What is Affiliate Marketing?
NOTE: From today, we are starting a new series where we will publish short blog posts and explain you different terms in WordPress, Marketing, SEO or Design. Hope you’ll like this series. If you’ve any specific term or anything that you want us to explain, please write it down in the comments section below.
Affiliate Marketing is a performance based marketing wherein you promote someone else’s product(s) or service(s) on your website and you earn commission out of every sale.
In other words, it is earning commission by selling someone’s products. It is one of the oldest form of internet marketing and still been practiced heavily.
It mainly involves four players:
- Merchant – It is a retailer who owns the products or the service
- Network – It is a system which contains offer for the affiliate to choose from and takes care of the payment
- Affiliate – The one who is willing to promote others products or services
- Customer – The one who makes a purchase
Let’s explain this with an example.
Take the company GAP who sells clothing line. GAP says if you have a website, join our affiliate program.What happens is, you put links on your site and if a visitor to your site clicks that link, goes to the GAP website and makes a purchase, GAP will pay you a commission on that purchase. It’s that simple.
There are hundred of thousand of merchants who wants to sell their stuff. As an affiliate, all you have to do is to introduce the product into the marketplace to get people to see it and somebody buys the product that you’re marketing, you earn a commission.
To become a successful affiliate marketer, you’ll need to learn how to drive targeted traffic to your site(s). You’ll also need to know how o capture leads and build a list, so that you can market other affiliate products to them, creating more profit for your business.
To start in affiliate marketing, all you’ve to do is signup for an affiliate program which is normally free and takes only a few minutes to do. And you’ll find most big online retails, all have affiliate programs. All you’ve to do if add the affiliate link onto your site and promote in on various channels for people to see it. Once they buy the product through your link, you get the commission. But that commission will depend upon your affiliate program. Some program offers high commission while some don’t. So select a high value and high commission product to make the most commission.
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