Affiliate marketing is a business model where all you do is to refer people to a particular merchant and if a purchase is made it would earn an affiliate commission.
affiliate marketing is so cool because you could do it all from the comfort of your homes and you do not have to deal with any shipping, customer service or whatever.
All you do is market the product you are promoting using whatever strategy or techniques you know and if anyone goes through your link and a purchase is made and verified, you get paid.
There are a lot of terms used in affiliate marketing and I would be showing you some of them so that you can have a smooth experience while dealing with these companies.
Terms used in Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate program : affiliate program is hosted by a merchant. It is a platform that allows people to sign up to some terms and conditions before promoting his / her product.
There are over a hundred affiliate program available. Some are free to join while others would require you have a standard blog before you can be accepted.
Merchant : this is the owner of the products which you wish to promote, they are the ones who state the terms of service and also handle payout. Example of merchant are Jumia, Amazon, bluehost etc.
Affiliate : an affiliate can also be called an affiliate marketer. He is the one who is given a referral or Affiliate link to drive sales to the merchant website.
As a blogger, you are an affiliate of any affiliate program you sign up to.
Affiliate commission : this is the amount of money you are being paid for each successful purchase that comes as a result of your referral.
This sometimes is a fixed amount or a percentage of the sales.
Digital products and services tend to have the highest affiliate commission. This is because the merchant actually has the entire cost price as profit and he would not mind giving you 50% of it for every successful purchase you make.
Payout threshold : this is also another popular term that comes with any affiliate program. A payout threshold is the minimum amount of money you must have in your affiliate account before you can request for a withdrawal to your local bank account.
Cookie lifespan : a cookie in the tech realm is a browser tracker. Immediately someone clicks on your Affiliate link, a cookie is being placed on their browser. This cookies would help the merchant know if the person referred by you comes back to make a purchase. What this means if that, if someone clicks on your Affiliate link with a cookie lifespan of 40 days, as long as he or she make a purchase within 40 days of clicking your link, you would still get a commission.
Affiliate link : this is a unique link given to an affiliate marketer by the merchant. This link contains a tracker that allows the merchant know whenever you referred someone to their sales or landing page.
How to get started with affiliate marketing
To get started with affiliate marketing, there are done few steps you would have to take and they include
Build a viable and well targeted audience
you can choose to do this using a blog, YouTube channel or even your social media profile. Your audience should be well targeted so that you can easily know the kind of products they would be interested in.
Once you build some audience and a loyal following, you can then move on to the next step.
Search of Affiliate programs
If you want to make money at all, you have to make sure that your audience would be interested in the project you are promoting to them.
For instance, if you run a blog on how to prepare pancake, I guess one hot product you should be marketing to them is a no stick frying pan. You can simply sign up to the Amazon affiliate program and start promoting right away.
However, I would recommend you do not promote spamming products, only promotes products you have personally used and have a good reputation.
Promote your affiliate offer the right way
Depending on the category of products you are promoting, sometimes Banner ads works well while in most cases inserted links would do great.
So find out what works best for you and do not be not afraid to experiment new ideas and techniques.