5 ways to earn money as an affiliate

How to make money as an associate?

Basit Ali
9 min readJun 15, 2020

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I am sure you have heard of the term “affiliate marketer” and have read about people making hundreds, thousands or millions of dollars online from affiliate marketing. In other words, it is a performance-based business where companies pay people like us to promote their products. These people are known as collaborators.

Some of the things you bought on the internet were recommended from the website you were visiting. The owner of that website may have made a commission due to your purchase. The more products customers buy, the more money will become an affiliate.

Most affiliates pay affiliates costs (CPA) through this. This means that whenever an action occurs, the affiliate earns money. This usually takes the form of a sale (when a person buys something) or a lead (when a person signs a newspaper, such as a free trial, registration, etc.).

Many companies have their own in-house affiliate program. This is common to large internet companies such as Amazon and small companies that sell only one or two products. Another option for companies is to use affiliate networks to commission junction or share a sale. These networks list thousands of offers and products for affiliates.

Commission Junction (www.cj.com)

As an affiliate, there are many advantages to using an affiliate network. In-house affiliate programs and affiliate networks all have a minimum payment threshold. If you have hundreds or thousands of different products and services to promote, it is very easy to reach the payment threshold. Disappointingly, many in-house affiliate programs have unrealistic payment limits. I’ve come across affiliate programs that pay $ 20 to sell a $ 5 product, yet they do not pay affiliates until they reach $ 100 in sales. It means any of the commissions you have earned will be lost if you cannot reach $ 100 in sales. Collectively this can be a problem because you can have a lot of money spent in dozens of in-house affiliate programs that will never pay you. This is less of a problem when you can promote several different products from one network.

Choosing which product to promote is very important. You may be tempted to promote the products with the largest commissions, although generous commissions mean nothing if you can’t convince someone to actually buy the product. Affiliate networks help you with your decision by listing the offers that you can promote in a table format. Common information is payout, type (eg lead or sale), earnings per click (EPC) and conversion rate.

Earnings per click informs you how much you can expect to send per visitor to the offer. For example, an offer may pay $ 40 but an EPC of $ 1.50. The conversion rate tells you what percentage of your traffic is converted into sales. If you know the conversion rate and vice versa then you can work EPC. In this example, the offer has a conversion rate of 3.75% with a payout of $ 40.

How reliable the affiliate network offers EPC and conversion rates depends on how popular the offer is. The more people promoting the product or service, the more reliable information is. You may be able to convert a lot more than the average affiliate or you may struggle to achieve any sales. It all comes down to targeting your traffic. Take for example two different websites: a sports news website and a sports equipment review website. The news website will be able to get a good conversion rate promoting any sports related product, however the review website will get a better conversion rate on a product such as a sports GPS watch. The reason is simple; People are on that website to buy something. They are not there just to read the latest sports news.

Keep this in your mind when you are choosing a product or service to promote. The more closely related to your audience is the offer, the more likely you will convert visitors into sales and leads.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the most popular ways to make money through affiliate marketing

5 ways to earn money as an affiliate

1. Analysis

Reviews are a great way to promote offers. There is a wealth of information online for those who do not make impulsive purchases. I know because I am one of them. It usually takes me a few minutes to decide whether to buy a WordPress plugin that can be used on one of my websites, however when it comes to buying a new laptop, television, or phone, I am borderline obsessed. It is not uncommon for me to spend weeks making a product to make sure I choose the right one. I know many people are like me.

This is why a review is such a great way to promote a product. People are looking for information about a product so that if you can provide it to them, it is more likely that they will click on your link for the product and buy the product. Reviews have been one of the most profitable ways for me to earn money online. Blog revenue from reviews on my last major generated more than 75% of the website’s income, advertising sales etc. from what I was making.

The owner of this site, Jerry Low, also has considerable experience in this area. On WebHostingSecretRevealed.net (WHSR), he reviewed hosting companies in great detail. At HostScore.net (his other project), he has developed a system to monitor hosting performance and has created a platform to collect user reviews. This goes a long way in convincing people to visit a site and your review can be one that convinces that person to click “BUY”.

People are also reading : Legitimate ways to make money online from home (No Experience)

2. Banner

Most websites sell their banner space, although sometimes it may be more profitable to promote offers in its place. With the previous website, I struggled to sell a particular banner area for more than $ 100 per month but I later received a special offer that doubled me.

I have found that some of the reviews I have written have received a lot of traffic despite the website which was written when it was not popular. This is mainly due to the article ranking for relevant keywords in search engines. Banners vary as they are usually featured on your website. Unless your website is focused on a specific topic, you will probably see a poor conversion rate from banner ads to review. Apart from this you also need to take advertising blindness into account.

It is not fair to compare reviews to banners because they are completely different things. Writing reviews takes time, while copying the code for the banner and pasting it to your website only takes a minute. The more you target the traffic of your website has, the more your banner will be displayed. If, all things are considered equal, you will be seeing an increase in banner revenue as your website traffic increases.

3. Promote Direct Offers

Majority of affiliate marketers who are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per month are doing it by directly promoting offers. They buy traffic and then send people directly to the offer or to a landing page that promotes the offer (note: many offers do not allow linking directly to the offer page, so you need to direct visitors to the landing page). Once they receive a profitable offer, they try and scale it up. For example, they may invest $ 10- $ 50 to promote an offer to see if it is profitable. If they are able to reduce the profit, they will start increasing their advertising expenditure to increase their profit.

As an Affiliate marketer you need to spend thousands of dollars before finding your first profitable campaign. Even if it sounds hard but it is a well-known fact. Once an affiliate marketer has gained experience in making money through this method, they will still see a lot of ups and downs. The difference between a profitable campaign and one that costs them money is very small. This is why affiliate marketers spend so much time analyzing data.

If you are new to working online and do not have a large budget, it is not advisable to promote proposals directly in this manner. It did not talk about Tyler Cruz . He stressed that you should not go into this type of affiliate marketing unless you have a lot of money that you can lose.

If you have some money and want to try affiliate marketing, I recommend signing up to a trusted network PeerFly and then finding an offer that is converting well. Then try and press the traffic in the offer using a PPC service, Google AdWords or Adsterra . Start with the long tail keyword, so you don’t have to spend too much money. Hopefully, you will start seeing some conversions after a few days and then you can resume things, change the keywords you are targeting, the website you are buying traffic from, etc.

The best way to learn how to earn money in this way is by doing it yourself. When it comes to making the campaign profitable it is really a case of trial and error.

4. E-mail marketing

Top bloggers and marketers continue to tell others that “money is on the list”.

They are 100% correct. A targeted email list with loyal subscribers is the only way ticket to consistently make money. There are email marketers who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and can make thousands of dollars from a mailing by recommending a product.

There are different ways to make money from email marketing . The main ways to benefit from a mailing are:

Sending an email that recommends the product or service — then you will be paid an affiliate commission when one of your customers but offers.

Using inventory to promote your products — Some marketers have done this by making millions. Even a simple ebook that is 100 pages long can make thousands of dollars within a few days if the marketer has a large list.

Selling Ads — Many email marketers send mailings on behalf of others for a fee. The more customers they have, the higher their fees for ad placement.

The frequency of mailing is something that many people disagree with. There are marketers who are sending emails with customers every day. Continuing sending readers usually sees the unsubscribe rate through the roof so that marketers are constantly trying to replace the remaining subscribers. This constant churn of customers means that part of their income must be reinvested in acquiring new income or the list will die.

It is more profitable to build long-term, good relationships with customers. When customers know you and trust you, they are more likely to buy your products and products. Some marketers have such a loyal following that they email every day and do not see a large unsubscribe rate.

I believe that customers who email at least once a week are the best. If you email less often, say once a month, customers may be less responsive. It is common for people to subscribe to the website for updates and then complain when an email is sent to them because they forget they ever signed up. This is one of the downsides to repeated emails.

Creating an email list is cheaper if you have an existing website. If you do not, you will need to create your list by purchasing advertisements on other people’s newsletters. If you want to build your list through advertising, blogging can be time-consuming, so I recommend starting this kind of service Safe Swap for some targeted ad purchases and ad swaps.

Tip: An email marketing tool can make or break your email marketing campaign — read this guide and choose the right one.

5. All of the above

The process of promoting an offer is directly thought of when they hear the term “affiliate marketing”, although it refers to any method of promoting the offer in exchange for a commission. There are some people who only do direct offer promotion or email marketing, however in my experience most affiliate marketers use all of the above methods.

Blogs are a prime example of this. Most blogs are monetized using reviews, banner ads, email marketing and embedded affiliate links within the content.

I hope you have enjoyed this overview of affiliate marketing and it has given you some ideas on how you can make money on the internet.

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Basit Ali

I am passionate about earning online, remote jobs and affiliate marketing.