How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketing is one great way to earn money online by promoting a product merchant’s products through your own platform. Such platform could be your own website/blog or your social media account. You get paid affiliate commissions for your efforts when sales are made. Payment of these commissions is made easy because affiliate marketing sales are usually tracked by affiliate links or through special discount codes.

Affiliate marketing is usually a tripartite business arrangement between product merchants, content marketers/publishers and consumers. The business of the affiliate is to help product merchants promote their products to consumers and once sales are made, the affiliate earns a commission as per agreed terms and percentages. It is the business of the affiliate therefore to help product merchants promote their products to a wider audience as partners with influence and a large online audience.

In most cases, affiliates usually get paid once they generate a certain number of clicks, sales or leads. When affiliates promote products through affiliate marketing, they earn revenue mainly in the following ways.

Pay-Per-Click, PPC: In PPC, affiliates get paid for diverting traffic to the seller’s website.
Pay-Per-Sale, PPS: In PPS, affiliates get paid every time a consumer buys a product by clicking through your affiliate link or using the affiliate code.
Pay-Per-Lead, PPL: In PPL, affiliates earn revenue by creating leads for the seller. Such leads usually have to do with consumers signing up for newsletters, an online course or downloading free guides or some other desirable marketing activity.

From the foregoing income sources, affiliate marketing is usually a great avenue to earn passive income if you are diligent and consistent enough in your marketing activities. These activities relate directly to how you promote products and generate sales. Your products promotion efforts depending on your preferences and expertise could be multi-channel through your own website/blog, via your YouTube channel, social media platforms, email newsletters, podcasts, or a combination of them all.

However, to make money in affiliate marketing, you must promote mostly products that sell well since your main duty as an affiliate is to bring these products to the attention of consumers. Affiliates can join popular and reputable affiliate marketing networks too to leverage on their reputation and wider reach to promote products. The main duty of affiliate networks is to match marketers with products to promote. These networks allow affiliate marketers to sign up to advertising campaigns from a range of different brands/merchants and affiliates can leverage on their in-house marketing tools to do a great job.

Affiliate marketing is easily a preferred choice when people are keen on making money online. It is cost-effective and you don’t need any huge financial layout to get started. For this reason, you can get started quickly and work your own schedule as you please. You don’t even have to get involved in some other marketing related issues like customer service.

If you elect to become a successful affiliate marketer, here are some key questions you must have to properly address right from the outset.

What type of products will you be promoting?
Exactly how are you going to promote these products?
Do you have a big enough audience to earn money?
Do you have the influence to encourage consumers to buy products?

If you have the right answers to the above questions, you’re good to go in your affiliate marketing activities. Next is to ensure you are using the right techniques. Affiliate marketing techniques aren’t just limited to individuals with a huge following as audience or even a strong social presence. You need tools too to measure your progress and to track your campaigns. Data tracking tools do assist marketers to optimize their marketing approach and targeted strategies for every campaign. If you elect to market on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok where you can easily open free accounts, you stand a very good chance to greatly enhance the affiliate commissions you earn. Some Affiliate marketers who work on a commission or percentage basis tend to make thousands of dollars by marketing brands and products through this process.