and then they are redirected to the publisher’s sales funnel. Here they purchase the product.

The final result.

The merchant can track when you send a customer to them and will pay you when a purchase of a product or service goes through.

As the affiliate is a third-party to the sale, the affiliate has no say over the price of the product but also carries less risk.

When all aspect of affiliate marketing works in harmony, every party benefits. Consumers get their product, merchants generate revenue, and the affiliate makes a commission.

How long does it take to be a successful affiliate marketer?

The truth is that building your income and being successful as an affiliate marketer will take time and effort. Don’t expect overnight success. It is not a get rich quick industry. My advice is to get the correct training and knowledge behind you first. Then success is almost a given.

However, many affiliate marketers report making modest sales within the first three months, even though that’s not a guarantee.

You need to approach this as if you are your own brand. The questions that gets asked the whole time are, "does an affiliate need a website?" and "how can I build my own website?" With Wealthy affiliate you will learn how to build your own website as well as how to start a social media account. After that you will then create content that adds value to your target audience.

Many successful affiliate marketers focus on building compelling content first. Then, they worry about revenue. This method costs them nothing but time.

You can however also utilize paid ads. The timeline for making a sale can be much shorter provided you know what you’re doing.

In Conclusion.

Just remember, you have to start by providing value that draws attention, and then you move to capitalize on that opportunity.

It also helps if you genuinely believe in the product your selling. This creates a more genuine conversation with your audience. You can certainly build an affiliate business around any product, but that doesn’t mean you should.

Now the most important advice. Enjoy marketing your product.

Should you have any questions or comments on the above please comment below. For questions that I cannot answer, I will research and come back to you.