How To Start Affiliate Marketing In 2020?

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance marketing whereby an advertiser or merchant offers the opportunity for its products or services to be marketed and sold by others in exchange for a commission payment. The affiliate gets paid a commission by recommending the product or service in its affiliate website and once a sale has been confirmed via the affiliate tracking software.

The third-party promoting the merchant is called an affiliate or publisher and usually runs a website or a blog reviewing products and services, they also add content recommending the merchant services and providing detailed advice as to why a customer should purchase the product. Affiliates also display product images, videos, and banners to promote the advertiser and drive traffic to their website.

Affiliates can monetise their website, subscriber’s database, and social media followers by promoting the merchants with banners, text link offers, discount coupons, and tracking this activity via the affiliate program. The affiliate merchant then tracks this activity for impressions, clicks, sales, and commissions, paying the affiliate the due commission for its marketing efforts once the sale has been confirmed.

In order to run affiliate marketing activities, an affiliate merchant must set up an affiliate program to manage the relationship directly with the affiliate or alternatively join an affiliate network to promote their offers as well as payments and day to day communications with the affiliates. All these activities are tracked by the affiliate software which links both the merchant and the affiliate.

There are many product and services channels for affiliates to choose from including fashion, travel, dating, nutrition, and more recently software as a service – SaaS services. There are many advantages for affiliates to promote SaaS affiliate programs over traditional retail affiliate programs and this is mainly because SaaS Affiliate Merchants pay high commissions that range from 20% upwards and also pay recurrent commission for the lifetime of the customer.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work in 2020?

Affiliate marketing is carried out by 4 parties who have different roles and responsibilities but are all involved in the affiliate sales transaction. The key players are the Affiliate Merchant, Affiliate Publisher, Affiliate Network, and the final consumer that purchases the product or service.

The Affiliate Merchant

Is the online retailer that offers a product or service in a given market to be promoted, for example, Sports Equipment or Software, the affiliate merchant uses an affiliate software in order to track visits, sales, and commissions. The merchant provides all the promotional assets such as banners, product offers, and access to performance reports and commission payments.

The Affiliate Publisher

They can be an individual marketeer, marketing agency, or an online outlet with high traffic volumes. Affiliates can belong to a particular category: Content, Blogs, Email Marketing, Social Media Experts, Price, and Product Review affiliates. They market the merchant’s product or service to their audience in an appealing way and convince them to purchase the product. Affiliates then get paid commissions for delivering a desired action to the merchant website, it could be new sales, leads, or subscribers.

The Affiliate Network or In-House Affiliate Program

Many affiliate merchants run their affiliate marketing activities via a third-party affiliate network where the network is the middle agent between the merchant and the and affiliate publisher. Affiliates can then decide to join any of the programs that offer a competitive commission or is aligned with their website content on offer as affiliates often target a specific audience or niche that will most likely convert to the merchant’s promotions.

Alternatively, there is also the option for affiliate merchants to run their own in-house affiliate program where the affiliate websites benefit from joining a dedicated program, tracking technology, reporting, access to links, marketing material, and commission payment in one place.

The Final Customer

The consumer that buys the product via the affiliate website makes the whole system work. Sales are the driver of affiliate marketing and they generate the revenues and commissions to be split between the affiliate website, the affiliate network, and the affiliate merchant. In many cases, the affiliate informs the users that they may get a small commission if they buy from their site, but this is not compulsory.

The affiliate tracking system then takes care of the whole process in the background and the consumer can fulfilled their purchase generating a sale and a commission for the affiliate. By buying from an affiliated site the price of the item purchased by the final consumer is not going to be more expensive.

Start Affiliate Marketing Easily With A Blog

One of the easiest ways to get involved with affiliate marketing is by setting up your own Blog, you can make money with your blog with affiliate marketing by promoting products and services in your blog posts and in your email list. The easiest way is by writing product reviews that compare the product’s pros and cons and add valuable information for your visitors. Bloggers can also write product comparisons and reviews of several online merchants with content that is honest, genuine, and valuable to the final user to make the purchase.

To become successful with blog affiliate marketing you must offer valuable content and stand by your advice, visitors will then trust you and even recommend you to others, in turn, visitors and followers of your blog will click on your listed products and make the purchase generating a commission for you. Setting up an affiliate blog is very easy and a great way to start building online traffic from the search engines, forums, and social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram by publishing high quality and unique content.

To get started with your blog you must first find your niche or product that you want to promote online, making sure that there is big demand and there is good supply of affiliate products with an easy to reach target audience. The focus of your blog is to offer valuable content to your users and that it offers the best advice out there, that it answers your user’s questions and you can offer them the best guidance.

Get A Domain Name for Your Affiliate Blog

This is a very easy thing to do, domain names are not that expensive to buy and they range from anything between $5 to $15 per year, however, note that once you buy a domain, you will have it for at least a year or more. Domains expire in a year, so you’ll need to renew it every 12 months. You should get a short, catchy, and memorable domain name that represents your blog and ideally a .com extension. When buying your domain make sure that you select a good domain registrar that offers good customer service.

Make sure that when you are buying your blog domain it communicates what your blog is about. Your domain should reflect your business and if your exact business name is not available, then you have to get creative without making it complicated for your brand to be memorable by adding numbers or special characters make the name difficult to remember.

Get Web Hosting for Your Affiliate Site or Affiliate Blog

Once you have acquired your domain the next step is to choose the web hosting service for your website or affiliate blog as this is where all the data pertaining to your website sits and very important for your site to performs well. To this end you must take into consideration different factors when choosing your web hosting service, bandwidth is a very important factor and the amount of bandwidth is reflected in the price and is basically the number of bytes that the servers are set to send out to your website visitors.

Therefore, you need to estimate the likely amount of traffic your website would get and the amount of data that your website is likely to have to manage. For example, if your website uses a lot of video or multimedia content, you’ll need a good amount of bandwidth per visit or if your website has lots of images. On the contrary, if your website or blog is dedicated to publishing text reviews and product comparisons using one or two images your demands for bandwidth are much lower.

Is also very important for your web hosting provider to offer you scalability and be prepared for unexpected demands in case your traffic volumes increase and that they offer the flexibility to switch to a higher hosting plan if required and avoid potential downtime issues.

Choose A Blogging Platform

There are many options available to bloggers and WordPress is the most popular platform for blogging with many affiliates using it successfully to promote merchant products and services. There are many other blogging alternatives such as Blogspot, Joomla, Wix, and Tumblr but WordPress gives you more control over your blog or website. For example, you can add a forum, store, and even paid memberships. It also offers thousands of templates to create your website and access to free plugins.

Promote Affiliate Products and Services in Your Affiliate Blog

The next step is to start promoting affiliate programs by joining a high paying affiliate program that also pays for recurrent commissions. Use your blog to create and post your review of our products, including your affiliate link, and add our promotional banners to your website or blog.

Affiliates can use Twitter to help increase brand awareness and to communicate regularly with their followers.