What Type of Business Model is Affiliate Marketing?

Simply put, an affiliate marketer is an online salesperson who promotes products in exchange for a commission. It is an online business model where you are paid commission for promoting other peoples’ products and services. In the business, the people promoting the goods and services are called affiliates while the people who have a product affiliates can promote to earn a commission are known as merchants. Of course, the people who buy the products are invariably called customers.

In that type of business model, the affiliate is expected to do just 3 routine things:

Promote products

Gets paid for every sale you generate

Repeat the two processes over and over
 
Simple no doubt! If as a marketer you are able to do these things repeatedly, there is no upper limit to how much you can earn as an affiliate marketer. The harder and better you work, the more you earn, simple! So, how much you earn depends entirely on you. This simplicity makes affiliate marketing one of the most popular home-based businesses around. If you are keen, you can start your own affiliate marketing business right now in your room, making hundreds of dollars any time from now. This model stands out as one of the simplest ways to start a home-based business even without formal training or experience.

Therefore, anyone can start affiliate marketing and make money. There are no financial risks involved. You needn’t pay anything to promote an affiliate product. If the product does not convert well, you are always free to switch to any other products you want. Even if you may not need to have prior experience at selling, you must however be willing to commit to a learning process if you want to succeed fast enough in the business.

As an added advantage, you do not have to design, develop or manufacture any products yourself. It is the sole business of affiliate merchants to design and produce their own products and promotion materials like images, banners, product links etc. The only job you have as an affiliate marketer is to simply promote the products using the materials such as banners and product links as supplied by the merchants. There is a lot of money to be made in the business and that can not elude you even if you are a newbie.


 

Best Affiliate Networks Online

Every newbie affiliate marketer always wants to know where they can be to get good results. We are immensely pleased to make some recommendations. At the moment, some affiliate networks offer hundreds of affiliate marketing programs all in one place. Instead of chasing numerous individual programs, you are best advised to simply register with an affiliate network to enable you gain access to numerous affiliate marketing programs they have on board. In my view, the very best options currently available are:

VigiLinks

Skimlinks

CJ Affiliate

ShareAsale

Rakuten LinkShare

Avangate

LinkConnector

FlexOffers

Affiliate Window


 

Popular Variants of Affiliate Marketing

The question is often asked by newbie marketers, how many variants of affiliate marketing are there? That question always leads many people to wondering whether there is more than one type of affiliate marketing. Indeed there is even though most established marketers argue otherwise claiming there isn’t really any distinction. For newbies in the business, it helps just to establish a little distinction hoping the information can help them to know where they are and what approach they need to succeed faster. For their benefit, let us limit our discussion to just two types of affiliate marketing.

Product Centric Affiliate Marketing and Content Centric Affiliate Marketing


 
What exactly do these mean?

1. Product Centric Affiliate Marketing

In real practice, most affiliate marketing efforts are traditionally built around a product/service. All that is required is to simply identify a product/service you like then use different marketing channels to promote it. One of these channels is to build a website around the product or niche the product belongs to then promote it like mad. Alternatively or in addition, you can build social media pages or groups around this product/service, buy ads on Facebook and Google, create email marketing, and sales funnel all to drive sale to this product/service to enable you earn handsome commissions. To maximize earnings, you could be doing this for multiple products and services simultaneously.

Also you could build dozens of small niche websites each targeted at the product/service you are selling. Even if you don’t have a website of your own, you can just buy ads from Social Networks, Search Engines, and other traffic sources to drive traffic to your affiliate products and services. The main business of a product centric affiliate marketer therefore is to build a business around simply selling a product/service through concerted promotional efforts.

2. Content Centric Affiliate Marketing

This is the second variant with some slight difference. As a Content Centric Affiliate Marketer, all you do is to build an audience by creating regular content online then use affiliate marketing as one of the ways to monetize your content creation. This is what most bloggers to online to earn a living. Your passion here is to share your content and build your brand.  Affiliate marketing is just one way you can make money from that passion. Assuming you write a very popular blog online with a high traffic of visitors. All you need do is to display banners and text ads around your blog posts to catch the attention of visitors to your blog. When these visitors click on these ads and or buy products through your links, you earn a commission. Good business no doubt but you must have an informative, educative and entertaining content to share regularly to keep the visitors coming. The advent of popular social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook which make it relatively easy to share content and photos has helped to revolutionize content centric affiliate marketing around the world.

It must be noted that nothing in the business restricts anyone to any of these two methods absolutely. In fact, it pays better to combine both if you can. A combination of both however requires some experience. As you go deeper and become more experienced in affiliate marketing, you will at some point find it very profitable incorporating the two approaches in your marketing strategy.