Affiliate marketing guide for 2021: What is it and where to start your way?

Affiliate marketing is considered by many to be one of the most effective promotion methods. Let’s break the ice and find out how affiliate marketing works, answer frequently asked questions on this topic and understand whether this sphere is a gravy train. All right, here we go.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a comprehensive activity aimed at promoting goods or services on the Internet owned by others for a fee.

Simply put, you advertise the product and profit from the target action of a potential audience, whether it is lead or purchase. A partner’s cost or service is similar to the price from the owner or manufacturer. But the second pays a percentage of the sale. Affiliate marketing allows you to earn more because the product itself is popularized, new customers come, the potential audience increases.

Affiliate marketing pros:

The main pros of affiliate marketing is saving money. If you work with partners on the CPA model, which will be discussed in more detail below, then you will only pay for leads or purchases that have already been made. The second pros of affiliate marketing is time savings. You need to find partners and determine the terms of cooperation, after which the work will be theirs.

Affiliate marketing cons:

There are not so many disadvantages in this case, but you should always remember that delegating work to the wrong hands is always accompanied by a certain risk. A partner can ruin your reputation if he uses not entirely honest and promotion methods.

The number of sales and the profit of the business depend on the quality of the created advertisement. To attract the attention of a potential audience, you need good content, transparency and informativity, honesty, and decency. Unforeseen moments may occur, such as a sudden break in agreements: on this, at best, you will lose time and money, at worst — your reputation. Therefore, be careful when choosing a partner. Although the partner makes paid advertising, it must be honest and of high quality.

How does affiliate marketing work and what is an affiliate link?

The advertiser enters into an agreement with an affiliate network, offering their product. A marketing partner receives a personal tracking link for each offer, attracts traffic, and if someone uses this link to take targeted action, then the affiliate receives a commission. Such links are called an affiliate.

How to start affiliate marketing?

Here are a few steps to get you started using affiliate marketing to benefit your business:

Choose your niche and explore it

When deciding which products you want to promote, consider your niche and what types of products are most appealing to your customers.

If you are unsure of which product or service is right for solving problems or meeting the needs of your audience, niche research should be done. This is an important step that will save you from unnecessary waste of time, energy, and money. Check forums and sites that are popular in your niche.

Finding products to promote is an important step, but this is just the beginning. Now that you understand what products you want to promote, you need to register as an affiliate for those products, get an affiliate link and choose an affiliate program.

Find an affiliate program

Affiliate marketing programs are diverse. You need to choose the one that best suits your needs. Each affiliate program offers different ways of interacting with affiliates, different commissions. If you are just starting to work with affiliate networks as an advertiser, choose the largest and most proven ones, study their conditions.

Performers in affiliate marketing get paid according to several models, here are the most common ones:

• PPS (pay per sale) — payment for the sale.
• CPA (cost per action) is a reward for the fact that a user has performed a certain action (downloading a file, filling out a form, etc.)
• CPC (cost per click) — the partner is paid for each click on the link posted on his website.

The most common model — PPS — when you pay a percentage of the sale. This payment method best motivates the affiliate to do quality work to attract the target audience to your website.

The CPA model is also popular. Many people prefer it to PPS. Still, the number of sales cannot directly depend only on the affiliate. In the case of payment under the CPA scheme, the partner will receive a reward precisely for bringing the target audience to you. And it depends on you whether they make a purchase or not.

CPC is the most unreliable scheme. She does not motivate her partner to do her job well. If a partner is dishonest, then they don’t have to worry about generating quality leads. It will be enough for them in any way to force users who are not interested in your offer to click on the link. And in some cases, they can simply cheat with fake engagement and you will get no benefit from such traffic.

Decide on a platform

Based on your program, determine which platform you will use for affiliate selling. These platforms will allow you to track your affiliates, clicks or sales from referrals, and affiliate payouts. Also, you can find a website that has your target audience and collaborate directly with it: for example, you create cooperative content with an ad element. After that, you need to think about how you will generate traffic.

Get started creating content

In this case, you have two options, which depend on the program you have chosen:

• You, on behalf of your business, write the content yourself and share it with affiliates, and then use the affiliate links to track conversions, purchases, and pay affiliates money.
• The second option is when affiliates produce all the content themselves, and then you pay them if there was a success.

The main places for affiliate links:

• Contextual advertising
• Blog articles
• Landing pages
• Banner advertising
• Teaser advertising
• Email newsletters
• Social network

Analyze the results

Track incoming traffic for affiliate programs. This is the only way to evaluate the effectiveness of different affiliate placements. Traffic can be analyzed in Google Analytics. Use UTM tags to pinpoint the traffic source. You can write UTM links manually or use online constructors.

Analysis helps you understand whether any adjustments are necessary for the program to be profitable for your business.

What does affiliate marketing give you as a business owner?

• Saving the budget for promotion and increasing interest in the product
• The attraction of new clients
• Significant increase in sales
• Full sales cycle delegation

Affiliate business is not just a trend. This is what works today, allowing you to sell more and increase your target audience.

Now you know what affiliate marketing is and how to organize it correctly to increase sales. Share your examples of affiliate marketing in the comments.