Day 7: Affiliate Marketing

Intro

Are you tired of working a 7 am – 5 pm or more than 10 hours a day job? Have you set your dreams aside and are working to make other people’s dreams come true? If you are reading this, it means that you have taken a step forward in your life and bring a positive change to it. You might either want to earn a passive income or learn ways to make money online as a hobby, side hustle or even as a business. Search no more my friend, because one of the best ways to be making money online in 2019 is Affiliate Marketing. Below I will describe is it and why we can use affiliate marketing as a business opportunity not only in 2019 but also in many more years to come.  

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing, as mentioned in one of my previous contents, check it out here, follows the 3 profit activators and is one of the top core 4 successful online business. Affiliate Marketing is a process in which an affiliate marketer makes up his own marketing strategies to market/ promote a particular product or service of someone or a company to earn a commission (based upon an agreement) after a sale is done.  

How does it work?

Affiliate Marketing involves 4 simple and basic steps.

1. Request to be an affiliate
2. Acceptance of being an affiliate
3. Promotion/marketing the product or service
4. Getting a commission

 

Step 1: Request to be an affiliate

As an affiliate marketer, you will need to request permission to be allowed to promote whatever the person or company, now referred to as Merchant, is selling. This is done via an affiliate program so he that knows he needs to give you a commission for bringing in a buyer if a sale is done.

What is an Affiliate Program?

It is simply a way for the merchant to sell his product(s) or service(s) in a higher volume in the least amount of time. Let’s assume that the merchant has a product or service that he will sell at $1000 and makes a profit of $750. Now for him to sell more of that particular product or service, he makes an affiliate program. In this program, he offers a certain % of the sales done as commission to the affiliate marketer that will bring in potential customers that will buy his product or service. Even though his profit margin has decreased, the frequency of the product or service being sold has now been increased.  

Step 2: Acceptance of being an affiliate

Once the Merchant has agreed, you are given an affiliate link to promote/market his product or service.

What is an affiliate link?

An affiliate link is a specific URL that contains the affiliate marketer's identifications. In affiliate programs, the merchant uses affiliate links to record the traffic that is sent to his sales pages by that specific affiliate marketer.  Therefore, if a sale is done, he will automatically know who he should give the commissions to.  

Step 3: Promotion/marketing the product or service

This involves the strategies employed by the Affiliate Marketer to promote the products that will eventually lead to sales.

What are the strategies applied by Affiliate Marketer?

I will try to explain the most basic strategy an Affiliate Marketer can apply to promote and eventually let that merchant (for whom the promoting is being done) to make a sale. So first and foremost, for a sale to be done there needs to be someone who is willing to buy. Let’s refer that someone who is willing to buy as traffic.  

How to get your traffic?

There are two methods to acquire traffic

1. The free traffic methods
2. The paid traffic methods

 

Free Traffic Methods

The best but slow way to get free traffics is through:

1. Youtube Channels
2. Blogging
3. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc…

 

Paid Traffic Methods

This is a fast but rather expensive way to get traffic. In this one, an Affiliate Marketer actually pays for ads to get their traffic and they are through:

1. Facebook ads (and other social media ads)
2. Google ads

Since I’m talking about the best way to make money online for beginners, the free methods are the most practical ones.

Youtube Channels

Youtube channels are absolutely free to operate. All you ever need is a good space and a camera to film your videos. People are always curious about things. If an Affiliate Marketer manages to get a particular person’s attention, there is a high possibility that the person will look for the marketer’s other videos. It is through those videos that the marketer gets traffics. The videos can be reviews about a particular product, service or tutorials or any niche.  

Blogging

Blogging is the same as youtube but in a written way where, videos, pdfs or Ebooks can also be included in it for the traffic to be more interested in future posts. There are two types of blogs. The free version and the paid version To put it as simple as possible, the free blogging website gives you basic website functionality with limited ways to manage and use them while the paid version allows you to use your own domain name and gives you access to manage the appearance of your website and various ways to alter it. I am using a website known as Bluehost to do my blogging activities and trust me guys it is one of the best out there. The normal lowest price for Bluehost hosting is usually $7.99/month. However, to get it for $3.95/month, Click Here. I will also give you detailed steps on how to set up your hosting website and blog 😉  

Social Media Platforms

Being in a social media platform such as facebook, twitter, and so on, allows an Affiliate Marketer to have access and get into contact with other affiliate marketers and entrepreneurs. By sharing the views and ideas on a particular topic(s) in groups, you, as the Affiliate Marketer, get to grow your “List of Traffics”.  

What to do with the obtained Traffic?

If you really want to be a successful affiliate marketer, don’t just drive your traffic (which you’ve worked hard for) to your affiliate links directly. For an affiliate marketer to be successful in the affiliate marketing industry, you need to promote more products or services to those potential buyers you once generated in order to earn more and more commissions, right? So for this to happen, you need to collect the contact information of your traffic and have your own lists of traffics to which you can contact at any time and make money.

 

How to collect the contact information of  the traffic

Since the transaction is being done online, information such as their names and their email addresses are collected via a landing or Opt-in page, also known as funnels. We all live in an era where the internet has advanced and we all look for fast and reliable ways to do a task. The funnel companies have revolutionized the online marketing world. These funnels are so user-friendly and easy to understand that they are not only used for name and email collection via landing or Opt-in page but also perform various sales transactions via Bridge & Sales funnels. Check my post on Sales Funnels for more information. Bridge and Sales funnels are pages created by the Merchant in order for him to sell his products and services to the traffic being sent by the Affiliate Marketer. There are presently many funnel providers such as

1. Click Funnels
2. LeadPages
3. Convertri
4. Instapage and so on…

I personally use the funnels of Click Funnels as it allows me to make funnels that markets, sells and deliver different products and services online. Furthermore, Click Funnels provide 14 days of free trial. You can already start to earn as learn during this 14 days free trial. To access your 14 days free trial, Click here.  

Where do the collected emails go?

That’s the beauty of Click Funnels. It allows you to either collect the required details (names and email addresses) on Click Funnels itself (upgrade is required) or allows you to directly link your email database to the landing or Opt-in page that you used to collect the details and build your email list. Once someone enters their details, the email list is automatically updated. There are various Email Management Software that you can use and they are:

1. Aweber
2. Getresponse
3. Mail Get
4. Pabbly Email Marketing

I am actually using Aweber as it is cheaper and gives a free 1-month free trial and is one of the easiest to set up and use. Click here to get access to set up your Aweber account.  

Once your email list is being filled with traffic, you can then promote other affiliate products or services directly to the list of traffic, which contain potential buyers, by sending them automated emails. This process is also called Email Marketing.   So if we map all the strategies mentioned above together, we will come up to something as illustrated in the picture below.

Step 4: Getting a commission

The fourth step and final step is direct. It all depends on the Bridge and Sales page created by the Merchant. Once the product or service being promoted is sold, you receive the agreed-upon commissions by the Merchant.

Conclusion

Affiliate Marketing is a process where an Affiliate Marketer brings in Traffic to a company’s or person’s Sales Funnel by using strategies to earn a commission when the particular sale is done. The best part of being an affiliate marketer is that you do not have to OWN or SELL the product as it is the merchant’s task to do so. The only task for you is to direct potential buyers towards the merchant by getting them to click your affiliate link. It doesn't matter in what year we are, affiliate marketing is one of the Core Top 4 Successful Online Businesses. If you want to start as an affiliate marketer, here is my number 1 and number 2 recommendations. If you like what you just learnt, please feel free to comment to share your views with me as well as share it with your friends and closed ones. Stay blessed. * If you purchase anything through a link in this article, you should assume that I have an affiliate relationship with the company providing the product or service that you purchase, and that I'll be compensated in some small way at no extra cost to you.