Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.

 Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Source: Wikipedia

Affiliate Marketing tips, tools, companies, and more

 There are 2 different types of affiliate networks, CPS (Cost Per Sale) and CPA (Cost Per Action). CPS networks typically pay a commission that is a percentage of the sale amount. CPA networks typically pay a fixed commission for each offer. I primarily work with CPA networks but have been doing more with CPS or revenue sharing types of programs recently.

There is a lot of terminology to understand so here are a few important terms and how they are calculated.

A convervsion means that a customer has purchased the product or service offered, submitted the requested information, or performed the desired action, like downloading a software application.

A commission is the amount earned for each conversion.

Conversion Rate(CR) is calculated by taking the number of times an offer converts and dividing it by the number of times it was clicked. CR = Conversions / Clicks

Earnings Per Click(EPC) is derived by dividing the commission earned by the number of clicks. You can think of it as CR expressed as a monetary amount. Both EPC and CR are a metric to gauge how well an offer is performing.  In some cases EPC is expressed as earnings per thousand clicks.

Affiliate Marketing Companies

MaxBounty

Amazon

Click Bank

Shareasale

Tools

Buy a domain name and setup hosting at NameCheap

Setup a free website at Weebly or Wix

Track your traffic with Voluum, AdsBridge, or another service

Improve your SEO with a Free Search Engine Submit

Learn How to Market Successfully

 There are lots of people out there who offer information about affiliate marketing, but some of them are not so reputable. Here are some good sources of information.

Affiliate Summit Slides

Luke Kling’s Forum Afflift

Digital Marketer

Aff Playbook

Aidan Booth

John Chow

Stack that Money

Adrian Morrison

Anthony Morrison

Go a conference like ASW to learn affiliate marketing from the pros
Learn from the pros like this seminar from Affiliate Summit West 2016

OutSourcing

You can’t do it all yourself so somethings you need to outsource. Here are some places were you can find help:

Upwork

Freelancer

Fiverr

I hope this helps!

Bill York