Since we noticed so many people complicating what affiliate marketing is, we decided to write a clear and easy to understand summary.
What is affiliate marketing?
Have you ever heard of people that make money every time they sell something for someone else? Maybe a real estate broker? Art dealers? etc.
Affiliate marketing also known as “partnership programs” is just that. You signup to a partner program (same thing like a companies affiliate program the words are interchangeable) for free (never pay) and you make money if you send them customers.
How do they track my sales?
Every affiliate (you) gets a special link (just an example amazon.com/affiliate=123) when someone clicks on that link and makes a purchase, the website (in this case amazon) reports to you (sometimes in real time sometimes with a little delay) that you generated a sale. Most affiliate programs will also report the number of clicks (meaning people you sent to them even if they didn’t buy anything).
Can you trust affiliate sites to be honest?
Almost all affiliate program have a third party that tracks your sales and in many cases that third party is the one that pays you.
Never promote sites that do not have a third party tracking system unless the company you will be promoting is a major company. This is a big newbie mistake. You fall for a big commission but the sales reports are not honest and one day you won’t even get paid for the few sales they do report to you.
How often do you get paid?
Every affiliate program is different, some pay weekly, others monthly and some even longer than that.
What type of products and services offer affiliate programs?
Almost every product or service you can think of has either a direct affiliate program or an in-direct affiliate program.
What is a two tier affiliate program?
A two tier affiliate program doesn’t just pay for a commission for the sales you generate, but also pays you for the sales people you referred to the affiliate program generate.
For example, an affiliate program might pay you 50% for every sale you generate but also pay you 10% of all the sales the person you referred to the program generates.
Many people that might not have traffic for a product, might have traffic for people that can push their product. Some of these networkers can make incredible amounts of money by having those with good relevant traffic promote a product.
Consider this math. If you have a strong following of 200 site owners within the “business startup” nice and you have them all start promoting a company that designs logos that pays a $10 for the main affiliate and $3 for the person that referred that affiliate, the person referring the affiliate would earn 1200 dollars a month if his downline of 200 sites sent a combined total of just 2 sales a month!
Understanding Conversion Ratios and Niche Targeting:
This is the most difficult part of all of affiliate marketing. This really sets apart those that make money from those that will never earn anything much.
Once you master this art, and you have a traffic source, you will have amazing streams of income coming to you from many sources.
More information on this will be posted next week.
The Recurring Secret:
Most will never truly get to break into this category thus never making it to the top spots of real affiliate earners.
Even those that do know the power of recurring affiliate programs, might not understand how to pick the right ones. In essence, this is like not benefiting at all from this model.
Why bother with recurring if you could get a bigger one time commission?
It does not have to be either or. You could have programs you promote that pay a one time fee, and some that pay recurring.
If you only promote one time payout affiliate programs, you risk that if suddenly your traffic sources don’t work, or you lose ranking in Google, you suddenly have a serious drop in income or possibly no income from affiliate advertising.
With recurring, even if something happens, you still built up a stream of income. Even if your whole site goes offline, you will still collect payments from the old customers you sent to various programs.
Common mistake, forgetting business products and services
We can’t really talk about recurring income without mentioning the many products and services you could market to businesses as an affiliate.
A good product or service to a business will usually mean a longer term rate of recurring income.
Imagine if you are promoting web hosting, phone services like voicemail and toll free services, ad platform services and other items that businesses will renew for as long as they need them.
You will be making monthly commissions for a long time because once a business buys one of these services and they find them useful they will allow these services to renew every month.
Affiliate program scams and how to not fall for them.
One of the biggest scams in the affiliate advertising world involves a company that offers a big payout per sale to lure new affiliates.
Imagine you see an affiliate offer that promises to pay you $70 per sale. You decide to try it with a little traffic and what do you know, after 8 clicks you got a sale!
You are stunned, you decide to try it with a little more traffic and again, just a few hits and you another sale. This time you decide to really ramp it up, throw all possible traffic you have so you could make a lot of money off this program before everyone else starts promoting it. You might even start telling others you know how it and the great conversions.
So what’s the affiliate scam? Well, they do not payout unless you have 250 dollars in sales, but that is not the scam part, the scam part if that those first 2 sales were manually added to your account to fool you into thinking that it converts great. Now, you could wait a long time for any sales but in the meantime you added a lot of backlinks to them and if you do happen to make sales they might pay or might not care.
These games do not happen (they do but rarely) when you use a reliable third party affiliate tracking company.
You sent traffic to many programs but you are getting no conversions, what could be the problem?
There are two main reasons for this:
- Fake / forced traffic
- Non-targeted traffic
Most traffic for sale online is fake / forced even those that have really good reviews.
What is fake traffic?
Fake traffic is traffic that is generated by a computer program that looks like real traffic. It could click around, spend time on the page, even fill out form, but it’s not real.
What is forced traffic?
Forced traffic is a popup or other ad that the user is presented with forcefully. For example, a popup, email spam, redirects and so on.
Why do most people fail at affiliate marketing?
There are many reasons people fail at things, however, with affiliate marketing there are two main reasons.
One: They pick what to promote based on the commission instead of what will work with their traffic. If your traffic is almost all female and you choose to promote a product that is mostly purchased by men because of a high commission, what do you expect will happen? If your product is mostly people with bad credit, would you promote a credit card offer that you know only approves people with good scores?
It sounds so obvious doesn’t it? You will be surprised how many people get into affiliate market that have good traffic but choose the wrong offers to promote. When it fails to generate sales they claim the company is cheating or that it’s all a big scam.
Two: The traffic you thing is good is junk. This is the case almost 100% of the time. Most people get into affiliate marketing after seeing how much commission a product offers. They go and find some traffic providers that claims 100% human traffic and buy 50,000 hits (usually for under 50 dollars). Obviously it doesn’t convert and they start blaming everyone but the traffic.
Almost all traffic for sale is junk. You have a better chance of a random street cat visiting your site and dancing around on the keyboard and placing an order than this bot traffic that you think is real humans. Even when it is real humans, it comes from countries and areas that cannot afford the product and possibly don’t even read the language of your site.
If you understand traffic you decide how much money you earn. If you don’t, you decide how much you lose.
Most people can achieve really great things if they don’t give up that fast. It is very frustrating that with affiliate marketing most people give up because they really thought they did everything right, when in fact they didn’t.
More info coming soon.