Affiliate Marketing: How Does the Affiliate Marketing System Work?

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In today’s age, marketing is an extremely important part of any business or brand’s identity, it is a way that they are able to create awareness around what their company does, the products or services they sell and how they can help their customers improve their quality of life. While this is an important part of any brand’s identity, it is also often extremely expensive to have an entire team dedicated solely to marketing, and more often than not, it is not within a brands budget to be able to have an entire team of marketers on their payroll. This is where affiliate marketing comes in handy! Affiliate marketing refers to a marketing model, whereby marketers and publishers are outsourced and when a third party comes in and handles generating traffic and sourcing leads. This third party is referred to as an affiliate and they are incentivised to bring in traffic, getting paid per purchase or per click that is generated through their marketing tactics. 

To properly define affiliate marketing and understand what affiliate marketing is, it is important to recognise that this tactic has been around a lot longer than digital marketing and even existed before the internet! Before the rise of the digital world, affiliate marketing was done by creating incentives for people promoting their brand or business. if a customer had to recommend a certain product or service to someone else, they were often given discounts for their own purchases, incentivising the promotion of the brand and their products! This of course led to the online affiliate marketing system that many brands and businesses still continue to use today! 

Affiliate marketing is a tactic that has grown in popularity thanks to different analytical developments within the digital marketing sector, making it possible for brands and businesses to easily measure where their customers are being streamed from and how successful a certain marketing tactic is at generating leads and converting these leads into customers. Affiliate marketers are incentivised and receive payments for either the clicks that they generate or the products that are sold due to their marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is a great way for companies to outsource their marketing teams, ensuring that they are paying for only the customers that they get from marketing tactics! brands could have one affiliated marketer or they could have 50, it entirely depends on who the brand is and the incentives involved in generating leads and converting them into sales!

Why Does Affiliate Marketing Matter?

Affiliate marketing is becoming the way of the future, as outsourcing of marketing teams and marketers becomes a preferred way for brands and businesses to operate. Affiliate marketing is important as it can help a brand to streamline their company, cutting costs and ensuring that they are as profitable as possible. Online affiliate marketing has created a space whereby marketers can create an entire business through getting paid to advertise and promote certain brands and products, creating revenue streams and ways for marketers to make money! This lucrative industry is growing every day, with more and more companies looking for new and inventive ways to successfully streamline and operate their businesses. 

What are The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing?

• Low start-up costs: One of the issues with creating a new business from the ground up is that it can take up tons of time and money. With affiliate marketing the start-up costs are low, and the majority of the work can be done by you alone, without having to bring in and pay for external help. Through contacting brands and businesses and promoting your target audience within a particular niche, you can start your brand up with little to no cost involved! Though it may take some time and a lot of energy to maintain a certain market and develop your niche, once you have attracted attention, you are able to start earning immediately! 

• High earning potential with little risk: Once you have got your affiliate marketing business up and running, there is a high earning potential, with little risk! Most risk in business comes from having to invest a large amount into starting it up, but with affiliate marketing, you can do most of the initial work on your own! As your business grows and more companies trust you with their affiliate marketing, your income will steadily grow as your links are clicked on and seen by more and more people! 

What Are The Best Affiliate Marketing Tools?

As with many marketing tactics, affiliate marketing programs and tools will help you to construct, develop and plan your affiliate marketing strategy, providing you with all that you need to create the best marketing plan for the brands and businesses that you are helping. The following are a few affiliate marketing platforms and tools that will help you lay out the perfect strategy to draw customers to click on links and convert these clicks into leads.

Flippa

For those who are starting out and are looking to purchase a website, Flippa is the best tool to use to find the perfect site for you! Flippa works as a platform where people can buy and sell their websites, with tons of different offers available. One of the biggest reasons why Flippa has become so popular with affiliate marketers is due to the fact that the sites offered usually have strong backlinks, ensuring that you are already well on your way to having a website that stands a great chance of ranking highly on search engines. 

SEMRush

When it comes to SEO, SEMRush is one of the top tools on the market, with a suite of different features that each ensure your SEO is constructed correctly, with no mistakes that could affect your ranking! Affiliate markets need to understand what content will result in the highest return of investment (ROI) for their customers, and SEMRush helps you to construct this content with the best SEO practices in mind. Whether you are analysing the competition or looking for the best keywords to use to draw attention to your website, SEMRush is a handy tool to use when it comes to affiliate marketing. 

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a great tool to use when designing and creating content for affiliate marketing, and it can help you to set up your website using the best SEO practices. Yoast SEO is mainly used to customise things like meta tags and canonical tags, but there are tons of other handy features that can be used to help improve your SEO and the ways that your affiliate marketing plan is structured! 

Voluum

One of the most important aspects of affiliate marketing is the tracking and monitoring of your data that is needed to ensure that your content is doing what it is meant to do. Without tools like Voluum, you may not be privy to this information, and issues with your content and SEO features may not be picked up on or noticed. Having the best tool to monitor your content and track it will ensure that you have all the information necessary to make changes that are negatively impacting your website and affiliate marketing practices. 

Buzzsumo

Whether you are new to affiliate marketing or are an old pro looking for great content ideas, Buzzsumo is the best place to track and find out what topics are trending in specific industries. Ensuring that the content that you create for your clients is relatable to popular topics and trends is imperative in ensuring that the content is recognised. Buzzsumo has tons of different information on questions, topics and even keywords that are trending at a particular point in time. 

Google Keyword Planner

Another popular affiliate marketing tool is the Google keyword planner. This handy tool provides a ton of vital information on keywords, ensuring that you are using the best and most valid words and phrases in your content. It is no longer just necessary to use keywords and phrases that are popular, but they have to be relevant to current topics and things that are popular at a certain point in time. Google keyword planner ensures that you have all the information necessary to choose the best and most relevant keywords. The filtering system provided also ensures that you are given not only the best keywords but the best keywords according to the topics that you are writing about. This will go a long way in ensuring that search engine crawlers will index and rank your web page highly. 

Ahrefs

For those affiliate marketers who are looking to find the perfect tool to help them construct their backlinks, Ahrefs is the tool suite for you! While this suite does have other features that help with things like keyword research and competitor analysis, Ahrefs provides important information about things like spammy backlinks, lost backlinks and it can even help you to grow and develop the backlinks that you currently use. Backlink analysis is an important feature to consider if you are hoping to improve your SEO and gain more clients through search engine searches, so be sure to consider this tool when creating your website! 

Who are The Four Parties in The Affiliate Marketing system?

To become an affiliate marketer who understands the ins and outs of the industry, it is important to note the parties involved within each aspect of the business. The following are the different members involved within an affiliate marketing system. 

The Merchant

In order to have an affiliate marketer, there needs to be a brand or business around to sell the product or service and offer compensation to the marketer for the work done. In affiliate marketing, we refer to this element at the merchant. The merchant could refer to a massive corporation, a small local business or even an individual selling items out of their home. The merchant is not a silent part of the process, and the affiliate marketer will have to have a good idea of the products or services sold and understand the basic philosophy of the company. This information is provided to marketers by the merchants, who would obviously know their brand and the products they sell the best. They are also the determiners of what the incentives are, giving value to the work that the affiliate marker will have to do to promote a product or service. 

The Affiliate Marketers

Any party who provides affiliate marketing services within the system is the actual affiliate marketer. The affiliate marketer is the third party who will be promoting a certain product or service, and much like the merchant, it can be anyone from affiliate marketing companies to a single marketer working from home! Affiliate marketers earn their money through promoting other brands products or services and they create links to the brand’s website where a purchase can be made. The links that a marketer uses are tracked through analytical tools to ensure that for every click and sale that they drive, they will be paid according to an agreed-upon amount. Most merchants pay per sale rather than per click, so it is important that the marketing tactics used to drive consumers to make a purchase. The promotion of products does not stop after one post or marketing tactic has been completed, and if you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, you will need to continuously find new and easy ways to promote the offerings of a brand to ensure that you are getting paid for your efforts. 

The Consumer

Consumers are those who you are promoting specific products or services to, and they are the ones who will be making purchases. It is important that you have a good idea of who your customers are and how best to attract their attention. As an affiliate marketer, having a customer base that is well defined and ensuring that you are marketing certain products to the right group of people will determine whether or not you are successful! As an affiliate marketer, you will have to be inventive with the tactics that you use to come up with your marketing strategies, and find the best ways to attract consumers to your links. If you already have a platform that can cater to advertising for this niche, you may have just found a system of affiliate marketing with free traffic! 

The Network

An affiliate marketing network refers to the systems that are put in place between the affiliate and the merchant. This system tracks how much money the affiliate has drawn in through their marketing tactics and how much needs to be paid to them and it also consists of a database of products that an affiliate can use to get ideas of how to best marketer a certain product or brand. The network is an important part of the affiliate marketing process and it really helps an affiliate marketer to manage their business! 

How Does the Affiliate Marketing System Work?

The affiliate marketing system works on the basis of getting paid for the work and effort that you put into your marketing strategies and tactics, getting paid when a consumer who you have attracted clicks on a link or makes a purchase. The payment systems work differently for each merchant, though most tend to only pay you a percentage when a consumer has made a purchase that has led from a link that you promoted. The following are a few of the different ways that affiliate marketing payments work.

• Pay per click: The pay per click system works on the basis of an affiliate marketer getting paid for the clicks that are generated from his/her link to the website of the merchant. Every time that a link is clicked, they get paid an agreed-upon amount, usually a percentage of what the product costs. This means that for different items, a different amount is paid out. 

• Pay per purchase: The majority of merchants who use affiliate marketing use a system whereby an affiliate marketer is paid per item that is purchased. There are various tools that monitor links and where paying customers  click on links, and this is used to determine how much an affiliate marketer makes. 

• Pay per lead: This system is a bit more complicated to monitor and it involves affiliate marketers getting paid for every lead generated. Many brands and businesses work on the basis of getting a customer’s information and following up with them in a more personal way, through email lists or even phone calls. When an affiliate marketer attracts a consumer who signs up to receive more information, the pay per lead system will pay them a certain amount. 

How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing?

Decide on a Platform

One of the top tips for affiliate marketing for beginners is to decide on a platform that works for you and one that your intended user markets use a lot! Whether your target market is more on Instagram or rather uses Facebook, ensuring that you have the best platform that works for your audience is extremely important when setting up your affiliate marketing plan. Some of the best affiliate marketing websites and platforms are not websites at all, but social media pages! Social media is quickly becoming one of the best platforms for affiliate marketers to use, as there is tons of traffic directed to these platforms each day! Two of the best platforms to use when it comes to affiliate marketing are Youtube and blog pages, as these generally are able to stream the most amount of traffic to websites.

Choose Your Niche

With so many affiliate marketers who have recently joined the industry, it is important that you are the best at what you do, so as to set you apart from the rest. One of the best ways to ensure that you are the best affiliate marketer that you can be is to find a niche and promote something that you know well! This will ensure that you are able to promote the product or service to the right kinds of people and use the best tactics to draw customers in. Having a market already set up through email lists, social media and other platforms will ensure that brands and businesses will trust that you have the best network of consumers to promote to and have the best chance of drawing leads in and converting them into sales. Finding your niche and working within it is one of the best ways to get started when it comes to affiliate marketing.  

Create Great Content

As with any marketing tactic, the best way to generate leads and turn them into converted sales is to create great content. The content you create needs to be enticing, informative and lead a consumer towards making a purchase, as this is where you will more than likely make your money. Sales tactics and marketing tactics are combined when creating your content, and you need to remember that the end goal is to promote the content you are creating to an audience who will be interested in a certain product or service. Very often, the type of content you create for certain groups would be different, highlighting different aspects of the product or service and distributed across different platforms. 

Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Site

Streaming traffic to your site is how you are going to convert consumers to paying customers for your merchant, and it is, therefore, a very important part of the process. How you drive this traffic to your page is dependent on a lot of things, and the features and tactics you use to draw in this traffic will impact how much traffic and how many conversions you get. It is important that you are directing advertisements at the right kinds of people, those who would be interested in what the merchant has to offer. Building your community within your intended niche market can take some time and effort, but once you have accomplished this, tons of traffic should be heading your way! 

Get Clicks on Your Affiliate Links

Once you have drawn traffic to your affiliate website or social media page, you now have to ensure that your users click on the links to take them to your merchant’s webpage. This is where content comes in and ensuring that you have information that is geared towards ensuring a sale will mean that consumers are more than likely going to click on the link and find more information on your merchant’s webpage! 

Convert Clicks to Sales

Converting clicks on links to sales is an incredibly important task that an affiliate marketer often relies on to make money. While some brands and businesses also pay for clicks and leads generated, many only pay for the converted sales that are generated from affiliate marketing tactics.  In order to be successful in converting leads, you need to create good content and be promoting it towards the right target audience. Identifying who your target audience is and coming up with the best platforms and marketing tools to draw them in and convert them to leads is how you will make money as an affiliate marketer and also how you will make a name for yourself within a certain niche. 

How Does Affiliate Marketing Affect SEO?

When it comes to SEO affiliate marketing, having an affiliate marketer publishing and creating content can only increase your visibility as a business! As you get more and more traffic through these links, your website and business will begin to hold more authority. This leads you to have a better standing with search engine crawlers and it may help to increase your rankings. Any tactics that involve drawing consumers in and getting them to your webpage, and even better, resulting in a sale, will help to improve your SEO, so affiliate marketing is an important part of improving your SEO on your webpage! 

How to Earn An Income with Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing can help you to earn money and create a constant stream of revenue! Affiliate marketing metrics measure how many people are clicking on your links and how many converted sales are gained through your marketing tactics. As these measurements are tallied, you will receive an agreed-upon percentage for every sale or click that the merchant receives. 

One of the best affiliate marketing examples to look at when understanding this is thinking about affiliate marketing before it became an online tool. Before the internet and online marketing were popular, shops and brands would entice customers to spread information about their business through word of mouth, and if a consumer used the brand or bought something from the shop, the first consumer, who spread the word about the company, would receive a discount! Nowadays, most brands do not work with discounts, but you rather get paid for the work done to promote a brand. This is how you can earn a living through affiliate marketing. 

Why Should People Do Affiliate Marketing?

There is no affiliate marketing investment that needs to be made upfront when you begin your journey to become an affiliate marketer, and there are many benefits to starting this kind of business and growing an affiliate marketing brand! 

Low-Cost and Low-Risk

When it comes to affiliate marketing trading and development, the process possesses little to no risk, and the money that is generated through providing links to a merchants customer base could ensure that you have a passive income! Though in the beginning, it may be harder to find the right kinds of target audiences and create content geared towards specific people, there is no upfront investment that you need to make and you can start generating money as soon as you have your content up and running!

Easy to Scale

As your audience grows and you gain more trust from various brands and businesses, you can easily bring people on to help you with different affiliate marketing tactics and content creation. Scaling your affiliate marketing business is easy, and you do not have to put a ton of money into building it! All it takes is growing the number of customers you have and adding on the necessary help as you get more and more business. With the right business plan and people helping you, you could grow an empire of affiliate marketers and bring in a ton of money! 

How Popular is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing and the outsourcing of marketing teams are becoming more and more common across the world, as brands and businesses looking to streamline their systems. It can be hard for merchants to trust such an important part of the sales process to external teams, as no one knows their business better than themselves! This is why it is important to source external marketing teams from people that you know you can trust. Whether you are looking to learn the ins and outs of becoming an affiliate marketer or are looking for a team to trust with your affiliate marketing, our team of professional SEO consulting experts and SEO copywriting specialists are able to help you with anything you may need, from professional advice to content creators who are able to make your goals come to light! For the best team on your side, both to trust with your marketing and help you learn more about affiliate marketing, look no further than the Markethinkers team!