Introduction
You may be tired of the daily grind of going back forth everyday back and forth to work especially if you live in a large metropolis like New York City. Or even if you don’t live in a large American City, but you are looking for another way to earn an income, one that would allow you to spend more time with your family or more time for leisure, one area to look at is affiliate marketing. One of the benefits from working as an affiliate marketer is you work from home, setting your own hours, making money from anywhere at any time even when you are asleep.
The affiliate marketing industry is big business today and getting bigger every day. Forrester’s Consulting conducted research on affiliate marketing and found that the amount of money spent in affiliate marketing in the United States shows an annual growth rate of over 10%, and by the year 2020 $6.8 billion will be spent annually on affiliate marketing. Lots and lots of people are making lots of money as affiliate marketers today.
What is Affiliate Marketing
So, what is affiliate marketing? It is an agreement between a merchant and a website owner, or affiliate. The merchant rewards the affiliate marketer for each customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The marketer promotes the merchant’s products on social media or on a website or blog using a link to the merchant’s website. The affiliate earns a commission on all sales generated by referrals from his site.
How Does Affiliate marketing Work?
To make this process work there are three parties involved; the merchant, the affiliate (you), and the customer.
Let’s look at the role played by each party.
- Merchant
- Affiliate
- The consumer
The Merchant is the vendor of the product. The vendor could be small entrepreneurship or a large enterprise such as Amazon.com, the largest vendor in the world. The products to be sold could be any of a wide range of products including personal items, household goods, books, etc.
The affiliate, also known as the publisher, could be an individual or group promoting product to convince consumers of the benefits of the products. In other words, trying to get them to purchase these products. If the consumers end up buying the products, the affiliate receives a commission from the profits.
The consumer is the ket to the affiliate marketing process. Because if the consumer does not purchase the products neither the merchant, not the affiliate makes any money.
How Do Affiliate Marketers Get Paid
There are different types of affiliate programs, and each has a different pay structure. The three most common ones are Pay Per Sale (PPS), Pay Per Lead (PPL) and Pay Per Click (PPC).
Pay-per-sale is the standard affiliate marketing structure. In this type of affiliate marketing, the merchant pays you a commission whenever the customer you referred buys something from the merchant’s website. The affiliate gets a commission from the profit s made from the sale after the consumer buys the product.
Pay-per-lead is different from PPS because the customer does not have to complete a purchase from the merchant’s website for the affiliate to get a commission. In this type of affiliate marketing, you get paid for conversions to leads. In other words, you get paid when the visitor he refers to the merchant’s website fills out a contact form or take some other desired action related to the merchant’s business.
Pay-per-click is a very popular type of affiliate marketing and the easiest way for the affiliate to earn money. No purchase or conversion to leads is required for you to be paid. In this type of affiliate marketing, the merchant is paying for clicks. So, he pays whenever a visitor is referred to his site and clicks on an ad or a banner, etc.
Benefits of Being an Affiliate Marketer
Here are some benefits you can derive from being an affiliate marketer?
Easy way to make money
You can earn by having an ad and link to the merchant’s website, which your visitors will click to purchase the product. when customers click on the ad on your site, they are redirected to the merchant’s website, and you get paid for the purchase. The more customer you refer, the more money you will make.
Working from Home
The convenience of working from can be very appealing, especially if you want to spend more time at home with your family or if you simply can no longer stand the daily grind of the everyday commute to go to work. If that is the case, affiliate marketing can be an ideal solution because you can work from the comfort of your own home
Cost Effectiveness
You can join most affiliate programs without cost, so you don’t have to worry about start-up costs. For example, to join the Amazon affiliate program you just sign up for Amazon Associates Account and fill out a tax form. Once you are approved, you get your own dashboard. You do not have to worry about production costs either because the products have already been developed by the merchant and all you must do is find as many customers as you can to refer who might purchase the product. No sales experience is necessary, you do not have to handle inventory or provide support to customers after they buy the items.
Minimal Risk Involved
Another benefit of affiliating marketing is that there is not a lot of risks involved for the affiliate. If the product you are promoting is not making money, you do not have to stay with it. You can just drop it and choose another.
How to get started
If you try to learn how to make money online on your own, it can be a long and tedious process which could cause you to get discouraged and quit. The best way to learn the online business is to learn from the experts who provide training for prospective online marketers. One of the best online training websites on the internet is Wealthy affiliate.com, a training platform for affiliate marketers and online entrepreneurs which provides starters with a free starter account. They will teach you everything you need to know about affiliate marketing. The platform is ranked by industry insiders as one of the best in the business. You are trained how to build a website and create an online business as an affiliate marketer or in a niche business of your choice, all at no charge.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is more popular now that it has ever been and will get more popular in the years to come. According to Forrester Consulting, more than 80 % of Advertising companies and publishing companies have affiliate marketing programs and these numbers are expected to grow.
As an affiliate marketer you will have lots of opportunities to increase your income, and even if you work part-time at this, you can still make a profit.
So, if you want to learn how to make money online in affiliate marketing or as an entrepreneur, go to Wealthy Affiliate for a free starter account.