tl;dr If you click an affiliate link on this site and make a purchase, the company will give me a portion of the money you spend to reward me for the referral. You do not pay any extra when you click an affiliate link so it doesn’t cost you anything. This article explains how it works.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is one of the methods that content creators (publishers) can monetize their websites and it is also a tool that companies (merchants) can marketing themselves and increase sales and leads. There are middlemen (networks) that manage the affiliate programs, tracking, and payments on behalf of the merchants. The last player is the customer, who ultimately makes a purchase or becomes a lead.
Here’s an example scenario:
John searches for “shoes” and clicks on my website about shoes. He sees a blog post reviewing Allen Edmonds’ Park Ave shoes and clicks on it. After reading the review, John wants to buy a pair and it just so happens there’s a link on my website: “Want a pair of your own? Buy your Allen Edmonds Park Aves on Amazon!” John clicks the link and makes the purchase.
As the affiliate, I get a 6-8% commission on the sale (at no additional cost to John), the network (Amazon) also gets a cut from the merchant (Allen Edmonds).
This is one of the biggest ways that people make money online. Displaying ads is another way to monetize websites, but that will have to be another post. If you’re dying to learn more, here’s your entrance to the rabbit hole: Google AdSense.
Popular Affiliate Marketing Networks
There are three that I use, in order of my preferred networks. I’m on all four, so you aren’t limited to just one!
- Amazon Affiliates: Just about everyone loves and trusts Amazon, so getting a cut of the sales that you help them generate is relatively easy and you can do it with confidence knowing that customers will be taken care of well.
- ShareASale: I like this network because they let you export tons of data into Excel files so that you can deal with large amounts of data (to update many sites) all at once. It’s also the platform I’m most familiar/comfortable with. ShareASale has lots of big brands that you’re familiar with.
- CJ Affiliates: This network is a very close second to ShareASale. Their user interface cleaner and they also have quality, well known companies on their platform.
- MaxBounty: I recently joined this platform and they have a lot of good campaigns to choose from. It has some of the best resources for affiliates and the best customer service too (in my experience so far). You can get your commissions in Bitcoin too, if you’re into that stuff.
- Honorable mention: ClickBank. This platform is onne of the oldest ones. They have a lot of companies and products that aren’t as well known so they may be harder to promote than the others.
How to become successful with affiliate marketing
If this is something you may be interested in trying out, you’ll need to build a website and an email list. Here’s a link to a post I did on my favorite internet marketing tools to help you learn about some of the things you will need to be thinking about. I don’t have any posts on how to get started, but if you’d like to learn for yourself, I do have a guide on how to teach yourself anything. If you start to do research, be careful out there! Not all internet marketers are as honest as I am…
If you want any help or guidance, feel free to contact me for a free consultation.
Featured photo by Maria Tyutina from Pexels
