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.

 

Welcome to Affiliate Marketing as a Business

 Well, these days everyone wants to make money online/offline whichever they prefer. Many get involved in promoting products/services and earning a commission from sales. You have probably heard about making money with Affiliate Marketing and wondering what it is all about and how you can tap into the opportunity. I guess your mind is working in the direction many marketers are now earning a decent living.

Now, what exactly is Affiliate Marketing? It means many things to many people depending on how involved they are in the business. It is nothing new or completely novel. Affiliate marketing in its simplest terms means referring people to buy a product or service in return for a commission from the product seller or service provider. 


 

“Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting products or services online or offline in return for a certain percentage as commission for each successful sale from the merchant.”


That is rather simple and straightforward. It can be used for any business. That is exactly why many and varied businesses like Financial services companies such as insurance companies, banks, and asset managers have been using a variant of it for decades to build their businesses. Even though some of these businesses like to call their affiliate marketers such fanciful names as independent marketers, and call the commissions they pay out, performance bonuses, but the bottomline is, it is still affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing may have been around for decades, but its popularity ballooned when the internet happened. With the internet and proliferation of web technologies, affiliate marketing became simpler, attracting more interest from diverse people.

With the internet, Affiliate marketers no longer had to go knocking door to door to make a sale. They can simply unleash the power of web technologies to promote the products or services of their clients. That is one real advantage over traditional door-to-door salesman marketing methods. The internet also ensures that you are no longer restricted to your region to make a sale. That makes it possible to expanding your reach widely and increasing your potential sales volume as a consequence. If you have access to the internet, you can simply sit in your own little corner of the world and successfully sell products to people all over the world.  Same way, you also get paid and receive your commissions as well through same web technologies. All these combine to make Affiliate Marketing a really very exciting type of business.

7 Big Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

 Yeah, you too can easily get involved if you want to make money from Affiliate Marketing. Many people get involved just to make money. The real reason they easily fall prey to online scammers. Everyone involved gets to make some mistakes along the line but if you manage to avoid these here mistakes, you stand a very good chance of long term success in the business.


 
01. Taking on Too Many Programs
 
Many Affiliate programs online habitually offer several variants. It is always a big mistake to get involved in all of them because of that reason. Experts advise, “Never join any and every affiliate program you came across.”  It pays to choose your affiliate programs wisely to avoid overloading yourself and overburdening your efforts.

 02. Not Enough Testing
 
 It is a mistake not to fully check out and test every affiliate program you want to get involved in. Always put yourself in the shoes of your customers. What you won’t like, it is pointless promoting it to others. Leading customers to promotions that can jam up their email boxes with thousands of mails is a real put off. Testing well enough before promoting is one great way around such a problem.

03. Not Enough Tracking

The ability to track your customers and sales is a very smart marketing technique. In Affiliate Marketing, making any commission is cool, but knowing where and how you made that commission is what makes you a better marketer. Doing so allows you to grow and scale your campaigns — as opposed to working blindly. It helps your ads budget too. Not tracking your sales enough is a no no.

04. Selling Instead of Helping

My mentor once told me never to present myself to prospects as trying to sell them something. It pays to offer help to solving a problem instead of attempting to sell. Yes, the word “marketing” is part of the phrase Affiliate Marketing, but for the most part, the real job of an affiliate is not to sell. His job is to lead people on to places where their problems can be solved. The selling job is better left to the sales page our affiliate links lead the reader to. Attempting to sell always instead of offering help first is one huge Affiliate Marketing mistake.


 
05. Making False Claims

Never make false claims about any Affiliate Marketing program. Excessive hyping too is not good. With the internet, people get to find the truth fairly easily and you can lose credibility real quick. Perhaps you’ve seen this before, ad lines such as “How I Made $1000 Dollars in one day” followed by a link to an affiliate site. Not everybody gets to make a grand so easily if ever. People always get out fast when they see through any falsehood and that easily taints your credibility as a marketer.

06. Not Comparing Enough

Experience shows that one of the best converting tactics to sell affiliate products online is to find a credible way to compare the “main” product with two or more similar products then leave the buying decision to the customer. When people are in buying mode for a physical product, they tend to have their options narrowed down to 2 or 3 and need help making the choice that is best for them. Giving options for comparison helps that decision. Not giving that option is a bad marketing decision. Here is why. Comparison web pages are not only very popular and helpful for readers; they are also very profitable for the marketer.

07. Allowing Distractions

Just like it sounds, distraction leads to wasted efforts and dissipation of energy in the wrong direction. It should be avoided. Sometimes, a marketer may already be working on something, all of a sudden, something looking great just pops up to attract attention. Deciding to just check it out could lead you off to go chasing some new idea to make money taking you off track completely. Such distractions should be avoided if you are already working on a project with good prospects. Truth be told, one completed and profitable campaign is worth so much more than 20 almost half-finished campaigns or projects. The real reason distractions should always be identified and pointedly ignored to allow full attention to the business already at hand.