What is Affiliate Marketing?

So what exactly is affiliate marketing and how does it all work, it’s simple you sell or promote products for a merchant (company) in return for a commission. The whole world works on network based businesses whether its online or offline, lets expand on this, in the real world imagine company ‘A’ selling goods to company ‘B’ directly this would be classed as B2B (Business to Business), now imagine the same company selling goods or services to the public directly and you’re their employee selling products to customers. The difference between you working for the company and being an affiliate is, an employee is contracted to work a set time where an affiliate would probably be selling the same goods online and doing his own marketing and advertising, in return for a commission set by the company….let us go on and simplify this…….

There are three main entities that make up the affiliate marketing industry, you would want to know which category you fall into.

• The Network
• The Publisher
• The Advertiser

There are many Affiliate Networks out there, here are a few top affiliate networks; ClickBank, Commission Junction (now Known as Affiliate by Conversant), ShareASale, Rakuten, Affiliate Window and many more. All of these affiliate networks are to some degree different to each other, ClickBank specialises in digital products, CJ specialises in a lot of categories like books, electronics, health and financial products etc.…
So it all depends on which product you would like to promote as an affiliate, this would depend on your niche website or a website made from scratch for that one product/program or you may have multiple products in the same niche on that one website.

The Publisher would be the person that created the product to put on the networks stated above, so it may be a health program that’s on any affiliate network… as an affiliate you would look at different affiliate networks to see the best program or product for your niche.

The Advertiser would be yourself, as an affiliate you then would pick a product that the publisher has created and put on the network and then you would advertise/promote the program or product on your niche website to your customers for a commission.

Just a quick break down on how commissions may work…
Product ‘A’ Fitness Program value $50, commission on this product may be 50%
Product ‘B’ Cooking Lessons value $100, commission on this product may be 20%
So every sale you make on Product ‘A’ would be $25-Minus Marketing Cost
And every sale you make on Product ‘B’ would be $20-Minus Marketing Cost
Then comes the cost of marketing, that would give you the ROI (Return of Investment).

Now that the explanation for Affiliate is out the way phew lol, a lot of people forget to explain the second part, which is marketing. The fun and exciting bit of making money online.

When it comes to marketing online you will be using or should be using different techniques to generate traffic, after all Traffic Equals = Sales and then $$$....

So here are some of the methods and terms you will hear a lot on how to generate traffic:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
• PPC or PPV
• Email Marketing
• Content Marketing (very important)
• Keyword Generated Traffic
• Display Ads and a few others…

Now I hope we are all on the same page.