The short answer to the question in the headline of this blog article is "Yes, definitely!”
For as long as the economy as we know it has existed, we humans have been constantly looking for opportunities to earn passive income in order to feel more financially secure, especially in times of economic instability. The classic way of doing this is clear: you buy a property, a home, or a business premise, and you rent it out. But for this purpose, you must have worked and saved money for more than 10 years to make this investment possible. Most likely, you will not be able to do it without taking a loan either, which even makes the idea of this kind of investment a little bit scary.
Fortunately, these days we already have a wonderful opportunity for gaining regular passive income with a minimal, almost negligible initial investment. And this opportunity is the more and more popular affiliate marketing.
In this blog article, we have gathered the answers to the most common questions about affiliate marketing programs that affiliate marketers would like to know before jumping into their new business adventure.
Question #1: What affiliate marketing is and how does it work?
Affiliate marketing is a commercial method that is based on commissions that marketers acquire for reselling or helping a product or service to be sold. Beforehand, an affiliate needs to sign up for an affiliate program. Once they register, the business owners let them gain a unique affiliate link that they will be sharing with their audiences in order to generate their individual commissions.
Affiliate marketers popularize their affiliate links by publishing them on their own blog websites, social media, or YouTube channels, or by sending them by email marketing materials, which are usually accompanied by at least some creative marketing textual content.
Affiliate marketing is considered more honest than traditional advertising methods because, at its core, it is sharing honest reviews of experts, influencers, or people who have been selling similar products or services for many years. Trust is the most important asset in this marketing field. This is why many affiliate marketers try to succeed in constructing stable connections with their clients for a long period of time.
Question #2: What affiliate marketing programs are?
An affiliate program is a kind of business contract in which a business owner remunerates an affiliate marketer or an influencer with a turnover commission for advertising and reselling their products or services through an affiliate link.
People usually refer to an affiliate program as a website where a business presents the terms and conditions of its affiliate marketing initiative, its types of deals, the amounts of the commissions, its payment methods, etc. On these sites, any potential affiliate marketer can learn not only the terms of the offer, but they could also sign up for the particular affiliate program. After registration, an affiliate link is provided, through the distribution of which the affiliate marketer can generate their monthly passive income profit.
Question #3: What investments should I make in advance?
In the world of e-commerce, affiliate marketing is the most favorable way to earn good profit by advertising merchandise and services without making huge monetary investments in advance. In fact, this does not only apply to the realm of online commerce, but to all the fields in the modern business world. The only investments might be limited to the creation of at least one of the following initiatives. Some of them could be created for a cheap price, and others might be available completely for free:
- А website where you can write extensive reviews about the products and services or make a comparative ranking between several competing brands that offer the same kind of products and services.
- A social media profile through which you would be able to present in short posts and videos the advantages and disadvantages of a particular type of product or service.
- A YouTube channel where you can share more detailed video descriptions of the pros and cons of the product or service. There, you could record a nice and friendly video, in which, for example, you could demonstrate how the product is used or how the service must be activated. Interviews with experts and real users are also highly appreciated.
- A list of affiliate emails to promote your goods and services. There are some important rules of email marketing. It would be good for you to get familiar with them in advance, so you could follow them strictly and achieve the desired success.
Question #4: What web hosting affiliate programs are?
A web hosting affiliate program is an affiliate program in the niche of hosting services and software products. Most often, it lets affiliate marketers earn profit by referring website owners to hosting purveyors. Nowadays, nearly all big server hosts around the globe, as well as many smaller ones, rely on affiliate marketing to advertise their services. For this purpose, they have created affiliate programs where any enterprising affiliate marketer could sign up.
Web hosting businesses advertise with affiliate marketing not only because this business is based on trust, which could help them make their services look more trustworthy. But also, because this is how they manage to save money on advertising campaigns. With the methods of standard advertising, neither a host could be sure if they will be able to recover the investment for the advertising itself, nor they could know if the campaign would bring them any additional funds at all, which is, after all, the final goal of any standard advertising.
In addition to various hosting services, such as shared, VPS, dedicated, or cloud-based servers, with some hosting affiliate programs, you will also be able to earn from reselling domains, site builders, SSL certificates, VPN software, antivirus programs, etc. Each hosting affiliate program offers different options for reselling, so you would better get familiar with them beforehand.
Question #5: How to choose your niche?
When choosing an affiliate program, it is extremely important for you to select the right niche from the very beginning. For this purpose, you should think about your interests and capabilities, so you could get aware of them. Besides web hosting affiliate programs, there are also similar programs in the following various e-commerce business fields that are no less favorable:
- Finance (fund investments, cryptocurrencies, etc.)
- Online gambling (online casinos and betting)
- Lifestyle (sports, fitness, healthcare, etc.)
- Fashion & cosmetics (clothes, cosmetics, accessories, etc.)
- Children (Toys, baby foods, safety devices, etc.)
- Pets (food, food additives, toys, conveniences, etc.)
- Tourism (holiday packages, hotel booking, tickets for planes, trains, buses, museums, etc.)
- Culture & entertainment (tickets for concerts, theatres, cinema, sports games, and other events)
In addition to being interesting to you, the niche you will choose should also be well profitable. Of course, you could always try to develop your own affiliate networks of business partners and customers in not-very-popular niches. But it would be great to stand on at least one well-developed footing, which is the most interesting for you.
Question #6: What are the types of deals?
Usually, each affiliate program advertises several types of deals that the affiliate marketer can opt into. By choosing a deal, the affiliate marketer also determines the principle on which the generated profits from advertising will be calculated.
Most often, affiliate programs offer several types of deals. The most common of them are the following:
- Revenue share: This is the most commonly used type of deal and the most preferred one by both businesses and affiliate marketers. Once the revenue share type of deal has been selected, the affiliates could receive a preset percentage of turnover for the sales made through the affiliate link.
- Cost per action (CPA): Unlike the revenue share type, this type of deal does not pay a commission but a pre-fixed amount of money for each sale conducted through the individual affiliate link.
- Hybrid: This is a mixed deal type that includes both “revenue share” and “cost per action”. Affiliate marketers receive both a preset commission for each sale made through the affiliate link and a pre-fixed amount for each successful sale.
- Flat fee: This is a very rare type of deal that is mostly used by large affiliates who have a very large network of customers. Marketers are paid a fixed amount for advertising but not for selling a product through the affiliate link. Although this deal is implemented by affiliates, in practice it works on the principle of standard marketing and advertising.
It matters a lot which deal type you will choose right from the beginning of your initiative. As most affiliate programs are difficult to be persuaded to change the marketer’s type of deal over time, you need to evaluate your options well from the start of your affiliate initiative and choose the best deal for you from the very beginning.
Question #7: How do affiliate marketers get their earnings calculated?
In affiliate marketing, the profit calculation is based on the number of sales or the turnover from the sales that were successfully made through the affiliate link (depending on the specific type of deal). And the calculation itself is usually done completely automatically with software that the owners of affiliate programs install on their sites.
Yes, affiliate marketing is so advanced that there are even special software programs that are designed specifically to automatically issue individual affiliate links and calculate the individual commission of each affiliate marketer. By signing up for an affiliate program, you actually provide your data to the software program that the affiliate program uses. The software used for this purpose is most often any of the following in the list:
Each of these software programs above serves thousands of affiliate programs worldwide. Therefore, you can be sure that the calculation of your commissions is in safe hands and will be done correctly and professionally. With them, the possibility of errors is reduced to an absolute minimum. If you ever notice any problem with the calculation of your commissions, you could always contact your affiliate manager from the affiliate program and let them know. If a human error is detected, they will be able to recover it since they have full access to the menu of the system.
Question #8: How do marketers receive their payments?
Each affiliate program has its own way of paying commissions and profits to affiliate marketers. Most often, the remuneration process happens through some popular online payment method once a month. The popular hosting affiliate program Miss Affiliate, for example, does this through PayPal. Other affiliates could do this by using other payment methods, such as the following:
It is rare for an affiliate program to pay its affiliate marketers their due dividends through unpopular methods. But if this is your case, that should not worry you at all as you could check the method’s legitimacy on the Internet. In case it turns out that an affiliate is not correct (or uses an incorrect payment method), you could eventually switch to any of its competitors.
Question #9: How much money will I earn?
Frankly, this is a question we have no way of answering as profit from affiliate marketing is determined by a number of key factors, including the following few:
- Your individual marketing abilities: Every business requires flair and specific niche knowledge. In the field of affiliate marketing, there is a combination of many qualities and talents that could positively affect the success of your affiliate marketing initiative.
- The quality of the products: If the product or service is of poor quality, this will quickly be understood by customers and they will stop buying, using, and recommending it.
- The price of the products: If the product is very expensive, it would be much harder to sell.
- The season: A product might be salable in one period of the year, but it might be unusable in another.
- The right targeting of customers: People with a certain profile may have a great interest in a product or service, but people with a different profile may not find it interesting or necessary at all.
- The current economic situation: In periods of crisis and uncertainty, people prefer to spend money only on the most necessary. In case they are not essential, it is possible that your products or services might not be that popular in such a period of uncertainty.
- The product itself: This claim might sound ridiculous to some very enthusiastic businessmen. But the truth is that there are products and services that are simply not salable, no matter what kind of marketing and advertising tricks you apply.
Question #10: Can affiliate marketing make me rich?
There is no way to know in advance how much you will earn from affiliate marketing. Therefore, we cannot give an answer to the question of whether one can get rich by popularizing their affiliate link. But still, there are some statistical facts that you can use to do some very superficial preliminary conclusions for the magnitude of your potential success:
- Approximately a tenth of the affiliate marketers earn more than 45 000 - 50 000 EUR per year, which might be pretty enough for most people to live in most societies. For them, affiliate marketing could be their only job.
- About half of the affiliate marketers worldwide earn less than 18 000 - 20 000 EUR per year. With affiliate marketing practices, they usually get supplemental passive income that could help them upbuild their primary income.
- About a third of the affiliate marketers worldwide earn more than 18 000 - 20 000 EUR per year. For them, it would most probably be difficult to live with the profits from affiliate marketing enterprises only, but their participation in an affiliate program is a perfect way to gain additional passive income and increase their business investments.
In other words, an affiliate business may not make you as rich as Elon Musk, but it can certainly bring you at least a decent extra income to amplify your monthly budget, or even give you about a 10% chance of living with this kind of activity alone. Of course, this conclusion does not rule out the possibility of you getting really rich thanks to an affiliate program, but you just have to be aware that the probability is as high as getting rich from any other business venture.
Conclusion
If you really want to start your own e-commerce business with minimum initial investments, then do not hesitate even for a moment to sign up for an affiliate program. There is no doubt that this is the cheapest way to start your business enterprise right now and gain a regular and decent passive income. You just need to think carefully about the niche that is most interesting to you, create a website, a YouTube channel, or a niche-dedicated social media page, and sign up for an affiliate program. It is that easy! In case you believe that you might be a great influencer, you could also try to popularize your affiliate links through your personal social media profiles as well.
If web hosting is exactly your piece of cake, we would highly recommend you take a look at the current affiliate programs of MissAffiliate.com and their terms and conditions. There, you could find some really exceptional commissions for advertising products and services for very successful global and regional brands (such as MissHosting, StableHost, ProfesionalHosting, Time4VPS, Hostens, and others), as well as a friendly collaborative environment and great and proactive attitude from the affiliate managers.
