How do affiliates make money?

Affiliate marketing is a way to make money online, in some cases lots of money is being made as affiliate marketers grab a substantial portion of online sales.

Don’t believe any stories that you hear about how it is so easy to make money as an affiliate; it just isn’t true nobody pays you for doing nothing.!!

The truth is yes anybody who is willing to do this online Entrepreneur certification course and learns how to become an affiliate marketer the right way has the potential to make a lot of money.

The secret to making money online as an affiliate is to immerse yourself in this excellent training, complete the full course, then put everything that you have learned into practice.
Think of it in terms of serving your apprenticeship, you need the knowledge so that you go about the business of making money as an affiliate in the right way.

Even if you are an Affiliate marketer why not hang on here and let me show you in detail how do affiliates make money.

Affiliate marketing is one way of making money online by creating great content and promoting other companies’ products or services to a wider audience for a commission on verified sales.

Sales are made from traffic to your website or blog, as the affiliate you don’t have any responsibility for sales or customer service, you are simply the person that invites your site visitor to click on an affiliate link to be taken to the companies store or sales page.

Passive income

One of the benefits of becoming an affiliate is that it generates passive income, passive income means that for example you could be on the beach with your family and without you having to do anything somebody makes a purchase from your vendor because of a recommendation on your site.

Now that is the dream that you need to work towards, by creating a quality informative website or blog that gains the trust of the search engines meaning more visitors and hence more sales.

Affiliate marketing is definitely not a get rich scheme but rather a longer-term strategy that will build into a money-making machine once you learn how it all works.

Neil Patel

Neil Patel is one of the top affiliate marketers in the world and according to Neil there are four parts to the whole affiliate equation so you have the merchant, the affiliate network, the affiliate and finally the consumer.

For everything to work in tandem there has to be a relationship between each party so that the process satisfies the needs of each separate identity.

The merchant

The merchant is the creator of the product or brand, they could also be a retailer or a vendor, as an affiliate you will deal directly with the merchant or through a third-party source known as an affiliate network.

Affiliate network

According to Wikipedia an affiliate network is an intermediary that stands between merchant affiliate programs and publishers or affiliates, it is a platform that allows publishers (affiliates) to gain access to affiliate programs.

On the other hand, an affiliate network allows the merchant the opportunity to bring his product, brand or service to a much wider audience. Some good examples of affiliate networks are:

• Amazon associates’ program
• Commission junction
• Clickbank
• Market health
• EBay affiliate
• Shopify.com
• Click funnel
• Wealthy affiliate
• Jaxxy.com
• Avangate (2 checkout)
• Peerfly
• Warrior Plus
• Skim links
• Rakuten (Linkshare)
• JVZoo
• Flexoffers
• Shareasale

Which affiliate program?

It can be a little bit confusing when trying to choose an appropriate affiliate program, there are pros and cons to every program, for example take the Amazon affiliates program, it gives each affiliate the opportunity to sell a huge range of products that ships to almost anywhere in the world.

Amazon associates program

Amazon provide the storefront, a very high converting storefront meaning your website visitors will buy from Amazon through your affiliate links more times than other merchant sites. The downside of an Amazon associates is the low commission rates from 1-9 %.

Commission junction

Commission junction or CJ is perhaps the number one affiliate platform on the internet because almost all of the major retailers have an affiliate program there.
If you want to promote some of these huge brands then why not sign up as a CJ affiliate.

Clickbank

Clickbank has been around for a very long time, it started out selling what was perceived to be low quality so over the years they have changed to be the place to go for affiliates if you want to sell digital products.
Commissions at Clickbank can be rewarding, you should be able to find products there that will suit your website or blog.

Market health

I actually use Market health for one of my health niche websites, they are a market leader in health products, you can have your own version of their online health store, commissions are earned from products sold or through the CPA offered or cost per acquisition model.

EBay partner network

By becoming an EBay partner and recommending products in your niche you can make some decent money, depending on where you live commissions will vary. EBay partner network offers free to use link generators, they have over 160 million active customers, if your site has good traffic numbers you should be able to generate good commissions.

Shopify.com partner program

Shopify.com was set up to allow the ordinary Joe or a business owner the opportunity to be able to build an online store without any technical expertise, commission rates are very attractive for affiliates in their partner program.
Basically shopify.com offer a web hosting and ecommerce store with payment processing, if you feel that visitors to your site have a need for this service then it could be the right affiliate program for you.

Clickfunnel

Landing pages are pages where people are sent to sell a product or service to them, Clickfunnel I’d a platform that provides excellent landing pages or sales funnels for marketers. They offer an affiliate program that pays up to 40% of any sales of their products, if you refer a person who becomes an affiliate, they pay you 5% of the revenue that they generate.

Wealthy affiliate

Wealthy affiliate is an affiliate marketer dream platform because it leads the way in affiliate marketing training at an unbelievably low price. It was set up over 13 years ago by two friends in college Kyle and Carson to provide an online training platform for aspiring affiliate marketers.

In 2020 the users on this affiliate platform has grown to over 2 million, pretty popular eh!
Since its inception Wealthy affiliate has focused on the training needs of ordinary people to help them understand the best strategies to make money as an affiliate.

To make recurring monthly or yearly commissions with WA you need to send people that are interested in making money as an affiliate to this platform.

Jaxxy.com affiliate program

If you intend to work as an affiliate marketer one thing is for sure you will need a good keyword tool to help you find the best keywords for your content creation on your site or blog. Jaxxy.com provide a top keyword research tool and if you recommend this tool you can earn some good commissions.

Avantgate

Avantgate now known as 2Checkout has an affiliate program that focuses exclusively on sales of software and digital products from some of the best-known brands like Hewlett Packard, Kaspersky and BitDefender.
It is a market leading vendor for software that converts Microsoft products, commissions are in the 28-40% range.

Peerfly

Peerfly is a cost per acquisition affiliate network, it has a limited range of offers mostly digital products with some physical products also, minimum pay-out is $50.
Warrior plus
If selling online courses in the make money niche interests you then this website may be the place for you to earn affiliate commissions, they offer a large range of online courses the commission rates are hard to find pay-out is via PayPal or Stripe.

Skim links

Skim links is an affiliate program that offers links to over 24,000 merchants, it’s for affiliates who just want to set and forget their dynamic links to generate commissions. They give you access to merchants or advertisers that have physical or digital products; commission rates are good.

Rakuten (Linkshare)

Rakuten (Linkshare) is one of the earliest online affiliate partner networks, however its market share has diminished because of competition, however it’s still a formidable affiliate platform.

You have access to various banners that rotate the product offering for you, this allows you to optimise without having to change each one individually.
Payments are only sent out after the money is collected from the merchants; you won’t have as much choice on this platform as some of the bigger ones.

JVZoo

Having only been set up only 9 years ago JVZoo has blossomed into a very popular affiliate network platform, they offer digital products, internet marketing offers, online courses and e-commerce.
It is a bit like Clickbank but products can be low quality at times, commissions are good JVZoo is proving to be a real competitor to Clickbank.

Flexoffers

Flexoffers was set up more than 10 years ago, it has grown into a massive affiliate network they offer access to thousands of solid affiliate programs that will suit nearly every niche that you can name, they pay-out on time while offering a good range of advertiser’s commissions.

Shareasale

Shareasale is an exclusive affiliate network platform with more than 4,000 merchants to choose from, their affiliate back office offers a lot of data like average sale amount earnings per click, reversal rates and average commissions. Shareasale is a solid affiliate network that pays out on the 29th of the month once commissions reach $50.

Where do you go from here?

Your first step is to choose a number if affiliate programs then pick out the products that you feel will sell on your site, the merchants or vendors will provide you with your affiliate links and banners to promote their products.

The range of promotional material will include affiliate links, banner codes, text links and creative copies that you can simply copy and paste into your webpage.

Traffic to these affiliates is monitored by the affiliate network or in the case of a direct relationship between you and the merchant he will keep a track of all activity. You can view all activity within the affiliate network for all advertisers there or from the dashboard in a direct vendor/merchant affiliate relationship.

What are you paid for?

Companies reward affiliates in different ways for example pay per click, pay per lead or pay per sale:

• Pay per click
This business model is used to reward affiliates that manage to get their website or blog visitors to click on the affiliate link of the vendor or merchant.

• Pay per lead
In this scenario the vendor merchant pays the affiliate a commission once they provide the name and contact details of a prospective customer.

• Pay per sale
Relatively straightforward way to earn money as an affiliate is to get paid a percentage of the selling price of a product.

Why would you do affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is fast becoming a very attractive way to make money online because of the vast amount of affiliate marketing opportunities out there, whether you want to sell other people’s products or you want to produce and sell your own products.

Affiliate marketing has a lot if advantages compared to other bricks and mortar business or online business for example:

Low start-up costs

Of course you have to learn how to become successful at affiliate marketing, this doesn’t cost an awful lot especially on this excellent platform. The marketing side of things are cost effective if you can write all of the website content yourself.

• Customer support

As an affiliate marketer that only recommends merchants or vendors’ products and not your own you don’t need to have customer support, so zero costs there.

• Shipping

As an affiliate you don’t have to worry about shipping any products out to customers, all of that is taken care of by the merchant vendor.

• Passive income

This is the part of being an affiliate that I personally like the best, passive income isn’t like working a nine to five and getting a wage packet, passive income is money that you earn whether you are working on your computer or out walking your dog.

• The marketplace

Your marketplace is worldwide, you can target nearly every country in the world for the affiliate products that you want to sell.

How do you get started as an affiliate?

I hope that by now you have a better understanding of what it takes to make money as an affiliate your next step is find your niche, a niche is a segment of a market that you are going to focus on.

My friend Kyle from the Wealthy affiliate platform has created a very good training on how to find your niche you can access this free training by going here.

My advice is to pick a niche that has a broad appeal, a niche where you can find profitable keywords and a niche that you know something about.

Build your website

Now you have done your research and found a profitable niche to get started in, your next step is to build your website using a good quality keyword tool like the one that I use for this site.

WordPress

Nearly 40% of all websites use the WordPress platform because it offers you for free a huge selection of website themes and blogs that are fully customizable, if you like a particular theme you always have the option to upgrade to the pro version.

I recommend that you use WordPress it’s the one that I used for this site, pick a nice theme that is fast loading and responsive play around with the colours, fonts, menus, and sidebars.

Kyle has outlined in great detail how to go about the business of setting up your website.
Content creation.

Now that you know how to set your site up your next step is content creation or how to write valuable interesting content for humans that the search engines will love.
You will need to spend a large amount of your time finding niche keywords and building content around those keywords without using the keyword too many times in each page that you write.

You will need to be proficient at creating content, most affiliate networks won’t accept your affiliate application unless you have a sizeable number of visitors to your site each month.

Use email marketing

Email marketing is the practise of gathering subscribers to your email list by using email subscription services like this one that I use. Email marketing is a popular method to gain subscribers to your blog and email your list each week or month with affiliate offers.

According to some reliable sources email marketing is a very profitable way to make money from your subscribers a whopping 38/1 return on investment.
This training by my friend Jay will show you in infinite detail how to go about setting up an email marketing campaign.