There’s no shortage of ways you can make money online. However, few are as flexible and rewarding as affiliate marketing. If done right, it can be a lucrative way of earning an income by producing creative and valuable content. In a nutshell, affiliate marketing enables you to monetize your content by promoting other companies’ products using affiliate links. When somebody buys a product or service based on your referral, you earn a small commission on that purchase. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the basics of affiliate marketing and discuss how it works in practice. We’ll also show you how you could benefit from using it and give you some help in getting started. The article continues below - but before you scroll, consider subscribing to our content below so you never miss an update! Subscribe to our blog and receive great content just like this delivered straight to your inbox. Affiliate marketing involves promoting products from external vendors on your own website.
This post has be en created with G SA Conte nt G en er ator Dem ov ersion.
While definitions sometimes vary, there are generally three or four parties involved in an affiliate setup. The affiliate. Also known as ‘the marketer,’ this is the person running a site that contains affiliate links. The affiliate receives a commission on each purchase made by visitors who found a product by clicking on one of their links. The consumer. This is a visitor on the affiliate site who clicks on an affiliate link and completes a purchase (whether that’s the original item being promoted or something else from the same company). The network. This refers to the internal or third-party platform that the affiliate program operates on. This means they’re the ones providing the links that the affiliates use and paying the affiliate their commissions. The merchant. This is a company that sells products being marketed by the affiliate. In many cases, the merchant and the network are the same, as some companies run their own affiliate programs. For simplicity, we’ll be combining these last two entities throughout the rest of our discussion here.
Content has been g enerated by G SA Content Gen erat or DEMO!
Those are the essential elements of any affiliate marketing deal. Now let’s talk about how those elements come together to help you make money. Affiliate marketing may look simple on paper, but actually making money from it requires a lot more work than you might imagine. Let’s discuss several examples of different programs to understand better how affiliate marketing works! You might have noticed that many web hosts offer affiliate marketing programs. DreamHost is no exception. The way the program works (and how most do) is that a website owner applies for it. If they’re approved, they get access to a custom dashboard where they can track referral activity and earnings. We say if they get approved because most serious affiliate programs filter people who can access them. That way, the program owner or affiliate marketing the "network" can protect its brand affiliate marketing by deciding who can promote it. Once you’re part of a network, you’ll get what’s called a referral link.
The referral link leads visitors from your website to the network. It contains a unique identifier (a cookie) that tells the network, "This visitor came from over here! Hosting affiliate programs are outliers because they tend to pay much higher referral bonuses than other networks. Most other programs pay you a small percentage of your sales. With hosting affiliate networks, you tend to receive flat fees instead. As an affiliate, there are a lot of ways that you can promote hosting products. On paper, the process is really simple. You publish hosting reviews, wait for users to find and read them, and collect payment on link clicks. However, that process can take a long time in practice. Moreover, most affiliate programs pay in net terms. That means you might have to wait one, two, or even three months to see referral payments. That setup exists to prevent any abuse of the program.
It’s important to understand that convincing real people to spend their money on your recommended products requires trust. Affiliate marketing can be incredibly lucrative. However, you need both decent traffic and a trusting relationship with your audience to get there. One of the best examples of an e-commerce affiliate program is Amazon Associates. Amazon accounted for 36.9% of all e-commerce sales in the US during 2020. That’s a staggering figure, reflecting the massive scale of Amazon operations. One component of that market share is Amazon’s affiliate program. Amazon Associates accepts several kinds of websites, but it focuses mainly on sites with blogs. You can also apply for the program if you have a mobile app or a YouTube channel. Plus, there’s a separate category for social media influencers. Applying for Amazon Associates requires a well-established blog. Amazon usually filters applicants with fewer than ten blog posts on their sites. However, you’ll need a website that gets a lot of traffic to make decent money from the program.