Greetings!
We are expanding the boundaries of our news feed. Starting today, we are launching a new section with useful information for those who are just starting on their professional path in affiliate marketing.
And we have decided to devote our first article to such a question as…
What is affiliate marketing?
Simply put, affiliate marketing is when someone (an agency or an individual), whom we will later call an affiliate, helps promote a brand for a small commission.
In this case, the commission depends on the amount of purchases, subscriptions, registrations on a website, application downloads, etc. In other words, the brand pays only for the specific target actions of the client.
Some basic definitions:
A brand promoted by an affiliate is a merchant (advertiser, marketer, seller).
The affiliate program is also called the offer. It is the kinds of actions of the client and how much the merchant is willing to pay for them.
If a client, who visited a website thanks to an affiliate, performs an action that the merchant is willing to pay for, this committed action is called a lead.
This payment model is called CPA (Cost per Action).
In fact, it all works quite simply: for example, you are an affiliate of an online store selling books and you recommend a book → people buy this book by following your link → you get a percentage of each such sale.
Such were the schemes of the very first affiliate programs. You can find more information out about them and other interesting facts on the history of affiliate marketing in the article below.
To date, affiliate marketing has developed very much and reached a turnover of 76.3 billion rubles in Russia and approximately $6.8 billion in the United States (Source: Statista) per year, and such affiliate relationships take on many forms and guises.
If you have ever bought coupons on a special site, made purchases through cashback services, read recommendations from a blogger on a product and seen them along with a link to buy it — Yeeppee! That means you have already dealt with affiliate marketing.
More information about with whom and how to affiliate is understandable by the type of affiliate marketing.
We will use the book again as an example. Each of the affiliates working with this online store receive their own link. If someone buys a book using an affiliate’s link, the commission will be received by the one who posted the given link.
Who can post your links and where:
- Publisher (webmaster) — these participants have their own website (or the ability to create it), where they will place their affiliate links for buying a book;
- SEO experts — these place links on the sites they are promoting or on any other resources that they are working on.
- Bloggers — these people will give a recommendation on the book and the link to it in their blogs;
- Coupon sites — these websites place coupons for buying the book;
- Review Sites — these formulate complete descriptions of the product / service while placing a link to it in their reviews.
- Loyalty programs and cashback services
- Email marketing (the link is in the newsletter).
To date, these are the main types of affiliate marketing, but there may be more, because the industry is evolving and new forms of interaction are emerging constantly.
How to understand that affiliate marketing is right for you?
- You attract customers, or sell products / services via the internet;
2. Depending on the type of product / service: nowadays, affiliate marketing is used by almost all types of businesses: e-commerce, real estate, banks, cryptocurrency projects, education institutions, etc. It works especially effectively for the sale of a mass-produced or inexpensive product, for example, small electronics or cosmetics. Less commonly, affiliate marketing is used to promote B2B products or services with a long transaction cycle.
3. You are interested in large volumes of traffic (customers). If you have a limitation, for example, of up to 6 clients per day, and you will not be able to take on any more, then there is a risk that in this case affiliates will prefer to work with other advertisers and affiliate programs.
4. You are technically and organizationally ready for additional traffic — the site will not go down, and customers will not be redirected, because the financial performance of advertising for the promoted business directly depends on this factor.
If everything is OK, then welcome to the world of affiliate marketing!
Define your goal and remember the importance of monitoring the effectiveness of affiliate programs — stay only with the most effective ones.
We hope that this article was helpful. Share with us what you would like to know in the following articles of this series.
Stay tuned!
