This type of marketing has greatly reduced the entrepreneurship admittance criteria in today’s world. Any business entails buying and selling. To begin a number of businesses, one has to invest in an inventory or whatever services they intend to offer.
Affiliate marketing gives you an inventory at no cost whatsoever, but pays you a commission on each sale you make. How convenient is that. As a blogger, i can tell you this is always a great source of income. Unfortunately there aren’t too many who have hopped in and taken advantage of this potential gold mine.
An online survey i read on “blossomtheme.com”, about 21 random but successful bloggers, revealed that affiliate marketing brought in the highest income per month, surpassed only in a few cases, by sales of the author’s personal products. After putting in time building a steady flow of website traffic, they were able to earn passively through affiliate marketing, and even experienced continuous growth in income as time went on.
This model is far from complicated, three pieces make up the whole formula – the seller/producer, the affiliate and consumer. Your position there is the affiliate(or middleman). What may be required from you is that you establish a good platform where potential customers can visit and then make purchases. On your website, you can have links within the body of your posts or you can simply just put banners on your homepage. It’s totally up to you.
Affiliate programs have become very popular because of their ability to boost sales and revenue. Sellers can have more eyes see their merchandise, affiliates can also earn a commission on sale, and the consumers, their satisfaction. Below are 10 affiliate companies you might want to consider is you are looking to get involved in this business:
• Amazon associates.
• eBay Partners.
• Shopify affiliate program
• Bluehost affiliate program
• Google Adsense.
• Jumia affiliates.
• Clickbank.
• Shareasale.
• Konga affiliate program.
• Travelstart
Types of affiliates
Affiliate marketing is a commission based business, within it are three basic models. Let’s discuss these below:
1) Unattached affiliate marketing: this is often referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. In this form of affiliate marketing, the affiliate has nothing to do with the merchandise. The merchant is simply displaying products on your platform (e.g. website, blog) and the more clicks on this link, the more your commission. A familiar name would be the Google adsense.
2) Related affiliate marketing: with this, ads placed on your website are related to your niche. It’s a more effective means of driving sales for the seller and affiliates. The reason is, most sites attract a specific audience and displaying ads in the same niche as a website will greatly increase the conversion (visitor to buyer) rate. Kindly note that these affiliates don’t necessarily have to be consumers of the merchandise marketed on their sites. That’s for these next set of affiliates…
3) Involved affiliate marketing: affiliates in this category aren’t just middlemen. They use or have used these products and so they recommend it to their audience, who have confidence in their judgement. They are able to boost sales through detailed reviews and persuasion.
There is no restriction on what type of merchandise an affiliate can display on their site. But amongst all three, I’d say the best route would be to display products related to your niche (related affiliate marketing). You already have a “niche-specific” audience and so it’s a lot easier to convert them. Whether or not you’re a direct consumer of the merchandise.
In some cases, however, I’d also advise you simply try out what affiliate products might appeal to the majority of your audience, whether its niche related or not. This is what I’ve been testing out on my own website. Studying consumer behaviour can give you all the insight you need to get that winning product.
