People have always been looking for opportunities to increase their yield, no matter the epoch, civilization, or times - easy-going or laborious - they lived in.
Nowadays, more and more people are looking for options to gain decent profit from any kind of passive income initiative requiring little effort. And this is quite a common choice for people who are busy with their main professional and daily family responsibilities.
The traditional ways of doing this are well known for decades, even for centuries. Here are the first options that come to our minds:
- Buying properties, cars, machines, etc., and reselling them at a higher price
- Renting a city or holiday properties
- Retail trade of goods purchased from a wholesale warehouse
- Buying shares of companies
- Investing in funds
As we live in a digital tech age, more and more people are finding ways to supplement their income on the Internet, and many of them do it quite successfully. One of the most popular ways to do this is by diving into affiliate marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an e-commerce initiative that lets you earn profit as a commission. It’s quite easy to establish as usually all you need to have beforehand is a single website. What is required from you as an affiliate marketer (or simply “affiliate” as the role is most often represented) is just recommending services or goods to your web page's audience.
Why is it Preferred?
Unlike custom advertising campaigns on the internet, which are usually quite tedious and irritating for the audience, with affiliate marketing businesspeople don’t pay for the ad unless a purchase has been made. This is the reason why many companies prefer this very method of advertising.
When it Started?
As the constitutor of e-commerce affiliate marketing is considered William J. Tobin - the founder of PC Flowers and Gifts, who started selling flowers and gifts with an affiliate program in 1994. Probably the most recognizable platform for selling goods worldwide, Amazon, created its affiliate program two years later, in 1996, when affiliate marketers could implement banners or text with links leading to Amazon.com.
How Affiliate Marketing Works?
Affiliates may use many different ways, or a single way only, to conduct the sales that will bring them the commission.
Review Pages
Most often, they bet on creating a review page in which they describe the pros and cons of the product or service, or write a blog article about it. Affiliates usually apply good SEO practices to get visitors. Usually, they embed a button to a tracking link that was created specifically for their site, or they insert a link somewhere in the creative text. And if a purchase is made through this tracking link, the affiliate receives their commission.
Tracking Links
In order to prevent the customers from buying the product or service not through the tracking link, but directly from the site of the company that is offering the product or service, the client may be required to enter a simple bonus code identifying where they were convinced to make the purchase. Or, the offer accessible through the tracking link might be set to be more advantageous than the original one.
Several Brands, One Site
Often affiliates might present several competing products on a single website, providing tracking links for each of them - no matter if on a single page or on separate pages. It is also quite а common practice for an affiliate to publish a ranking on their website, positioning a product or service in first, second, or last place, according to their own criteria.
Other Ways to Promote Your Tracking Link
Besides publishing review pages and articles for products and services, affiliates might also use other methods to attract potential clients - standard display advertising, e-mail marketing, social media, and more.
Is it Risky and How Much Can You Earn as an Affiliate?
100% Legal
Affiliate programs are far from dubious investments like those from the 20th century, known as get-rich-quick schemes. Depending on your particular deal type, the only criterion is how many people you succeeded to influence and make them buy a product or pay for a service, or visit the company’s website.
Cheap Investment
Considering that the only investments you have to complete to start your business as an affiliate are buying a domain, paying the hosting support, and creating a website - affiliate marketing seems to be among the least risky enterprises one could undertake. In addition, this is an investment that could not only let you gain profit soon, but it could keep a regular income that continues on and may even rise in the future.
Profit Depends on Your Skills and Efforts
The amount of monthly profits you could gain depends on a set of various factors such as the following:
- The particular business niche you are marketing
- If the textual content of the affiliate website is interesting and engaging
- The SEO tricks you apply
- Your website’s appearance
- The commission amount
- Your negotiation skills
- The conditions of the overall deal you negotiate
- The overall time and efforts you could invest
Therefore, you could earn from literally nothing to wealthy profits.
Sub-Affiliates Options
Many affiliate programs also have an option for referring sub-affiliates. Thus, you could not only earn money from your personal website, but also gain a percentage of the earnings of affiliates you referred.
How Do Affiliates Receive Their Earnings?
You could receive your profits directly into your bank account or by any popular e-wallet like PayPal, Google Wallet, or ApplePay, unless the particular affiliate program has certain non-negotiable conditions. How you will receive your money is entirely dependent on the deal you make.
Types of Deals
The conditions of your commissions are another thing that is usually deal-dependent. In most cases, an affiliate gets credit whenever there’s a purchase conducted through the particular tracking link provided by the company. This type of deal is called Cost Per Action (CPA). But there are also a few rarer, but still occasional variants. Here are a few examples:
- Instead of a commission for each purchase, you can get a strictly individual amount for each new customer that you managed to bring to their site
- Gain a share of the revenue that the buyers from your website caused
- Combined CPA and revenue share
How to Enter Affiliate Marketing: The 5 Consecutive Steps
Here we present the first 5 consecutive steps in diving into the vast business opportunities of the affiliate market which is ideal for semi-passive incomes.
1. Choose your favorite market
The first thing you need to consider is which marketing niche you would like to tackle. It will be quite easy and enjoyable for you if you endeavor with genuine interest and deep passion. Your personal interest in the field of the products you recommend is extremely important, as your main asset is the customers' trust in you. People won’t buy any product unless they feel that the recommender is really into the subject and they’re not trying to mislead them. Contrary to standard trading, in affiliate e-commerce honesty is preciously valued. And it is exactly what generates your well-deserved profits.
Therefore, if you love sports, you can make a great betting affiliate. If your passion is travel, then you can become an affiliate marketer offering plane tickets, tours, and vacations. If your state of mind is into software products or hosting services - then with no doubt this is your best choice. Do you like cars? No problem, then step boldly into the field of the automobile market. As you will need to post and update information in the area of the specific niche regularly or from time to time, it would be satisfying if you could have fun doing it.
The most “profitable” e-commerce niches for affiliate marketing are considered to be technology, finance, cryptocurrencies, fashion, cosmetics, fitness, health, gambling, tourism, dogs and cats, home, and child care. But remember that traditionally successful fields do not guarantee you luck. And vice versa - nearly every marketing niche could be triumphal if you manage to apply the right customer approach.
2. Find the perfect affiliate programs
Once you have decided which e-commerce marketing niche to target, it is time to choose a decent affiliate program. This might be a very entertaining activity. In case you want to offer several competing and similar products or services at the same time, you could also choose several affiliate programs.
There is a large number of affiliate programs on the Internet, especially in the fields of software technology, travel, and gambling. By typing your preferred marketing field in on Google followed by "affiliate program", there is a good chance that you will be very pleasantly surprised by the huge and varied choice.
Every single affiliate program has its own terms, conditions, and payout method. As we already mentioned above, negotiating the deal, and choosing the right commission type is a key segment of the business process since your real profit depends on it. Usually, affiliates start with a “Cost Per Action” deal, but sometimes receiving a strictly specified amount for every new customer might be better in terms of your overall income. If you manage to reasonably evaluate your potential, you could sign a beneficial contract from which you will have the best possible earnings and get the emanative motivation to grow. That’s why you need to think about the best possible choice of commission type very consciously.
Each affiliate program may have different payout methods. If the one used by an affiliate plan is not your favorite, you'll have to put up with it and comply with the condition. Affiliate program managers tend to make exceptions for the payout methods on extremely rare occasions only.
3. Start creating the website
After choosing the marketing niche and getting familiar with the affiliate programs that are available for it, your next step is the most creative and fun one, but also a little bit labor-intensive: creating your affiliate website.
We suggest you start with the domain. It must be very relevant to the marketing field that you chose. For instance, if your marketing niche is pets, then it could be a pet-related name, for example:
- Dogsandcats.com
- Adventures4pets.org
- Walkingwithmydog.eu
Thus, you would be able to improve the SEO presence of your website and increase the chances to be noticed by potential clients. Make sure the domain name is related to the niche, it is easy to type and remember, and it sounds good to you. It could also be the same as the name of the affiliate website. This is recommended as it will increase your credibility as an e-commerce trader.
After that, you need to choose a decent hosting and server provider where all your website’s data will be stored. Given the specific needs of your e-commerce business, you should also choose the best hosting plan for you. In case all these tech-concepts sound not very clear to you, Seravo could quickly and efficiently take care of everything instead of you.
4. Choose between coding and CMS
There’s another tedious thing you have to decide: if you will count on custom-based content management for your site appearance and support, or if you would prefer a ready-to-use platform such as WordPress. To create a website by coding, you will most probably need a skilled developer, which might cost you any amount that you would most likely prefer to save. If coding a website is quite far away from your hobbies, then a content management system (CMS) is your solution. Unlike code-based websites, CMS ones are easier to update for people that are not familiar at least with HTML and CSS.
Considering that sometimes code-based sites crash and may need prompt fixes in-depth, CMS might also be a better option as they usually have customer support that could help you anytime you feel unable to cope with any issue.
The most prominent and widely used CMS platform is WordPress. The first thing that WordPress users could enjoy is choosing an appropriate template for their new website. They are all well-arranged and cool. Any WordPress page could be quickly enhanced with images, banners, and useful add-ons. Thus, you could keep your affiliate website refined all the time for a cheap cost.
5. Make your website look really great!
You should really make your website look quite appealing, so you could look trustworthy and entice as many people who will make purchases as possible.
Once the theme conception of your website is resolved, all you need to do is fill it in with textual and visual creative content. This is where you need to unleash your full creative potential. Don’t forget to apply cool images and banners to your website to prevent it from looking boring. In addition, images are a wonderful tool to make your website look fresher, more entertaining, and more refined.
Your texts preferably should be unique, well-structured, easy to understand, and attention-grabbing. You can bet on different written and video genres. For example, detailed reviews and comparisons of products and services, useful articles, blogs, vlogs, columns, interviews with experts, etc. It would be best if they are all related to the marketing niche. By placing the tracking links at the right places and implementing good SEO tricks, you will start collecting the first purchases and earnings soon.
There is a hoard of options to start an e-commerce business in affiliate marketing, no matter what your area of interest is. A huge variety of affiliate programs are waiting for you! As you already know the 5 simple steps of making yourself an affiliate, you can already dive into the affiliate marketing pool!
Why not check the biggest performance network for web hosting services? You can become an affiliate in just a few clicks. Once you get the unique tracking link and your website’s visitors start making purchases, every month you will be paid a commission for each action of sale conducted through your affiliate link.
