7 Best Practices for Affiliate Marketing Compliance

Affiliate marketing like any other business is regulated by extant laws and rules that require compliance across board if you want to profit from the business. The business is based on a simple business model requiring individuals/businesses to actively promote products/services for product merchants in exchange for commissions. This commission comes from each sale affiliates generate through the referrals attributable to their unique affiliate links. There are clear regulations and guidelines for all three parties participating in affiliate marketing business model. In the relationship, the affiliate helps to make a product from the product merchant available to a consumer/customer and the merchant pays him a commission for each sale he helps generate.

Following are some 7 best practices for affiliate marketing compliance you need to know in the world of affiliate marketing.

1. Be Authentic and Transparent: Being authentic and transparent quickly helps to build trust in affiliate marketing. In this quest, always ensure to promote only the products you genuinely believe in and have experience with. You must be transparent about your personal experiences and any potential bias to help convince even a skeptical audience.

2. Stay Updated: As the internet evolves, so are internet marketing strategies. Even affiliate marketing regulations and guidelines do evolve as well. To remain compliant in affiliate marketing, you must stay well informed about all changes that evolve regularly in the business.
 
3. Maintain Consistency across Various Channels: You need various online marketing channels to effectively promote affiliate products/services. You must therefore maintain consistent disclosure practices across all the marketing channels. Even if you are marketing out of your website, your blog, via email, social media, your content formats must be consistent in all the channels.

4. Make Clear and Conspicuous Disclosures: Full disclosures are great for building trust in affiliate marketing. Therefore, you must never fail to fully disclose your affiliate relationship with your audience. For easy and clear understanding, this disclosure must be done in very clear and easy to understand language and in a conspicuous manner as well. It is advisable to always place disclosures before affiliate links or in a way that’s easily noticeable on your website and on any other marketing channel.

5. Be Compliant with Platform Guidelines: Technically, different marketing platforms may have specific and unique guidelines for affiliate marketing. Make sure your practices align with the guidelines of the platforms you use, if you want to avoid sanctions and or penalties from these platforms.

6. Educate Your Audience: In affiliate marketing, the right information is essential to help your audience make their buy decisions. You must take quality time to sufficiently educate your audience about affiliate marketing and how it works. This practice in marketing means transparency which helps to build trust and reduces the likelihood of misconceptions in the minds of the audience.

7. Use Correct Terminology: Every business has its own peculiar language and or terminologies, so is affiliate marketing. In affiliate marketing terminology, so as not to confuse your audience, you must always use the correct terms like “affiliate link,” “sponsored,” or “advertisement” to clearly indicate your relationship with products/services and brands.

6 Steps to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing; Advice from Experts

If you’re a new to affiliate marketing, there is a tendency to be overawed by all the technicalities involved. This should not be so. Affiliate marketing is quite a very simple online business really. It is easy to get involved in by anyone no matter their previous experience in the business. Anyone who has access to Internet connection through a smartphone, a computer or laptop can become an affiliate marketer in a matter of hours. Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing system where a product vendor pays an “affiliate” a commission when someone buys their product, if that “someone” was referred to the vendor by the “affiliate.” Sounds complicated? Not quite. Here is how it works. As an affiliate, you are expected to have your own website/blog. Once you decide to promote a certain product through an affiliate network, the network assigns you a unique affiliate link/ ID. That ID helps to link the sales you generate correctly to your website. 

When visitors to your website click on this affiliate link/ID, they are redirected to the vendor’s site, where the product vendor will close the sale. When any of your website visitors buys the vendor’s product, you get paid a commission from the sale. It is as simple as that. But, because the business is performance based, the more sales you initiate, the more money you make. If you do not initiate sales, you don’t make money. If you happen to be new in affiliate marketing, there are many reputable affiliate networks like ClickBank and Amazon you can choose from to join. They help you with the basics to get started. When you join, you simply do your products promotions and you earn your commissions. Simple!

To get started, here is what experts recommend.

1. Choose Your Niche and Product

The first step you take is to decide which niche you intend to operate in bearing in mind that a “niche” is a group of people with very similar interests, e.g. physically challenged persons, hikers, how to make money online, bikers, golfers, vintage auto owners, etc. Make sure the niche you choose has proven “buyers.” Without buyers, it is pretty difficult if not impossible to make money from a niche. You must therefore deliberately search for and select niches that have several products whose stats indicate they are selling well. If however you have lots of products that are selling well, the niche that is most profitable to sell in is preferable. When you decide on a product in the niche, you can then sign-up as an affiliate to market the product. Next is to be issued a unique affiliate link/ID to place on your website. Anytime a visitor clicks on that link, they are redirected to the product vendor’s sales page. On getting there, if they buy the product, you get paid the commission assigned to that product by the product vendor.

2. Get a Domain Name for Your Business

As an affiliate marketer, you need a functional website to market out of. So, before you setup this website, you must decide on a domain name unique and reflective of your type of business and based around the niche you’ve chosen. For example, you can have domain names like Seniorbikers.com, Fredsbakery.com, Weightlossopportunities.com and so on.  A domain name which is unique to your business serves as your website “address” online. If you need a great domain name, you can contact GoDaddy which is one of the most popular domain registrars online.

3. Arrange Good Hosting

After settling for a good and unique domain name, you can then arrange to have a good hosting for the website. This is where all your website files will be stored and secured. When anyone wants to make a search online and enters your domain name in their computer browser, they will be directed to your website. You have access to very many web hosting companies out there online, but HostGator is highly recommended for beginners.

4. Set-Up Your Website

After settling for a niche and the product(s) to sell, getting a domain name and arranging hosting, next is to set-up a great website as your business address online. For search purposes, your website needs to be highly relevant to and laser-focused on your chosen niche and product. A mere mention of your website should automatically reveal what the main business of the website is. This is hugely important for the sake of search engines that need to properly rank the website for the organic they will have to send its way. To have a great website, you need a platform or specialist software to build the site. For this purpose, the most popular platform by far today is WordPress which is free and has many in-house tools to help your content marketing efforts. An added advantage is that good hosting companies like HostGator allow you to select WordPress directly from within their hosting control panel with just a couple clicks.

5. Consistently add Great Quality Content

Every affiliate marketer needs content, good quality content to market affiliate links. Without good content, you cannot market these links successfully. For successful marketing therefore,   the content on your website must be highly relevant to, and laser-focused on, your niche, such that your website visitors get great value from the content. It is this value that attracts visitors to the content and your website. Your content must readily give top tips, something new and trending, the latest studies/research findings, new trends, hot news, etc. That is the kind of value you must keep adding to your website steadily to attract visitors.

6. Drive Traffic to Your Website

Driving traffic to your website is about the final requirement if you must make good sales as an affiliate marketer. Without good traffic, your products are like dead ducks in an open sea. Even if you have the best website in the world, the best product(s) to promote that will definitely be of need to your target audience, if nobody ever lands on your website, nobody will ever notice what you are marketing. It is traffic, good traffic that brings visitors to your website. Without these visitors, you cannot make any appreciable sales to earn worthwhile commissions. Traffic is so important to affiliate marketing that marketers may decide to get it free or even pay to get it. Affiliate Marketers can get free traffic from online activities like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is the art of getting your website ranked high on the SERPs of Google, Bing and other major search engines. On social media, you can also get tons of free traffic by posting great content (with links back to your site) on the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube videos, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. When people click on the links, they end up on your website.

You can also to drive free traffic to your website if you regularly post comments on blogs and forums in the same or similar niche as you.  If on the other hand you are good at writing great articles, you can get free traffic by publishing articles in popular Articles Directories like EzineArticles making sure to always leave a link back to your website in the Resource Box of your articles. If you can afford it, you can go for paid traffic as well. You get paid traffic by advertising on other niche websites, Google, Bing and social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. You can also pay people who have large email lists in the same niche as you to send out your promotional emails to their list.

5 Ways to Earn Passive Income Online

Digital marketers always want to earn income online. If such income keeps coming in even without any additional work so much the better. That is passive income which comes in steadily as a result of certain business activities you’ve carried out in the past. Passive income could be in form of a single stream or multiple streams. The more passive income keeps flowing in, the more gratifying things become. There are several ways marketers can attain this feat, but these here are five of the commonest ways.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a way to help brands market their products, while affiliates earn commissions for their efforts. Because most products merchants are always looking for viable ways to spread the word about their products and to sell such products, the marketing activities of affiliates become very handy. Affiliates actively promote products through their own channels and to their own audience. Once a sale is made through any affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission as per agreed percentage of the sale volume. This way, affiliates earn passive income from commissions for marketing products online. They earn a commission from every sale they help make. If you are an affiliate, the more people buy your advertised products through your unique affiliate link, the more money you earn. That is passive income.

2. Real Estate Investing

Real estate investing is one of the most popular ways to earn passive income. With a little investment, you can buy and rent houses, offices, apartment buildings, and other types of real estate. By making little adjustments for property maintenance, you can earn rental income each month for as long as you have tenants occupying your property.

3. Sale of Digital Products

Digital products are usually very hot items to trade online because people are always in search of valuable information. If you have the knowledge and the skills, you can package any type of downloadable or streamable media products and sell them online to make money. Popular digital products you can easily earn money from include eBooks, templates, and plugins, PDFs, printables, audio or video courses. You can design and create digital products from collections of recipes to design templates and even schematics. Once created, you can generate passive income by distributing and selling the products through popular websites like SkillShare or Udemy.

 
4. Rental Income on Your House

If you have quite a roomy home or you are going on vacation, you can rent out part of your home in partnership with reputable rental companies. This method works really well to earn passive income if you have free rooms to spare or if you are going out of town for a while. Some home owners at times throw in their cars or even boats for hire as part of the deal to earn a little extra income.

5. Investing in Company Stocks

If you know little about stocks trading, it is advisable to work with professional stockbrokers here. When you make a stock investment, you are essentially buying shares of a company. You can resell the shares for profit or you earn income from the company’s periodic dividends declaration. As the shares you own increase in value and volume, you get paid higher dividends at regular intervals. Since these dividends are paid per share, the more shares you own, the higher your earnings. However, it should be noted that trading in stocks is a bit risky though. The reason you need professional stockbrokers to help trade stocks for you. The passive income you earn depends on the vagaries of the stock market. The reason there are no guarantees. To hedge against risk, you can diversify your portfolio and reduce risk. Despite this risk element however, investing in company stocks is one great way to earn passive income.