Despite the fact that it’s a lot of blogger’s top earners (including myself!), a lot of people don’t actually know what Affiliate marketing is, or how to get started with affiliate marketing on their blog. This comes as a great surprise to me, as it’s one of the most effective ways to make money off of a blog today, especially since we have plugins now like Adblock that prevent CPC ads such as Adsense being shown. Anyhow, for those you who are completely new to affiliate marketing, here is your place to start.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is a type of product marketing, digital or hard goods, which you advertise on your website in a variety of different ways. These can include product reviews, contextual links, and banner ads. When someone clicks on your affiliate link (a special link that’s given to you by the advertiser to recognize when you make the sale) and then later goes on to purchase the product, you get paid a commission of the sale, generally a percentage of the product’s price. These commissions can range anywhere from 1% to 75% of the product sale – a heck of a lot more than you’ll get for an Adsense click, usually.
How Quickly Do Visitors Have To Buy For Me To Get Paid?
Whenever someone clicks on one of your affiliate links, in most cases, a cookie will be placed in their internet browser. This cookie can last anywhere from a few hours to months at a time, and this all depends on the advertiser’s affiliate program. Because it takes an average of 7 exposures of a product for a consumer to buy it, affiliate programs with longer cookies generally do a lot better than those with short-lasting cookies.
How To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing
First of all, you should find products that are related to your niche that you believe your audience would be interested in. For example, if I was starting a blog about iPhones, perhaps I would focus on selling accessories for the iPhone, such as cases or chargers. After all, it wouldn’t really make much sense for me to start selling lawnmowers on an iPhone blog, even if they pay a high commission. Quite simply, it’s very unlikely that those interested in iPhones are also interested in purchasing a lawnmower. See what I mean?
A lot of retailers will have affiliate programs for their companies. The easiest way to find this is to Google the name of the company you want to become an affiliate for, and include the word “affiliates” or “affiliate program” at the end of it.
For digital products such as e-Books, Clickbank and e-Junkie offer great affiliate programs. Because the products are digital, there are no shipping fees and such, which means that the commissions are often very high. Clickbank has been one of my top earners for years now, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
If you can’t find an affiliate program for the product you want to sell on your website, you can always try huge online stores such as Amazon or eBay. Because so many different products are sold on those websites, chances are, you’ll be able to find something for almost any niche (as long as it’s not adult related).
It does take a little bit of time to set up. But over long periods of time, as you develop trust and connections with your audience, the affiliate sales will start flowing in. One day it can even become your website’s top earner, as it has for mine.
If you have any questions about affiliate marketing, feel free to post them below. I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can!
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