What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

Introduction. What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing. The online world has tremendously affected our everyday lives that sometimes it might even seem impossible to imagine our lives without technology and online communication. This trend naturally transferred to the business world, where the new technologies opened up so many exciting opportunities.

The businesses out there were no longer confined by location or restricted by infrastructure. Once everyone hurled to the big cities because these have been places enabling your business to grow. Businesses needed more qualified employees, they wanted exposure to more customers and opportunities to network and create partnerships.

All of these required your business to have headquarters in a big city, but this is no longer needed.  All you need is a computer and an internet connection, and you are ready to take your business anywhere you want.  

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Speaking of the business world, this term has so long been used about big corporations and management teams, but nowadays, we see more and more one-man businesses that grow and expand their reach globally. There is a significant number of businesses completely set up and run by a single person. Or they start as such, only to expand as their influence online begins to increase. Entrepreneurship has become a popular business model which helped so many wonderful business ideas come to life.  

The possibilities on the market are numerous, especially if we have in mind the online market.  There are so many different ways and strategies to set up and grow a business, depending on the niche, resources, knowledge, etc. What is safe to say is that these opportunities are a part of the online world, and new opportunities keep popping up. One of those is affiliate marketing.  

Affiliate marketing  

While every business starting nowadays will first create a website, optimize it and then head to social media to establish a presence there, not everyone will consider affiliate marketing as an opportunity at first. The goal of this ebook will be to show you the real potential of affiliate marketing and how developing a strategy of your own can help your profits soar and your business grow. 

For starters, you will need to understand the difference between being a merchant and an affiliate because these require two completely different strategies. These can develop your business in different ways, so you can either focus on one or choose to be both, a  merchant and an affiliate, which, although less frequent, is still doable.

You will also learn about business models that are available in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate programs and tools will be essential parts of your strategy, which is why you need to learn about those as well. Your goal will be to learn as much as possible about affiliate marketing opportunities and about different affiliate programs and tools that enable you to form your custom strategy, an approach, and a plan which will be oriented towards one idea – improve your business through affiliate marketing. 

Affiliate marketing is a part of online marketing, which means it is connected and related to all of the segments of online marketing. This is why there will be a chapter about this connection,  and how using affiliate marketing requires at least basic knowledge of online marketing in general.  

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What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing statistics 

Before defining the term and analyzing this concept of affiliate marketing, it is helpful to have in mind a couple of statistics that illustrate the state of affiliate marketing in the business world at this moment. 

  • Approximately 15% of the digital media industry’s revenue now comes from affiliate marketing. (BusinessInsider) 
  • Over 50% of top affiliate programs fall into 4 categories: Fashion, Sports, Health &  Beauty, and Travel (AMNavigator) 
  • The top factors for choosing an affiliate program are product or service relevancy  (18.15%), affiliate program reputation (15.97%), and affiliate network or tracking platform (11.58%). (AffStat) 
  • The most common places to find new affiliate programs include information on the merchant’s website searches on Google, and affiliate network websites. (AffStat)
  • Affiliate marketing will affect 14% of all e-commerce purchases in the United States.  (DigitalCommerce360) 
  • With the power of social media, content publishers, and a plethora of digital media readily available at their fingertips, today’s consumers are more educated and shopper-savvy than ever before. (Rakuten) 
  • When it comes to purchasing decisions, price point had the most influence on a  Millennial (62%), outweighing recommendations from a friend (55%), brand reputation (47%), and product quality (35%). (Rakuten) 
  • Mobile devices were crucial for Millennial mothers to search for the best possible price of a product (79.4%), read reviews (68.9%), and download coupons (67.1%).  Even in-store shopping was greatly influenced by Millennial mobile users, with over half (52%) comparing prices to other retailers. (Rakuten) 
  • More than 30% of affiliate-generated sales originate from a mobile device. (Awin)
  • Nearly 50% of affiliate-referred traffic originates from a mobile device. (Awin)
  • 40% of marketing professionals quote affiliate marketing as the most desired digital skill. (AMNavigator) 

What we can conclude about affiliate marketing is the following: 

  • Affiliate marketing has (and will continue to have) an important role in e-commerce.
  • Affiliate marketing is an amazing opportunity to increase sales (and revenue) for both merchants and affiliates.  
  • Content is the best way to promote affiliate links. 
  • Working on authenticity and reputation is the best way to earn credibility online and thus increase the profitability of affiliate marketing.  
  • Mobile is affecting affiliate marketing as well, which means the mobile user experience is something merchants and affiliates need to focus on.
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What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

What Is Affiliate  Marketing?

As one of the strategies available to online businesses, affiliate marketing offers plenty of opportunities but before you get started you need to understand the entire concept and what it is all about.  

The origin and development of affiliate marketing  

The entire concept of affiliate marketing is focused on sharing the revenue by partnering up with others, and it is the concept that has been around for a while before the world wide web even started. In terms of affiliate marketing as an online business model, we can trace back its origin back to 1994 when the first affiliate program was launched by PC Flowers & Gifts.

One year later, they had over 2000 partners in their affiliate program. Perhaps the best-known affiliate program today, Amazon’s affiliate program, was launched in 1996. E-commerce websites, in general, started seeing affiliate marketing as an excellent way for them to increase sales without any direct promotion on their part.  

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https://pixabay.com/en/wallet-money-credit-card-online-2125548/

Even though there have been several business models in affiliate marketing, what changed the game was the introduction of Web 2.0. This shifted the focus to user-generated content, optimization, and integration of social media.  

As a result, affiliate marketing became even more available to ordinary people, bloggers,  influencers, etc. who suddenly started seeing this type of marketing as a perfect way for them to monetize their online influence. No longer has this partnership been available for businesses only, but individuals started taking a massive role in the concept, changing the world of affiliate marketing for good.  

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What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing Defined 

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing. This means that the efficiency evaluation and reward systems are based on performance, which can be evaluated at specific intervals, or can have a particular goal that needs to be achieved.  

There are two roles in affiliate marketing that are crucial for this entire system to work.

First,  there are merchants, who decide to create an affiliate program. They provide an offer for others to promote their business and earn their commission. On the other side, there are affiliates, who are also known as publishers. They are the ones that are interested in joining an affiliate program.  

The main reason for merchants to create an affiliate program in the first place is the potential to increase sales and boost profit with no direct promotional campaign, except for enabling affiliates to join the program. Since the entire concept of affiliate marketing is performance-based, there is no investment or pre-payment required by the merchants.  

Affiliates are also motivated by profit to join an affiliate program. Once they enter the program,  they can promote the merchant’s products in any form they can, to increase sales. Their performance is tracked using trackable links and they are paid based on that performance, i.e., based on the conversions they achieve. 

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What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

Digital buyers  

Apart from merchants and affiliates, who take an active role in affiliate marketing, it is also important to mention digital buyers. These are the modern consumers who are experiencing the buying process in a completely different way nowadays. Not only does the habit of buying online instead of offline change rapidly, but the way consumers buy is also changing.  

Digital buyers are more prone to explore products before they buy. This is how showrooming and web rooming were introduced in e-commerce. Nowadays, buyers want recommendations, and they want to see the benefits of the product. They look for recommendations from friends and people they respect (bloggers, influencers, etc.).  

All of this has a positive influence on affiliate marketing because it increases the chance of online buyers finding the products through recommended (affiliate) links. Furthermore, a lot of surveys show that affiliate marketing drives performance, which includes brand discovery and awareness, as well as customer engagement and purchase. Affiliate marketing connects merchants and buyers and affiliates are those who connect the two. 

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Getting started  

Learning more about affiliate marketing (by reading this ebook for example) is the first step that is going to help you get started with this type of marketing. You must understand the basics to be able to explore your options and how you can leverage the potential of affiliate marketing.  

As mentioned above, you will have to choose one of the two roles in affiliate marketing. If you have a product and you need help with the promotion of that product, then you will be a merchant.  On the other hand, if you have a great blog, lots of subscribers, or online influence, and you want to cash that in, you can do that by becoming an affiliate.  

We can summarize the entire process by defining the tasks of these two participants.

On one side, a merchant sets up a program. He provides everything needed for the product promotion, including images and links. Affiliates join this program and start advertising the product using online resources. Their activity is being tracked through links. Once the online user clicks on an affiliate link, that activity is stored in the user’s browser cookies. When the user buys a product, and this has been detected as a visit originating from an affiliate link, that affiliate is paid a  commission.  

The time interval during which the cookies stay in the browser can be different from one website to another, but it is usually a period of 30 or 60 days. This means that the transaction can be detected during that time interval and still be contributed to the affiliate.

For example,  the user clicks on the affiliate link, and checks out the product, but decides not to buy. However, the same user goes back and buys the product days later. This sale can still be attributed to the affiliate if the cookies are stored in the browser.  

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What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

Types of affiliate websites  

Affiliate links can be shared on several different types of websites including: 

  • Price/Feature comparison websites 
  • Product review websites 
  • Personal websites 
  • Coupon websites  
  • File-sharing websites 
  • Video-sharing websites  
  • Shopping directories 

There is no limitation when it comes to promoting an affiliate link, so an affiliate can use multiple resources to share these links online. The more exposure the link gets, the more likely it is for the affiliate to earn the commission. 

What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing
What Is Affiliate Marketing? Definition, And Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

Benefits of affiliate marketing  

The tremendous popularity of this method of online marketing is the result of many benefits that can be obtained, for both merchants and affiliates.  

Benefits for merchants  

There are several benefits for merchants which encourage them to create and make available affiliate programs for their products and use this as a way to grow their businesses in the digital world.  

Pay for performance  

With affiliate marketing, merchants do not need any investment. There is no risk involved because no payment is made in advance. Affiliate marketing is often called performance-based marketing, which means the affiliates are only paid based on their performance. Once the sale is completed, the affiliate is paid a percentage of that sale. 

Easy tracking  

Trackable links and affiliate marketing tools are used to create and track the performance of the affiliate links. This way, the merchants can successfully manage and monitor the traffic and inbound links generated by the affiliates.  

Exposure and more inbound links 

Since affiliate marketing is all about affiliates promoting your links, with methods that include posting the links on their website(s) or blog(s), you will likely increase the exposure of your brand as well as the search engine visibility. If the websites that link to you have a good domain or paid authority, this will be a great boost for your SEO.

You will have to be careful here because you should avoid accepting affiliates who are likely to post links on spammy websites or use suspicious methods to promote the links. This can harm your site’s reputation and thus have a negative influence on the site’s search engine ranking.  

Increase in traffic through referrals  

Another benefit obtained through links in affiliate marketing is an increase in traffic. To make this traffic an asset of yours, you will need to have a compelling landing page and a  powerful CTA, to make sure you take advantage of the traffic you receive through affiliate links.  You might also want to generate leads through an offer or online promotion, which is another aspect you will need to include when designing the landing page.  

Lead generation 

Not only do you get to increase traffic and amplify sales, but you will also generate leads at the same time, with no additional costs involved. It is necessary to create a website page that will encourage users to sign up or claim an offer, after which they can become a part of your mailing list. Regardless of the affiliate’s performance and earned commissions, these leads remain your asset that can be used later on for email campaigns.  

Full control over commission rates, promo materials, and selection of affiliates  

When you set up an affiliate program, you define the terms for participation, which means that the commission and other terms (such as cookies’ life) are in your control. The affiliates who want to join will have to accept those terms. You will also provide images and other materials used for the promotion, so here is another aspect you can control. 

Benefits for affiliates 

When it comes to affiliates, affiliate marketing also provides many benefits:

No investment  

Unlike opening your online store, where you will need an investment to start, affiliate marketing helps you promote and sell products with no investment on your part. You do not own the products, so there are no costs of making or buying products. The only investment needed is the promotion of the product.  

Minimal or no operating costs 

If you already have a website or a blog and influential social media channels, you will not have additional costs. However, if you are starting without any of these, you will need to create a  website (or blog) and set up social media channels, and these will involve certain expenses,  depending on whether you will need assistance with those tasks or you will do them on your own. The costs involved would be for website maintenance, content creation, and content promotion. 

No need to stock products  

Since you do not own the products you are promoting, you will not need a warehouse to stock the products. If those are physical products, you will not be involved in the shipping process either. The only goal you have is to promote the product and direct the buyer to the website where the product can be bought using your affiliate link. Handling the products and shipping is done by a merchant, and it does not require your involvement. 

Possibility to earn money 24/7 

Affiliate links bring you profit at any moment of the day. Any time the visitors click on the link the activity is tracked and there is a possibility to earn a commission if the conversion is completed. This kind of passive income is an excellent opportunity for bloggers to make a profit even when they are focused on other projects. 

Large audience to reach online 

Affiliate marketing offers great potential because you are not limited by a specific territory or language. This helps you reach a large group of people, which results in more opportunities to earn from affiliate link promotions.  

Multiple platforms to use for the promotion  

As an affiliate, you will have many platforms to use to promote the products. The most common way to do so is using your website or blog, but social networks can also be used for such promotion.  

Both merchants and affiliates can use affiliate marketing to grow their business online. They are joined by one common goal – to increase profit. Affiliates’ willingness to promote merchant’s products is motivated by the possibility to earn a part of the profit. On the other hand, a  merchant is motivated to increase sales and is willing to share the profit in exchange for a new  (or often recurring) customer.  

It is a win-win relationship which is the main reason why affiliate marketing continues to be often used in online marketing. 

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