Are you a business owner who is looking for a cheap, efficient, and time-proven method to advertise your products and services? If your answer is “yes”, this article would be quite a useful one for you.
What Affiliate Marketing is?
Affiliate marketing is a relatively new commercial pattern that is grounded on commissions. Business owners provide individual affiliate links to each affiliate marketer that registered to their affiliate programs, and these links work for the purpose of generating the commission for each product or service sold through it.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate marketers promote their affiliate links by publishing them on their own affiliate websites, blogs, and social networks, or under email marketing rules. Unlike regular marketing, affiliate marketing relies heavily on the sincere and honest reviews that affiliate shares with the audience. Only in this way can they win the trust of their customers for a long period of time.
What is The Commission Amount?
Depending on the deal type, the commission amount shared with the affiliate marketer is usually between 5 and 30 percent of the turnover, and this is quite a decent incentive for many people, especially those who are looking for a way to earn money from a passive income, to become affiliates.
Why Affiliate Marketing is a Great Opportunity?
Undoubtedly, in the world of online commerce, there is no other such profitable opportunity for a business owner to advertise their products with absolutely no investment. Just as there is no other accessible opportunity that allows you to earn money from the resale of someone else’s goods with a minimal investment. Affiliate marketing is a great option for both business owners and affiliate marketers for several reasons that we will explain to you in detail.
1. No payments for ads
Unfortunately, in the standard way of advertisement, it often happens that advertising campaigns are not successful at all. Often, even the money spent on the ads cannot cover the cost of the campaign itself, while with affiliate marketing you have the favorable opportunity to pay only for the effective advertising that really led to the sale of a product or service.
Affiliate marketing ads are free! Unlike traditional advertising, here you don’t have to pay for advertising campaigns beforehand, the positive outcome of which could never be certain. The main goal of the affiliate marketer is not only to take your money (like regular advertisers actually do) but also to create high-quality articles, reviews, or social media posts, with which they could promote the affiliate link that was submitted to them by you.
In turn, affiliate marketing is similarly beneficial to affiliate marketers as well. Instead of investing huge sums of money for products and services to later sell, affiliates can make money with absolutely no investment by reselling someone else’s merchandise. Any way you look at the scope, it is a precious win-win opportunity for both mutually collaborating sides.
2. You make the rules!
In order to attract a large number of affiliates to promote your services or merchandise, it would be best to create an affiliate program website. On it, you could determine what the advertising conditions will be, what the commissions will be, as well as what types of deals you would like to offer. All the rules are up to you, and you don’t need to comply with the rules of pretentious advertising agencies anymore.
Most often, affiliate programs offer the following types of deals that are beneficial to both affiliate marketers and the party that offers the products and services for sale:
- Revenue share: The most common type of deal. Affiliate marketers earn a share of the revenue generated through their affiliate links.
- Cost per action: There is no commission for the affiliate marketer whose profit will be a preset amount for each purchase or new client recruited.
- Hybrid: A custom-made plan that incorporates “revenue share” and “cost per action” elements together. Usually, it is appropriate for affiliate marketers that are making a large number of sales.
- Flat fee: As with standard advertising, marketers are paid a preset amount based on advertising, but not on the number of sales they make. This type of deal is only appropriate for occasional periods of time and for affiliate marketers who have a really huge network of potential clients.
3. Saves you money on salaries and honorariums
A major business benefit of affiliate marketing is that you can save a lot of money on salaries and fees for services that someone has to do for you. Affiliate program advertising does a great job that in the traditional way of advertising has to be completed by a team of people.
Each affiliate marketer can open your affiliate program themselves, view the types of deals and conditions, register, and choose their type of deal between revenue share, click per action, and hybrid. An affiliate link, with which they will be able to advertise and sell, will be automatically generated for them. And based on the sales made through the affiliate link, the amount of the commission could also be automatically calculated.
To automate this whole process, you can subscribe to an affiliate marketing platform, for instance, “Income Access” or “Affise”. It only has to be connected to your site, and it will take care of all the processes by itself.
4. Low ongoing expenses
With affiliate marketing, the majority of your marketing-related work will be conducted by the affiliate marketers you collaborate with. Not you, but they will be responsible for almost all marketing expanses that could appear for advertising purposes. The only thing that you will be required to regularly pay is the commission for each sale (or another kind of commission, depending on the type of the affiliate’s deal). In this way, the net profit of your turnover will always remain intact.
Of course, you could always help by supplying marketing materials. Most often, these materials can be photos of your product or a video that reveals exactly how it is used and applied. But though it is your product, in no way providing such kind of materials can be reflected as your obligation. With affiliate marketing, advertising is the responsibility of your affiliate partners only.
5. Affiliate marketing will make you more trustworthy
Affiliate marketing could constantly generate traffic toward your website, as well as it could drive consistent sales of your products and services, not only when you've funded an advertising campaign in advance. As more and more affiliate marketers will be posting positive textual information about your merchandise or services, your brand name could become very popular on Google and rank higher when searching for related keywords.
Also, since affiliate marketing is based entirely on trust, it would definitely be a much more effective method for your business to get regular and loyal customers. Considering the fact that regular advertisement often forces marketers to exaggerate the qualities of their products to make them marketable, affiliate marketing is a quite better and much more honest way to present your merchandise than any traditional advertising appliance.
6. You can get more recognizable
With the methods of standard marketing, each advertising agency is “geographically” limited in a specific region where it could advertise you. Some agencies have networks in other countries as well, but this makes the cost of the advertising service even more expensive and the money return even less likely. But with affiliate marketing, you have multiple regional opportunities to advertise your product.
Brands could undoubtedly increase their recognition worldwide by being selected by the right internationally recognized affiliate marketers. In every niche, there are some of them that are well-recognizable and trustworthy, and they usually reveal very reliable rankings on their websites, in which they compare the qualities of various similar products (or the reliability of several different brands) according to their own criteria. If you manage to achieve your presence in the top 5 rankings of several popular and reputable affiliate websites, your brand will undoubtedly become much more popular and recognizable.
Not only you could count on marketers to find your affiliate program on the internet, but you can also google them with specific keywords, find them, and contact them accordingly with amiable offer messages for possible mutual collaboration. There is no shame at all in offering your own affiliate program to potential new affiliate partners. Actually, it is quite a frequently occurring practice in this business.
7. You could better respond to clients’ necessities
Traditional advertising campaigns are usually not targeting the characteristics of the audience and their specific interests and needs. Although some popular modern platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram have an option that screens and target the audience by age, gender, some interests, and other general characteristics, none of these traits could guarantee as much success as the actual necessities of the individuals at the particular time.
Selecting specific individual necessities is probably the most crucial advantage of affiliate marketing. In addition to promoting products and services, it often provides useful knowledge, which is somehow related to the products and services for sale. And from these beneficial facts and awareness, the interested individual could be later redirected to an offer page that presents the advertised service or product of yours. Without any doubt, the most reliable client is the one who is interested in the solution of a problem, which your services and products could easily and effectively solve.
8. You can do experiments
With affiliate marketing, you can always try multiple experiments without risking anything, because these advertising experiments are completely free. Honestly, there is no easier way to conquer multiple foreign markets than affiliate marketing. In these diverse markets, for instance, you could experiment with emphasizing different product qualities (often of the same product) in each of them.
Affiliate marketers could usually try one or several regions where they can make your products trending. And it is an interesting, easy, and completely free way to check if a product or service (or any particular characteristics of a product or service) can be successfully marketed in various regions.
Usually, due to the different cultural, geographical, and even political considerations in each country, there are products that are impossible to sell in some locations but extremely easy to sell in others. However, it doesn't cost you anything to experiment and find the right regional target thereby. Neither materially, nor as an effort.
Even if an affiliate does not work in specific regions where you would like to try to trade a product off, they can successfully collaborate with other affiliate networks to make your products and services recognizable and marketable thousands of kilometers away from you. The only thing you may help with is providing cool additional creative materials, such as textual copies, photos, videos, etc., to be adapted for the specific region, though these tasks are usually handled entirely by the affiliate marketer.
9. New knowledge from affiliate marketers
Affiliate marketers, especially those who have years of experience in the field, can give you a lot of useful ideas and knowledge to improve your products and make them more marketable. In the communication processes with these people, you can learn many useful and easily applicable tricks that will help you and them earn more.
By observing how affiliate marketers work, you will be able to gradually learn how to make your products meet the needs of potential customers in certain regions. Because, after all, that's their job. Thus, you will be able to think of how to apply this knowledge by heart. And so, over time, you could expand the business by filling other niches with other products and services as well.
10. A marketing field with good prospects
Although affiliate marketing has evolved tremendously in the past 10-15 years, it is still unfolding. As more and more businesses prefer to advertise through affiliate marketing nowadays, it is still developing as the most successful bloom in the field of advertising.
We can conclude that affiliate marketing is not just a great alternative to regular ads, such as TV, radio, newspaper, and online advertisements, but a method with unique advantages. As a marketing process, it has a bright future that is yet to bring advancement to small, medium, and large business owners, as well as affiliate marketers who are actually the engine of modern affiliate marketing strategies.
Final Words
Life today makes more and more people, especially those with new families and children, explore various ways to generate long-term passive incomes or search for opportunities for self-organization of their working time, so they could share more beneficial moments with their loved ones. These are the two main reasons why many people try to start their own small businesses, most often in the fields of e-commerce and services. But competition is usually high, and it forces many budding business people to look for alternative means of advertising and selling, such as affiliate marketing.
If you also recognize yourself in these words above, then do not hesitate at all to initiate the creation of your own affiliate program. Without a doubt, this is the most successful alternative to traditional advertising methods that lets you establish yourself in highly competitive markets and earn good profit without any initial monetary investment in advertising.
If you are not into doing your own business, then you would likely enjoy the opportunity to become an affiliate marketer and earn a regular commission for reselling products or services. This is a great chance for receiving a routine passive income, for which you have practically invested nothing in advance. Think about your favorite niche, create a website, sign up for an affiliate program, and take full advantage of this opportunity!
In case your favorite niche is the field of hosting services, we would recommend you check out the affiliate program on MissAffiliate.com. We offer a great commission, we work in various regions around the globe, and we appreciate all the people we are working with, no matter if they are our affiliate partners or our customers. Most probably, this is precisely the reason why we are rated 4.9 out of 5 on the worldwide popular ranking platform Trustpilot.
