A Newbie Blogger’s Guide To Affiliate Marketing

How many times did you hit the search engine to find methods to Earn Money Online? How many times did you think of monetising your newly built blog or website? If you are seriously looking for methods to Earn Money Online or monetizing your blog/website, becoming an affiliate is one of the best methods you can try for yourself. Also, this is considered to be the best method for people who could not get Google Adsense. Personally, I prefer Affiliate Marketing as my way to Earn Money Online.

In this post, find out what is Affiliate Marketing, what are Affiliate Links, how do these Affiliate Links work and how do they make money for you?

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a marketing technique in which a business offers money to the affiliates who bring them new customers through their own marketing efforts.

Let me explain this through a simple example. Say, your friend has opened a new shop where he sells mobile phones. Now, he has asked you to help him out with selling the products – mobile phones. But, hey why would you do that free?

So, your friend promises to give you 5% of the profit he makes. Now, when you bring a customer to your friend and a mobile phone is purchased, your friend makes some profit and you, as decided, would get 5% of that profit. This is how Affiliate Marketing works.

Your friend didn’t do any marketing. All the marketing efforts were put in by you and you got paid for that. The first question that comes in someone’s mind is, isn’t that too less? Just 5%?

Of course, you need to put in great efforts in the beginning, but once you set for flying, you can make much greater profits through Affiliate Marketing as compared to any other Marketing technique.

Basically, there are four players in the industry –

1. Core players: include the merchant (the brand or the retailer) who manufactures the products and needs to sell them to people.
2. Network: provides offers to the Affiliate (you) to choose from and take care of your payments (through Affiliate Links)
3. Publisher (Affiliate): the person (you) who would help the core player to sell his products.
4. Customer:  who would actually buy the product and pay for it

How much money can you make through Affiliate Marketing?

It all depends upon you. It depends on how seriously you take Affiliate Marketing and how you implement it. If you do not take it seriously and spend very less time on this, you won’t make much profit but if you treat Affiliate Marketing as a proper business, you can make a FULL TIME INCOME.

But how do they actually track that it was me who sent those customers to them? It really made me think for a lot of time before I actually hit the search engine to find it out. This is the part where Affiliate Links come up.

When you sign up for a company’s affiliate program, they give you links. These links have a tracking code attached with it. That tracking code is, in fact, a unique id which would let the provider identify that who was the affiliate who sent that customer and thus, the affiliate gets his/her share of the profit.

Websites like Amazon.com make use of ‘cookies’ for this purpose. If a user clicks on the Affiliate Links placed on your website, he would be directed to the Amazon.com page. At this time, a cookie would be stored in the user’s web browser which would contain your id. This cookie would help amazon.com to recognize that it was you who sent that customer.

Does my customer have to buy immediately after clicking the link?

Not really. The cookies are stored in the customer’s web browser for a specific amount time, say 7 days. It depends upon which company’s affiliate you are. Check out their policy to get more details. If the customer buys the product within the time the cookie is active, you would get your share for sure.

Would My Visitors Like Affiliate Links?

Give me one good reason for they would hate it?

First of all,  Affiliate Links do not leave any trace on the customer’s (visitor’s) computer and they do not have to pay any extra money for buying a product. There would be no special screens or code block asking them to enter some information in order to get you the commission. In fact, they wouldn’t even know that it was an Affiliate Link or a simple ad to help them out.

But yep, they would hate it if you are going to bug them with unlimited amount of affiliate ads and links and create a hindrance in the actual purpose for which they visited your website/blog at the first place. But if you placed those ads carefully and in a planned manner, they won’t mind at all.

Moreover, if you do enough efforts to provide them with those Affiliate Links which would go by the content of your website, the visitors are going to love it.

For example, say, I write one article in which talking about the benefits of having Green Tea. Below my article, I would put an ad asking them to buy Green Tea at cheap price. My visitors would actually feel well for if they were really convinced with my article that would be the first step they would have taken themselves – Buy Green Tea. So, you see – no one is going to be unhappy in this situation.

Why One Should Go For Affiliate Marketing?

Just five points and I think they are enough to explain you why you, as a newbie blogger, should take up Affiliate Marketing.

1. No investment – who doesn’t want to earn money without spending anything on that thing, I have always been reluctant to try earning money from sources which required initial payments no matter how reliable they seem to be. (They’re always a scam!) If you are also like me who wants to start earning without heavy investment, go for Affiliate Marketing. All you need is a website/blog, good content and good traffic – which are all available for free or for the cost of hard work.
2. No Staff – Do you find it difficult to work with other people and trust them? Affiliate Marketing is something which you can do all by your own and you need anyone’s help or cooperation.
3. No expert Knowledge – Are you worried about how will you get it done? Do you need to take some tutorials or something? Nothing at all. You do not need any expert knowledge. The Affiliate Links can be easily embedded in your website code.
4. No product – When people used to suggest me how to Earn Money online, the first thing that came up was selling a quality product. But the biggest problem was where to get the product from? Was I supposed to manufacture it? Then I came to know about this – a method to Earn Money online where I did not need any actual product.
5. Earn income by working anytime – you do need to reschedule your life in order to become an affiliate. However you would need a lot of efforts initially but after that, you can enjoy your passive income easily.

Some Ideas To Use Affiliate Links

First, here are some companies that offer affiliate marketing opportunities

1. Amazon.com (it’s the best)
2. ShareASale
3. Amazon.in
4. Flipkart.com

I personally use only Amazon.in as I do affiliate marketing for mostly books.

Some ways you can do Affiliate Marketing

1. Always link to the products mentioned in YouTube video description, if you make YouTube videos. This is my biggest source of income from Affiliate Marketing.
2. Link to the products you mentioned in your blog post.
3. Write a blog post reviewing a specific product and review it.
4. You can even start an affiliate blog, a blog dedicated to product reviews so as to generate affiliate income. This is the leading method used by bloggers to earn money online.

I would suggest you to experiment with different affiliate platforms and then, pick the one that’s most convenient to you.

Still have questions about how it works? Comment below!