What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?

Long gone is the world where normal methods of marketing would have worked just fine. In 2018, social media ads marketing – one of the many types of online marketing – was a 27$ billion industry. In the modern world, new and effective methods of marketing have risen up, and no business can truly survive without needing marketing in its digital form nowadays.

Here is everything you need to know about affiliate marketing, and how it works:

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the many types of marketing that have become very important in recent years. Unlike normal methods of marketing, affiliate marketing is usually a no-risk method of marketing that requires almost no effort from the business itself. A dictionary defines an affiliate as a person that is officially connected to someone else or an organization in any way.

Affiliate marketing, in its true sense, is using someone else to market one’s organization or business. It is a complete industry all on its own and is truly self-sufficient. As long as there are businesses that require marketing and people that need to earn favors or goodies from companies in return for providing marketing.

Why do you need affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is important for all the three parties involved: the customer, the company and the people running the affiliate market. Think of affiliate marketing as an effective sort of marketing where everyone wins.

Affiliate Marketing as a business

Since there are two main phases of an affiliate marketing tactic, we will first briefly cover everything about affiliate marketing as a business, including but not limited to how it works, its pros and what businesses could lose through this marketing strategy. Without further ado, let us begin:

What is affiliate marketing as a business?

Affiliate marketing as a business refers to hiring an affiliate marketer to do your biddings in return for rewards. Think of affiliate marketing as a type of business where you are hiring salesmen that only get paid for their sales. You don’t have to pay them any minimum salary and need to contract to hire them.

Affiliate marketing is a great practice for companies because you can set your own rules and your own percentage that the affiliate will earn from your business.

Pros of affiliate marketing as a business

We have compiled a few pros that you will receive from affiliate marketing as a business:

You pay for only the sales

The main benefit of affiliate marketing is that you only need to pay the affiliate for the sales they are making. That means that no matter whether the affiliate is making a sale in a day or a week, or even a month: you only need to pay the affiliate for the sale that they are guaranteeing.

Secure

Affiliate marketing is a secure way of getting marketing because you are not losing any money anyways. Since the reward money does not come out of your pocket: you only pay the affiliate a certain percentage of the sale made – affiliate cannot take advantage of the situation.
There is a popular myth going around that affiliate marketing is nothing more than a low-value source of income or just a scam.

The reality is that hundreds of thousands of businesses are using affiliate marketing as a sure-fire way to increase their business marketing with guaranteed ROI.

Helps expand into new markets

Affiliate marketing can effectively help expand your business into new markets without needing to take unnecessary risks. An affiliate is either a customer or someone who thoroughly uses your products – which is how they are able to refer someone else to your business. By getting effective feedback from these valuable affiliates, and doing the statistics yourself, you can effectively figure out whether you can expand into a certain new market or not.

Exponentially improve customer base

The best advantage of affiliate marketing that many businesses perhaps skip over is that almost anyone can become an affiliate. This means that even the customer can become an affiliate. Customers want to get the most bang out of the buck. By effectively using this tactic, you can easily convert customers into affiliates that can bring in more customers.

In this way, you can effectively get exponentially more customers. Think of it like this: you get one customer who is willing to do affiliate marketing and invite 2 people to your customer base in return for x% discount on your certain product.

The resources you would otherwise risk on other forms of marketing for getting 2 people could be spent on the affiliate, ensuring 2 more customers into your business. This affiliate will not only be bringing more customers into your business, but you will also be getting an effective brand reputation.

Cons of affiliate marketing as a business

Though affiliate marketing as a business has a lot of advantages, it does come with its fair share of disadvantages or risks. Here are a few cons of affiliate marketing as a business that you should know about:

Scamming affiliates

Any business that exists in the world has some sort of risk. One simply cannot make a profit if there is no risk involved. Since anyone can be an affiliate, there are chances that any potential affiliate can in turn scam you or turn your effective marketing strategy into a deadly whirlpool that will swallow not only your funds but also your brand’s name.

A bad affiliate marketer is still a marketer, but someone who scams other people through your affiliation can give your business a bad reputation. This can in turn drive away sales, ultimately proving to be a fatal mistake.

Though there are ways to reduce this risk, the risk still exists for any business.

You need experience beforehand

To control and do effective market affiliation, you will need someone in your team who is extremely experienced in the world of affiliate marketing. Someone who doesn’t know anything or only the barebones of affiliate marketing will never be able to figure out and deal with the risks involved.

Hiring an effective experienced affiliate marketing manager can be a premium for your business that you may or may not be able to afford, depending on your situation.

Affiliate Marketing as an affiliate

Now that we know that affiliate marketing is an excellent strategy for a business, we must come to the other part of the story: affiliate marketing for an affiliate. The next section of this guide will cover how to do affiliate marketing as an affiliate, the pros, and cons involved with going into the world of business as an affiliate marketer:

How to do affiliate marketing as an affiliate?

As an affiliate, you will have access to a wide variety of social media platforms and websites such as blogs, YouTube, Vimeo, and so on to effectively market a product. There are only three main things that you need as an affiliate to start earning money:

• Affiliation profit – you must ensure that you will be getting rewards or profit from the affiliation you are doing. The last thing you would want is to get someone else to buy a product only to know that you are not getting anything in return. We would recommend Amazon as a good place to start affiliate marketing.
• Your persuasion skills – if you are not able to persuade even a single person to buy a certain product, you will never earn any money.
• A viewer base – if no one sees what you are writing, no matter how persuasive or good your article is written, you will never get any sales. An effective affiliate is also an effective SEO specialist. A good affiliate knows that they need SEO to rank on search engines, on social media platforms, and on YouTube/Vimeo.

Pros of affiliate marketing as an affiliate

Here are a few pros that you will receive if you start doing affiliate marketing today as an affiliate:

You need no investment

As long as you have the skills, you don’t need any sort of investment, a degree or anything else to start affiliating. Because of the very nature of the internet, as long as you have internet, you can start posting on public platforms anywhere. Hop on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and throw your affiliated products, convince people to buy them & watch the magic happen.

It is an evergreen field

As you start writing and marketing a product, you will also eventually become better at selling products. You will start learning trends, how to deal with SEO, how to reach an audience and various other things that can help you sell more. As you start getting better at selling good-quality products, more people will high-light your effective reviews over the others and start hopping onto your website and links more.

People will start trusting your words more than your competition, which will help you sell more considerably more easily. You can take the example of the bigger YouTubers. The products that they showcase on their channel often see a massive increase in sales. These YouTubers often also get sponsored – effectively helping them earn considerably more money.

Cons of affiliate marketing as an affiliate

Though affiliate marketing is a great field for an affiliate, considering it is evergreen as long as you keep sharing good content, affiliate marketing does pose certain risks such as:

Impressions do not account to sales

As an affiliate marketer, your job will be to persuade people as well as deal with SEO. Just because you are seeing viewers on your website does not mean that they will automatically translate to sales. One out of a hundred or so viewers might buy through your link, and that is only by chance as well.

Many times, an affiliate is struck with almost no profit from their marketing of a certain product. This is something that almost all affiliates have to deal with.

You need to constantly deal with people

As an affiliate, you will also act as a sort of communication valve between the customers and the company. All customers have some sort of questions regarding a product and since they can’t ask a company itself, they rely on affiliates or reviewers to get their answers.

You will have to constantly spend hours of your time answering people’s queries until they will want to buy the product themselves.

Affiliate marketing has a slow start

Starting affiliate marketing head-on as a full-time job is extremely ineffective. You need to realize that you will have a very slow start and even if you are very lucky, you will get about 10-15 sales in your first few months.

As an affiliate, you will want to do intensive research and figure out what products will yield you the most product & what products do actually sell.

Final Thoughts:

We hope that this simple guide on everything about affiliate marketing and how it works for both a business and an affiliate has helped you. Though we have not affiliated ourselves with any business, we will try our best to help you with your queries. Affiliate marketing is a great market, but it is not for everyone.