Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic that lets a product owner increase sales by allowing others targeting the same audience – “affiliates” – to earn a commission by recommending the product to others. At the same time, it makes it possible for affiliates to earn money on product sales without creating products of their own. The cost to the customer purchasing the product or service through an affiliate is the same as buying directly from the product owner. While product owners make less money per sale because they must pay a percentage of the sale to the affiliate, they are also reaching potential customers they probably wouldn’t reach on their own. Affiliates can earn commissions on a one-time purchase or recurring income through sales of subscriptions or membership programs.

How to become an Affiliate?

Marketers become affiliates in a number of ways that include:

Registering to become an affiliate on retail or ecommerce sites. Shopify, for example, has an affiliate program that lets marketers earn commissions on new Shopify customers.

Surveying existing customers to learn their favorite products or services and then contacting those companies to inquire about an affiliate program. For example, a small business marketing consultant might become an affiliate of an email list management and distribution service.

Searching online for products that are relevant to the marketer’s site and will appeal to the target audience. Most companies that offer affiliate programs indicate that with an “Affiliates” or “Partners” link at the bottom of their site home page.

Looking for potential affiliate products at affiliate program managers that include Commission Junction, Clickbank, and ShareASale.

After being accepted into an affiliate program, marketers receive a unique URL that includes their affiliate ID. They share that unique URL with their subscribers, site visitors, and social networks via text links or ads. When someone clicks on that link, affiliate software records that click and any resulting product sales in the affiliate’s account. When commissions reach a predetermined threshold, the affiliate is paid.

Best Practice :

Most importantly, FTC guidelines require that affiliates disclose when they’re using an affiliate link, whether it’s on a website or in an e-mail message, tweet, or social network status update.

Affiliates are most successful when the products they promote match the interests of their followers and subscribers. In addition, many successful affiliate marketers advise recommending and promoting only products that the affiliate is personally familiar with. That’s because familiarity with the product, program, or service helps build trust between the affiliate and end-user.

Type of Affiliate Campaign:
– CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
– CPC (Cost Per Click)
– CPL (Cost Per Lead)
– CPS (Cost Per Sale)
– CPT (Cost Per Transaction)
– Hybrid (CPL+CPS)
– PPC (Pay Per Call)

Affiliate Network :

Indian networks-
1- Tyroo.com
2- Vcommission.com
3- Dgperform (dgm-india.com)
4- Omgpm.com (omg India)
5- Trootrac.com
6- Ads.ibibo

International networks-
1- cj.com (commission junction, affiliate by conversant)
2- clickbank.com
3- clickbooth.com
4- cpalead.com (incent campaigns)
5- peerfly.com

How to do Affiliate Marketing
1- Content
– Article marketing
– Blog
– Review articles/blog/websites
– Coupons
– SEO
2- Email marketing
3- Media buying
4- Popups and pop under
5- Traffic buying
6- Content locking
7- Facebook PPC

Affiliate Success Story :

Here are examples of successful website monetized with other affiliate programs.

  • #1 The Wire Cutter
    The Wire Cutter is one of the Internet’s favorite review sites for electronics, gadgets and consumer goods.

    Today, The WireCutter focuses on doing dedicated testing and research to create in-depth and useful product buying guides to help readers pick the best products in a wide range of categories.

    Since its birth in 2011, the Wire Cutter has grown into one of the top 6,000 sites online. The affiliate website was reported to be acquired for over $30,000,000 in cash by The New York Times in October 2016.

    · Founder: Brian Lam (@blam), a former Editorial Director at Gizmodo
    · Niche: Consumer product reviews
    · Goal: To help people find the best product in every user category
    · Key Challenge: To design innovative tests and select the best product possible, without being influenced by commercial interests.

    Content Strategies :
    · The Wirecutter’s success is clear once you read any one of their reviews. They do fun tests with products that are so good; they have a very high chance of successful in each space.

    ·For example, their review of best wirless earbud headphones under $50 is on such another level that all content makers should use The Wirecutter as the premier example of what a product review piece should be.

    ·Never seen a product review, or any blog post for that matter, with over 750 comments.

    ·It looks like they start by reading reviews on Amazon and other major online marketplaces to narrow down the best products of a category and then they actually buy them to run their own tests to come to their own conclusion.

    ·As seen in another example of the Best Home Bluetooth Speaker, this allows them to create much better, in-depth content than all of their competitors. And it works.

    ·It has over 11.4k referring domains and is just about leading Google for every “best product” search terms in the gadgets and electronic space.

    ·They have expanded by starting a sister site, The Sweethome is also doing just as well for home-focused products.

    How they make money?
    The Wire Cutter explains its monetization model on its ”How To Support Us”, which builds trust with their audience through transparency. They mostly make money from Amazon’s Associate program but also use affiliate programs from various other retailers and Skimlinks.

    Some different tactics they use to monetize include:
    · “Best of” product pages for each category and each recommendation comes with an associated Amazon link.

    ·They use quite a lot of in-content affiliate links to the recommended products throughout the Article.

    ·They also include a callout of their best pick at the end of the review

    Key Takeaways :
    · The Wire Cutter does just one thing: in-depth reviews builds trust with your audience and
    significantly helps improve conversions.

    ·It uses a simple page with a list of best items in each category.
    · Quality > Quantity: The Wire Cutter’s tests are so innovative and extensive that manufacturers sometimes ask it for advice on how to improve their products. It also writes only 6-12 posts a Month.

    ·In fact testing products gives the ability to create much better content than most other niche sites allowing better opportunities for getting links, traffic, and conversions.

    #2 Snapsort
    Snapsort offers an online platform that allows its users to find and compare cameras by its features.

    The site uses a data-driven method to produce their review and comparison content. Most of their pages are less than 1000 words but they still rank very high for their targeted keywords. What they do basically is collecting specs and features of digital cameras on the market and then uses that data to generate side-by-side comparison pages like Canon vs. Nikon
    This is different to the common approach of creating in-depth and long-form content that most people follow.

    · Founder: Alexander Black, Christopher Reid
    · Niche: Digital Camera Comparison and Reviews
    · Goal: To help people find the best digital camera by comparing with other products.
    · Key Challenge: To stand out in a niche and add credibility and trust for the user.

    Content Strategies :
    · They publish reviews of various digital cameras and navigating the site is easy to find what you’re looking for.

    · Using their “popular recommendations” section sorted by category makes it easy for people to find a camera based on their needs and the ultimate goal of a camera.
    · It likes to use the camera’s features as the main review standards. for example the Nikon D750 review.

    · They compare these features to other cameras in its class in order to give a more accurate rating, which is a great way to rate technology.
    · Their camera vs. camera pages also attracts a ton of search traffic by ranking highly for thousands of keywords like “Nikon D750 vs. NikonD800“.
    · To attract international traffic, they provide the ability to translate the site into a total of 6 different languages.

    Also, you can change the prices that displayed to 11 different currencies and the affiliate links change to the selected country.

    How they make money?
    Customers have the choice to buy the products through affiliate links to Amazon, B&H Photo-Video, and/or Adorama. They automatically change the affiliate links based on the selected country as well for more optimization.

    Here are some tactics they use:
    · Affiliate links to three different online dealers giving the user the choice where to buy
    ·Automatically switch links based on selected country (11 available)
    ·They also accept advertising requests in various forms to extra affiliate income

    Key Takeaways :
    · Translating your site into multiple languages can boost income over time
    ·Using custom graphics or designs builds branding and credibility
    ·Finding a good way to rate and compare products can help make the user make a better choice and therefore buy You don’t always need to create long-form written content in order to rank high in Google. What’s more important is the ability to help the users with exactly what they want.

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