What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?

While surfing on the internet, Have you ever seen advertisements on websites?

Have you wondered why people put advertisements on their websites?

If you see the advertisement closely, you will see services or products.

What are these products? Why do people put those products on their blogs? What are the benefits of doing that?

This process of promoting services and products is called Affiliate Marketing. In this tutorial, I will explain Affiliate Marketing and How does it work?

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is the way to make money online by promoting or selling products and services of other companies on your blog. You can also promote the products in any possible way, like on social networking sites or email marketing. Your role will be as a publisher in Affiliate marketing.

Now, you might be thinking about why we promote the products or services of Advertisers on our blog? Do we get any benefit from it? Yes, you will get a commission as per the affiliate program policy. Advertisers will pay you for each sale that happened through your unique affiliate link.

You will get the commission when your readers click on the ads and buy products or services promoted on your blog. You will get paid according to the Advertiser’s policy. 

Terms used in Affiliate Marketing

Before starting the tutorial, let’s get a clear idea about the terms we will use throughout this tutorial.

1. A Merchant- This is an Advertiser or business that sells products from where we get Ads, Banner, Links, etc.
2. The Affiliate– This person(publishers) who promotes goods and services on their blog or any other way.
3. The Customer– The readers who click on the affiliate links and purchase the products and services.
4. The Network– The entity that manages all these processes is called a network like Commission Junction, ShareASale, etc.
5. Affiliate Link- Each affiliate program will provide you with a unique link so that they can identify the sale that happened from your blog/link.
6. Payment Mode- The mode of payment for the affiliate program like PayPal, Direct bank transfer, etc.

Some Advertisers manage their affiliate programs on their own. So, if you want to join it, you have to visit the official site of those products and register for the program.

Some Advertisers give their affiliates to the networks that will manage all the things related to it. Affiliate networks get paid by the Advertisers/business. In this case, we need to sign up on the Affiliate networks where we get lots of products to promote.

How does Affiliate marketing work?

In simple words, Affiliate marketing is just promoting products and getting a commission through it. In this process, you will have to go through the four steps-

1. Sign-up for the program/affiliate networks
2. Get the approval
3. Start promoting products/services
4. Get commission

Sign up for the affiliate program- The first thing is to find the right products to promote on our blog-like. If your blog is about blogging, you have to promote the blogging-related products and services on your blog.

If you are writing a review of the product, it’s the best way to promote that product because every buyer read the review before buying something. It might be possible that they will read your review and purchase the products from your blog. Once you selected the products, then sign up for the affiliate program.

Approval-  Once you sign up for the affiliate program, your application will be reviewed by the affiliate team. It will take a few days to review your request. Then, they review your application based on various factors. Once they complete the background process, you will get an email about the status of your application, either approved or rejected.

Promote products- Once your application gets approved, log in to your dashboard, complete your profile update your payment method and address, etc.

You will get different types of advertising banners, and links in the dashboard, pick up the banner or links suitable for your blog space and place it on your blog.

Get commission- When interested users click on that links or banners and are redirected to the product’s site. If they buy that product, then you will get a commission accordingly. 

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Performance or sale tracking

When your Affiliate application is approved, you will get a unique affiliate link in which your affiliate ID is embedded. Using that unique ID, the Advertisers or the affiliate network will track your performance or sale through this affiliate ID. Your Affiliate ID was embedded in your published ads code, so it’s easy for them to track your earnings. In addition, you can track Affiliate performance in your dashboards.

Why Affiliate Programs?

As I told you above Affiliate marketing is the best way to make money online. The affiliate program is the most efficient and least expensive monetization technique to make money online, so most bloggers prefer it. Here are some reasons why every blogger chooses Affiliate marketing as their primary source of income.

• Free of cost- Affiliate marketing is entirely free of charge. You don’t need to pay for joining an affiliate program.
• The sky is the limit for earning- You can make unlimited money from Affiliate marketing.No limit for making money.
• Global market- You can reach more people from around the world.
• No customer support- You don’t need to provide any customer support to buyers. It’s none of our business. Advertisers will take care of it.
• Easy sign up the process.
• You will get lots of Advertising stuff like banners, links, coupons, etc.
• Easy mode of payment ACH, PayPal, and others.

Note- Affiliate marketing will be useful only if you have high traffic. Then, most of the visitors will ignore the ads. There might be some exceptions, but in most cases, it works for high traffic.

Affiliate Networks

As I said that some business have their affiliate program, but some business uses the affiliate network to promote their products.

Commission Junction(CJ) and ShareASale are affiliate networks where you will get thousands of Affiliate programs. When you join these two networks, you can search for several related products available for marketing on your blog. You will need to apply for each product individually again; they will review your application. Once approved, then only you can place ads on your blog.

If you have targeted traffic, then I recommend you join the affiliate programs. Start promoting a product. You will get rewarded as much as you deserved.

Here, I am promoting only blogging-related products, so I joined the Bluehost, Dreamhost, Cloudways, Kinsta, Hostgator, Vultr, etc., affiliate programs.

Which product should you promote?

You can promote any products on your blog, but I recommend promoting only those products that your blog is related to. If your blog is focusing on blogging, you have to promote products related to Web hosting, Domain name, etc.

If the readers are reading blogging content, they are looking for some product they must be interested in.

I hope that you have understood all the concepts of Affiliate Marketing. If you know more about it, then do share your knowledge with our readers. If you have any doubt regarding affiliates, then feel free to contact me.

If you like this article, then do share it with your friends.

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