Whether you’re an entrepreneur, aspiring blogger, or global enterprise CEO, content marketing is an excellent way to put your brand on the map in every corner of the internet.
But affiliate marketing takes your earning potential to the next level.
In fact, affiliate marketing is now responsible for driving 16% of online sales in a world where 81% of consumers research products before buying.
The question is:
How will your business take advantage of an affiliate income stream?
Well, this is our definitive guide to affiliate marketing — starting from square one!
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is passive income at its finest. It’s a commission-based model where a website owner (known as an “affiliate” or “publisher”) promotes another retailer’s products or services in exchange for a cut.
Here’s how it works:
A publisher promotes a product on their blog, Instagram — really anywhere their followers interact with them.
They include an “affiliate link” to a page where readers can purchase the product.
When a user clicks the link, it saves a tracking cookie on their device, set to expire on a certain date (sometimes up to 30 days).
The affiliate program or network attributes any purchases linked to that tracking cookie.
And, when they do …
The affiliate earns a commission or a percentage of the sale on any products they help sell. After all, if it weren’t for your savvy marketing efforts, that sale wouldn’t have happened!
Types of Affiliate Marketing
35% of affiliate marketers pull in $20,000+ per year.
(Hence, the travel bloggers who brag about sipping Mojitos on the beach in the Caribbean while the rest of us slave away at 9-to-5 desk jobs.)
via GIPHY
What nobody tells you is that affiliate commissions come in a few shapes and sizes, each with its own advantages.
The three most common structures include:
Per Sale
In the per-sale structure, you earn a percentage of the sales price for every sale your affiliate links generate. This is the most popular type of affiliate marketing and carries the most earning potential.
…as long as you promote high-ticket items.
A 5% flat rate is chump change if you’re promoting products with $5 price tags. That’ll afford you a single gumball (yipee). But a 5% commission on a $2,000 flat-screen TV bumps your earnings up to a much sweeter $100.
Per Click
The pay-per-click (PPC) method is equivalent to “renting” out ad space on your website. When a visitor clicks the ad and redirects to a retailer’s site, the network pays you for the traffic, often at a per-1000-visitor rate.
PPC ads are a goldmine for websites drawing monthly traffic in the seven figures. Even if you partner with a network that pays a measly $15 for every 1,000 clicks, a 10% conversion rate will yield $1,500/month!
Per Lead
The per-lead strategy is popular in the service industry, meaning commission doesn’t rely on driving sales to a company’s products. A “lead” could be a user signing up for a free trial, scheduling a call, or creating an account.
Per-lead affiliate programs tend to be stingier with their rates. But with a lower bar to hurdle and the word “FREE” attached to offers, visitors are more willing to bite.
Commission rates could be a few cents, but if you recruit a new customer, that rate could skyrocket beyond $100 per lead!
How Much Can You Earn With Affiliate Marketing?
The top 3% of affiliates pocket upwards of $150,000/year in purely passive income. But for the average affiliate, a salary of $20,000/year — or about $1,667/month — is more realistic.
We’ll touch on how to maximize your earning potential later on!
How to Start Affiliate Marketing
Whether you’re the brains behind a new startup or planning to monetize your company’s current website, all paths lead to affiliate marketing.
In fact, 84% of your fellow publishers and 81% of all advertisers are already members of the affiliate marketing scene.
(Hey, we’re not one to encourage following the crowd, especially after the whole Tide Pod fiasco of 2017. But the facts speak for themselves!)
So how do you turn your website into a passive-income machine? Or your Instagram business profile? Or even email marketing campaigns?
Below, we’ll reveal our step-by-step beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing, from choosing a blog niche to boosting your website conversions.
1. Find a Blog Niche
There’s no definitive rule in content marketing that says you need a blog niche. But without one, you’re shouting into the Google void, and your message is being drowned out in the sea of its 130 trillion pages (literally).
We talk more about how to narrow down blog niches in our “What to Blog About” article. But let’s put an affiliate marketing spin on the process.
When choosing a niche, find one that:
Doesn’t Have Insane Competition
The search volume shouldn’t be so low that monthly traffic never exceeds triple digits. Nor should it be so competitive that you’re stranded in Google Wasteland somewhere beyond page 20.
