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.

 

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Great question! Many people particularly newbies keep asking this question. Many of the questions are concerned mostly about online affiliate marketing even though affiliate marketing can be done offline as well. The real reason for this curiosity is because of the internet which allows many affiliate marketers to leverage easily on web technologies. To do affiliate marketing, first you need a merchant or a company that offers affiliate marketing opportunity or an affiliate marketing program. Next step is to signup directly with the merchants or with an Affiliate Network which may have hundreds of programs to join, making it easy to find affiliate marketing opportunities to your heart’s desire. An affiliate network acts practically like a middleman between merchants and affiliate marketers. They offer tracking software that tracks your sales and reports your sales and performance. They also handle payments for and on behalf of marketers.

Here now is the real business. When you sign-up to an affiliate program, you are provided with promotional material which includes a link and / or banner and links. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to promote these links and banners using your blog, social media pages, or online advertising. These affiliate links lead to the merchant website and come with a tracking code that monitors whether or not the lead buys a product from the merchant. When a person clicks on your promoted link, a signal is sent to your affiliate program’s server notifying them of the referred visit by means of a specialized cookie which chalks up the counter of your referrals. Depending on the merchants, you can get paid-per-visit, PPV or paid-per-click, PPC depending on what the cookies record in your favor. That is how Affiliate marketers get to make their money. Simple business no doubt!