How to multiply your website’s revenue with Affiliate Marketing

Are you still advertising on blogs? Affiliate marketing can make more money

Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Marketing is the blog you are reading that has both Google Adsense ads and affiliate marketing links on it. Over the course of a month, affiliate marketing earns 10 times more than advertising. Many bloggers are still earning money from Google Adsense ads.

If these bloggers can also use their own web traffic channels to run affiliate marketing, then their profit prospects will be multiplied.

1. What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is simply a way to get a cut of what someone else sells. Affiliate marketing is the process by which a company can promote its products with the help of its partners, so that sales can grow rapidly, and then give some of the profits earned to these marketing partners. Everyone is happy. It is a mutually beneficial and win-win model for making money.

On the other hand, from the promoter’s perspectvie, there is no capital investment, no inventory and no customer service. Therefore, it is a very low-risk and profitable way to make money online.

The operation of affiliate marketing can be simply explained as follows:

• An advertiser makes an affiliate offer and then recruits a group of publishers to help promote it.
• The partners use their own marketing channels (e.g. blogs, Facebook fans, YouTube channels, or paid advertisements) and place a relevant affiliate link. As soon as a visitor clicks on this link, she comes to the product page of the company. You will have the opportunity to make further transactions.
• For each transaction or task, the vendor will pay the affiliate a commission for the corresponding profit.

2. Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is very much like a traditional industry of housing brokerage or insurance solicitation. It is also like an online version of a sales job. As long as the orders are completed online, you will be paid a performance bonus.

There are several advantages to this type of marketing using the Internet:

• It’s free to join – most affiliate marketing programs are free to join. It is a very friendly way to earn money online.
• It is a great source of passive income. The marketing pipeline is available year-round, and site visitors can complete transactions at any time of the day or night through promotional links. This allows you to make passive income even while you are sleeping.
• No need to go to the trouble of visiting customers and avoiding the embarrassment of being rejected face-to-face or by phone
• You only focus on product marketing, and the money flow, logistics and follow-up customer service are all handled by the manufacturer. It can be considered a risk-free way to earn money online
• There is no geographical restriction. Through online marketing, you can sell your products to the Unitied States, Europe or even further away to China.
• Through different online media traffic, you can reach a large number of potential customers. This greatly increases your chances of making a profit.

3. The function of Affiliate Marketing Network (AMN)

Some advertisers run their own affiliate programs, but most of them entrust affiliate marketing platforms to help them manage them. The benefits are:

• The platform provides a comprehensive transaction tracking system, such as tracking codes, promotional links, transaction records and audit bonuses.
• There is a Marketing Account Manager (AM, Affiliate Manager) to answer and solve any problems that members may encounter while promoting.
• The platform will be responsible for recruiting new members and screening qualified promoters so that the affiliate program will have enough manpower to do a good job in marketing.

From a publisher’s perspective, the affiliate marketing platform brings many businesses together in one place, making it easy for members to choose the affiliate program they like. As long as you find a good selling product with a good bonus. Just apply for its promotion. Start marketing and earn commissions.

Of course, members can also operate many affiliate programs at once, test to see which one has a higher conversion rate and is more profitable, and then increase their marketing efforts. Then you can increase your income quickly.

4. Types of Affiliate Marketing Programs

There are many different types of affiliate marketing, but here we will only categorize it into two different types:

CPS (Cost per Sale) – bonus based on sales volume. It is mainly for physical products but also includes some digital products. This is the main type of affiliate marketing currently in use, and the famous Amazon Associates is marketing this type of product. With more than a million products currently available on Amazon.com, the number of affiliate programs available to affiliates is staggering.

Generally speaking, for CPS affiliate programs that focus on promoting physical products, the merchant will most likely offer a commission ranging from 2% to 10% of the sale price of the product to the promoter.

However, if the product or service being promoted is digital, such as e-books, online courses, software, etc., then the commission is much higher. Then the commission will be much higher. Sometimes it can come to 50% of the unit price of the product, or even up to 70%. This type of affiliate marketing platform that specializes in selling digital products is represented by ClickBank.

In fact, after a digital product developer has made a good product, he can keep selling it indefinitely, because there are no inventory and delivery problems, and the cost of the product is mostly very low. Therefore, the commission can be much higher than the physical goods.

CPA (Cost per Action) – bonuses are calculated based on the number of tasks completed.
These tasks include collecting a list of customers, applying for a bank credit card, joining a market survey, renting a cloud software service, or downloading a mobile game. Because of the diversity of marketing projects, there are several sub-categories that have been developed, the most common being:

CPL (Cost Per Lead) – This type of marketing program is mainly used to obtain a list of customers or to complete a membership registration.

CPI (Cost per Install) – This is mainly for downloading cell phone games, apps and applications. Visitors will receive a bonus for each download and installation.

Pay per Call – When someone sees your advertised phone number and uses it to call and ask for information about the product. For each successful call, you will receive a bonus. This type of promotion is now being expanded to include mobile-based Click2Call and Click2SMS. This makes the marketing program even more flexible.

COD (Cash on Delivery) – also known as Cash on Delivery. In the early days of many beauty and health care marketing programs, customers were given a free trial before being automatically charged (rebill). Later, consumer protection measures in countries such as the United States became more stringent, and they had to switch to COD. This type of marketing program is now very popular. The marketing is also extended to many new trendy products.

5. How to choose a good affiliate marketing platform

What should I look for in a good affiliate marketing platform? Make sure that the platform has the products you want to promote

• The company’s reputation should be good – try to choose a company that is large and has been in business for a long time. Also pay attention to any negative reviews on the Internet. Such as untimely payment of profit bonuses or malicious deduction of promoters’ commissions
• Payment method – Generally, bonus payments are made through PayPal, bank transfer or check.
• Minimum bonus amount – The current standard is about $100 or more. Of course, the lower the required amount, the better it is for you.
• Commission payout cycle – The commission payout cycle – the platform confirms the validity of the promotion bonuses, some of which are paid out within a month, while others take 3 months or more to pay you. For platforms with a long payout cycle, it increases the risk of poor turnaround or not getting paid, so you need to consider whether it is worthwhile to help them with their promotions.

6. Apply for an affiliate program

Membership in most affiliate marketing platforms or affiliate programs is free. Each platform has a different degree of difficulty in qualifying. Generally, CPA-based platforms are more stringent. Sometimes there will be a phone interview.

In fact, sometimes Sofia’s membership applications are rejected, so try a few more times and there’s always room for acceptance. You may also want to use Skimlinks, an affiliate marketing service.

Skimlinks brings together about 50 of the world’s leading affiliate marketing platforms (e.g. Amazon Affiliate, CJ Affiliate), offering close to 50,000 vendors with affiliate programs for you to join freely.

Skimlinks is easy to apply for and currently has over 60,000 members worldwide. More than half of the top 100 U.S. online media outlets such as USA Today and Buzzfeed are its users. Of course, it is also used in the blogs of “Webearphia.com“!

The advantage of using Skimlinks is that you don’t have to apply to join individual affiliate marketing programs once and for all. The downside, of course, is that it takes a cut. About 25% of the profit you earn will be deducted as a service fee.

7. How to choose an affiliate marketing program

There are often more than a hundred or even a thousand affiliate marketing programs, and sometimes it can be quite overwhelming to choose one. Sophia has put together some points to consider when choosing one:

1. The best way to promote the product and the content of the site – for example, if a travel blog on the promotion of floor sweeping robots. It may seem quite abrupt.
2. Promote as many popular products as possible – Most affiliate platforms will make a list of the most popular products with high transaction volume. You can make good use of this statistical data to find the ideal products to market. Generally, hot products have several characteristics – good brand reputation, excellent quality, high conversion rate, good profit bonuses, etc.
3. Comparison of three different products, not to lose – sometimes on different platforms, you will find the exact same product, but each platform gives a different commission. This time you have to be diligent to do a comparison, pick out the high bonus program to promote.
4. Find the sweet spot where the product sells best – if the product is very cheap, you will get less money. If the unit price of the product is very high, it may be very difficult to close the deal and not get the commission. How to find out the hot deal price, increase the number of orders (and get more bonuses), you may need to spend some time to observe and analyze.
5. The longer the validity of the cookie, the better – Amazon affiliate program tracking code is only valid for one day, visitors through the promotion link to Amazon shopping, if the transaction is not completed within 24 hours, then you do not get the commission. Most of the current promotions from vendors have cookies that last between 30 and 90 days. The longer the cookie expiration date, the better for you.
   Choose products that are not easily obsolete – Some electronic products are updated very frequently, so if you promote this type of product, you will need to update your marketing copy every once in a while. This will inevitably create a lot of workloads. For example, you specialize in marketing popular cell phones and introduce more than 20 models in one go on your blog. But then a new model comes out the next year, and you have to change your marketing content all over again.
   Think about it, this will not be very tiring. Therefore, when looking for products to promote, it is best to choose something that will not fade in popularity (such as ergonomic chairs) to promote.
6. Pay attention to promotion restrictions – Many affiliate programs have promotion restrictions. If you don’t follow these rules, your bonuses will be forfeited. It’s like working for nothing. Similar restrictions apply when operating keyword ads (PPC, Pay per Click), which prohibit the purchase of brand-related word sets. In addition, some internet traffic channels may also be on the prohibited list. For example, pop-ups cannot be used for promotional purposes.
7. Make sure the landing page is highly convincing – When a visitor arrives at the product page through your promotion link if he finds the content boring and unconvincing, the order will not be closed. Then the order will not be closed. You won’t get the bonus either.

So, when choosing an affiliate program, make sure the company’s product page is appealing. Make the customer willing to order.

8. Which is more profitable, CPS or CPA Affiliate Program?

Both camps have people making very good money. Most of the CPS type marketing programs are operated through websites/blogs. Once a website has a significant amount of traffic, it can gradually bring in closed orders, making it a good passive revenue stream.

In addition, many people will sell their websites for about 30 times the average monthly income after making the website profitable. That is, if the monthly affiliate marketing revenue is $10,000, you have the opportunity to make $300,000 for yourself on a website auction platform like Flippa.

As for CPA operators, many of them choose to use the media buy approach to their business. The advantage of this is that you can immediately buy a huge amount of traffic to operate an affiliate program and make money very quickly. This type of advertising operation can be very profitable, but it requires a lot of money and skill.

First of all, there is a time lag between paying for the ads and actually receiving the commissions, so you will encounter cash flow problems. On the technical side, there are more issues to deal with in terms of ad placement, such as:

• Choosing the type of traffic: what kind of traffic you want to use to advertise. Google keyword traffic, social media traffic, native ads, pop-up/under traffic, push notification traffic, etc. The price and quality of each kind of traffic are different, so you have to know how to choose.
• The choice and operation of advertising platforms: Google Ads, FB ads, and many third-party ad traffic trading platforms (Outbarin, PopAds…)
• Ad tracker operation and use: Tracker is an indispensable tool to measure the effectiveness of advertising.  For example, Voluum.
• Web hosting enhancements and content delivery network (CDN, Content Delivery Network) settings. The landing page will be more responsive.
• Use of ad spying tools: mainly for analyzing competitors’ ad copy. To stimulate more marketing inspiration.  Such as WhatRunsWhere, and AdPlexity.
• Ad copy and landing pages are continuously optimized to improve conversion rates

There is a wide range of advertising techniques available, which may be confusing to the uninitiated. Therefore, CPA affiliate marketing with paid ads is more suitable for experienced people.

9. Affiliate Marketing Payments

Generally speaking, it takes about 30 to 60 days to receive a commission on successful orders. Affiliate marketing platforms will bill you once a month for your bonuses and send you money via the payment method you instructed.

The most common ways to receive your money are through bank transfer or through PayPal, you can even use the virtual personal bank account it offers in the U.S. (or other major foreign currencies) to collect commissions earned in foreign currency (such as Amazon affiliate marketing revenue).

10. Jargon is often used in affiliate marketing

Here is a list of a few terms that you will often see, and occasionally use to make you look more “professional” .

AM – Affiliate Manager. Many CPA oriented affiliate marketing platforms often assign an AM to act as a contact point for you after you join as an affiliate. The AM will usually advise you on which marketing programs have good conversion rates. The AM will also help you with any marketing challenges you may encounter.

Cap – usually refers to the amount of money you spend each month on marketing. Some affiliate programs have budgetary restrictions or need to control the quality of the campaign (e.g. list collection), and the platform will give you an amount in advance. If you exceed your quota, you may not receive a profit bonus.

Geo – refers to the country where the marketing plan is valid. If you are not in the list of successful orders, you will not receive a commission.

Lead – the number of active orders/jobs

Offer – refers to the affiliate program itself. Some people use the word campaign instead.

Conclusion

If your current website or YouTube channel’s primary source of income is from Google Adsense ads, you should consider affiliate marketing to create a second revenue stream for yourself.

Affiliate marketing can often generate much more revenue than advertising. I believe that in the near future, it will become one of the most important sources of your online profits.