Affiliate marketing has been around for a long time. It is an excellent way to increase traffic to your site and to create additional passive income and residual revenue for your site while you are building up your business.
Affiliate marketing, as its name implies, takes products that are owned by other advertisers and promotes them on your site. It helps the advertisers of the products who can generate more sales through your site and it helps you by giving you a cut of the profits.
How Much of a Commission to Offer?
The amount that you will earn on affiliate products depends on the advertiser and how much commission they offer for you hosting their product links on your site. This varies greatly between companies. For example, ADT, the home security system, used to offer a $100 cut per purchase for any site owner who was able to generate new sales for them via their website.
Other advertisers offer much less, but some may even offer more. Clickbank is a place to start if you want to look into getting started with some affiliate marketing.
That’s how it works from the front end if you choose to host other business’s products on your website to generate extra income.
Selling Your Products Through Affiliate Marketers
If you want to work this system from the backend, it may be even more lucrative. The way you do this is to put in your product information to Clickbank or another affiliate marketing portal site and list the information such as the percentage that you are offering your publishers for sales from your site.
To learn more about affiliate marketing or to connect with some of the biggest brand marketers in the world today, don’t forget to attend internet marketing conferences in your area.
Producers vs. Publishers
It is important to understand the difference in the terminology if you decide to become an affiliate marketer on either end of the spectrum. A producer is someone who is putting their product on another person’s site in the hopes of generating more sales on the secondary site.
A publisher is someone who serves as the host site who offers the products that they got from the other business. Publishers, just like publishers in the literary world, put out the information or publish it to the masses and their target audience can purchase the products or services straight from their website.
How Affiliate Marketing Helps Your Brand Expand
As a producer then, you are putting your product on a variety of locations across the web rather than just your site while offering a percentage of the profits in return. It’s almost like having potentially hundreds of other sales representatives who are offering your product on their storefront as well, boosting your product line in numerous other places.
What you lose is the percentage you decide to give the publishers for doing this. But think about how much you will gain by having your products on so many other sites.
When it comes to considering how many products you should do this with, this is up to you. It becomes somewhat of a monetary and financial question as well. You have to look at your checks and balances and decide how much you are willing to pay the publishers for host your products. To learn more about how affiliate marketing works and the process different brands are using to grow their reach through partner sites, be sure to check out these affiliate marketing infographics.
There are myriads of new affiliate programs, possessing the highest earning potential. This enables you to sleep and still make money while off the content you provide and achieve the best conversions. These user-friendly affiliate programs make it simple and easy to earn income from your website, as well as serve as excellent sales channels.
It is also advisable not to place every product with affiliate marketing since the payout for some items may make your profit margins too thin.
The best way to take advantage of affiliate marketing as a business owner is to think about which products offer the most value and put the products out there that are most likely to give you a return on your investment that you are paying your producers for their help.
Which affiliate marketing site to use
Another question that comes up is which affiliate marketing company to use. There are several to choose from. Some of the most popular ones are listed below.
- Commission Junction
- Clickbank
- Rakuten.com
- Shareasale
There are much more. Just do your homework and see how each one works. Also, keep in mind that the affiliate marketing network and portal sites usually take a small cut for every sale as well. Some may require a monthly fee to be a member as well for either producers or publishers. You can learn more about each of these networks through most affiliate marketing training material.
How Affiliate Marketing Compares to Real-World Sales
Affiliate marketing is a way to network with other businesses without actually doing business with them directly. Consider what you might do in the real world that compares to this. Imagine if you had a business with an office in a downtown area and you weren’t making enough sales. So you asked your fellow business owner down the street to put a sign up for your products. When you have a customer for your friend’s business come into your shop from the friend’s place of business and place an order, you give your friend a percentage of the sale.
Another similar real-world example would be hiring sales representatives to go around and sell your products door-to-door. This is the same thing except you are bringing it to the online market.
Everything is Online Now
The world is changing to an online digital storefront, so we have to adapt everything that we used to do in the physical world to the online environment. This is a way to take the sales rep model to your online business.
To get started with affiliate marketing, you could start by visiting one of the popular affiliate marketing systems listed above to sign up with them and then start listing products through their system.
You could also list products from other businesses on your site. But just remember that you should always keep the content, including affiliate marketing products relevant to your business to avoid penalties from Google.
How You Can Use Infographics with Affiliate Marketing
Have you ever considered how you could use infographics and other media within your affiliate marketing campaigns?
Remember that, when you host products from other sites or other sites host your products, they (or you) will need to sell them! You can’t just put the products up and hope a fish takes the bait. They should be relevant to your content and you should also create articles and other media to advertise the advantages of the products.
Usually, this would require creating a video that describes the product or downloading one (if available) from your producer’s website. Additionally, you might need to include lots of text to explain to visitors how the product will benefit them.
But with an infographic, your time that you must invest in this process is cut in half. It doesn’t take near as much time to create an infographic for a product as it does to create video content or to write ads or articles about them.
Infographics can be a great advantage to your affiliate marketing campaign, whether you are a producer or a publisher of goods and services.
If you need help creating an infographic for your products that you can share with others to promote your goods or services, see us.
Infographicdesignteam.com is a professional infographic design firm that understands how infographics fit in with online marketing including affiliate marketing.
Let us create an infographic for your next affiliate marketing campaign and watch your profits soar!
