Hey everyone, David here from safe money makers, and I wanted to give a little lesson on affiliate marketing, what it is, how it works, how to make money doing it, and how to use affiliate links!
Affiliate Marketing explained in its simplest form is when a source of influence, being a website, a YouTube channel, or any other kind of influence has an arrangement with an online retailer. The Influencer drives traffic to products from the online retailer and is the customers from the traffic buy products, the influencer gains a commission, and the online retailer makes a sale. Essentially, it is a win-win situation for all parties involved.
What can I promote as an affiliate marketer
The first big stage of becoming an affiliate marketer is figuring out your niche is, and creating relevant content for that niche. A niche in affiliate marketing terms is a section of media that attracts a group of people. Niches can also be broken down into sub-niches.
Here are some examples
Gaming: PC gaming- Mouse- Keyboards- Monitors- Memory/Ram- Motherboards-etc
Home Décor: Posters-Lamp Lights-Candles-Fragrant Cleaners.
Essentially, any kind of product or service has a niche market behind it, and these niche markets are people that you can attract to your website. For a very in-depth overview of what a niche is, click the link below
Click here for an in-depth explanation of what a niche is
To have access to affiliate links, you must sign up with an affiliate network. Now, I do not suggest doing this is your website is relatively new. There is usually a threshold to enter into affiliate programs. Most require you to have a specific amount of traffic before signing up, and if you don’t meet these requirements, they might reject your application.
The reality of affiliate marketing is that it is going to take you some time to start earning money online. There is a process to getting your content ranked on Google, and thus gaining traffic and an audience because of it. There are a lot of factors to learn about it, a lot of mistakes that you will make, but it is worth it! To have access to the best affiliate marketing tools in the world, and the best training that will skyrocket your success, click here! (trust me, this training and knowledge put to use will earn you six figures a year and more)
Once you get accepted into an affiliate marketing vendor, they will provide you with affiliate links that you can use in your content.
There are various kinds of links, some of them are text links, and some of them are pictures and banners. The links are specialized with a tracking code that is unique to you. The tracking code is how vendors pay you. It is a code that identifies that it is your link, so when someone clicks on the link, the referral counts in your name.
There are many affiliate programs out there, all of them offering various types of products and pay structures.
Some affiliate programs offer low commissions, however, to make up for that, they offer an unbelievable variety of products, which stacks well with a decent cookie length.
What is a cookie in terms of affiliate marketing?
In the affiliate marketing world, a cookie is a length of time that people are in essence, attached to your affiliate link.
Amazon associates have a 24-hour cookie length on all of their affiliate links. This is where the idea of affiliate marketing gets fun! You just promoted a product and you got some traffic to click on your Amazon affiliate link. Since you referred them to amazon with your link, anything that they buy on amazon within 24 hours of the time they clicked that link, you will get a commission.
Types of affiliate programs:
Commission structured based affiliate programs:
Amazon associates in my opinion are hit-and-miss on the affiliate program department. The biggest thing they have going for them is that they have the largest marketplace on the entire planet. Nothing has as many products on the stock as amazon associates, and not to mention that they also have the best delivery times, Amazon is the biggest e-commerce giant the world has ever seen, but they also offer the lowest commission rates and the lowest cookie length out of almost all affiliate programs.
On April 21st, amazon cut their commissions by over 50% for multiple categories, some even completely cut off. While it is still very possible to make a full-time income with amazon associates, it is going to be a long and arduous process, especially when you are limited to a 24-hour cookie length.
Wal-Mart and Target:
E-commerce giants like Wal-Mart and Target also have affiliate programs; however, it is hard to be able to pull off sales like you can with amazon associates. This is because most people relate to Wal-Mart and Target shopping centers and will simply relate to them in that sense. They don’t really think of Wal-Mart and Target as a delivery service in the same vein that amazon is considered. The one advantage to using these affiliate programs vs amazon associates is that Wal-Mart has a 3-day cookie length and Target has a 7-day cookie length.
and many more:
There are so many affiliate programs out there for you to make money from. Get on your search bar and start looking for them!
High Ticket/digital Affiliate Programs:
These are affiliate programs that pay out much more handsomely and are more based on digital products, instead of e-commerce products. These kinds of affiliate programs are where you would promote software or training programs. These are in the nature of WordPress hosting, Email Marketing, chatbox software, so on and so forth. The website Cloudways has a post explaining the best high ticket affiliate programs, if you are interested, I highly recommend checking it out here!
Recurring commissions affiliate programs:
These affiliate commission models are my favorite! Recurring commissions are when you get referrals to sign up for a subscription-based service, and when they pay their monthly fee, you get a cut of every payment. So these kinds of recurring commissions, have the potential to last for a lifetime. Imagine if you got someone to sign up for a service, and that service costs $100 a month, and there is a 50% commission from your affiliate link.
Imagine making $50/month off of one sale! That one sale is worth $600 a year, that’s from just one sale! Imagine making 10 of those sales, or 30 of those sales! 30 sales net you an extra $18’000 a year. What would you do with an extra $18’000 a year?
The best training to become an Affiliate Marketer:
As I mentioned before, being an affiliate marketer is rewarding, but it is also very hard work! Many courses show how affiliate marketing works, and little tips and tricks you can incorporate into your campaigns and whatnot, but there are a lot of failures in this industry, and the reason why is that the courses aren’t personal enough with you. The creator of the course doesn’t interact with you and answer questions for you when you need help.
The course creator simply creates the course and says “here you go” and makes himself unavailable to his audience! He is too busy making his next course that will put six figures in his bank account. That’s where Wealthy Affiliate steps in!
Wealthy Affiliate is an all-in-one affiliate marketing platform that provides training, website hosting, and other various necessary affiliate marketing tools to launch an incredibly successful business.
I could go on all day about how they have the strongest WordPress hosting software that I have ever seen, but chances are you’ll have no idea what I am talking about. The strongest element I have that is geared towards beginners in the affiliate marketing world is the community.
Wealthy Affiliate is full of people who have made over six figures a year, as another thing that Wealthy Affiliate is, is a hub for affiliate marketers to socialize! There are so many people available at your fingertips to ask for help. But hey, I can only talk about it so much, I highly recommend that you try it for yourself, it’s free, no credit card is required.
For a full in-depth review of Wealthy Affilaite, click here!
Conclusion:
Well, guys, that wraps up this post! I hope that you found it informative and has given you knowledge of how affiliate marketing works. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below!
-David Nelly
David Nelly's goal is to set you up with the right pathway to entering the world of making money online!
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Hey Dave,
I enjoyed reading your article on how to avoid make money online scams. I agree with you, there are many of these and they are increasing. They play to peoples emotions by promising make money fast by their “systems” and push button profits. The reality though is that nothing could be further from the truth. Making money online is a bit like making money offline, it requires hard work and commitment.
I see that from the paid survey options that you do recommend Swagbucks. Can you estimate what the earnings could be weekly on Swagbucks? E.g. if you spend 1 hour/day what could you earn and then again at 3 hours/day. I’m curious as some want to make this smaller income to help them build a real online business.
Very much agree with your analogy about how making money online can be like making money offline. It is definitely true that it is quite a grind to actually be successful online.
I cannot give you a definitive answer to how much you can make with Swagbucks but based on my own experiences with the company and doing some google-fu with what other people have made, I would estimate that you can earn an average of $1/hour if you are working hard on completing surveys and offers.
Putting that into terms of 3 hours a day, around $3-4 a day. If you work at a normal pace, I would say that you would probably only make around $20/month, which may or may not be worth your time. If you’re at work and wanted to earn some chump change on your work break, it’s definitely an ideal oppertunity.
Keep in mind that you might not be able to scale your income with Swagbucks appropriately as many surveys require you to qualify to take them.
You can also watch videos to earn a little side cash. This would probably be my #1 most recommended way to earn money with Swagbucks. It’s easy and you could have the videos on background while you’re doing something else, you don’t even have to watch them.