Introduction to affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular business methods in the digital world. What sets it apart from other types of advertising is that the advertiser does not pay for clicks or impressions as is usual, but for sale. In this article I give tou an introduction to affiliate marketing.
What is affiliate marketing?
This type of online marketing strategy is to promote a product or service from a third party and get a commission or percentage on the sale. It is a type of results marketing to obtain passive income and is considered a win-win business.
Within this digital marketing strategy there are 3 parts:
Advertiser or affiliate: this is the company or person that promotes the service or product. In internet blogs or related to the world of digital marketing it is very common to see people offering coupons to hire discount hostings.
Seller: company or person that markets your products or services.
Consumer: this is the final user who makes the purchase of the seller’s product through the advertiser’s website.
Basic terms of affiliate marketing
In this article of introduction to affiliate marketing I am going to talk about 3 basic concepts within this type of strategy.
Affiliation network: digital place where the seller and the advertiser meet. There are two points of view within an affiliation platform.
On the one hand the seller has access to an administration panel where you can configure and manage your affiliate program. Within this you can add new products, indicate the percentages of the commissions or other aspects. As a general rule, sellers are charged a flat rate and a small percentage per sale achieved.
On the other side we have the affiliates, who can join for free. They also have a configuration panel where they have all the information of their “projects” and where they can search and select more products to sell.
Affiliate program: in this case there is no platform through, but the seller speaks directly with a person who believes that you can report benefits. For this program to work properly it is necessary to install a code on the seller’s website so that there is no problem when the sales come from the affiliate.
Affiliate link: in this case the seller grants a unique link to your affiliate, and this will be responsible for distributing it over the network. Each sale that comes from that link will be for that affiliate, and therefore you will receive your agreed percentage.
Affiliate marketing’ advantages
No initial investment: most affiliate programs are free, so there is no need to pay to use this sales strategy.
Income without products: you do not sell your products or respond to them. No one can complain or have manufacturing costs.
Passive income: Obviously it is complicated and takes time, but if you are able to manage your projects well and have a popular website you can achieve good income every month.
Affiliate marketing’s disadvantages
Competition: obviously everything that glitters is not gold. Be clear that if you find a quality affiliate program you will not be the first to work with it.
You don’t have power to decide on the price
You do not get clients
Long-term strategy: as I said throughout this article of introduction to affiliate marketing it will be a long time until you get some interesting benefits with this strategy.
Is is a good strategy?
From my point of view if it is a good sales strategy, although for the same affiliate is not so interesting. The reason is that it is necessary to have a page with many users or have a certain reputation for people to use your links or codes. However if you start little by little and you have things clear, you can get to make money, yes, in the long term.
I hope that my introductory article on affiliate marketing will be interesting for you and discover a little more about this popular selling strategy in the digital world. Later on I will get an article where I will go deeper in case you want to encourage this form of income to work.
See you in the next article!
