How Affiliate Marketing Works
How Affiliate Marketing Works
Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy. Businesses pay affiliate marketers a commission for driving visitors, sales, or a desired action.
Affiliates promote products, digital information, courses, or services through unique internet links and earn a commission for each successful predetermined action or referral.
It's a lucrative win-win situation: businesses gain desired results, and affiliates can earn significant income.
Affiliates join commission-based programs offered by various companies.
The marketer "affiliate" receives unique affiliate links to promote products or services.
When a customer completes a desired action, "CPA" buys via the affiliate link, and the affiliate earns a commission.
Tracking can be used, such as cookies or referral codes, to ensure proper credit is given to affiliates.
Very low risk: Affiliates don't need to create, locate, ship products, handle payments, or provide customer service.
Significant passive income potential: Do the work one time and earn continued passive income from past work.
Flexibility: Run your business on your own terms, work from home, and choose products that interest you.
Scalability: Expand your affiliate marketing efforts to increase earnings over time, or, in some cases, build a sales team earning commissions for you.
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing involves an affiliate operating as a connector between a buyer and seller of goods or services. An affiliate can be either a private individual operating as a non-company or a web based company such as Nerdwallet.
For a person to start an affiliate business and make it work, it is very simple. Most of the major retailers and online retailers have some kind of affiliate program that you can join and earn commissions from. When a purchase is made via a personalized internet link or URL given to you by the affiliate program or retailer, your commission is generated.
As an individual affiliate, your only job is to get traffic or visitors to your affiliate link, and when a purchase is made, you earn a commission. And the best part is that the program or retailer handles all the payment processing and customer service. It is a totally hands off business model for the affiliate.
You can find affiliate programs to join at most major online retailers, such as Walmart and Amazon. If you look at the bottom of those websites, you should find a link that will take you to the retailer's affiliate sign-up page.
As an alternative to looking at major retailer affiliate programs, there are online portals that have hundreds or even thousands of affiliate programs that you can earn commissions from. This type of offer portals can offer physical product commissions and opportunities to digitally download products, such as educational courses or How-to courses
One of the biggest and most popular of these portals is called, Clickbank.com.
Your commission from large retailers such as Amazon or Walmart can be on the low-end of the scale, unless you sell something on a very large scale, such as a very expensive item. But generally, the larger retailers offer a small commission as compared to the industry average.
As mentioned above, other than the large retailer affiliate programs, there are also affiliate portals such as Clickbank. There, you can find some digital product offering programs that offer up-to 50% commission and more. But with Clickbank, most of the digital products are priced below $100.
So if you want to spend your time promoting only the highest-paying programs with the largest commission, what are they, and where can you find them?
An example of a high ticket program with massive commissions is companies offering real gold and silver bullion. This can be on a collector basis or an IRA retirement basis. For example, if someone funded their retirement account with a $50,000 gold or silver bullion purchase, your potential commission could be massive. Here is a link to a reputable gold and silver bullion dealer that offers huge commissions.
Especially today, with high inflation, the shrinking purchasing power of your currency, and bank failures, people are looking to diversify more into precious metals. Also, as an affiliate of these bullion programs, you don't need to land a big fish to earn a commission.
The precious metal company mentioned here has opportunities for the average person to diversify into precious metals for only about $100, making it easy for you as an affiliate to get customers of all sizes or grab some for yourself.
Another high ticket commission, but more unusual, are private jet charters. There are jet charter companies that offer affiliate programs. And there are the high ticket luxury jewelry affiliate programs. With a bit of imagination and online research, you can find high paying affiliate programs. such as the gold and silver program
The first thing many marketers think is the most important thing to do is find something to promote, and how will they get traffic to their affiliate links? Yes, those things are important, but they are not really the most important thing to consider first.
The most important thing is the method, tools, or way you intend to promote your links. If you don't have a sound plan for how you will promote, it could lead to undesirable results. Thus, what you promote takes last place in importance.
Additionally, the advertising or traffic method used, such as using free social media methods, blogging, or paid advertising, also takes last place in my opinion based on past personal experience.
What is really important are the 2 different business models for promoting your links.
The first way is, create everything from scratch, Are you going to create your own website to promote your links?
For the best results if using the first method, using a custom-built landing page or website is a better method than having no internet presence at all. Just spamming your affiliate link all over social media does not convert to sales, is difficult to control or expand, and could get your link banned for spamming.
And some paid advertising platforms, such as Google, require you to have a landing page or website. If you don't have your own affiliate website or landing page, then you don't really exist online.
This first choice is where many beginners get overwhelmed, cut corners that lead to no sales, or give up, not knowing there is another method that is proven to work, especially for beginners.
With this second method, the affiliate takes the done-for-you approach. Uses a prebuilt platform with an integrated prebuilt money making website hub to promote their affiliate links. This done-for-you money hub is not just an old-school sales funnel. It can have a sales funnel, but it's not just a sales funnel, it's not just a website either. It can have its own integrated social media platform similar to Facebook, but it's not part of Facebook. It can also have it's own integrated blog, and its own live streaming page, like Zoom.com.
As of 2024, there is now a platform like no other that exists, as described above. In addition, the description I mentioned above is only a small portion of this powerhouse online marketing platform. This platform is a multi-million dollar custom-built platform that exists no other place at the time I write this. You can see this platform here
Below is image is a copy of an article from the Huffington Post
Surpassing $17 billion in 2023, affiliate marketing showed massive growth from its $13 billion valuation in 2016. This exponential rise underscores its pivotal role in modern commerce.
Looking into the future, the outlook for affiliate marketing remains outstanding, with continued expansion anticipated. The industry's ability to adapt to changing digital landscapes and its proven track record of driving revenue for the average person solidify its position as a cornerstone of online business strategies.
With advancements in technology, the proliferation of e-commerce platforms, and the ease and low cost of entry for marketers to get into affiliate marketing, this is unlocking new opportunities and revenue streams.
As businesses increasingly recognize the need for performance-based marketing and affiliates, opportunities for the average person to join affiliate programs are expected to soar, amplifying the sector's impact. Emerging trends such as influencer marketing and AI integration promise to reshape the affiliate marketing landscape, offering innovative avenues for engagement and monetization. Although not lastly, traditional affiliate marketing for the average person or beginner will most likely be the cornerstone of this industry.
In essence, the $17 billion milestone is not merely a testament to past success but a harbinger of the boundless potential that lies ahead for affiliate marketing in the digital era.
When it comes to knowing how affiliate marketing works, knowing your possible commission amounts is important. The amount of commission from your internet marketing should be sufficient to produce a profit. Below is a free commission calculator to help you quickly decide your possible commission per sale.
Enter the sale amount and the percentage of your commission, and you will know your commission amount.
Enter the total sales amount and commission rate to calculate your commission: