Affiliate marketing is considered one of the best performance-based marketing in today’s world. In this marketing, a business offers rewards to the affiliate(person bringing or recommending your brand) whenever visitors arrive on the website with the help of that same affiliate’s marketing efforts.
A person who promotes any brand’s product is known to be as an affiliate and the practice of promoting products through different channels is called marketing. When a visitor clicks or visits that same channel and reaches to the company’s website, the affiliate earns a commission from the company.
The marketing methods that affiliate marketing includes are:
Organic Search Engine Optimisation: SEO
Paid Search Engine Marketing: PPC(Pay Per Click)
Email Marketing
Content Marketing
Affiliate marketing drives significant sales and revenue to the business. Actually, it is beneficial for both i.e., the business and the affiliate marketer. In fact:
At present, 84% of the publisher and 81% of companies support affiliate marketing and this statistic will continue to grow as affiliate marketing is increasing every year consistently. (Source: WebMarketSupport)
The spendings on affiliate marketing have increased by 10.1%. And, with all calculations, it will reach till $6.8 Billion by 2020. (Source: MediaKix)
38% of marketers consider affiliate marketing as the best customer attracting methods. (Source: WebMarketSupport)
Want to know why and how? Let’s check out the latest trends of affiliate marketing that you can apply to your business.
Well Balanced Affiliate Reporting & Attributes
Most of the affiliate campaigns work on last-click attribution. In this, the affiliate marketer gets the final click before the sale receives complete credit for the conversion. But now it is actually changing.
With the help of latest attribution models and analytics feature provided by affiliate platforms, you can now easily track every affiliate marketer’s tactics working together. It even allows you to take a complete check on marketing funnel and cross channels.
Test & Optimise Conversion rates Regularly
Let’s imagine you are promoting a product through an affiliate link on your promotion page. If you receive 5000 visits per month on a 2% conversion rate, you will be having 100 referrals.
However, your target is to get 200 referrals. In this case, you have two options, either to concentrate on attracting 5000 more visitors or you can increase the conversion rate by 4%. Whichever of the options seem good for your business?
Rather than consuming time in blogging and guest posting for building your website’s domain authority and generating organic traffic, it will be a good option to increase the rate of conversion by 2%
For increasing the conversion rate, you can optimise your website’s landing page, test Call-To-Action buttons and can optimise various strategies for conversion rate. After optimising and testing your website, you will be getting improved results in less period of time and efforts.
The Change In GDPR
GDPR(General Data Protection Regulation) was effected on the 25th of May, 2018 and brought a new set of regulations that strictly governs the organisation’s usage of personal data across the European Countries.
Now, because this GDPR new regulation, the affiliates who are not located in Europian Union are also forced to retrieve user’s data via opt-in consent.
So, it’s better to follow FTC guidelines as per new GDPR regulation and openly disclose that you are receiving commissions for practising affiliate marketing with the name of organisations.
Affiliate Marketing Now Getting Smarter
Organisations or merchants are receiving a huge amount of profits with the help of their affiliate marketers. And most of the companies are now depending on their affiliate partners.
Well, this can be a great moment for all the affiliate marketers to understand their importance as this can lead them to get good deals and higher commissions.
It does not matter whether there are commission structures like CPA, CPL or CPC, there are many affiliate programs. That can make you earn a good amount of commission.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is like a huge playground where you can practice your marketing skills in different patterns. However, the only aim of every marketer is to earn a higher commission. And to earn it, you will have to follow the latest trends in digital marketing.
So, with these above-mentioned affiliate marketing trends, you can update your knowledge and can apply on your further marketing plan.
Affiliate marketing is now not a new concept, but it is still a very fresh and rewarding way of marketing online. It is about a relationship between three main parties: the affiliate (publisher), the merchant (advertiser), and the customer. Furthermore, affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways of making money online.
It offers a low-cost technique for traders and dealers to display their products and services and build brand awareness.
Geno Prussakov has mentioned in of his blogs that 38% of marketers call affiliate marketing one of the top customer acquisition methods.
What is affiliate marketing?
An affiliate marketing model is straightforward; it acts as a commission-based recommendation practice. A partner or affiliate promotes a trader or a dealer’s products for a slice of the pie. Affiliates are as good as extended sales and marketing departments of the merchants. They play a major role in your marketing campaign and assist the customers to choose products and buy them online.
According to a study, in most affiliate programs less than 10% of affiliates drive 90% of traffic and conversions.
Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing. Despite affiliate marketing doesn’t require a fate and years of struggle to get started, you shouldn’t presume excellent results overnight. It is intensely competitive and you need to dedicate productive time for choosing products and ensuring that they meet market needs. Consequently, learn how to promote them and how to measure the success of an affiliate marketing program.
How to become an affiliate marketer?
Let us have a look at the traits of a successful affiliate marketer. Typically, an excellent affiliate possesses the following traits:
To become a successful affiliate marketer is not a tough job; it is a simple process as shown below:
1. Discover an exclusive niche
As a secret success formula, do not try to straightaway offer anything at all. Rather, stay focused on a precise niche market. Figure out your audience, analyze their pain points, offer them solutions to solve their issues, and ultimately assist them to achieve their goals. To identify the service area which can work best for you and your audience, the best place is to visit forum and question answers’ websites of your industry.
2. Make powerful use of search engine marketing
Search engine marketing is a powerful mechanism for online businesses. After assembling affiliate storehouse, jump into its timely and logical promotion. The preferred option of most of the affiliates is pay-per-click. However, to reap long-term benefits use a proper blend of organic search and paid search. PPC can definitely give you instant results but if you rely only on PPC for a longer time, all your profits might end up in the hands of Google Adwords.
3. Understand Your Product and Identify Your Audience
This is a complete analytical exercise. You need to devote your time in knowing your product and knowing your audience. Create a database, you will find it handy as and when required glancing through. Learn in-depth about the products and/or services. Think about the value you can provide to your customers along with your products/services offerings which can help you to build your credibility. This is because trust can be earned from credibility builds trust.
Have a psychological study of your audience. This will help you in developing and designing a web site that converts well and ultimately boosts your ROI.
4. Don’t ponder all your prospects or resources in one thing or place
This is the excellent tip to become a successful affiliate marketer. Promote products from diverse merchants. This way you will be able to balance the cash flows. Furthermore, out of multiple merchants, if one or two fail to promote your product, the overall impact on your business will be minimal. It is absolutely fine to opt for diversification and promote niche products from diverse merchants.
5. Gain excellence in internet marketing
Internet marketing is a very dynamic field. On an ongoing basis, trends keep changing. You need to act intelligently here to succeed. Keep yourself updated with the latest trends, tips, and tactics. In order to become an expert affiliate, you must always dedicate your time in reading, learning, and embracing the dynamics of Internet marketing.
6. Monitor your efforts
As an affiliate, don’t give up if it doesn’t reach the satisfaction levels. Try and try, again and again. Monitor your efforts and analyze your statistics, to figure out what is working well and what is going wrong. Accordingly, amend your affiliate marketing strategy.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate marketing works on click; by clicking on a special hyperlink made available by the particular affiliate program. The most common type of tracking is tracking via a cookie. When a user clicks on the link, a cookie is stored on their computers. This cookie lets the merchant know that in case a sale transaction happens, it has come from you.
To get started with affiliate marketing, the first step is to sign up for a partner program. On getting login details, you will be assigned a link with a unique ID that makes it feasible to track all traffic sent by you to the advertiser’s site. If your visitor clicks on it and performs the qualified action, you will receive a commission. Qualified action depends on the compensation model. The most commonly used one is pay per sale model which is based on the revenue sharing when a merchant pays an affiliate the percentage of the sale.
Affiliate marketing works best in three types of products /services promotion where it has shown highest success till date:
1. Information products
can make you earn commission up to 50% since they are cost-effective; production costs are lower as compared to prospects they offer
2. Physical products
easiest to sell but churns out a lesser commission (not more than 5 to 10%) since most of the amounts get deducted in variables like shipping, wholesaling, and others
3. Services
based on trends, one can normally expect commission in the range of 10 to 30%
Over 50% of topmost affiliate programs fall into these FOUR categories: Fashion, Sports, travel, and Health & Beauty.
Affiliate marketing can provide you with a stable stream of income. How much you can earn entirely depends on how successful you are in converting your browsers into buyers and service subscribers. Affiliate marketing is cost-effective; the place is not important, you can work from anywhere in the world and still earn handsome amounts.
How to make money as an affiliate marketer?
Affiliate marketing experts often make an income that can tally over five figures per month, however, only 1 to 5% of thousands of marketers literally achieve this level. When an affiliate reaches this elite level, they are often referred to as a “super” affiliate.
“Affiliate Marketing Has Made Businesses Millions And Ordinary People Millionaires. Affiliate Marketing may be Your Next Best Career Move.”
Bo Benette
If anyone asks can you make money with affiliate marketing, the precise answer is “yes”. It is true that affiliate programs can earn extra money and even a full-time income from home. The long answer is a little more complicated. Like any home income venture, success comes not so much from what you choose to do to make money, but whether or not you do what needs to be done correctly and consistently.
Affiliate marketing is the ultimate home business since it has no dependence on finance to get started. Furthermore, neither you need to manufacture, stock, ship product inventory, nor you need to deliver a service on demand. Under affiliate marketing, you are fundamentally paid for referring new clients and customers to other businesses.
[A] Affiliate marketing WITH website
It is better to do affiliate marketing with a website. Once you have figured out your niche and have zeroed down your research on an affiliate marketing program, the immediate step is to build your site. For a newbie in the realm of building sites, an easy option is to go for WordPress. Since the WordPress CMS provides ease in operation and coding skill required is zilch, you can set up your own site effortlessly.
Make sure that you go for the authorized domain for better authenticity of your site. And, the content which you publish on your site should be of excellent quality. Your content plays a major role in your overall marketing strategy.
The type of content could consist of product reviews, banner ads, blog posts, common questions and answers (FAQs), informational content, etc. In your blog posts, you can mention about your products, how it helps your target audience, why they should buy it, what are the common issues with the product and how to deal with it, etc. Coming to the informational content, you can have a tab of FREE resources wherein you can add some slideshow, presentation, tutorial, EBook, etc. all these tactics will bring traffic to your website. In case your product is admired enough and brings sufficient relevant traffic to your website, you could also monetize the traffic in other ways, such as AdSense.
Promotion of website and content
Once your website is ready with relevant content, the next step is the promotion of your website and your content on various social media platforms. On the basis of your niche, you can choose from FacebookTwitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and several other niches and location-specific networks.
Now, everything is ready for your affiliate marketing, starting from website to content and social media. Once all requirements are fulfilled, you can straightaway go ahead with the promotion of affiliate offers.
Remember, under affiliate marketing, merchants only pay for actual customers, not just visits. This gives affiliate marketing a major benefit over other promotional channels, such as PPC, where it’s trouble-free to spend a large chunk of money on clicks without producing any actual conversions. Successful affiliate programs use the multi-channel acknowledgment to ensure the affiliates that create the most value get paid the most.
According to Bill Burnice, top affiliate networks for 2017 are:
It might be sounding absurd, but yes, you can do affiliate marketing without having a website also.
You can start posting the products which you want to promote on blogs and forums with your affiliate link in your signature
You can take help of EBook as a promotional scheme. Go for writing a ‘viral’ book and post on sites like eBay. An informative and useful book as compared to simply laden with affiliate ads might get quite better traction from your target.
Video marketing is one of the most prominent content marketing strategies as per SEO Trends 2017. Hence, go for sites like YouTube and Vimeo and promote your video clips. You will surely convert a good amount of fan base into affiliate profits.
A simple yet effective technique is to write classifieds for the products you want to promote and submit them on various sites. Classified submissions are regarded as one of the most favoured marketing prompts for affiliates who don’t use websites.
Build your own social network and let your followers know about you and the products you promote.
Write guest posts for the website having high traffic.
Little less recommended method is PPC. Because promotion through pay-per-click technique involves creating PPC campaigns through search engines like Google and Bing, and promoting the merchant website directly through your affiliate link.
Closing thoughts on affiliate marketing
The problem with affiliate marketing, like many other home business options, is the self-styled sages and get-rich-quick programs. These sages and programs hint that affiliate marketing can be done fast and with little or zero effort. So, the issue isn’t really whether or not affiliate marketing is a viable income option (it is), but whether or not you can make affiliate marketing work for you. Affiliate marketing isn’t hard, but it does require knowledge, planning, and consistent effort to make any significant income.
A blog is a valuable resource to own, a place where you can pen down what you think freely, without inhibitions and external influence. It is a true reservoir for the inner workings and musings of your mind. But are you satisfied? Maybe you are.
But, how about earning from what you really like doing? Now, the question you might be having is “How to make money?” with your WordPress blog. Let us help you understand how you can maneuver and manipulate this leading CMS according to your will to make the most returns out of the same.
One can use WordPress in either of the two forms offered:
WordPress.com: An Open platform where one can start blogging.
WordPress.org: A Self-hosted platform having one’s own server.
You may be surprised to know that many people are making a living by running a blog on WordPress. Have you ever wondered how you can do the same? Well, there can be many ways by which you can make money using WordPress. Listed below are few of the easiest and most popular ways:
USING WORD ADS
One of the easiest ways to generate decent revenue from your WordPress blog is by using WordAds. It is the advertising solution for WordPress.com which can be used by anyone. However, one of the prerequisites, in this case, is that you need to apply for it and wait until your request for WordAds gets accepted.
Some of the things that one should keep in mind while using WordAds are:
You can monitor your earnings from WordAds very easily by tracking the same from the dashboard.
The payment you receive from WordAds is based on impressions and not clicks. Thus, higher traffic leads to more earnings.
It works better when the web traffic is from North American and European countries.
Minimum denomination to receive payment is USD 100.0 and payment is made through Paypal account.
“Tip” of the Digital Iceberg: Note that you cannot use Google Adsense on a WordPress.com blog. However, if you are using an enterprise version of WordPress.com, you can definitely apply for AdSense.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Another lucrative and intriguing way of earning through your WordPress blog is through the use of affiliate links. Now, what is affiliate marketing you might ask? Simply put, it is promoting other web pages on your blogs and helping them generate revenue. But, how? You help your affiliate site by generating higher web traffic and channelling the same to their blog or website, thus increasing the probability of higher sales. One of the best ways to go about affiliate marketing would be to use backlinks or hyperlinks in your article to link your content with your affiliate partners. However, an image with a backlink to an affiliate partner is not a lucrative option. Through affiliate marketing, you also gain a share of the returns that you help your affiliate partners produce. This method can generate quite a substantial amount of revenue in a very short duration.
THE BEAUTY OF AFFILIATE MARKETING IS THAT YOU DON’T HAVE TO INVEST THE TIME AND EFFORT TO CREATE A PRODUCT TO SELL. YOU CAN BEGIN SELLING SOMETHING AS AN AFFILIATE AS SOON AS YOU HAVE A PLATFORM TO SELL IT ON. @patflynn
SPONSORED POSTS
This is another method for generating money. However, this works better in the case of established blogs. One of the best ways of garnering a sponsored blog would be to write a review on some other blog with the consent or mutual agreement or writing or posting sponsored content related to similar interests, products, services or more.
Few important things to consider in this case are as follows:
It is advisable to use self-hosted WordPress platform, especially in case one wants to run a third-party advertising program.
You can get yourself suspended if you are caught violating WordPress.com advertising guidelines.
CREATING AND SELLING PLUGINS
WordPress blogs are mostly run by using one or several plugins. Thus, you must have realized the importance of plugins. There are thousands of plugins available for WordPress – some of them are absolutely free and the remaining are premium ones. Well, if you manage to create your own plugin, be sure to generate revenue from it by properly advertising the same.
You can sell your plugins at CodeCanyon or similar sites, or, you can also sell them from your own website. You can also opt to do freelance projects for developing plugins, on some of the major freelancing sites out there, such as Freelancer, Elance, Odesk, etc.
“Tip” of the Digital Iceberg: If you are thinking of making money by selling WordPress plugins, make sure to create them by focusing on a specific need, especially one which is faced by almost all bloggers but is still unsatisfied to a large extent.
DEVELOP WORDPRESS THEMES
You can also make money by developing WordPress Themes. You can do this by going solo or by joining a team. After developing a theme, you may sell it to websites such as Themeforest, Creative Market, Mojo Themes and more. These themes can also be put up for sale on your own website
OFFER WORDPRESS CONSULTING SERVICES
Another revenue-generating stream would be to offer consulting services for bloggers who are lost in the virtual realm. It can be related to anything from creating custom designs for clients or creating and teaching WordPress tutorials to beginners or even advanced users.
START YOUR OWN BLOG
You can use these tips to launch yourself into the world of blogging and emerge as a professional in your field of choice. So, what are you waiting for?
Are you making money through WordPress blog? Please share your experience and your methodology and help others join the bandwagon.
