What Is Affiliate Marketing? Everything You Need To Know About Affiliate Marketing

Today's market has witnessed the sharp increase of affliate marketing. This model is becoming more and more exciting with the rapid participation of publishers and advertisers. So what is affiliate marketing? How to start affiliate marketing? Why is this model attracting so many participants?

Join FieldCheck to find all the answers to the above questions in the following content.

Affiliate marketing program

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a model of marketing products and services. Accordingly, distributors, also known as affiliates or publishers, will use their channels or methods to promote and attract end users to buy or use services from suppliers.

When successfully marketing to the end consumer, affiliates will receive a commission. Affiliate marketing can be seen as a form of cooperation for online stores.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

At that time, the shop owner - Advertiser and collaborator - publisher aim to find and attract potential customers, convince them to purchase and receive commissions for successful orders.

For traditional models, advertisers often face many inadequacies in the process:

• Self-employment
• Train each publisher
• Merchandise management
• Track your order successfully or not

The above work is to avoid affecting the interests of both parties. Therefore, the affiliate network model becomes an intermediary bridge to help provide information at the same time to a series of publishers of shop owners or businesses/suppliers.

Publishers are also provided with a diverse product portfolio to choose from. In addition, the management of orders also becomes fast and transparent and ensures the interests of both parties.

How to Do Affiliate Marketing

The operating model of affiliate marketing is shown through the following steps:

• Step 1: Potential customers visit the publisher's website.
• Step 2: Customers see links/banners promoting products/services of publishers. Then, they accept the links tracked from the affiliate network. Customers will not know that it is an affiliate marketing link if the website owner does not inform them that the website has integrated affiliate marketing.
• Step 3: Clicks will be tracked by the affiliate network and cookies of the devices used by the client.
• Step 4: Customers make an application and complete the online application.
• Step 5: Advertisers receive reports from affiliate networks about successful orders.
• Step 6: After the affiliate network notifies advertisers, advertisers confirm order returns for those successful orders.
• Step 7: Affiliate network sends commissions to publishers.

Most advertisers will cooperate with affiliate networks in tracking their affiliate marketing programs. Affiliate networks provide a digital platform to assist in tracking affiliate links placed in the text links and banners on affiliate websites.

How affiliate marketing works

When the end user clicks on that link, a cookie will be attached to the device and recognized by the affiliate network. The affiliate networks check the cookies when an order is completed on the advertisers' websites.

If it is an affiliate network publisher, that order will be recorded on the platform. Based on the network's digital platform, advertisers and publishers track the number of orders recorded and the number of commissions received.

Shortly, the affiliate marketing model can predate the Internet, yet regarding digital marketing, cookie and analytics make it a billion-dollar market. A business that runs this model could track the URLs bringging in leads and see the conversion to sales via internal analytics.

Affiliate Marketing Pricing Models

The model for pricing in affiliate marketing is Cost per Action (CPA). This is the optimal way to charge advertising because it is based on the buying behavior of the end user.

In addition, suppliers only pay fees when an order to order a product or service is successfully fulfilled for the distributor here, who is the publisher.

CPA presents a highly competitive advantage over other charging models. 

For example, for Cost per thousand impressions (CPM - a form of charging based on the number of impressions or cost per click (CPC), the Advertiser can pay a commission for the number of virtual visits and clicks.

How to do affiliate marketing?

Some of the current forms of advertising fees:

• Cost per order: the publisher will receive a commission based on the number of successful orders on the website.
• Cost per lead: the commission will be charged to the publisher when the customer fills in all information in the registration form.
• Cost per sale: publisher receives a commission when advertisers confirm the order.

Advantages When Doing Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing possesses several advantages as follows:

• Increase passive income for publishers: Publishers only take an effort to promote in the first stage to earn a passive income for affiliate marketing. You can earn from Amazon affiliate marketing or Shopee affiliate marketing.
• High flexibility: Publishers can actively arrange their time to promote products/services. In addition, you can be active in your work location as long as you have an Internet connection.
• Low cost: Most affiliate marketing programs do not charge publication fees.
• No need to buy products: Publishers do not need to buy products from suppliers but only need to promote them to earn commissions from advertisers.

Promote products and services through affiliate marketing

Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing

However, affiliate marketing still has some limitations as follows:

• High competitiveness: Recent years have witnessed an explosion of affiliate marketing. The more people participate in this piece of cake, the competition also increases significantly.

To bring in an attractive passive income requires publishers to put in more effort than others.

• Late payment: Another problem is late payment for publishers. Affiliate networks usually pay publishers at the end of the month. However, some programs still cannot pay publisher commissions as expected.
• Time: Publishers need to understand the market as well as the shopping needs of customers. Alternatively, you can consider existing affiliate programs like Amazon affiliate program to join.

If the marketing campaign is not effective, publishers also need to take the time to make timely changes.

Affiliate Marketing Terms

Some of the techniques used in affiliate marketing include:

• Publisher: a person who promotes products and services on his website or channels to make money online through commissions.
• Advertiser: the provider of products/services and pays a commission to the publisher.
• Affiliate network: An intermediary between Advertiser and Publisher. The network will provide digital platforms such as banners, affiliate links, statistics, conversion rate management, click-through rates and commissions. This is also the place to solve problems arising between Advertisers and Publishers.
• Affiliate link: This is a link containing the ID and publisher name for the affiliate marketing program. This link will help affiliate networks record the number of clicks on the publisher's website.
• Commission: This is the commission paid to the publisher when the orders placed on their website are successfully recorded.

Find passive income with affiliate marketing

There are also some other performance terms when doing affiliate marketing as follows:

• Impression: This term refers to the amount reached by the link on the visitor's browser. Impressions can tell the performance of affiliate links.
• Conversion rate: this is the conversion rate when a customer clicks on the affiliate link and makes a successful purchase of a product or service.
• Click through rate (CTR): this is the rate of clicking on the affiliate link. For example, when your website has 100 impressions and ten clicks, the CRT will be 10%.
• Approval rate: approval rate - this is an important rate for affiliates and MMOs - making money online.
• Earning per click (EPC): income based on the number of clicks.
• Return on investment (ROI)

Affiliate Marketing Experience For Newbies

Here is how to do affiliate marketing for beginners that you can refer to:

1. Find the right niche

You can write beauty articles and attach affiliate links with products sold on Lazada, Shopee or Amazon. When potential customers search and read the article, they can click on the link placed on the website. After that, a commission will be charged for that order.

The reason for choosing the beauty industry is because cosmetics is a commodity with strong purchasing power and is easy to sell because of high demand.

Some other niches where you can join affiliate marketing include:

• Food
• Fashion
• Travel
• Games
• Course
• Health
• Music
• Sport

Another specific example is as follows: If you are a lover of learning English, you can design lectures or materials related to learning English on your website or social networks.

In it, you can attach links to sell English learning books or English courses available in the affiliate program. For example, the pronunciation course from Elsa.

Blogging

When choosing a niche market, it is necessary to check whether consumer demand is high or not to avoid wasting time and effort.

2. Create a blog or social channel, TikTok or YouTube

You can make money online with affiliate marketing on three channels: blogs, videos on TikTok or YouTube and run ads.

YouTube channel

It should be noted that for the form of running ads, you will need to spend an initial amount of capital. Here is a summary of the differences between a TikTok/YouTube channel and a blog:

• Content: The blog needs articles, and YouTube/TikTok channels need videos
• SEO traffic: YouTube/Tiktok videos are easier to get views than blogs
• SEO difficulty: YouTube/TikTok gives faster results than blogs, and SEO on videos is easier than on blogs
• Cost: Both methods require initial capital to create the product, such as domain fees, hosting, cameras, etc.

3. Sign up for an affiliate marketing program

To get started, you must create your account at affiliate networks and participate in running programs.

The best affiliate programs for beginners include Accesstrade, CJ, and Optimise. There are also other affiliate marketing campaigns on other websites, such as:

• Shopee, Tiki, Lazada: The commission rate on this e-commerce site ranges from 1% to 13%
• Fiverr: Publishers can earn commissions ranging from $15 to $50
• Binance: Commission Rate: 20% - 40% fee per transaction
• Coursera: Commission rate: 45%

4. Set affiliate link

You can get affiliate links on your website when you join the affiliate program. Example: https://shp.ee/vk3aim9

Most affiliate programs allow cookies to be stored for 30 days. Others allow 7 – 90 days.

5. Shorten links

Amazon sales page allows shortening direct marketing links on the website. For programs on other sites, you can use a plugin named URL Shortener to shorten affiliate links to insert into your website.

6. Increase traffic

The important thing that you need to focus on is increasing traffic to your website. This will help you increase your conversion rate so you can earn commissions.

To do that, you need to learn about SEO - Search Engine Optimization. This is a tool to help optimize the results displayed on Google or YouTube.

7. Create a content store for your channel

To grow your affiliate channel better, you need to diversify the content you write or create videos on your website or YouTube/TikTok channel.

TikTok

Some good tips on how to do affiliate marketing to help you get topics for your content include:

• Search the "People also ask" section on Google to know consumers' needs.
• The number of posts on average is 1-2 posts/week and should be maintained for a while.

Wrapping Up

Above is the entire content about affiliate marketing that you can refer to. With competitive advantages such as high flexibility, increased passive income, and no need to spend capital to buy products, marketing programs attract many participants.

But this also creates some disadvantages, such as high competition for publishers. FieldCheck hopes that you have enough information yourself in the article. Good luck!